It’s become one of his defining musical moments - the YouTube view count currently stands at more than 150 million - but what motivated Prince to deliver his blistering, unrehearsed solo on The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently weeps at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony has never really been established.
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A so-far unreleased Netflix documentary, though - we’ll get to that - is said to give credence to one particular theory that’s been bubbling under for some time.
The performance came a year after Rolling Stone had omitted Prince from its list of the greatest guitarists of all time. The magazine, it should be noted, was co-founded by Jann Wenner, who also happens to be the co-founder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
In a lengthy article for The New York Times Magazine, Sasha Weiss - who has seen the unreleased documentary - reports that it features footage of Prince fan Questlove expressing disbelief that Prince wasn’t included in Rolling Stone’s countdown. “Prince nursed these kinds of slights,” writes Weiss.
The suggestion is that the solo was a musical riposte to Wenner and the rock ‘n’ roll establishment in general. To emphasise his point, Prince was making it on a stage that also contained the likes of Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison (son of George Harrison, While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ writer).
Weiss also reveals that a close, unnamed friend of Prince’s told her that, following the performance, Prince would watch it over again over again.
The story goes that, at a rehearsal the night before the ceremony, Prince kept his powder dry, leaving Jeff Lynne’s guitarist to play both the original While My Guitar Gently Weeps solo - performed on the Beatles' recording by Eric Clapton - and the one during the outro.
Joel Gallen, though - producer and director of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony - felt like this was a missed opportunity.
“So I talk to Prince about it,” he later told The New York Times. “I sort of pull him aside and had a private conversation with him, and he was like: ‘Look, let this guy [Lynne’s guitarist] do what he does, and I’ll just step in at the end. For the end solo, forget the middle solo.’ And he goes, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ And then he leaves. They never rehearsed it, really. Never really showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basically telling me, the producer of the show, not to worry. And the rest is history.”
A multi-part Prince documentary has been in the works at Netflix since 2018, when it was announced that it was being helmed by Selma director Ava DuVernay. She left the project the following year, but the baton was picked up by Ezra Edelman, best known for his OJ: Made in America documentary.
Edelman has now completed a nine-hour edit of his film, but is reportedly at loggerheads with the Prince estate which, after seeing it, reportedly submitted “17 pages of notes demanding changes”.
While he’s agreed to some of these, Weiss reports that Edelman isn’t prepared to “remove episodes or ideas that felt crucial for the film’s narrative and journalistic cohesion.” It’s also reported that the Prince estate is pointing to a clause in its original deal with Netflix, which states that the documentary be no more than six hours in length.
There remains a possibility that someone else could be called in to re-edit the film to the Prince estate’s satisfaction so that it can be released, but as things stand, there seems no prospect of viewers seeing it in its current form.
Explaining the difficulty he had in pinning down ‘the real Prince’ while making his film, Edelman told Weiss: “How can you tell the truth about someone who, when you’re talking to people, they all had different things to say? How can you tell the truth about someone who never told the truth about himself?”
