When Prince saw Andy McKee play his 2006 classic Rylynn, he wasted no time in recruiting the fingerstyle acoustic guitar virtuoso for his Welcome 2 Australia tour.
And, in true Purple One style, he had big plans for the show – but not all of them felt natural to McKee.
As McKee explains in a new interview with Guitar World, Prince had grand designs for his role, but his intended entrance and set-opener spectacle proved to be an uncomfortable proposition.
“We toured in Australia and did nine concerts, and that was an unbelievable experience,” McKee tells us. “Never would I have dreamed something like that would happen.
“Even if we never did any shows together, just to have him appreciate what I did was so incredible. It was very moving for me.”
“He originally wrote to me about opening the concerts, and he had had this whole plan laid out,” he remembers. “I was going to come up on an elevator and have this 50-foot cape on, and start playing something in a minor key, kind of mysterious.
“Then I was supposed to walk down the stage, which was his symbol, and my 50-foot cape was going to unfurl. They were going to have these projections on the back of it.
“Then he was like, ‘Maybe switch into something major key.’ The projection on my back was going to turn into fire and explosions and stuff. But it was a bit too much for me, man.”
It was a Very Prince Plan, but one that took McKee a bit too far out of his comfort zone. Stepping up to open Prince’s show was already spectacular enough. So McKee came up with an alternative option.
McKee continues, “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I could do that.’ So I just sent him a version of me playing Purple Rain. I was like, ‘Would this be okay?’”
Prince was clearly impressed by the arrangement, so much so that he dropped his vision for fire, explosions, and a 50 foot cape in favor of McKee’s more humble, virtuosic entrance.
“Prince was like, ‘That’s cool, man. I’ll let you do that.’ So I just came up on an elevator and played that,” McKee says. “You know, I’m a bit too shy to do something like that.’”
Head over to the Guitar World YouTube channel to watch the full interview with Andy McKee.
