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Please visit our digital "flip book" special edition catalogue with all details and photography providing the history of this guitar and case by clicking on the catalogue cover image below:

Prince owned and played original Cloud 2 "Blue Angel" guitar with roadcase, magazine and photo.

Builders: O'Hagan Guitar Company, Tommy Stinson, Dave Rusan, Mark Sampson, Barry Haugen

The guitar, currently painted an electric blue finish, has been refinished a number of times, but began white. The guitar has also been painted and used by Prince as peach, light blue, and yellow. The guitar neck is cracked from between the 6th and 7th frets up to the headstock. From 1984 until the time that Andy Beech began making Cloud guitars for Prince in 1993, this was Prince’s primary performance Cloud guitar. Guitar is accompanied by a custom purple Calzone case with stenciled labeling identifying this as “C1” and listing the address for Paisley Park.

A detailed timeline of this guitar and its many finishes is provided below. It is important to note that this is the only Cloud guitar that was painted the lighter blue/teal color giving it the nickname “Blue Angel.”

• The guitar was created for and used throughout the Purple Rain Tour (1984-1985)
• Used throughout the Parade Tour (1986)
• Used throughout the Sign o’ The Times Tour (1987)
• Appeared in the 1987 music documentary “Sign o’ The Times” and it is featured on the poster for the film
• It is the primary guitar Prince used throughout the Lovesexy Tour (1988-1989)
• Prince played this guitar on September 24, 1989 when he appeared on the Saturday Night Live 15th Anniversary Special and performed “Electric Chair.” The guitar featured Batman fingerboard decals at that time.
• Appeared on September 1991 Spin magazine cover, a copy of the magazine is included with this lot.
• Used at the September 5, 1991 MTV Video Music Awards when he performed “Get Off.”
• September 9, 1991 Prince appeared on the Arsenio Hall show for a now legendary performance of five songs on stage for over 20 minutes throughout the show. He played this guitar for the opener “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Cream,” and “Purple Rain” 
• Used in the music videos for “Get Off” and “Cream”
• Used throughout the Diamonds and Pearls Tour (1992)
• It is not simply a play on words to say that the history of Prince Cloud guitars has, to this point, been a bit nebulous. This is due in large part to the many conflicting and inaccurate accounts floating around the internet.

There were a great number of later copies of the Cloud commissioned by Prince that, to the casual observer, are a close match to the originals; by design. It doesn’t help that Prince was a perpetually evolving artist whose instruments are reminiscent of the Emerald City of Oz horses of a different color that cycled through the colors of the rainbow.

All of this is set against the background of a virtual revolving door of guitar techs who worked with Prince throughout his long career. Unlike some prominent guitarists who employ one guitar tech for decades at a time, techs generally didn’t last long with Prince. One story relayed by a former tech tells of hash marks on the warehouse walls to mark the number of days each tech would last, and some reportedly chalked up only one mark. Therefore, there is no single person with continuity from the time this guitar was made until this guitar has come to market that can trace the entire history of this instrument from start to finish.

The research on this guitar required going back to the very beginning of the Cloud guitar itself to determine how it was constructed, repaired and refinished through the years (and it was repaired and refinished a lot).

We consulted with John Woodland who has spent a year and a half researching the origin and creation of the original Cloud guitars. Woodland also performs conservation work on Prince’s guitars at Paisley Park. He is currently writing a book with Gerald Ronning (former Knut Koupeé Music employee, 1983) on the subject. They recently previewed excerpts of their book in the publication “Fretboard Journal: 45” which is referenced throughout this description.

Woodland was recently cited by Amanda Petrusich in the Smithsonian Magazine article, published online October 2019, as the specialist who, “reached out to the Smithsonian with a sneaking suspicion” regarding the Cloud guitar at the Smithsonian. The article continues to explain that after Woodland shared his research with the Smithsonian, their guitar underwent a CT scan and extensive paint analysis. The article quotes John Troutman, curator of American music at the National Museum of American History saying, about the Smithsonian’s Cloud guitar, “All evidence suggests that this was the first cloud guitar ever built for Prince.”

Woodland guided our investigation of this guitar performing the same diagnostic analysis through the use of paint samples and CT scans performed on the guitar by Westside Medical Imaging in Beverly Hills.

We also consulted former Knut Koupeé employees as well as former O’Hagan guitar employee Dave Seaton. We not only had to go beneath the surface details of the guitar figuratively, we literally had to look inside this guitar to discover its details of construction.

The first thing people are going to see when they look at this guitar is the fact that the headstock looks like a Schecter. We’ll get to that, there’s a very good reason for this, but that is at the end of this story chronologically.

In order to understand the need for all of this, it is important to start at the very beginning, before the Cloud as we know it was born. While the details of the story vary from version to version, all accounts confirm that in 1976 Prince was in New York City shopping around his demo tape recorded by Chris Moon, when he saw a bass guitar designed by luthier Jeff Levin of Sardonyx Guitars in the window of Umanov Guitars. Prince bought the instrument, later known to Prince fans as the Cloud bass, but Levin called it the F-Bass because he based the design on F-style mandolins. Levin notes in the Fretboard Journal article that the body and headstock design is “a derivation of that Florentine-style mandolin. If you look at the Gibson’s, it’s not that far removed. I like to give credit where credit’s due.”

Fast forward from a teenage Prince shopping his demo tape around New York City in 1976 to an artist that had not only secured a record deal, but an artist that had already released five albums, For You (1978), Prince (1979), Dirty Mind (1980), Controversy (1981), and 1999 (1982), all achieving critical and commercial success. It was on the wave of this success that Prince embarked on his most ambitious project to date, Purple Rain. The script called for a guitar in a shop window that would serve as “The Kid’s” object of desire. For this, Prince enlisted the help of legendary Minneapolis guitar shop Knut Koupeé Music. According to all accounts, Prince brought his Sardonyx bass, and explained that he would like to commission a guitar version of the instrument in white, with EMG pickups and gold hardware for use in his upcoming film.

Before moving forward with the story, we have to go backward again to understand what happened next. Thanks to excerpts from Chapter 2 titled “The O’Hagan Connection” from the forthcoming book by Woodland and Ronning, we have a very clear understanding of the construction of the first Cloud guitars.

“In the late 1970s, a Minnesota clarinetist named Jerry O’Hagan determined that he would break into the guitar business. He commissioned a local art teacher, Jim Imsdahl, to design a line of O’Hagan electric guitars that would be made in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. O’Hagan hired Jim Olson to make the jigs, and in 1979, the company debuted its first line of four instruments, including the Shark, inspired by Gibson’s Explorer, and the Nightwatch, a Les Paul Junior – style instrument...

O’Hagan initially hired space in which to paint the guitars from Minnesota luthier Chuck Orr, whom diehard Prince fans know as Prince’s first luthier, who built the guitar he plays in the video for “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad.” With a crew of young luthiers working in the St. Louis Park shop, Jerry O’Hagan seemed to be off to a good start, and from a distance, O’Hagan looked as if it might be Minnesota’s answer to Hamer Guitars.

As Minnesota luthier and former O’Hagan employee David Seaton explains, “Things were good when I started, there were about 10 of us total employed at the shop.” O’Hagan didn’t live up to its founder’s hopes, however. According to Seaton, in 1982, O’Hagan sales began to fall flat. By early 1983, paychecks started to bounce and the company started to lay off its staff. Seaton recalls, “My coworkers weren’t showing up to work, and the rest of us were trying to figure out what to do. One day, I came into work to see if I could get a new paycheck cut and there was this big truck there and they were loading up bins of guitars and tools that would eventually go to auction.” Apparently, O’Hagan had problems with the IRS and needed to clean house. O’Hagan sold the majority of its inventory and tools and persisted for two more years at a shop near the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis until it’s final demise in 1985.

One of the buyers of those bins of guitars, parts and tools in the spring of 1983 was Knute Koupeé Music, a South Minneapolis store founded in 1973 by Karl Dedolph and Jeff Hill, the man who took the order for the first Cloud Guitar in 1983. According to employees, Knut Koupeé was initially a laughably small operation – at times maybe a half-dozen sets of strings and a couple of beat-up acoustics made up the store’s entire inventory.

But by the end of the 1970s, Knut had become a flourishing little shop benefiting from geography and an effervescent local music scene.”

That brings us back to 1983, Knut Koupeé had just purchased the buyout bins of guitars in all stages of completion, parts and tools, from the O’Hagan auction when they received their most important commission. The team at Knut Koupeé set to work on creating the first Cloud. David Rebel interviewed former Knut Koupeé employees Dave Rusan and Barry Haugen for his article that appeared in the November/December 2009 issue of the German Magazine “grandgtrs.” In his interview transcripts, Rusan recalls that when Prince brought in the Sardonyx bass, “I immediately started work on the instrument with Tommy Stinson, (not the bass player of the Replacements) who formerly worked for Schecter Guitars in California.”

In the Fretboard Journal article, John Woodland recalls a conversation he had with Roger Benedict, a Minneapolis luthier and co-founder of Benedict Guitar Company. Benedict once worked building guitars for O’Hagan, and he told Woodland that the original Knut Koupeé Cloud guitar was built from an O’Hagan Shark model guitar. Woodland does not believe this in any way indicates that Knut Koupeé was cutting corners, “If you already have a maple neck-through body that has dried and the wood is seasoned, it makes perfect sense to use it and achieve what was being asked of them on such a tight deadline.” By all accounts, work performed for Prince was always on an impossibly tight deadline.

The article goes on to confirm:

“The sides of the Shark were cut off of the maple neckthrough body design and new sides were grafted on. The neck pickup humbucker cavity rout was filled with wood to be later routed from the back side of the guitar for the smaller, EMG neck pickup, while the existing bridge pickup rough already accommodated the EMG Prince used. The existing tuner holes were filled and a little wingtip part of the headstock was grafted on from a new piece of wood.

The first Cloud guitar was constructed in 1983 painted white, and used in the film Purple Rain, which began shooting in Minneapolis on November 1, 1983. Prince was already planning the Purple Rain tour in the spring of 1984 before the film’s release in late July, 1984. The success of the film was certainly not assured by standard Hollywood metrics, with a cast that had never acted before, a firsttime director and the film’s lead reluctant to do any promotional press.

Although he likely didn’t anticipate that the film would earn him an Academy Award, he certainly believed in it enough to plan a North American tour that included 98 shows between November of 1984 and April of 1985. He also correctly predicted that the Cloud guitar, which had become almost another character in the film, would become a potent visual symbol. Prince, therefore, needed more guitars for his tour. In the spring of 1984 he once again turned to Knut Koupeé to build a second Cloudguitar. This time Prince had Knut Koupeé co-founder Karl Dedolph sign a contract stating in part:

“All worldwide right, title and interest (including, without limitation all copyrights, including all renewals and extensions thereof, trademark rights and design patent rights) in perpetuity in and on the Customized Guitar and the design thereof shall be entirely Prince’s property, free of any claims whatsoever by you or anyother person, firm or corporation. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, Prince shall have the sole and exclusive right to register any and all design patents and other patents in connection with the Customized Guitar and design there of…” [quoted from a copy of the original agreement obtained from public filings related to an ongoing legal dispute regarding the ownership of the guitar’s trademark]

Prince very clearly understood the fact that this guitar would become an iconic symbol of his brand with the release of the film, and he sought to protect it, reserving the right to own the design and trademark for himself. With this legal document in place, Knut Koupeé set to building the second Cloud guitar. This guitar was again built from parts purchased from the O’Hagan company, but this time an O’Hagan Nightwatch would become a Cloud.

In the Polaroid image shown right, you can clearly see the difference in color between the original central section of O’Hagan maple and the two maple sides that have been grafted onto the guitar. This same color differentiation is clearly visible in the CT scans done on the guitar up for auction.

The Joki Polaroid also shows that the neck pickup has been filled-in completely, as this would be re-routed from the back side of the guitar to accommodate a smaller EMG neck pickup.

What is unique to O’Hagan guitars is how they created a rout on the side of the guitar before the sides of the guitar were glued on, making for a straight channel in relation to the neck.

A cross section view of the guitar obtained during the CT scan also shows this straight channel routed into one of the sections of the original O’Hagan body that remains on this guitar. Former O’Hagan employee Dave Seaton has confirmed that this was their method of construction: “we routed a ½” wide channel in the body half to connect the pickup cavities before it was glued to the neck shaft.”

Another distinct feature of the pickup cavity that identifies it as O’Hagan is the wobbly and imprecise routing of the pickup cavity itself. When compared to other professionally manufactured guitars, they are quite imprecise and sloppy. If you look at the first example, shown on page 19, of a Gibson, Les Paul pickup cavity, it is clearly done with an exceptional level of precision. The pickup cavity corners of the O’Hagan guitars, shown left, appear to be done almost free hand. Former O’Hagan employee Dave Seaton shed some light on why the O’Hagan routs look so sloppy:

“The jig we used probably was a traditional looking Les Paul type pickup shape at some time in history. We used a plunge router with a straight 1/2" bit so the corners were never very square. That was part of the problem. We were cutting pretty fast in solid maple and sometimes it jumped the edge. Over time, the jig got mangled, repaired, mangled again, repaired again. Then a new jig was made from the old one- repeat. I know I blasted it with the plunge router more than once in my days in the shop before I moved to final setups.

When I moved to assembly and setup, I had guitars that the jig was misplaced by a few mm's, or for some reason the pickups just didn't fit in the cavity, so the Dremel with a small sanding drum removed what was in the way. The time lag between jig mangle and them getting to me in setup was a few weeks so a lot of bodies could get made with a jig that didn't work very well. I would tell the guys they needed to fix it and they did but meanwhile you'vegot some bodies with bad routes, you don't throw those bodies away. Remember - the business was on the verge of bankruptcy for almost the entire time I was there. We were getting by with the tools and wood we had. Not a lot of time for making it perfect - just making it.”

There is no question, based upon the physical evidence, that this Cloud is made from an O’Hagan guitar.

Mark Sampson (Matchless Amplifiers) confirmed this for us, “I began working at Knut Koupeé shortly after the first [Cloud] was finished but before the Purple Rain movie came out. My job there was primarily painting with some setup and repairs. I painted Clouds 2 & 3 when they were new for the first time. I additionally had to help strip and refinish #s 1, 2, & 3 a number of times during the Purple Rain Tour period. The #2 guitar started as a partially finished O’Hagan Nightwatch that was in a parts pile purchased by the store at an auction of the defunct O’Hagan factory. Extensive woodwork was done to transform it into the Cloud.”

The only characteristics of a repurposed O’Hagan Nightwatch that were not visible in the CT scans of this guitar, were the wooden dowels used to plug the original Nightwatch tuning peg holes, visible in the Joki Polaroid. There is a very good reason for this – this guitar was renecked in 1988. To understand why, we turned back to Mark Sampson and his successor Barry Haugen. Mark explained that repairs were common and performed under extraordinary time constraints. He recalled that “there were many times that either Dave [Rusan], I or someone from the store had to go to the airport to receive a broken guitar that a stewardess would hand someone coming to the airport to pick up!! We would have 48, sometimes 72 hours, to repair the break(s), strip, refinish including hand mounted fret markers, do a fret dress or replace frets as needed, polish after all work was done, rush back to the airport and back on a plane to next tour stop!!”

Mark Sampson overlapped at Knut Koupeé with Barry Haugen. Haugen was originally hired by Knut Koupeé to get all of the guitars ready for the Purple Rain Tour in the fall of 1984. Sampson, Rusan and Haugen worked on the guitars during the Purple Rain tour period. Sampson and Rusan both left Knut’s repair shop in 1985, leaving Haugen as the head of repairs from 1985-1992. When asked about his work on Cloud 2, Haugen recalls: “By the summer of 1985 I was doing all of the repairs and paint work on Prince’s Cloud guitars until Paisley Park took that guitar to Ron Tracy at Hoffman Guitars in Minneapolis. So, from 1985 until Ron Tracy, in 1991, got that guitar I did all the repairs and paint work. Not only on the Clouds, but I personally repaired all of Prince’s guitars in that time span until 1991/1992.”

Haugen has confirmed that in 1988, Cloud 2 was broken yet again, severely enough to require that he re-neck the guitar, replacing the original headstock that contained the dowel plugged holes from the original O’Hagan configuration:

“Clouds 2 and 3 were made for the Purple Rain tour. They were broken, repaired, and repainted several times. Cloud 3 came to me in 1986 with its headstock broken so badly, it needed a new neck graft. I didn’t have the tools or the expertise to do the job at the music store. So, I sought the help of my guitar repair teacher, David Patterson to help me. The new neck that was grafted had an approximate headstock angle of 7 1/2° instead of the traditional O’Hagan angle of 13°. I had read in a Guitar Player magazine that Paul Reed Smith used 7 1/2° on his headstocks, because he had seen a lot of broken Gibson guitars and hypothesized that a shallow angle would help prevent headstock fractures. That is why, when I crafted the necks on Cloud 2 and Cloud 3, I used an approximate 7 1/2° angle. I had a surplus O’Hagan maple fretboard that I put on the grafted neck on C3, and then I painted the guitar black with a clear gloss on the fretboard. There is a picture of me with the three guitars. C3 is the black one with the maple fretboard. In that same picture I am holding C1. In 1988 I painted Cloud 2 a light blue color for the Lovesexy Tour and also did a neck graft on that guitar at my home, without the help of Mr. Patterson in 1988. By the time I got this guitar in 1988 the headstock had been broken and repaired so many times I had to finally re-neck it. I used two-piece maple, joined at the center for the new necks.”

Haugen states that he used a two-piece maple neck joined at the center which is visible in the CT scan of the guitar up for auction. O’Hagan used a three-piece maple neck construction, and grafted a solid piece of maple for the headstock scarf joint. The CT scans show not only the center join of the two-piece neck added by Haugen in 1988, but also the original section of the O’Hagan three-piece maple neck throughout the lower portion of the neck as it goes into the body of the guitar.

Measurements were also taken of the guitar’s neck angle, which are approximate because the neck is currently broken, but from the measurements taken, the headstock on this guitar does indeed sit with an angle of approximately 7.5° as Haugen described. Haugen reviewed photos of this guitar and said: “It certainly appears to have the markings of the O’Hagan guitars that were used in the fabrication of the first original Cloud guitars. The truss rod is a dead giveaway.” Haugen is referencing the fact that this guitar features a Japanese-made aluminum truss rod with a female hex truss rod nut. Companies such as Gibson and Hamer used a 5/16” male truss rod nut on their neckthrough and set neck guitars. Andy Beech also used standard Gibson style 5/16” male truss rod nuts on his later Cloud guitars.

Another important detail that is apparent in this image of the guitar up for auction is the paint residue on the truss rod nut. Light blue overspray paint residue is particularly important because the only Cloud guitar that was ever painted a light blue color, used by Prince during the Lovesexy tour and nicknamed the “Blue Angel,” was Cloud 2.

The changing colors of the guitars make it very difficult to track which guitar Prince is using from one performance to the next. There are a great number of message boards and websites created by fans who have tried to track which Clouds were used when, based upon concert photos and videos. People point to things like fret markers and other details of the guitars to try to prove how many there were and which were used when. This has led to some inaccurate information because research has disclosed that most of the fingerboard markers were decals. These were replaced each time the guitars were refinished and they appear in different positions on the 12th fret after repairs were made.

A concise timeline has been compiled, with the help of Woodland’s extensive research, based upon physical evidence and interviews with the people we have consulted throughout this process to establish which guitars were what color and when. There are certain characteristics of each of the Cloud guitars that have proved useful in performing this research, including slight variations in the position of post holes in relation to the bridge pickup, variation in position of tuning pegs among other visual cues as outlined in more detail by Woodland above.

Cloud 1 – (1983) Born White

• Refinished white prior to 1985 Raspberry Beret video – white backplates put on at this time
• Peach – 1987 Sign of The Times era (painted at the same time as Cloud 2)
• Yellow – 1991 (painted at the same time as Cloud 2)
• Refinished yellow again due to repairs

Cloud 2 – (1984) Born White

• Refinished white multiple times 1984-1986 due to repairs
• Peach – 1987 Sign of the Times era (painted at the same time as Cloud 1)
• Light Blue - re-necked by Haugen new maple fingerboard - 1988 Lovesexy tour giving it the name “Blue Angel”
• Refinished light blue - 1989 Batman fingerboard decals added
• Yellow – 1991 (painted at the same time as Cloud 1)
• Refinished yellow again due to repairs
• Electric blue/purple – circa 1994

Paint chip samples from the inside cavity of this guitar show evidence of all of the colors described above in distinct layers along with undercoats. Chipped areas of paint on the guitar neck also show the multilayered paintwork.

Cloud 3 – (1984) Born White

• Refinished white multiple times 1984-1985 due to repairs
• Black - re-necked by Haugen new maple fingerboard – 1986 Parade Tour
• Refinished black – 1989- Batman decals
• Neck refinished black – 1990- Roman numeral fingerboard marker decals added

Cloud 4 – (1985) Born White

• Knute Koupeé was commissioned by Warner Bros. to create a guitar to be given away as the prize in a contest held in Europe.

In the German “grandgtrs” magazine article by Dave Rebel, Dave Rusan credits Tommy Stinson with “lacquering” Cloud 1. According to Mark Sampson, Stinson used a nitrocellulose paint for Cloud 1’s initial finish. Sampson used an acrylic lacquer for Clouds 2 and 3, “I used acrylic lacquer instead of the industry standard at the time, which was nitrocellulose lacquer. I did this because I could force dry the acrylic type much faster than the old nitro lacquer and time was of the essence! Rock and Roll makes for some unusual circumstances and sometimes new remedies for new problems. I did repaint #1 some time in there. The paint work on those was difficult due to the painted and hand installed transfer fret markers that had to be done after the first clear coat (immediately) and more coats applied immediately following. Most of my work though for that tour was on #s 2 & 3 sometimes on #1.”

After white, Clouds 1 and 2 were painted peach at the same time, and they were later painted yellow at the same time. Cloud 2 is the only Cloud guitar that was ever painted light blue and Barry Haugen said that he painted it light blue in preparation for the Lovesexy Tour in 1988, the same year he grafted a new neck on the guitar.

This light blue color is what gave Cloud 2 the nickname “Blue Angel.” Prince references the guitar by name at the 4:41 minute marker in the extended mix of the song “I Wish You Heaven (Part 1,2 & 3)” when he says, “say hello to my little friend the blue angel.”

At some point between 1992 and 1994 this guitar was painted the electric blue/purple color that it is today. We know, based upon a Paisley Park inventory listing prepared in early January of 1995, that the inventory number for this guitar is listed as “purple/blue.” The guitar was not only refinished at this time, but the headstock was also re-shaped before the electric blue finish was applied.

The wing shape that juts out from the headstock of the original Cloud guitars was created by grafting a small piece of wood to the body of the headstock, as the O’Hagan headstocks didn’t have the mass needed to reproduce the Sardonyx design. Haugen confirms that when he re-necked the guitar in 1988 he built a headstock from two pieces of maple with a center join that included the wing as an integral part of the design with no need for a separate piece of grafted wood.

Sometime, after the Lovesexy tour, this integral wing tip was broken and a new separate piece was grafted on. In the September 1991 Arsenio Hall performance, you can see that the back side of the wing was tapered in. In the 1991 Ron Tracy image of C1 and C2, shortly after the 1991 performance, the wing is shown repaired to its original form.

The tip of this grafted wing repair was broken off again at some point. For reasons unknown at the time of this publication, when the guitar up for auction was refinished to electric blue/purple circa 1994, the headstock was reshaped. Instead of re-attaching the broken part of the wing, or making a new replacement piece, the headstock was simply sanded down to smooth over the raw edge that had broken. This resulted in a smaller headstock that does not extend out as far as it once did. The CT scan of the guitar up for auction shows the join where a wing had been added, although very little of this wing remains.

Schecter Guitar Research Hollywood have confirmed that this is the guitar they used as a model for the first run of guitars they made for Prince in 1997. That is why the Schecter guitars have this truncated headstock shape. They also based the color of their 1997 guitars on a Pantone color match against the guitar up for auction.

The Roadcase

We have been using the names Cloud 1, Cloud 2, Cloud 3, or C1, C2, C3 in a chronological sense throughout our research. That is not the meaning of the “C1” spray painted on the roadcase that comes with this guitar. Most musicians touring at this level have primary instruments and backup instruments on the road. The instruments themselves often have labels on tape or other markers to indicate which is the primary instrument and which is the backup.

This guitar comes in an original custom purple roadcase made by Calzone, with “C1 / P.R.N. PROD.” and the Chanhassen Minnesota address for Paisley Park. The use of the “C1” in this case is meant to indicate that this was Prince’s primary instrument used during a tour.

When Haugen refinished Cloud 2 a light blue in 1988, a new brass truss rod cover was made that was more elongated than the original, with a “1” decal on the headstock to replace the original truss rod cover that featured a spade decal. Although the truss rod cover is now missing, presumably lost at the time of the last break, there are a great number of images of this guitar with a number one on the headstock, which matches this guitar up to this case.

The roadcase exhibits considerable wear and has layers of packing tape, adhesive residue, and partial mailing labels including: one from Paisley Park Studios hand addressed to The Record Plant in Hollywood California; a label from Matty Baratto in North Hollywood back to Paisley Park; a partially peeled label from Wilkins Guitars in Canoga Park, CA; and a label to Andy Beech of D’Haitre guitars in Washington state. This case has clearly been used for touring as well as for shipping the instrument to recording studios and guitar makers. The case stenciling and color is consistent with historic images of other roadcases used for original Cloud guitars and other equipment.

Please contact [email protected] or call (310) 836-1818 for additional information to bid on this lot.

The Estate of Prince Rogers Nelson is not affiliated, associated or connected with ‘Julien’s Auctions’ or this Auction, nor has it endorsed or sponsored ‘Julien’s Auctions’ or this Auction. Further, the Estate of Prince Rogers Nelson has not licensed any of its intellectual property to ‘Julien’s Auctions’ or the sellers of this Auction.

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