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D onna Grantis thought it was a joke at first: an email inviting her to jam with Prince at Paisley Park. But the note was real. It was late 2012, and Prince had seen a YouTube clip of Grantis, a virtuosic session guitarist, performing at the Toronto Jazz Festival. “I had been studying his live performances and transcribing his guitar playing out of love for the music and in hopes of one day playing in his band,” Grantis remembered to Sotheby’s Arsalan Mohammad. Within weeks she was encamped at “Paisley,” as everyone called it: the pharaonic recording complex in suburban Minneapolis that had been the locus of Prince’s creativity since the late 1980s. He put her through the paces of a rigorous rehearsal schedule – days, nights and wee hours of the morning, for up to 12 hours at a stretch. He was assembling a new group, and he wanted Grantis on guitar, along with Ida Nielsen on bass and Hannah Welton on drums. Their name would be 3RDEYEGIRL, and they made their debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon the following March.
3RDEYEGIRL’s sound was unlike anything else in Prince’s storied career, then in its fourth decade. Sonically, he honed the distorted, propulsive, funky rock sound he’d been attracted to growing up in the ’70s, when bands like Santana, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Sly & the Family Stone had commanded his attention. As if to underscore the shift, Prince greeted the crowd in Montreux, Switzerland for 3RDEYEGIRL’s inaugural European performance playing what had by then become his guitar model of choice: a Vox HDC-77. Headed to auction at Sotheby’s London’s Popular Culture sale on 29 August, this particular Vox guitar was to become one of Prince’s most extensively played instruments in the 3RDEYEGIRL era, and one of the last on which he left his indelible mark.
In addition to Montreux, Prince performed with the guitar throughout the duration of his now-iconic 3RDEYEGIRL HITnRUN tours across the UK, USA and Canada in 2014-15, comprising both arena shows and intimate secret performances; at Baltimore’s Rally 4 Peace concert; and in his final show with 3RDEYEGIRL in Washington, D.C.
“Over the next few years, the girls and I learned hundreds of songs,” Grantis said, “rehearsed at all hours of the day and night, toured the world, recorded PLECTRUMELECTRUM, developed our ping-pong skills” – Paisley’s Studio B featured a table, and Prince was a ferocious player – “and experienced a creatively immersive adventure of a lifetime.” The HDC-77 was around for all of it. First manufactured in 2010 and now discontinued, the guitar has a semi-hollow body with a unique concavity designed to wrap around the player’s torso. While rehearsing at Paisley Park in early 2013 – Grantis and Nielsen then playing rhythm guitar in the contemporary incarnation of Prince’s supergroup New Power Generation – Prince said to Grantis, “You should get the same guitar as Ida,” referring to the Vox double-cut semi-hollow HDC-77 in blackburst. “It has a much larger body than what I was accustomed to and, in contrast to my thinner solid-body electrics, it had a brighter tone and a heavier headstock,” Grantis recalled.
“Prince liked the percussive quality of the HDC-77 – especially for funk. It’s well suited for playing intricate rhythms.”
Prince envisioned a driving sound with 3RDEYEGIRL, and something in the Vox spoke to his concept for the band. His own playing on the guitar traded the jazzier inflections of the ’90s and ’00s for a more incendiary, blues-oriented approach, raw and emotional, sometimes even grungy, as if he’d belatedly imbibed all the bands of the alt-rock era. His watchword, it seemed, was aliveness. He could be searing and sublime, as evident in this rendition of “Purple Rain” from Baltimore in 2014, or propulsive and upbeat, as he sounded on “Guitar” at the Montreux show. Once again, he played like he had something to prove other than his own skill; he seemed to have reinvented himself out of some greater need, and he reminded his listeners what rock music could be at its most elemental, when the musicians actually listened to one another and the soloists allowed themselves to be vulnerable.
“Prince liked the percussive quality of the HDC-77 – especially for funk,” Grantis explained. “It’s well suited for playing intricate rhythms where the nuance of how 16th notes are articulated – the length of each note, the attack and the dynamic range – is so particular. You can really dig into it. Prince also mentioned that he liked to play the Vox because, as a semi-hollow instrument, it could generate feedback more easily.” During the 3RDEYEGIRL era, the collection of HDC-77s included a few in blackburst finish, as well as one ivory-white model ornamented with a psychedelic, multicolored decal that matched one of Prince’s performing outfits.
He played the Vox guitar unmodified, off the shelf – a radical departure for a musician known for flashy custom instruments. His famous Cloud guitars – one of which is on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution – were made to his specifications by the Minneapolis luthier Dave Rusan. A fixture of the Purple Rain tour, the Sign o’ the Times era and beyond, The Cloud really does resemble a wisp of cumulus adrift in the sky. In 1993, Prince commissioned another luthier, Jerry Auerswald, to build the Symbol Guitar, modeled after the glyph that served as his name during his long-running contractual dispute with Warner Bros. These instruments became inseparable from Prince’s mystique, but their appearance may have mattered more than their sound. “He’s not a guy who would sit around and polish his guitars … they were tools,” Rusan said.
Committed to developing his ideas on the fly, Prince learned that the guitar best suited to the moment was not always the most exotic or glamorous. Jesse Johnson, the touring guitarist for Prince’s side project The Time, remembered Prince picking up “my $179 Hondo Strat to play the chords” on the iconically funky “777-9311” record: “That’s why the guitar sounds so nice and dull … ’cause it was cheap!” Throughout his career, the guitar Prince turned to most frequently – his old standby – was the Hohner HG-90 “Mad Cat,” a Fender Telecaster knockoff, albeit a good one. Apocryphally it’s maintained that he bought the guitar for $30 out of someone’s trunk at a gas station.
“When I’m onstage, I’m out of body. … You reach a plane of creativity and inspiration. A plane where every song that has ever existed and every song that will exist in the future is right there in front of you.”
It’s worth noting that he was hard on his guitars, tossing them offstage and hoping that his techs would be there to catch them. This led to the mythical moment in 2004 when, during a searing all-star rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he tossed his guitar toward the ceiling. It never came back to earth. But such theatrics caused trouble, too. During 3RDEYEGIRL’s Late Night performance, Prince borrowed the treasured ’61 Epiphone Crestwood belonging to Captain Kirk of the show’s house band, The Roots. At the end of the song, he threw it to the ground and damaged the headstock. Kirk was incensed.
Prince’s embrace of the Vox HDC-77, then, could be understood as a return to form in many senses. He used the guitar straight out of the box because it looked right, just as he would’ve done starting out in the late ’70s, and he used it to play the kind of music he loved then. Its specifications were to some extent immaterial; he knew his talent would coax it to life. His instruments, in Grantis’s eyes, “were a conduit for channeling emotion, energy, healing and musical expression. He could make anything sound amazing.”
He approached the guitar with a disciplined work ethic even when it took him to elite places. In June 2015, 3RDEYEGIRL played for President Barack Obama at the White House, and Prince donned one of the blackburst Vox’s for the occasion. Grantis can still picture the crystal chandeliers quivering while the band sound-checked. A YouTube video had led Grantis to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue alongside one of the most singular musicians of a generation. “He was an incredible mentor,” Grantis said of Prince. “He taught me about spirituality, greatness, conviction and community. He would often say, ‘Music is medicine’ – a healing force that can bring people together.”
