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Some excerpts from the excerpts

Prince’s guitar playing was hot enough to inspire comparisons with Jimi Hendrix as well. He was a boldly original stylist and, like Hendrix, had a knack for fusing influences already in the air—R&B, hard rock, new wave, and dance music—in new and exciting ways. And he was certainly highly original in his choice of guitars.

Early in his career, Prince became attached to a fairly inexpensive Japanese Telecaster copy—the Hohner MadCat. He purchased the Hohner from Knut Koupee Music in Minneapolis in 1980, and it remained his main ax throughout his entire career, even well after he’d made enough money to fill a room with vintage Fender Teles. The MadCat’s maple body has a shape identical to a Fender Tele body, but it has a thin strip of walnut running down the center, joining the two blocks of maple that make up the main body. The bridge is more like a Strat bridge than a Telecaster bridge, which contributes to the MadCat’s slightly different tonality....

With all the guitars Sadowsky made for Prince, his actual interaction with the artist was minimal. This was a fairly typical situation with the eccentric superstar. Sadowsky remembers a meeting during rehearsals at an arena in Minneapolis.”

“I had some questions about the neck profile,” he recalls. “Prince was standing about 15 feet away, literally, with one of his bodyguards. I would ask a question, and Prince would whisper the answer to his bodyguard. The bodyguard would then walk over to me and tell me what Prince had said. That was exactly the extent of the communication.”

It’s not that Prince didn’t like Sadowsky—he later commissioned the luthier to build two more Tele-style guitars with floral designs (as shown on this page) on the body and fingerboard. The indirect-communication tactics were just part of the mystique he cultivated....

Another 18 Cloud guitar replicas were subsequently made for Prince by Andy Beech and Zeke Clark. Beech did the woodwork, and Clark installed the electronics. It would become fairly standard practice for Prince to commission multiple copies of much-loved guitars. He played the instruments so aggressively onstage that he would wear them out. Also many were damaged onstage when he’d toss them in the air and let them crash to the ground. This became a sore point for Clark, given his role in making many of the replicas Prince played.

“I actually said to him, ‘Hey, fella, a lot of love and work went into putting these together for you,’” Clark recalls. “‘I think it’s a little disrespectful that you just take it and toss it over your head.’ And he said, ‘Hey, Zeke, I understand where you’re coming from. But that’s me.’”

Thanks, that was a nice read!

Thanks. I had always heard the rumour that P bought his Hohner Tele from a gas station attendent while on tour (79-80). Nice article..would love to see his collection of guitars he never played live or was photographed with.

I know a waitress at a restaurant in Paris where he wasa regular customer, and yes, he always communicated his meal order to her through his bodyguard.

Thanks for the article and link.

I think the Hohner is Prince´s most iconic and also most mysterious guitar. I´ve heard the gas station story before but this one seems more legit.

I find the Hohner mysterious because you never knew if he played the one original Hohner or a replica ( I know he had several), and then there were so many different manufacturers and different makes but I guess he also used the same set-up.

Does anyone here know how many Hohners he had and whether it was the original old Hohner that he used in the studio or one of the replicas or newer models?sd

Someone on the org (a few years back) posted his Hohners from a backstage shot. There must have been 7 or 8 of them in his collection.

Very nice, can't wait to buy this magazine.