The riff Prince said only he could play right
It’s safe to say that most of the band behind Prince on most of his records could have easily been window dressing half the time.
‘The Purple One’ did enjoy a sense of community whenever he performed, but given how great his first records sounded, there’s a good chance that he could have created almost his entire discography on his own without much trouble and still have been a superstar. But no matter how many great moments he had with The New Power Generation or The Revolution, there were also certain sounds that he figured were trademarked to him half the time.
Despite having one of the greatest track records in the industry, Prince did have limits on where he wanted his music to go. You wouldn’t know it by looking at his body of work, but the man understood the power of restraint half the time, and that meant not stretching himself out into genres that he couldn’t bring anything to. Which probably explains why he eventually apologised for some of the genre switches like on Chaos and Disorder.
But even if he avoided certain styles didn’t mean that he couldn’t still take what he liked every now and again. ‘Te Amo Corazon’ from 3121 is a fantastic bossa nova song, but no one was expecting him to break out the acoustic guitar and play intense flamenco-style solos for an entire record, either. If there was one genre he was more comfortable with than others, though, it was jazz.
Prince always brings to mind the sounds of everything from rock to R&B to funk, but some of the less-recognised masterpieces in his catalogue usually come when he and his band are riffing for the hell of it in a rehearsal space. You can tell that he had a lot of fun fusing different genres together as he went along, but it wasn’t like he was ever trying to compete with anyone, either. He knew his strengths better than anyone else, and it wasn’t like he could see anyone replacing him on any of his songs.
Even looking at the records that he played on by other artists, he was still creating masterpieces for other people. The fact that he had other personas and could help build other hitmakers from the ground up was almost too much talent for one man to possess, but looking through his recreational records, he knew that his work with Morris Day and the Time had different pieces that no one else could play.
He could have easily saved the best playing for himself, but he knew that ‘777-9311’ was one of the few basslines he ever wrote that had his musical identity prestamped on it, saying, “Simple: Because nobody can play that line like I can. It’s like ‘Hair’ [1974’s Graham Central Station], or Stanley Clarke’s ‘Lopsy Lu’ – nobody can play that part better than Larry [Graham].”
If you take even a small look at Prince’s discography, though, there’s more than one song that has that kind of musical trademark on it. No one was going to mistake ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ for anyone else, and even when he was providing a guitar part for everyone from Kate Bush to Madonna showed that he could have been a masterful session player had he never got to the stage.
But, honestly, you can take your pick throughout every single album in his catalogue and get something that sounds identifiably ‘Prince’. Purple Rain, Sign o’ the Times, and Musicology don’t all necessarily sound like each other, but there’s no doubt that the same musical mind was always at work there.
