Great Guitar Solos, #10: Prince attacks "Whole Lotta Love"

For years, I didn't know that Prince was a bad-ass guitarist. I listened to him primarily during the height of his commercial popularity ("1999" and "Purple Rain"), before concert videos were readily available, and rarely heard stand alone solos that demanded attention; his leads on vinyl tended to be short lines that added color to the compositions. I was under the impression that he used the guitar mainly for songwriting, or as a prop to hide behind onstage, like Bruce Springsteen. 

Boy was I wrong.

The epiphany came when I first saw the video below, from the 2004 Rock Hall of Fame ceremony. Watch as Prince comes in at 3:38 with mad shred:

I viewed the clip several times, eyes (and ears) wide, and then filed it away in the mental recesses where treasured YouTube performance videos go to die. 

Flash forward to last April. I wasn't a huge Prince fan, but his passing hit me harder than the

deaths of other musical eminences this year. George Martin was 90; I was grateful he had lived as long as he did. David Bowie was 69 and had had drug problems early in his life, so I wasn't that surprised when he died. Paul Kantner had lived a full life and his best work was forty years in the rear view mirror. Ditto for Keith Emerson and Maurice White.

Prince, by contrast, was relatively young and appeared to be still vibrant. Every time I saw him in media appearances, he was dressed to the nines and looked healthy. I had never read

anything about him using drugs or alcohol; I suspected he was a straight edge like most Jehovah's Witnesses. Just six weeks before his death he played the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Walking past the theater on my way to work, I saw his name on the marquee and assumed he would kill it, as he always did. 

As the shock set in in the days after his death, I came across a concert video I had never seen, Prince's rendition of "Whole Lotta Love." I'm generally skeptical of Led Zeppelin covers—because so few musical acts are capable of doing justice to the original songs—but this performance is an exception. 

The above video captures much of what made Prince unique. The wicked falsetto vocal. The dandy threads. The beautiful, slinky women in Prince's backing band. The throwback psychedelic light show. And the sick lead guitar. Launching with the words "no format tonight," at :56, Prince puts on a guitar clinic of Hendrixian proportions, bringing a big, bold sound with soaring bends, tight vibratos, tasteful hammer-on pull-offs, and electrifying stagecraft. 

Considering the decline of the original batch of '60s six-string gods, and the dearth of new ones, Prince's passing may have robbed us of one of the last true guitar heroes. 

Other Truth and Beauty guitar essays:

         Click here for "The Second Coming:  Stevie Ray Vaughan," 
a first-hand account of Vaughan's final concert

here for "The heaviest New Year's Eve guitar jam ever: Hendrix

does 'Machine Gun'"

here for "The underappreciated ingenuity of Robbie Krieger"

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #8: Freddie King's 'San-Ho-Zay'"

                       
  here for "Link Wray's 'Rumble'"
                  

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #1:  Eddie Hazel (Funkadelic)"

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #2:  Frank Zappa"

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #3:  Hiram Bullock" 

here for "Great Guitar Solos, #5:  Alvin Lee"

 here for "Great Guitar Solos, #6: Neil Young's 'Hey Hey, My My'"

and here for "Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar - The Six-String Wizardry of Frank Zappa, Part II"

Rain as portrayed by The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Doors

Rain has been on my mind a lot this winter. 

As of last fall, California had experienced a four-year drought which left us in a very precarious position, so the relatively heavy rainfall these past few months has been welcome. 

Sometimes, as I stand in my living room gazing out the window while the rain patters against glass, or plod through Oakland with an umbrella in hand, my thoughts veer from the here and now to certain rain-related songs. 

Rain has been explored by everyone from the Eurythmics to Buddy Guy to Milli Vanilli, but four cuts by rock royalty stand out for me.

First up is the Beatles gem "Rain," from 1966. Lyrically, the song isn't much, but musically, "Rain" is a perfect encapsulation of the mid-years Beatles pop formula. Clocking in at a lean 3:04, the song features many Fab Four specialties, including ringing guitars, a bouncy bass line, liquid harmonies, and psychedelic-era backward vocals.

Led Zeppelin's "The Rain Song" from 1973 is a more muted track that shows Zeppelin's soft side. The band best known for heavy guitar riffs and bone-crushing drums here melds acoustic guitar, brush-stick percussion, and Mellotron—a synthesizer which produces the string sounds—to compliment Robert Plant's lyrics about the vicissitudes of a challenging (and ultimately rewarding) long-term romantic relationship.

Seattle native Jimi Hendrix was no stranger to rain, and it comes out in brilliant color below, in a video which fuses two separate tracks from 1968's "Electric Ladyland": "Rainy Day, Dream Away" and "Still Raining, Still Dreaming." In these songs, rain encourages the listener to lay back and groove as the music follows suit, starting out with saxophone flutters, meandering guitar lines, and organ voicings that variously intertwine, play point-counterpoint, or lurch off in their own directions, over a lazy four-four drumbeat. 

"Still Raining, Still Dreaming" comes in at 3:10 with a talking wah-wah guitar that speaks a language only Hendrix could evoke. By 3:57, the song is in deep jam mode, gutbucket drums driving the beat as unison guitars pan back and forth across left and right speakers and the organ comps in the background, eventually building to a heavenly crescendo. Not long before the two songs bridge, Hendrix says he is "leaning on my windowsill, digging everything," and we are right there with him.  

       

When the Doors first presented "Riders on the Storm" to long-time producer Paul Rothchild, in 1970, he dismissed the song as cocktail jazz. Fortunately for us, the Doors ignored Rothchild's poor judgment. Highlights include a jazzy opening which features heavy rainfall with an ominous bass line, a boss organ solo at 2:46, and the ethereal, cascading kisses of the Fender Rhodes keyboard throughout. This masterpiece of mood and space was the last track recorded by Jim Morrison, a fitting swan song that projects the otherworldly aura of rain like few tunes before or since.