When Prince took the stage, anything was possible—from feral, shirtless screaming to hall-of-fame guitar solos to the kind of destructive rock-star showmanship that few others would be willing to attempt. One of his signature moves was throwing his instrument—sometimes into the air, where, on one memorable occasion, it seemed to vanish completely; other times over to a technician waiting in the wings. Many of these guitars—including his “Cloud” axe, built by Dave Russan—suffered a fair amount of abuse. “He would always throw them to the roadie at the end of the show, and they weren’t always caught, so they’d have to be repaired often,” Russan told Alternative Nation. “They were hard rock maple but couldn’t always stand up to that.”
But that was Prince’s gear. Not the case in a case from 2013, when The Artist performed on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, having borrowed a guitar from “Captain” Kirk Douglas of house band The Roots. The wild promotional spot ended with a bold toss, a broken instrument, and a supremely bummed-out musician. But the story is even weirder than you might expect, and it led to a surprisingly happy ending.
Prince destroys—in more ways than one
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On taping day, Prince’s team had forgotten to bring his requested six-string, and Douglas—a huge fan of the rock/funk chameleon—was more than cool with sharing his own, a beloved 1961 Epiphone Crestwood. In fact, it’s almost like the stars had aligned: “The crazy thing is the only reason that guitar was in 30 Rock [home of NBC Studios, where the show was taped] was because I was rehearsing for a Prince tribute at Carnegie Hall this week,” Douglas later tweeted.
The performance itself is pure electricity. Joined by his back gin band 3rdEyeGirl, Prince brought a majestic psych-funk energy to 1979’s “Bambi,” concluding with a wah-wah-heavy solo on the Crestwood. Afterward, he tossed the guitar into the heavens and confidently stomped backstage as it crashed to the floor, spurting feedback through the room. A giggling Fallon walked up to plug Prince’s latest single, and the camera briefly cut over to The Roots, including a somewhat confused-looking Douglas, as they played the show’s theme song.
“Completely crestfallen”
“And at the end of the song, he lifts the guitar up, and I think he’s about to play behind his head, but he’s not playing behind his head,” Douglas reflected in a 2020 video on The Roots’ YouTube channel. “He lifts the guitar up and throws it in the air, and it comes crashing down to the ground, and it’s squealing in feedback. And he just struts off the stage. I was completely crestfallen, and I knew that there were cameras on me, and I knew there was nothing I could do about it, and I just had to sit there and be in it. I remember looking to my right, and Mark Kelley, our bass player, was laughing hysterically.”
Naturally, Douglas was devastated—at least at first. “I went through some complicated emotions in that very moment,” he recalled to Consequence of Sound in 2019. “Initially it was kind of negative. After it happened, I had my guitar in pieces. I went to Prince, and I was like, ‘Hey, you broke the guitar. If you don’t mind, could you sign it at least?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I haven’t signed anything since the ’70s.’” After assessing the immediate damage, he tweeted a photo of the guitar with the caption, “Purple Pain…Maybe it’s because I’m a dad,” he added, “but I think framing the guitar is a little like rewarding bad behavior.”
Silver linings
Prince eventually apologized for the ill-fated toss and arranged to have the guitar fixed. Plus, there were multiple silver linings to the heartbreak. As the guitarist told CoS, he wound up connecting with other music heroes, including Jackson Browne and Elvis Costello. And through conversations elsewhere (including one with Chris Rock), he realized he wasn’t the only one with a bizarre Prince story: “I feel like I’m part of this club of people who’ve been wronged by him,” he said. “For all I know, he could have just even known, in all of his genius, like, ‘Watch, I’m gonna hook this kid up. I’m gonna break his guitar so he can have this story and talk about it for the rest of his life.’ If that was his thought, he would not be wrong about that.”
He even ended up writing a song about it: “Little Friend,” which he released on his debut solo album, 2019’s Turbulent Times. “‘[It] was actually composed on the guitar I purchased with the money left over from the repair of the guitar he actually broke,” he told Rolling Stone. “I recorded the song with the Crestwood. The lyric comes from the emotion of the moment of that time where I was upset, but in retrospect it’s one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me. He’s probably looking down, saying, ‘I made your old-ass guitar way more interesting, paid you for your troubles, and gave you something cool to write about…You’re welcome.”
In the Roots YouTube video, Douglas rightly called the tale “one of the greatest guitar stories ever told,” noting that the instrument had since been displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s as part of the “Plat It Loud” exhibit. “That guitar is bigger than me,” he said. “But I’m so happy to have played a part in what’s now widely regarded as rock and roll history.”
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