3. Use to feed off McDonald's Smell
He was once so poor that he’d just smell food 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.
4. Prince’s Warner Bros. contract allowed him to recruit
Warner Bros. allowed him to recruit and produce other artists for the label.
He took advantage of this to produce an album by The Time.
5. There was so much smoke used in the videos for “1999” and “Little Red Corvette”
There was so much smoke used in the videos for “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” that many people on the set got diarrhea from all the mineral oil in the air.
6. Prince named the group "Vanity 6" because among the three members, there were six breasts
Prince also ghostwrote and produced a record for Vanity 6. A trio 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.
7. Prince is the only artist aside from The Beatles
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.”
8. The truth about Prince and musical protégé Apollonia
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.
9. Prince was deeply in love
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.”
10. 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.
13. The first time Prince ever saw his first wife, Mayte Garcia
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 videotapesof 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.
14. Prince keeps an extensive archive of unused songs
Prince keeps 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.
15. When Prince changed his name
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’s revenue streams were diminishing by the mid-’90s
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.
18. Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness around 1997
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.
19. Prince wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U”
He wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” for The Family, but Sinead O’Connor made it a worldwide hit in 1990.