The story of Prince’s Cloud Guitar
We catch up with Dave Rusan, who built the iconic guitar that Prince would play in Purple Rain, to find out the story behind one of the Purple One’s most unique instruments.
Prince was a different kind of rock star, and one of the things that made him such an enigmatic figure was his flair and unique style, something that was embodied in his unique taste in instruments. From Hohner Mad Cats to his more flamboyant designs like the ‘Symbol’ and ‘C-model’ guitars, he rarely chose the obvious or standard option.
Dave Rusan holding the original Cloud guitar he made for Prince.
There’s one custom guitar that stands apart from all the others he used in his career, however – a custom instrument that Prince was first seen playing in the film Purple Rain, and would become perhaps his most iconic and beloved instrument as the film and its accompanying album became a global megahit – The Cloud.
The guitar was built for Prince by a Minneapolis luthier named Dave Rusan. Dave honed his skills working from his house, and also had a shop at the Knut-Koupee music store in Minneapolis, which Prince had frequented as a teenager and a budding musician.
““One day I remember I was upstairs watching him play. He was doing some hammer-on stuff with one hand and play a line on the keyboard with his right hand that would harmonise with it. So we knew he was good!””
Minneapolis’s music scene was pretty small and tight-knit in those days, and so it wasn’t the first or last time that Rusan and Prince would cross paths in those early days.
“I tried out for his band a few years before, because I played guitar and I was pretty good,” Rusan recalls. “There was a rehearsal spot in town in a big dumpy old building that used to be a tire warehouse, and I got lined up through Bobby Z. Prince’s first album was out and it wasn’t a huge success, but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to think that somebody so talented might be destined for big things, so everyone in town wanted to try out for his band.
A Rusan Original guitar created with the exact design used for the first Cloud Guitar.
“I got there and Bobby was the and Andre Simone and that was it. Prince had put up a big poster of Hendrix on the wall and then he came in and he was eating a sandwich and he came in and started playing his synthesizer and we just did one-chord jams and at one point he asked me what kind of guitar I had because I had an Epiphone, but I had made a custom pickguard, but we jammed in different keys and stuff. He didn’t say hello or goodbye, but he played drums for a bit and a little bass. Andre Simone was the friendliest – he had a boombox that he was recording everything on so they could listen back, then Prince just left. Bobby Z said it went good, but Prince was really looking for a black female guitar player and at that time, I was neither of those!”
This article was originally featured in Guitar Magazine. You can read the full article here.
