Prince - "Litte Red Corvette" (spotlight)

Prince died today.  First, he was only 11 years older than me.  Second,  Haggard, Frey, Bowie, Lyons -- 2016 is not shaping up to be a good year for musicians.

I wasn't the biggest Prince fan growing up -- I was more into metal and related genres in the 80s -- but even then I knew he was important, respected what he was doing, and had to admit that LPs like 1999 and Purple Rain were really good.   And I always appreciated that, certainly more than his peers, he maintained a heavy guitar sound in many of his songs.

I will choose to remember him with "Little Red Corvette", the second single off his break through LP "1999", for several reasons:

• I remember when it came out (1982), 1999 seemed a million years away.  Oddly enough, the 17 years between 1982 & 1999 is now the same as between 2016 and 1999 (and sadly, sometimes 1999 seems like a million years ago).  
• I vaguely recall this LP, and especially this song, as the sound track for a junior high party at Tim(my) Young's house  (probably in early 1983) where I had my first kiss while playing spin the bottle.  I don't even remember her name, and I'm not even sure she continued at my high school.  But she was a "popular girl" and well above my middle school station, and so I was quite satisfied with the luck of the bottle.
• At some point a few years later, I discovered the difference between the radio edit (3:08) and the LP version (5:03).  And boy, what a difference those 2 minutes make...
• Having established at a young age that he was singing about a car, it wasn't until much later in life where I actually paid attention to the lyrics and realized he's not really singing about her car.

Prince - "Little Red Corvette" (LP Version, Radio Edit)




N.B. It will surely be a struggle to keep the links current in this post since, despite all the accolades Prince deserves, he was kinda a tool about copyright, cover songs, etc.