On March 15, 2004, George Harrison was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his solo career, a little more than two years after his death. To close the night at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, members of the Heartbreakers and George’s son Dhani gathered to play “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Prince, who was being inducted that same night, stood among them. What he did at the end of that song has been watched more than 100 million times on the Rock Hall’s YouTube channel. What almost nobody saw was how close it came to never happening at all.
A letter, two meetings and a question about who owns the music
The idea belonged to Joel Gallen, the producer and director of the ceremony. His dream, he later told The New York Times, was to bring everyone onstage for the finale with Prince taking the guitar solos. He wrote Prince a personal letter through his lawyer.
Prince answered by asking for a meeting. He told Gallen he liked the idea and wanted to listen to the song a few times first. A few weeks later came a second meeting and a firm yes. In both conversations, Gallen recalled, Prince wanted to know one thing in detail: who would own the performance. He did not want his playing used without his knowledge.
The rehearsal that went wrong
The night before the show, Prince was already having a rough day. During the rehearsal of his own opening medley, he battled sound problems so badly that, by Gallen’s account, he fired the monitor engineer his team had hired. When Gallen asked him to come back at 10 p.m. for the George Harrison finale, Prince made no promise. He only said he’d see.
At the appointed time, there he was at the side of the stage with his guitar. Then the band started, and something strange happened. When the song reached the famous middle solo, Marc Mann, a guitarist from Jeff Lynne’s band, played it note for note the way Eric Clapton did on the Beatles’ recording. Prince stepped back and strummed rhythm. When the long closing solo arrived and Prince moved forward again, Mann played that one too.
Prince said nothing. He played a few small leads here and there and nothing anyone remembered.
“Don’t worry about it”
Gallen was alarmed. He huddled with Petty and Lynne, then took Prince aside privately. Prince’s answer was simple: let the other guitarist keep the middle solo, forget about it, and he would step in for the ending. Then he told the producer not to worry and walked out.
Gallen later said they never really rehearsed it. Prince never showed anyone what he planned to play.
Petty, for his part, saw no reason to hold Prince back. The Clapton solo belonged in the middle, he reasoned, because fans knew it by heart. But the end of the song was another matter.
“Why should we give him an eight-bar solo?” — Tom Petty
Three minutes in the spotlight
On the night itself, Prince, dressed in red, spent most of the song standing in the dark at the edge of the stage. Many viewers at home did not even realize he was there. Mann played the middle solo as planned.
Then Prince stepped forward and played for roughly three minutes. Petty can be seen nodding at him to keep going; Petty later said he leaned over at one point to signal that it was going great. Dhani Harrison, playing acoustic guitar on his father’s song, watched with a wide, delighted grin. At one point Prince fell backward off the edge of the stage into the arms of a crew member, who pushed him back up while he kept playing. Drummer Steve Ferrone said the whole band panicked, thinking Prince was falling off the stage.
Craig Inciardi, a curator at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, had watched every induction performance since 1992. He described harmonics, finger-tapping in the style of Eddie Van Halen, power chords, and a brief nod back to Clapton’s original solo. On pure musicianship, he said, it was the most impressive of all of them.
So where did the guitar go?
When the last note rang out, Prince took off his guitar, a Telecaster-style H.S. Anderson Mad Cat, and tossed it straight up. Then he turned and walked off the stage. In the footage, the guitar never comes back down.
Even the people on that stage did not see where it went.
“I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too.” — Steve Ferrone
The answer turned out to be ordinary and loyal. Prince’s longtime guitar technician, Takumi Suetsugu, caught it off camera. When Gallen released a new director’s cut of the performance in 2021, he chose not to show that moment, preferring to let the mystery stand.
Why it still matters
The clip spread across the world in the days after Prince died in April 2016. People who knew him mostly for “Purple Rain” and “When Doves Cry” suddenly saw a rock guitarist who could stand next to anyone. Gallen said he still felt people did not realize what an amazing guitar player Prince was.
Tom Petty summed up the feeling in that room better than anyone: you could sense, he said, that something really big was going down. He also believed George would have liked it a lot.
Do you remember the first time you saw this performance? Did you know Prince could play like that?