Prince’s guitar solo during a 2004 live performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is now considered by some to be one of the greatest in rock history, but this wasn’t the only Beatles song he put his stamp on.
While some of his former collaborators have said that it took a while for Prince to ‘get’ The Fab Four, he covered several of their songs during his lifetime, including Come Together and With a Little Help From My Friends.
And then there’s the case of The Long And Winding Road, which was raised by Paul McCartney earlier this week during an interview with BBC Radio 2’s Vernon Kay.
“Actually, crazy scoop here,” he began. “I was with some guy a couple of years ago, so it was after Prince had died. And this guy said, ‘Have you heard Prince do Long and Winding Road?’ I said, ‘Well, no. That's one of my songs. I don't think he ever did it.’ He said, ‘Well, he did. He did it in rehearsal. He was rehearsing it for something.’
“So, he said, ‘I'll send it to you if you want.’ This guy, I think he was the photographer for Prince, his personal guy. So, he sent it to me and it's really great. And so I'm going to sort of ask them [about it]... because I could make it into something really good.”
Asked what kind of version the cover is, McCartney replied: “It's kind of rocky. He plays some really good guitar on it.”
Now, there are a couple of things worth saying about this. Firstly, it’s not the case that no one previously knew that Prince covered The Long and Winding Road, because he performed it multiple times in public during 2007. In fact, he even invited Elton John on stage to sing it during his famous residency at London’s O2 Arena.
So, if Prince was playing the song in rehearsal, it could well have been because he was preparing for one of these shows.
Even if a studio recording does exist, though, we have to consider Prince’s thoughts on the idea of living artists ‘collaborating’ with those that have died, which he put on record during an interview with Guitar World in 1998.
Asked if he would ever consider using technology so that he could “jam with any artist from the past,” he replied: “Certainly not. That’s the most demonic thing imaginable. Everything is as it is, and it should be. If I was meant to jam with Duke Ellington, we would have lived in the same age. That whole virtual reality thing... it really is demonic. And I am not a demon.”
So you’re on the fence, then? Oh, you're not.
Unfortunately for McCartney, Prince also went on to make specific reference to a project that he was heavily involved in – the use of John Lennon’s vocals in Free as a Bird, the ‘new’ Beatles song from 1995.
“What they did with that Beatles song, manipulating John Lennon’s voice to have him singing from across the grave... that’ll never happen to me,” he said. “To prevent that kind of thing from happening is another reason why I want artistic control.”
So, if Prince’s estate plans to respect his wishes, we’d say that the chances of a ‘duet’ with Paul McCartney are pretty slim. But, hey – who knows?
As a side note, Prince did release a studio version of one other song with ‘winding road’ in its title – Sheryl Crow’s Everyday Is a Winding Road, which featured on his 1999 album, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. We can’t honestly say that it’s an improvement on Crow’s 1996 original, but take a listen and decide for yourself…
