Steve Shark Leaves His Prince Right Here

Cover art by Fabulous False Memory Foam Island© Department Of Art Department Dept.

My first proper encounter [intones Steve Shark - Ed.] with Prince's music didn't go very well.

My local library had just opened a music section and back then, before the internet, it was a great way of experiencing "new" music. This was in the pre-CD days, so vinyl was the format on offer. There wasn't much that appealed to me that particular day, so I ended up with the Prince double album "Sign "o" the Times" (1987), which I took home to see what all the fuss was about.

Nowadays, it's regarded as one of his best albums, with Prince at the peak of his powers, but back then I really couldn't get into it. It sounded like just another jumble of synths and electronic drums, at a time when there were already enough sounds like that. They seemed to lack feel to my ears. Established artists such as Petty, Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, Sabbath and Stevie Wonder were pumping out last year's album but with a different sleeve, and Prince's album was just one more contribution to the general wash of musical mediocrity which seemed to thrive in the 1980s.

So, that would have been that, as far as Prince was concerned, if I hadn't borrowed a CD from a friend some 10 years or so later...

It was a bootleg called "The Undertaker", featuring Prince playing a lot of guitar, and I was immediately hooked. What I discovered was that Prince was a hell of a good guitarist and certainly knew how to groove, even in a power trio. It's really just a series of often bluesy jams, but the guy understood dynamics, so they have form and contrast. Scheduled for release, it never appeared, although it soon "escaped" - and in marvellous sound quality, too.

That set me off trying to find more of the same, and over time I came to understand why he was so popular - because he was always prepared to try something different. It might not have always worked, but it was fun finding out both for him, I'm sure, and his audience. What's more, it gradually turned me into a fan and I started listening to his back catalogue - whether there was a guitar to be found in it or not.

But is there more of Prince the Guitar Hero?

Well, there's a lot of guitar all over many of his albums I've now discovered, but it's mainly the Aftershow gigs in clubs, after the night's "main event", when he played most guitar. Many of these shows have been released legitimately or otherwise, but some are better than others. I tracked down a 1988 gig from the Hague in the Netherlands where he's really on top form and beating the crap out of his guitar, sounding remarkably like Hendrix at times. It's considered to be one of the best examples of an Aftershow and reveals a confident Prince just simply enjoying playing. It's called "Small Club" and it's superb. Fans of Funkadelic might enjoy this.

I have another guitar-heavy bootleg, but for which I can find no details whatsoever. It repeats one track from "The Undertaker", but it's one of the best ones, so it's not a hardship to hear it again. "The Blues Room" appears to be taken from a variety of sources and again shows Prince saluting Hendrix - more directly this time - with a version of "Red House" called "Purple House". There's also some great blues singing from him on this set.

Now, some 35 years later after dismissing him, I'm definitely into Prince. With such a vast output to explore I'm always finding something new and interesting. There hardly seems to be a musical genre that doesn't figure in it somehow - funk, rock, jazz, blues, soul, psyche, etc, and often in combination.

To get all three of these swell albums of Prince at his bluesy axe-wrangling best, just say which artist took the most time to grow on you.