The artist born Prince Rogers Nelson was taking a nap in the back seat of a pink-and-white 1964 Mercury Montclair when the idea for the song that became Little Red Corvette first came to him.
It was an early morning in the spring of 1982 and Prince had just emerged from an exhausting all-night recording session.
The Montclair that he was dozing in belonged to Lisa Coleman, keyboardist with Prince’s band The Revolution, and one half of Wendy and Lisa.
“Prince was always borrowing my car because it was awesome,” Coleman told Mark Savage of BBC News in November 2019. “It was just the perfect cruise-mobile on a beautiful day in Minneapolis.
“He actually put a couple of dents in it, because it was so big. He’d come up to me and mumble, ‘Hey Lisa, sorry about your car.’ So I'd run out to inspect the damage and there'd be a little dent with some yellow paint from a pole he’d reversed into, and I’d go, ‘Damn it. Watch where you're going!’”
Little Red Corvette would go on to become a groundbreaking song for Prince.
It was his first single to break into the US top 10, and the first to cross over to the mainstream and establish him as an artist who appealed to both R&B and pop audiences.
In the weeks following Prince’s tragic death on 21 April 2016 at the age of 57, the song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 peaking at No.20.
Little Red Corvette occupies a pivotal place in his rich and enduring legacy.
Glancing back over Prince’s life, it’s clear that he was destined from his earliest years for a career in music.
He was born on 7 June 1958 in Minneapolis to a jazz singer mother Mattie Della (née Shaw) and a pianist and songwriter father John Lewis Nelson.
Prince was named after his father’s stage name, Prince Rogers, and in 1991 his father told TV news magazine programme A Current Affair that he gave his son the name Prince because he wanted him “to do everything I wanted to do”.
The young Prince was a prodigious talent, writing his first song Funk Machine after learning piano at the age of seven. He mastered the guitar and drums by the age of 14, when he joined his first band.
In 1976, he recorded a demo tape with producer Chris Moon and took the tape to Minneapolis businessman Owen Hussey, who became his manager. One year later Warner Bros. Records signed him, agreeing to give him creative control and retention of publishing rights for three albums.
Two years later, Prince recorded his debut album For You at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. According to the liner notes, he wrote, produced, arranged and composed and played all 27 instruments on the album.
In October 1979, his second album – titled simply Prince – reached No. 22 in the Billboard 200 chart. That same year, at the Capri theatre in Minneapolis, he showcased his new band: a funk-rock ensemble featuring Dez Dickerson on guitar, André Cymone on bass, Gayle Chapman and Matt Fink on keyboards, and Bobby Z on drums.
One year later he released his third album Dirty Mind, a provocative work which Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic described as a “stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fuelled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock”.
It was a landmark release. In February 1981 Prince made his first appearance on the hip late-night live comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live, and in October that year he released his fourth album Controversy.
For all his progress there was evidence to suggest that the world wasn’t quite ready for Prince or his suggestive sexual wordplay.
In late 1981, Prince was one of three support acts for The Rolling Stones at a show in San Francisco. Dressed in black bikini briefs and a trenchcoat, he was forced to leave the stage after just a few numbers, when the audience reportedly began hurling shoes and chicken’s innards at him.
1982 would prove the real turning point.
In January that year he began recording the double album 1999. The album was recorded at Prince’s home studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota, with additional recording, editing and mixing at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood, California.
The album’s title track was released as the first single and reached No.12 in the Billboard Hot 100. At a time when African-American artists were reportedly struggling to get played on the new, hugely influential MTV channel, the addition of the single 1999 to the channel’s playlist was a significant boost for Prince.
But it was Little Red Corvette that would really fuel his ascent. The song reached No.6 in the Billboard Hot 100, giving Prince his first top 10 hit.
The song fused edgy lyrics, infectious hooks and a radio-friendly sound. It was the first Prince song to appeal to a wider pop audience and the first to perform better in the pop chart than the R&B chart.
Lyrically, Little Red Corvette uses the car as a metaphor for a casual sexual encounter.
Prince reportedly dreamt up the first lines as he fell asleep in the back of Lisa Coleman’s car. In an interview with BBC News in November 2019, Coleman explained the origins of the song’s lyrics to Mark Savage of BBC News.
“He was sleeping with someone we knew… and she was ‘sleeping’ in the back of the car, too. I imagine they were making out, or doing whatever, in the back seat and they probably had a wonderful moment of afterglow, which is when he got the seed of the idea. But it’s not a red Corvette – it’s a pink Mercury!”
Prince wasted no time recording the track, laying it down in his Kiowa Trail home recording studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota on 20 May 1982. This was the first time he had used his newly installed 24-track recording analogue Soundcraft 3B console.
There were just three people involved in the recording: Prince on vocals and virtually all instruments; Lisa Coleman on vocals; and Dez Dickerson on vocals and guitar solos.
For all its infectious radio-friendly appeal, Little Red Corvette is one of the most sexually explicit songs ever to appear in the mainstream pop charts.
As Jason Ankeny noted in his review of the song in AllMusic: “Everything about the song is suggestive, from its moaning synthesisers to its bump-and-grind rhythm to the orgasmic squeals which punctuate Prince's vocals; even the lyrical metaphors are so persuasive.”
The song is brimming with sexual innuendo, ranging from the opening lines in the second verse – “I guess I should've closed my eyes when you drove me to the place/Where your horses run free” – to the far more overt closing lyrics on the bridge – “Move over baby, gimme the keys/I’m going to try to tame your little red love machine”.
Sonically, it’s clear how the song crossed so seamlessly into the mainstream pop market.
For starters, its rhythm is created on a Linn LM-1, the groundbreaking drum machine that played a defining role in the sound of ’80s new wave and pop.
The Linn LM-1 provides the skeletal core of the song’s slow synth build-up, which is melded with rock guitars and a big 4/4 rock chorus.
It’s a beautifully judged arrangement, with synth string swells floating above the scrunching 123 bpm kick and snare.
16 seconds in, Prince’s vocal enters the mix, delicate, soulful and suggestive.
“I guess I should've known by the way you parked your car sideways/That it wouldn't last/See, you're the kinda person that believes in makin’ out once/Love ’em and leave ’em fast.”
33 seconds in, the synth bass line kicks in, bolstering the sultry, groove.
At 0:48 the chorus begins, as the whole song shifts into a much straighter 4/4 driving beat.
In anyone else’s hands, this could have lurched into something far more bombastic, but Prince keeps the production and arrangement lean.
On the second verse, the groove picks up, accentuated by thick stabs of synth and guitar.
At 1:40 Dez Dickerson’s blistering distortion-drenched solo enters the mix and it’s a part that owes far more to MTV pop/rock than the soulful, minimal grooves of the verse.
On the final verse, the whole thing drops down to just the LinnDrum and Prince’s vocal, before building back up to the chorus at 2mins 20secs.
From that point on it’s just freefall into the chorus outro and then a fade, with Dickerson’s searing lead guitar reentering the mix, bolstering the vocals through to the song’s closing seconds.
The whole thing lasts just over three minutes, a peerless slice of funk-pop that still has the power to enthral more than 40 years on.
Little Red Corvette was released as a single on 9 February 1983 and reached No.6 in the US, No.7 in the UK, No. 8 in Australia and No.11 in Canada.
This was the song that made Prince a star and established him as a uniquely gifted and revered artist.
Some critics noted that for all the sexual innuendo on Little Red Corvette, Prince just managed to steer the song away from becoming outright obscene. Now, many critics retrospectively view the song as a career high point.
“Not just Prince's first major hit single, Little Red Corvette may be his very best,” observed Jason Ankeny of AllMusic. “Only fitting that a song about staying power would have so much of its own.”
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