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Thu 11 September 2025 21:30, UK
For what he lacked in physical stature, Prince completely made up for in the mind-bending way he changed music forever. Standing at only five feet two, he made absolutely sure that he was never going to get overlooked.
All of this is to say that, regardless of physicality, the musician was a formidable presence on the music scene who nobody would ever be able to compare themselves with. It meant, without trying to paint a negative portrait in any way, that Prince was a rather intimidating figure. Feared equally as much as he was revered, there probably were never many people who were able to break down that veneer and see the real human inside him.
This extended, to a certain degree, almost to the man himself, as he was acutely aware that if he was to continue perpetuating this form of enigmatic persona for any given length of time, he truly had to become that ideal. As such, he was hardly the most accessible figure in the world – keeping his secrets guarded, his circles tight, and not often relying on his rock star contemporaries as shoulders to lean on for advice.
That was, except for one person who truly stopped Prince in his tracks. They came from completely different backgrounds and ultimately played totally contrasting visions of rock, but there was a particular god that turned the musician from his own insular self to an outright gushing fan, worshipping every inch of the ground he walked on just as much as the notes he played. It could only have been Tom Petty.
Indeed, the moment in which their paths crossed was a time to honour a fallen friend and perform a fitting tribute – and it’s fair to say that they pulled out all the stops. At George Harrison’s posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, former bandmates and friends gathered to remember his name and staged an all-star rendition of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, with Prince and Petty some of the most dominant among them.
But behind closed doors, the nerves were uncharacteristically setting in for Prince, who viewed the fellow guitarist in the golden light of a hero. Speaking of the event, he told Rolling Stone afterwards: “It was an honour to play with Tom Petty [at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony]. ‘Free Fallin’’ is one of my favorite songs. I used to love whenever he would come on MTV, because you knew you were going to get a great tune. MTV isn’t like that anymore.”
Truly, neither MTV nor the rest of the world will ever be the same without either of them. In some ways, despite the overtures of tragedy that plagued the ultimate demises of them both, it was rather poetic that Prince and Petty ended up passing in fairly quick succession of one another years down the line.
It was almost the world’s dark way of telling us that we just couldn’t handle their greatness any longer, and they had to go and join legends like Harrison somewhere else. Imagine all the jamming sessions they would have.
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