Pink Cadillac (song)

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"Pink Cadillac"

Single by Natalie Cole
from the album Everlasting
Released	1988
Format	7" single, 12" single
Genre	R & B
Length	4:12
Label	EMI Manhattan
Writer(s)	Bruce Springsteen
Producer(s)	Dennis Lambert
Chart positions
#5 (U.S.)
Natalie Cole singles chronology
"I Live For Your Love" (1988)	"Pink Cadillac" (1988)	"When I Fall in Love" (1988)

"Pink Cadillac" is a 1984 humorous rockabilly song by Bruce Springsteen that is most known as a 1988 Top 10 hit single, recorded in R & B fashion, by Natalie Cole.

1 History
2 Track listings
- 2.1 7-inch single
- 2.2 12-inch single
3 Live performance history
4 Pop Culture
5 References
6 Further Reading

[edit] History

"Pink Cadillac" continued Springsteen's well-known obsession with car imagery in songs. It was his second song about Cadillacs, with 1980's "Cadillac Ranch" being the first. "Pink Cadillac" was originally recorded by Springsteen in May 1983, during the sessions for the Born in the U.S.A. album. Springsteen put this together after most of the crew had left a session. He started strumming the riff on an acoustic guitar, put down the basic track, and recorded it with the band in the morning. It was on the short list for the album, until it was bumped in favor of "I'm Going Down".

Instead, it was released as the B-side of the album's first and biggest hit single, "Dancing in the Dark". It did not appear on any Springsteen album until the late 1990s outtakes-and-B-sides collections Tracks and 18 Tracks.

Natalie Cole's cover was a #5 Billboard Hot 100 pop hit in 1988. It also was a #16 Adult Contemporary hit, and topped to #1 on the Dance chart. In fact, the 1988 version that was a pop hit was a dance-oriented remix to begin with, compared to what was on her 1987 Everlasting album.^[1] However when Cole's 2001 Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 album was released, the original Everlasting version of "Pink Cadillac" was the one chosen, to the disappointment of many reviewers.^[2]

In 2001, AOL would not let users quote this in a Springsteen discussion group because they felt the lyrics were too suggestive. One of the offending lines was "My love is bigger than a Honda, yeah it's bigger than a Subaru."^[3]

In 2006, Bruce Springsteen featured on a recording of Pink Cadillac by Jerry Lee Lewis on his Last Man Standing album.

[edit] Track listings

[edit] 7-inch single

[edit] 12-inch single

Pink Cadillac (Club vocal) — 7:36
I Wanna Be That Woman (12" Version) — 5:20
Pink Cadillac (7" Version) - 4:12

A variety of other 12-inch remixes were also released, all done by David Cole and Robert Clivillés of C+C Music Factory. She also released a UK-only "Motorway Mixes" of "Pink Cadillac" combined with her earlier hit "Jump Start".

[edit] Live performance history

"Pink Cadillac" was frequently played on Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's landmark 1984-1985 Born in the U.S.A. Tour. It was used as a second-set comic relief number, elongated to include a low-budget skit involving Springsteen as a Jimmy Swaggert-style televangelist, alternating with a sleazy used-car dealer, describing the history of "the conflict between worldly things and spiritual health", using a wheeled-out blackboard to locate the Garden of Eden, first in Mesopotamia, but later discovered to actually be "ten miles south of Jersey City, off the New Jersey Turnpike." The story of Adam and Eve was altered to include their heretofore unknown exit strategy: "But right here on this back lot — for $9995 and no money down — I've got their getaway car. And if you've got the nerve to ride! son, I've got the keys ... to the first ... pink Cadillac!" Since that tour, however, "Pink Cadillac" essentially disappeared from the Springsteen repertoire, being performed only half a dozen times.

By the 2000s, Natalie Cole sometimes dropped the song from her concert set list as well^[4] and at other times combined the song with lyrics from Aretha Franklin's 1985 hit "Freeway of Love". ^[5].

[edit] Pop Culture

In the fall of 2006, "Pink Cadillac" sparked a revolution at Gettysburg College when a female student created a web-cam video of herself stripping to the song and accidentally posted it on her public file on the school's website. Students began joking about the tune on an hourly basis once again reviving the legendary song.