"Little Red Corvette"

From the beginning of his career, Prince had his eyes on the prize.  When he was starting out at the end of the 1970s, black artists were marketed to black audiences.  In that era before MTV made crossing over possible, that was just the way it was.

As Prince’s original touring guitarist, Dez Dickerson recalled, the band had no intention of being “limited…or marginalized.”  When they looked out from a concert stage, “we wanted our audience to look like the Western world.”

Rolling Stone summed it up like this in December 2019:  “[Prince] had scored a hit with “I Wanna Be Your Lover” in 1979, but his Dirty Mind and Controversy albums, with their explicitly sexual lyrics, failed to make waves in the mainstream.  With [the album] 1999, his most explicit desire was to write hits.“

And write a hit he did.

“Little Red Corvette” introduced Prince to music fans all across the planet.   It was a song that was kinda sorta about a car…in the same way that  “Vehicle” by The Ides of March or “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” by Meat Loaf or “Trampled Under Foot” by Led Zeppelin are about cars.

But as Slate.com put it, in Prince’s case, the song told “the story of someone who finally got Sally to slow her Mustang down.”

Prince was only 24 when he put his song to tape.  But the impact it had is still being felt today.  Not that long ago, a Chevy billboard campaign proudly pointed out that “They don’t write songs about Volvos.”  Ironically, the actual truth is that “Little Red Corvette” appears to have been inspired by a different vehicle entirely.

In a 2019 interview with the BBC, Lisa Coleman, a former member of Prince’s Purple Rain-era band, The Revolution, claimed that “Prince was always borrowing my car because it was awesome.  It was a '64 Mercury Montclair, pink and white, and it was just the perfect cruise-mobile on a beautiful day in Minneapolis.“

The legend goes that Prince was dozing in Coleman’s car, possibly with a companion, when the idea for a song came to him.  “I imagine they were making out or doing whatever in the back seat,” she recalled, “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!"

Why quibble?  It’s the image that sold the song, not the reality.  Someone who knew all about such things was automotive engineer and race car driver John Heinricy.  While attending a tedious corporate meeting about paint colors for upcoming Corvette designs, he snapped in frustration, “Why are we even having this discussion?  All Corvettes are red.  The rest are mistakes.”