Prince’s Flaws Only Made Him More Captivating

Soon after Prince's death, one year ago today, a clip from George Harrison's posthumous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2004 started to recirculate. A band that includes Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Steve Ferrone, Jeff Lynne and Harrison's son, Dhani, play "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." The video comes alive the moment that Prince saunters onstage, around three minutes into the clip. He's wearing a scarlet stetson to match his shirt and pocket square, a black suit, and there's a custom Fender Telecaster—one of his more modest guitars—slung around his neck. His guitar work is all cherry bomb pyrotechnics and the grin on his face moves from wry to ecstatic, but never out of control. Dhani looks on in awe—genuine, dumbstruck awe. At one point, during a particularly chaotic flourish, Prince turns around and eases backwards into the crowd, held up by a security guard, and for a moment it looks like he's floating. The video captures, as much as any three-minute clip of a six-minute YouTube video can, so much of what was essential about Prince Rogers Nelson. There, he's virtuosic, fun, natural, beautiful, a little arrogant, and transcendent. Almost literally. At the end, when he has decided that enough is enough, the drums slow, Prince rounds one final trill, the song ends, and in one smooth motion, he lifts the guitar from around his neck, pulls it down to his waist, hurls it in the air above him, and walks offstage. The guitar doesn't come back down. It remains, to most people, a total mystery.

Ben Greenman spent the better part of a year writing his sprawling, unique tribute to the late artist, Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God, and Genius in the Music of Prince. He has no idea where that guitar went. He interviewed Steve Ferrone, who sat at the drums a few feet behind Prince that night, but he had no idea either. Eventually, definitive answers weren't important. "Clearly, whether it was on a rope or whether there was a stage hand right there or whether it was magnetized or whether it was a raygun that dematerialized it, someone knows what happened," Greenman tells me. "It's not literally magic. And I think what I was trying to recreate is that sense. He's sort of a deity and it's sort of a charlatan and sort of a magician in the ways that real magicians are both magical and charlatans."

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