Once hit-making guitarist Mike Scott showed up in Minneapolis from his native D.C., it wasn’t long before he was working on records with the likes of Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Lionel Richie, and Gladys Knight.
Soon, Scott found himself landing one of the most highly coveted guitar gigs: at Paisley Park, as part of Prince's New Power Generation.
Among the many anecdotes that come with being Prince's first-call guitarist, Scott recently looked back on the one time he – accidentally – caught the Purple Rain legend using his own guitar gear.
“We never talked about gear,” Scott says on the 100 Guitarists podcast. "But my wife, Rachel Scott, she was a producer at MTV, and Prince ended up hiring her to do a multi-camera shoot of the band when he was doing 3rdeyegirl. We had to leave the room when 3rdeyegirl rehearsed, and she told me that he would be playing through my amp.
“I even walked in once and saw him – caught him – playing through my gear, and he got really upset,” he chuckles. “He's like, ‘Oh, Mike, you're not supposed to be in here.’ He's a captain, but he was playing through my amp and my rig that day.”
While the two never “talked shop”, as Scott puts it, Prince would sometimes have him check his guitar for soundcheck.
“He used to always say, ‘You step you step on my pedals like you're killing cockroaches or something. Why do you step on my pedals so hard?’ They call them stompboxes for a reason!” he continues.
“But when she [his wife] told me that he was playing through my rig... I mean, at night, the whole band's gear is sitting there, [so] I'm sure he was trying [it] out. You know, if I lived at Paisley and he didn't live there, I would go try his rig out at night!”
In more recent Prince news, Spike Lee recalled the time he asked Prince for one of his highly bespoke signature guitars – and didn't expect what happened next.
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