Credit: Far Out / Allen Beaulieu
Thu 30 April 2026 22:00, UK
There wasn’t a single instrument ever created that Prince couldn’t absolutely dominate whenever he played.
Some artists have the kind of chops that they spend years trying to hone, but when it comes to the greatest pop singers in the world, Prince was someone who lived and breathed music and would do anything that he could to get the sounds that he heard in his head. He was more than capable of getting most of those ideas out all by himself, but there came a point where he really needed a band behind him.
Half of those early records were already made with Prince playing virtually everything, but that sense of camaraderie with The Revolution was what he really needed. Getting someone like Wendy Melvoin to work on some of Purple Rain was absolutely perfect for what the song needed, and even if ‘The Purple One’ was still writing all of the tunes, every one of them kicked up a notch whenever they played them in a live setting. You think you’ve heard it all by listening to ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, but you haven’t lived until you’ve seen footage of them playing it live.
But Prince was the kind of artist who was almost too eclectic to have just one band behind him. He wanted the opportunity to stretch himself every time he played, and while The Revolution were normally capable of working with him on virtually anything he performed on, the New Power Generation was going to end up giving him a lot more musicians to work with than the typical rock and roll setup.
If The Revolution were the best blend of rock and funk that anyone had ever heard, The New Power Generation was a lot closer to what you’d see out of Sly and the Family Stone. Prince was still the ringleader, but it was about using different members of the band to bring out different textures on his records. And getting someone like Sonny T on bass was practically a godsend when Prince cut Diamonds and Pearls.
Sonny was already one of the biggest names in Minneapolis, but even though Prince took up guitar before anything else, he felt that getting him in the band was like drafting in his musical hero, saying, “I thought Sonny was God. A lot of what I do on guitar, I learned from him. I’d go over to his house and we’d play records and he’d show me things on guitar.” And you can hear it in the way that Prince constructs a lot of his tunes on Diamonds and Pearls.
He wasn’t looking to create features for Sonny by any stretch, but the lion’s share of that record is about finding the right vehicle for what every song needed. And while ‘Gett Off’ is still one of the greatest jams that Prince ever made, a lot of the best moments of the tune are when he’s taking a back seat to the rest of the band and letting the rest of them cut loose when the song breaks down.
And while bass was Sonny’s primary instrument, it’s not like you can’t hear Prince doing the same thing whenever he picked up the low end. There’s already a famous scene of Prince making tunes for the 1989 version of Batman, and when you look at the way that he attacks the instrument every time he plays, a lot of that comes down to him watching someone like Sonny and putting his own brand of grit into what he was doing.
Because, really, what both of them were doing was all about the guitar and bass serving the backbeat of the song half the time. Prince could have kept making one face-melting solo after the next whenever he performed, but if he wanted to truly feel the groove of what he was playing, he was going to have to pay a lot more attention to what he was making in the background of his tunes.
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