Prince Scoffs at Hendrix Comparisons

Another great multi instrumentalist who played as many or more intrument than Prince (Sly Stone) is a better comparison.

Sly & the Family Stone is the template to Princes career & he routinely cites Sly Stone / James Brown & Parliament Funkadelic( whom he inducted into the Rock HOF).


Prince went out of his way to hire women & Whites to get a more diverse look / versatile sound like Sly Stone.
His Catalogue is more in line with Stone than Hendrix.

Prince seem mostly uninterested in 10 minute power guitar solos & enjoyed being the showman/ entertainer more. Completely dispatched with his guitar at time.

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prince is only like hendrix because he's black and played guitar. that's where the comparisons end really. two completely different styles.

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Exactly. I'm not as familiar with Hendrix outside maybe a dozen records ,but I hear nothing remotely close to Prince.

There are always Prince / Hendrix Comparisons in articles ,but they never say specifically what the similarities are.


I just figured Hendrix fans can dismiss the comparison or give me specific similarities.


Prince= Sly Stone /Brown/Parliament funk.

Hendrix= Chicago/ Delta Blues amped up & on acid.

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If Prince denied that Hendrix never had any influence on him, he's was lying.

Although it's not a Hendrix original, his version of All Along the Watchtower is probably more well known & liked than Bob Dylan's.
Prince covered a bit of it during his super bowl halftime show.

prince also had his interpretation of red house.

purple house

Both had a flamboyant style when it came to their wardrobes.

Their most well known songs were purple haze & purple rain....

and prince really expected people to believe that being a black guitar player was his only likeness to Hendrix?

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So he covered 2 Hendrix songs when he was nearly or past 50 years old? What in his discography shows Hendrix influence? Sly Stone is everywhere except Stone wasnt the showman & ruined his career with drugs.




He's covered Sly Stone probably hundreds of times & even became best friends with the Family Stones bassist ( an idol) ,Larry Graham.

Prince is beyond generous in praising the obvious Sly Stone ,James Brown, Funkadelic influence .

Why would he simply dismiss Hendrix? He never said he did not respect Hendrix ,but his influence to his music is nearly non existent.

Hendrix owns Purple? As in the the Vikings whom Prince loved as a kid / adult & wrote a song for? And tied the color to royalty & his birth name Prince?


Besides a few covers later in life to the Rock critics / fans who think the world revolves around Hendrix there is almost nothing in a 40 album career ( especially at his peak in the late 70's / 80's that says "Hendrix".

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I've never seen the similarities either ,so what is Prince & I missing?

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Well, if you don't see the things I pointed out, you simply don't want to and are trying to come up with some way of denying it.
I'm not trying to say that Hendrix was the primary influence on prince or that they were a lot alike.
Your post quoted Prince saying that the only similarities he had to Hendrix was skin color & they played guitars.
I showed otherwise. If you can't or don't want to accept what someone else sees, don't ask for people to point out what you may have missed or what prince didn't want to acknowledge.
I'm not a big enough Prince fan to be familiar with his entire musical catalogue.
But have seen live clips where he's used some Hendrix sounding licks in his playing.

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Why would he simply dismiss Hendrix? He never said he did not respect Hendrix ,but his influence to his music is nearly non existent.

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I think his broader point is that - Hendrix and much of that era of rock (Beatles, Stones, Cream, Zeppelin, to a lesser degree The Who) were all grounded in the blues.

Prince was an evolution of the Jazz & Latin influenced side of Prog Rock (he mentioned Santana, who also betrayed some blues influence, but not overriding), dance music (I don't want to say disco - but you say "tomato," right?) and, more directly, Funk. Now, Prince became something else (the Minneapolis sound was heavily, heavily derived from the early Prince albums), but at his core - during the period of time he became a legend, it was a flavor of funk rock. And Funk was more progressive and jazz oriented with horns (and related sounds), more "funky" beats and tempos - the music was more complex and required a little more musicality for the band to pull it off.

Your middle of the road rock band could get by with great songs and a decent guitarist. Having better bassists and drummers opened up more of what they could do, but wasn't absolutely required.

On the other hand, if you ran a prog rock (Yes, Chicago, Deep Purple, ELP, King Crimson, etc.) OR a funk band (Parliament/Funkadelic, The Meters) - EVERYBODY had to be able to play, and the horns and singers better be locked in, too.

Or it wouldn't work.

Prince was a stripped down "funk" outfit, at first, because he could play every damned thing.

I'm inclined to agree with your point. We have to understand the context of this interview though: Prince riding high on the triumph of guitar hero-album Purple Rain and its tour, with neo-psychedelic Around the World In a Day on the way. It was easy for a publication like Rolling Stone, who worships Hendrix to a fault, to compare Prince to him. The garb Prince was wearing in the 84-85 period didn't remove such notions as well. Prince's background from Minneapolis where there was a 3% black population and little segregation in radio lent very well for Prince to have a massive influence base beyond the acid-blues of Hendrix.

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I think his broader point is that - Hendrix and much of that era of rock (Beatles, Stones, Cream, Zeppelin, to a lesser degree The Who) were all grounded in the blues.

Prince was an evolution of the Jazz & Latin influenced side of Prog Rock (he mentioned Santana, who also betrayed some blues influence, but not overriding), dance music (I don't want to say disco - but you say "tomato," right?) and, more directly, Funk. Now, Prince became something else (the Minneapolis sound was heavily, heavily derived from the early Prince albums), but at his core - during the period of time he became a legend, it was a flavor of funk rock. And Funk was more progressive and jazz oriented with horns (and related sounds), more "funky" beats and tempos - the music was more complex and required a little more musicality for the band to pull it off.

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Great points.

You seem to be a big Prince fan & thanks to my sister I'm almost familiar with every album/ track until " Sign of the Times " when my older sister moved out. I never heard/ thought Hendrix.


Prince even mentions his absolute adoration of Joni Mitchell & the ' prettier' guitar of Santana ( T-Bone Walker Texas style playing progressive Blues /Jazz influences over the Hard Delta/ Chicago style).

Prince is very generous in pointing out his influences & he only ' bristles' at the Hendrix Comparisons because he really wasn't a strong influence.

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You seem to be a big Prince fan & thanks to my sister I'm almost familiar with every album/ track until " Sign of the Times " when my older sister moved out.

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Well I was from Dirty Mind through the end of the 1980s. I grew up - Prince grew up and there was that whole quiet period.

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I never heard/ thought Hendrix.

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And I did, but not from a musical standpoint. He either consciously or unconsciously riffed off Hendrix's style with the "purple" thing and his look for some of those early albums. And Prince himself identified a specific point of comparison, "It's just because he's (Hendrix) black."

Light-skinned black guys who shred like that AND operate solo (or front a band) are few and far between since the classic age of rock and roll, at the very least.

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Can't forget the fact both were legendary sex gods. So that could be an additional point of comparison.

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I guess that was the point Prince was making about superficial Comparisons between he & Hendrix ( Race / Guitar / ,etc...)

Prince bristled at the comparison to Hendrix because obviously Rock critics aren't/ weren't familiar with 5 albums before Purple Rain( 6th album).

The only strong guitar Rock in his 1st 5 albums was the song " Bambi" ( a track from a mostly R&B / Funk 2nd album titled "Prince").

"When you Were Mine" would qualify as Pop /Rock I guess.

Check out multi-instrumentalist Sly Stone live performances on YouTube & the comparisons go beyond the superficial & is obviously Prince s' template( sans the dancing/ showmanship which Stone lacked).

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Although Prince only had a moment during Purple Rain film/Soundtrack era when he briefly approached Michael Jackson stratosphere he ( Prince) is perhaps the genuinely most versatile Pop act ever.

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I think we just have to gut it up and accept that - Prince was essentially "something else" - genre creating/defying.

What was Zappa? The Velvet Underground? Bowie in the 1970s? For that matter, White Zombie/Rob Zombie and Tool can drift into this category - like "WTF is this stuff?" And it can be great and influential. Pink Floyd with Syd is another one.

At the end of the day, Michael Jackson was a huge pop star, with roots in R&B/Golden Age of Rock and Roll - very similar to his one-time father-in-law, Elvis Presley. Prince was "something else" - I don't know how else to verbalize it.