Things you probably didn’t know about Prince

1. 1. At age 7, Prince wrote his first song on his father’s old piano. The song was called “Funk Machine.”

       

   2. His first band when he was a young teenager was called Grand Central.

       

   3. Prince is the only artist aside from The Beatles to have the No. 1 movie, album, and single in the United States at the same time with Purple Rain and “When Doves Cry.”

       

   4. His favorite meal during his ‘Purple Rain’ era was spaghetti and orange juice.

       

   5. Prince was never too cool for romance. He once canceled a Japanese tour to record an album in hopes of impressing his crush, ‘Batman’ actress Kim Basinger.

       

   6. Prince kept an extensive archive of unused songs, shelved albums, and assorted abandoned video projects in a storeroom he calls The Vault in his Paisley Park studio compound.

       

   7. Prince’s Warner Bros. contract allowed him to recruit and produce other artists for the label. He took advantage of this to produce an album by The Time.

       

   8. Prince was once so poor that he used to feed off McDonald’s smell instead of eating it. “I didn’t have any money, so I’d just stand outside McDonald’s and smell stuff,” he told Rolling Stone in 1985.

       

   9. The first time Prince ever saw his first wife, Mayte Garcia, was on a videotape. Garcia’s mother, a die-hard Prince fan, insisted that her daughter send videotapes of her belly dance routine to Prince when she was only 16. He began a long-distance courtship with Garcia with the hope of seducing her by the time she turned 18. They wrote letters to one another regularly, and he would give her tapes of new music, and she would send him videos of her dancing to it.

       

   10. His video shoots for ‘1999’ and ‘Little Red Corvette’ proved to be disastrous for toilets. There was so much smoke used in the videos that many people on the set got diarrhea from all the mineral oil in the air.

        

   11. Prince made his co-star and musical protégé Apollonia keep her marriage secret so the public could assume that she was actually in a romantic relationship with him.

        

   12. Prince developed a female alter ego known as Camille while working on Sign O the Times. He used the persona on the single “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” and achieved the effect by slowing down the tape as he sang in his normal register, and then speeding the tape up in playback. An entire album recorded as his feminine alter ego Camille was never released.

        

   13. The force is undeniable with Prince. He performed at George Lucas’ wedding.

        

   14. Prince was deeply in love with Susannah Melvoin, the twin sister of Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin, through much of the mid-’80s. His tortured romance with her, complicated largely by his philandering, for some of his best ballads, including “The Beautiful Ones,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and “Forever in My Life.”

        

   15. Prince named the group “Vanity 6” because, among the three members, there were six breasts. He also ghostwrote and produced a record for Vanity 6. The trio was fronted by Denise Matthews, a woman he was dating in the early ’80s. He originally wanted the group to be called The Hookers, and for Matthews to go by the stage name Vagina — pronounced “va-geen-uh” — but she refused and chose the name Vanity instead.

        

   16. When Prince changed his name to O{+> in the mid-’90s, he presented it to journalists as though it was a completely new persona. “Prince never used to do interviews,” he told Time Out in 1995. “You’d have to ask Prince why, but you’re not talking to Prince now, you’re talking to me.”

        

   17. Prince originally asked Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac to write the lyrics to ‘Purple Rain.’ She said the enormity of the track was too much for her and declined.

        

   18. He later co-wrote “Stand Back” with Stevie Nicks.

        

   19. He wrote “Manic Monday” for The Bangles.

        

   20. He wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” for The Family, but Sinead O’Connor made it a worldwide hit in 1990.

        

   21. Prince’s revenue streams were diminishing by the mid-’90s, but he still kept the Paisley Park complex running and fully staffed 24 hours a day and spent $500,000 per year keeping a studio ready in Los Angeles on the chance that he’d be in town and want to record on a whim.

        

   22. Prince is part of the reason the Parental Advisory sticker is found on some albums. Tipper Gore was shocked when she heard her 11-year-old daughter listening to ‘Darling Nikki,’ a song about masturbation. After a legal fight, the RIAA decided to put the sticker into use.

        

   23. Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness around 1997, and subsequently dropped his more sexually explicit material from his concerts, and avoided writing overtly sexy songs for many years.

        

   24. Prince never listened to his old albums. “I make a statement, then move on to the next,” he said to Rolling Stone.

        

   25. He played the electric guitar on Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’