“He looked at me like I had five heads”: Spike Lee once asked Prince for his signature guitar – he didn’t expect what happened next
Standing as a prime example of the ‘don’t ask, don’t get’ mantra, Spike Lee has recalled the time he asked Prince for one of his highly bespoke signature guitars, and wasn’t met with the warmest of responses.
The Purple One had a wild taste in guitars, with his eye-catching Cloud guitars – one of which sold for $900,000 last summer – and his Sadowsky-made Telecaster just two examples of that. Lee, it turns out, was an admirer, but didn’t get his way when he tried to claim one of his own. Initially, at least.
“He looked at me like I had five heads,” he tells Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. And though it seemed his cheekiness had backfired, Prince was perhaps just testing the producer’s patience.
“A year later, this big-ass guitar case shows up,” Lee adds. “A year later!”
The guitar in question was one of his unmistakable Auerswald Symbol electric, which he played throughout the ’90s. Built for him by luthier Jerry Auerswald, who also made his equally as bonkers Model C and Cleo axes, it features a maple body, locking tremolo, and an active single coil in the neck, and an EMG humbucker in the bridge.
The guitar and its rather impractical, but oh so Prince, silhouette can be seen in the videos for Endorphinmachine and Gold. Purple and White models were also built, with the latter featuring in the promo for his 19th studio album, Emancipation.
Lee ended up with a Gold model, and whether or not it was the guitar Prince had used or merely a copy is unclear, but it shows Prince’s selflessness, even if his outward demeanor was a little more steely.
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It wasn’t the only time that Prince gifted an electric guitar to someone he respected, either. During his 3rdeyegirl era, which saw him forging a guitar tandem with Donna Grantis, he had been turned onto Vox guitars by his partner, leading him to embrace the firm’s feature-laden semi-hollow HDC-77 into his expansive gear arsenal.
After he played one for Barack Obama at the White House in June 2015, he gifted it to Grantis, and it has since hit the auction block, with a $350,000 price tag.
Grantis has since reflected on her time in Prince’s band. She says she expected the unexpected; it is Prince, after all. But she never imagined she’d end up playing the Purple Rain guitar solo, with the man who wrote it watching on.
Meanwhile, an unreleased documentary, which leaked last year, suggests that Prince’s iconic While My Guitar Gently Weeps solo at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was an “act of revenge,” having just been snubbed by Rolling Stone.
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