Prince: Symbol
Prince was both a dream and a nightmare for a luthier – astonishingly talented, he would also fling guitars around for some poor stage hand to catch (as at his peerlessly casual yet brilliant 2004 performance honouring George Harrison). The “Cloud” model used in Purple Rain, and built by Dave Rusan, is every bit as insouciantly sexy as the man who played it, with a gorgeous spiral detail around the jack and an actual horn jutting out of the body, ending in its own spiral. But nothing is more iconic than the guitar made by Andy Beech in the shape of his squiggly sigil. Playing Purple Rain on it, in the rain, turned the 2007 Super Bowl into a kind of mythic Arthurian setting with the guitar as Prince’s sword, or as some saw it, phallus.
