Songfacts®:

• Kravitz may be a guitar god and style icon, but he had some difficulty hailing a cab. He explained in an interview posted on his website: "'Mr. Cab Driver' was written with a sense of humor. But, the whole thing stems from a day of trying to get to the studio to record. I was recording out at Hoboken, New Jersey, at the time and I was standing at the corner of West Broadway and Broome, trying to get a cab, and I was late for the studio, and I had a lot of work to do, and I was passed by about 20 cabs. Then, finally, a cab stopped for me. I got in, and told him where I was going, and he kicked me out of the cab. And by the end of the whole thing, we were fighting on top of the cab, and you know, he was calling me ni--er. And it got really out of hand. It was horrible. So, I went back to my loft, because I couldn't get to the studio. I was pissed off at that point. I had just been in a fight the middle of the street on top of a yellow cab, and I wrote 'Mr. Cab Driver' and went in the next day and cut it. And you know, the whole thing is about racism and what not, but it is written with a sense of humor." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Martin - Rostock, Germany
• In the black-and-white music video, directed by Geoff Barish, Kravitz recreates the incident that inspired the song.
• This is the third single from Lenny Kravitz's debut album, Let Love Rule. At the time, critics didn't appreciate his hippie outlook on the power of love, nor his retro leanings towards '60s R&B, funk and psychedelic rock. But Kravitz was confused by the anti-love sentiment. "People have gotten on me about the hippie stuff, singing about love and optimism," Kravitz told the Los Angeles Times. "They say I'm unrealistic, that the world is screwed up, so just accept it. But I believe the messages I'm putting out. Maybe I'm living in a dream world, like the hippies in the '60s. But what's wrong with dreaming? You have to dream about these things first before they ever become a reality."