“Not to be trifled with”: The night a guitar tech tried to sabotage Prince
Prince was a complete anomaly when it came to his creative process, his personal life, and his stage shows. His mind was his own, and it could not be questioned. He was unrelenting in his approach to creativity, never letting anybody get in his head. He knew that his ideas were solid and he should stick with them. Thank God for that, as it gave us some of the best music from recent decades.
Because he trusted his intuition, he was notoriously a pretty demanding person to be around. Things had to be done right; if they weren’t, it was a waste of both his and the listener’s time. Subsequently, he had a rotating cache of sound engineers who came with him on tour, as if you couldn’t keep up with Price’s mind; you weren’t kept on the payroll.
Some people see this kind of attitude as endearing, believing creatives must have a conviction within themselves, which means knowing when someone is holding them back. That being said, Prince’s cutthroat mentality also made him a lot of enemies, as music technicians, sound engineers, and roadies all thought he was too harsh in his approach to putting together the perfect stage show.
Morris Hayes, one of Prince’s band members, once spoke about one of these disgruntled guitar technicians who wanted to ruin Prince’s show, knowing he would be fired for it but not bothered about the repercussions. Hayes called the guitar tech “Fred” and remembers when he tried to stop the musical force that was Prince.
“He had been having some problems with Fred the whole tour…” recalled Hayes, “Fred knew this was one of the last shows we were doing, and Fred knew that he was done. He knew he was gonna get fired after it was over and done. So, he was gonna leave with a little parting salvo and give Prince a guitar that was way out of tune, and it happens to be in the section of the show when Prince does a solo guitar thing for about five or ten minutes by himself… There’s ten or 12 thousand people here and he does his thing where he goes through a few of his songs on his guitar.”
Fred gave Prince his guitar, and the moment Prince played it, it was clear that it had been deliberately given to him out of tune. Rather than panic, though, Prince engaged with his musical brain and gave the audience something entirely unique.
“He tuned one note, and because he was only playing with himself, all he had to do was tune the guitar to itself,” said Hayes, remembering how Prince started to tune the guitar while playing different segments of his solo, “He wasn’t going to be like, ‘Excuse me while I get another guitar’. It’s like, bro, the show must go on, and I’ve got to make a show out of this because it’s going to look like a big mistake, and I’m gonna look stupid.”
Hayes already knew that Prince was a musical genius, but that night, he really proved himself. “That was the craziest shit I’ve ever seen; this dude just murderized – he murderized that solo and let that guy know,” he said, “You can’t stop my show. You can’t ruin me. He was not to be trifled with.”
