One day at Sunset Sound, and a singer hidden behind two initials
On 7 July 1982, at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, Prince tracked Lady Cab Driver. Peggy McCreary engineered. Don Batts assisted. Prince played the instruments and sang the lead. The take runs 8 minutes and 25 seconds. It became track nine on 1999, the double album Warner Bros. released on 27 October 1982. In 1983, some pressings of the Little Red Corvette single carried the same recording as a B-side, so the long album cut also sat on a hit 45.
The song had a longer start. On 8 December 1981, during a break in the Controversy tour, he had cut a different piece called Rearrange. Lady Cab Driver keeps that chassis and rebuilds it: a drum machine, a bass figure, then a long middle where a cab ride turns into a sexual scene and a spoken list of grievances. Jill Jones sings the other voice. On the sleeve she is not Jill Jones. She is J.J. She had met him in Buffalo in December 1980, while she was singing backup for Teena Marie on the Dirty Mind tour.
Jones later explained the initials. He wanted the mystery, and he was not ready to put her full name on a record yet. Rearrange had been sitting since December. Six months later, in one Hollywood day, he turned it into the eight-and-a-half-minute track that sits on the second half of 1999. The first time he played Lady Cab Driver live was 11 November 1982, at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, the opening night of the 1999 tour. She was on that tour too, off to the side on background vocals, then out front for the encores. On the Parade tour he sometimes kept the song only as an instrumental.
Prince liked to have an air of mystery, so when I asked him why he put J.J. instead of my name, he said, let the fans wonder who you are.
(Jill Jones to Michael A. Gonzales, Wax Poetics)
What the sleeve withholds is the part listeners argued about. The middle of the track is explicit, and for years people treated the moans as a document of the session itself. Jones’s own account of the credit is plainer, and it is the one that is on the record: two letters, because he liked the mystery. The music does not need the rumour. It is an eight-minute funk track on a double album, with one singer hidden, and a groove Prince thought was worth a whole side of a hit single.
1999 is the album that opened the door to Purple Rain. Little Red Corvette and the title track did that work in public. Lady Cab Driver stayed the long cut: Hollywood, one day in July 1982, a voice billed as J.J., and a song he kept on the 1999 tour from the first night. Later editions, including the 2019 remaster, do not change the session. The take that counts is the one Peggy McCreary recorded at Sunset Sound on 7 July.
