Tag: 1/30/82

As absolutely everything Amercan must have a Dead connection, here’s Prince and his pre-Revolution band rocking the house that Peter Shapiro built, the Capitol Theatre. Even early on, Prince preferred trenchcoats and telecasters.

Other Dead/Prince connections:

• Went through many keyboardists. (Prince just fired his instead of killing them, but still: new guy in the seat every few years.)
• Both from Minneapolis, if you’re terrible at geography.
• Both did Chuck Berry covers, but you might say that about any two humans who played guitar in hockey arenas for a living. (I did some research and tried to find a master list of songs Prince covered, but it does not exist. I’ll give Deadheads this: we are so much better at details than everybody else. If I wanted to find a list of the Dead’s cover tunes, I wouldn’t even need Google. There’s a whole site for it, and we all have it bookmarked.)
• Depending on the veracity of rumors emerging about Prince’s recent days, he and Garcia may have had something in common.
• The Purple One and the Tie-Dye Ones preferred custom guitars, but in different ways.
• The Dead’s gear came from the highest-endiest of luthiers, and evolved over years and iterations, each guitarists’ axes tracing an evolutionary path, all in the pursuit of that elusive perfect tone.
• Prince liked guitars that looked cool.
• The “cloud” guitar?
• This one:
• 
• He saw that in a guitar store.
• Seeing a guitar on the wall of a Sam Ash is the opposite of how the Grateful Dead got their guitars.
• There was also the Artist Formerly Known As Prince Symbol guitar.
• This one:
• 
• Admittedly, Prince did not see that in a guitar store, because if he had, he would have had his lawyers burn the store down.
• He had that one made, but it was–obviously–fragile, plus Prince had a habit of throwing his guitars into the air to punctuate a song.
• And, it’s just a weirdly shaped piece of wood with a mass-produced pickup in it.
• Bobby and Phil simply avoided commercially-available guitar electronics, but Garcia was allergic to them: if his pickup coils weren’t hand-wound, he would break out into hives.
• His telecaster?
• 
• Not even a proper Fender telecaster, let alone a preciously-vintage one or an intricately-luthiered masterpiece, but a cheap Hohner knock-off.
• They make it in Japan!
• Harrumph harrumph.
• The man had no acquaintance with proper guitar decorum.
• Imagine how good he could have sounded with a decent guitar.