(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 8 March 2026 19:15, UK
“You spanked Jimi Hendrix?” Prince recalled with complete and utter glee, quoting a line he’d said to one of his ultimate heroes as he told a tale on a TV show decades later.
One thing that’s important to remember is that Prince was young. By the time he died, with 39 studio albums under his belt and a legacy that had been locked into and looming for decades before, he was only 57. That means a lot of work in a short amount of time, as he managed to convince Warner Bros to let him make his debut album completely solo when he was 18, signing the contract for it then but starting on these beyond-his-years compositions long before.
From then on, it was all guns blazing. In his prime, there was rarely a year when Prince didn’t release a record, sometimes sharing two in quick succession or at least making it a double album. Even when he was older, and the music came out slightly slower, the quality didn’t drop as the final albums from when he was alive, Hit N Run Phase One and Two, are still packed with intrigue.
It’s important to remember that Prince was young, not even so much for his achievements but for the simple matter of excitement. Prince was only a child in the golden age of the 1960s, and so those musicians who came to inspire him so much – they were his childhood heroes.
When he’d then risen through the ranks and found himself standing alongside them, that giddiness never went away. After connecting with some of those heroes, the members of Sly and the Family Stone, Prince did the inevitable, which was to beg to hear stories of their finest moments back in the days before Prince was even out of school.
They offered him one – the story of May 10th, 1968, the night they supported Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore East in New York. “Right then, I’m shaking, can’t wait to hear what went down,” Prince said about the tale, forever the excited kid.
However, this is less a story of the gig. Instead, it was a story of Larry Graham and Freddie Stone struggling to get there. “On the way to the gig, they pick up some of their amplifiers and their car is loaded with these amplifiers, right, so it’s hard to see,” Prince recounted.
“They either hit this guy or a guy runs into them, but there’s an accident, right? In the middle of the street in New York,” he continued.
Smiling to himself, he recalled on the show, “Larry jumps out of the car, whoops this dude’s backside.” Delighted by this insane tale of the carnage of even just trying to get to the historic show, Prince almost forgot to ask about the actual event.
“I asked, and I said, ‘So when you go to the gig, what happened? Who won the battle between you and Hendrix?’ and Larry said, ‘Oh, we spanked him.” Which brings us back to Prince’s first gleeful shout – “You spanked Jimi Hendrix?”
With nothing more to say, Prince just declared, “That’s Larry Graham!”, as if their boldness and their confidence didn’t just come as no surprise but were utterly deserving, making it clear who he threw his love behind.