NILE RODGERS
he was the unlikeliest R&B superstar, let alone AllKnowing Pop Sage of the 21st century. But hey, man, c’est Chic. “Timing is everything,” insists Nile Rodgers.
The R&B magician behind Chic, Daft Punk, Let’s Dance and more on Roxy, Aretha, and cleaning Frank Sinatra’s plane!
look at this,” nile rodgers invites Mojo to inspect his phone’s footage of the Chic guitarist, songwriter and producer to the stars chatting to Paul McCartney at an outdoor event. “We were talking about how musicians are always the first artists charities approach because musicians are altruistic. We’re happy to share riffs and teach what we know in a way painters, actors, are not. they like to keep their secrets.” We are in Beatle-blessed abbey road studios, where rodgers now has an office as Chief Creative advisor, sharing his secrets and acting as a lure to attract young talent to the famed recording complex. Who wouldn’t want advice from the man who, after launching Chic’s revolutionary jazz-r&B-soul dance sound in the ’70s, co-wrote and produced diana ross’s biggest studio album and made relative unknowns sister sledge worldwide stars with We are Family, broke into the white rock and pop markets by chaperoning david Bowie through Let’s Dance, Madonna through Like A Virgin, and enlivened duran duran, right up to daft Punk’s 2013 supersmash get lucky? dressed in a flamboyant jacket patterned with tropical flora and postage imprints, jeans ripped, patched and studded, a personalised white beret and silvery slip-ons, the new Yorker looks fit and, despite his second battle with cancer in recent years, is back at work and inexhaustible. the night before we meet, rodgers and Chic performed their dance music celebration at a serpentine gallery event, tickets £4,000 a pop, he says. the next Chic lP, It’s About Time, due in september, is both ironical – the previous release came in 1992 – and factual: the title was suggested when he shared a stage with the late stephen hawking to discuss time, the universal measure. it’s this writer’s sixth meeting with rodgers, the first was in 1978. he’s always full, frank and fascinating, ideas coming thick and fast. on his new Projects wish list: a three tenors-style collaboration on the Barber of seville but with guitars – rodgers, slash, Peter Frampton. he’s also at that stage when awards and citations seem to arrive daily. he’s proud to now have three co-compositions in the Us library of Congress – le Freak, We are Family, rapper’s delight (based on his good times) – and has been appointed chairman of the songwriters hall of Fame. so, it’s about time Mojo caught up with rodgers again. numerous singers guest on It’s About Time, from janelle Monáe and elton john – on Queen, inspired by diana ross, but a homage to thom Bell – to debbie harry, back in the fold after a rare Chic failure, 1981’s KooKoo. two songs not on the album: Prince said it and a song about Bowie, written before both deaths but ultimately omitted: “it just felt wrong,” he says. nile rodgers’ achievements following an unstable upbringing have been nothing less than triumphant, but that childhood also conspired, from the start, to develop an inquisitive independent spirit.
How did your somewhat chaotic upbringing shape your life?
There were lots and lots and lots of good parts, and the bad was actually helpful too. My parents were heroin addicts and their entire inner circle. The word wouldn’t be dysfunctional. They were highly functional, but in an intellectual way. They were…(laughs) They were really wacky, they were not cut out to be parents.
Was there much music?
Oh, continuous music. Modern jazz was around my house all the time and because of heroin and the lifestyle and our neighbourhood those musicians were also my mom’s friends, who all used to call me ‘Pud’. I played one of Nina Simone’s last performances [Sting’s Benefit Concert For Rainforest Foundation, Carnegie Hall, 2002], and she was sort of losing it. She was sitting at the piano and she wouldn’t play. And I went over and I whispered in her ear, I said, “Nina, it’s Pud.” She said, “Pud?” I said, “Yeah, it’s Pud, I’m in the house band, and we gotta play,” and she played! (Laughs)
You were well-known as ‘Pud’, then?
When I was a kid I used to work at [Los Angeles’s Van Nuys] airport, I used to clean Frank Sinatra’s plane. [Much later, in 1984] he was being produced by Quincy Jones, who wanted to use this new technology, a Sony digital tape recorder. There were only two in America. Frank Zappa owned one and I owned the other. So they came to New York to use mine. I said, “Mr Sinatra, it’s great to see you again.” And it was, “Again?!” I said, “Mr Sinatra, it’s Pud.” He said, “What are you doing here?” He’s probably thinking I’m cleaning the recording studio. I said, “Oh no, I’m the Number 1 producer in the world.” He looks at Quincy and he goes, “Hey Q, I thought you were the Number 1 producer in the world!” I said, “No, Thriller was last year.”
When did ‘Pud’ start playing music?
I was playing music my whole life. I wasn’t playing jazz or pop, I was playing classical. I started on flute, I ended symphonic classical on the clarinet. Because my parents were heroin addicts they moved a lot so I never went to the same school for more than a few weeks.
But you learned to read music… Right, music was part of the standardised American curriculum at the time so they would assign you whatever instrument was lacking in their symphony orchestra. So I learned how they all functioned even though I couldn’t play any of them really well.
You took up guitar at 15, 16. Did you immediately feel, This is my instrument?
Only after I learned how to tune it! One day my mum’s boyfriend came home and tuned it for me and then I played the first chord to The Beatles’ song A Day In The Life and I went, “Oh man…” and I played the second chord and it was beautiful. And at that moment I felt like, This is it. I want this feeling.
It was a fast learning curve. You worked in the Sesame Street house band and then at the Harlem Apollo.
Carlos Alomar had the job at Sesame Street right before me. So I was working with Sesame Street in the second year [1970]. They said, “Man you won’t believe this kid. He’s weird, he dresses weird, he’s got freaky hair, but he’s the fastest guitar reader you’ve ever seen,” because guitar readers are notoriously bad in general. You had to learn fast at the Apollo. The audience was hardcore, the bandleaders were hardcore, the musicians were pretty tough on you ’cos they felt like you had to earn that spot.
Your first Apollo date was with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. How was he?
They told me, “We hear you’re so good you don’t even have to make rehearsal.” So I didn’t know Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ routine. The first song was I Put A Spell On You. I didn’t even know a coffin had been rolled in from stage right. Then the coffin opens up, Screamin‘ Jay pops his head up: “Bleuuurgh!” He comes runnin’ after me and scares me to death. I snatch my big jazz guitar out of the amplifier and try and run off the stage! Now, the Apollo theatre is a really small, vaudevillian-type of theatre, so I try and run to stage right around the coffin, but they’ve got me blocked. By now the audience is crying, laughing their heads off, and the band is crackin’ up, they‘re all in on it. I’m the only one that doesn’t know ’cos I wasn’t at rehearsal. Oh man.
You learned a lot, though?
The old-school guys taught me about reading and interpreting R&B music. They say, “It may be written like this, but you feel it like this.” I was like, Aaah. They taught me about the swing and the swagger.
And you also met Bernard Edwards around that time?
My girlfriend’s mother worked at the Post Office with Bernard. She never heard him play, but she just said because of his vibe she had a good feeling about him. [But] when he and I first spoke on the phone I was like a superhippy and told him the band I wanted to put together was (pretentious ‘muso’ voice) “a cross between Fairport Convention, man, and, man, y’know, Country Joe & The Fish and a little bit of the Dead.” Bernard was so turned off he said, “Yo, my man, lose my number.” And he hung the phone right up on me. Then it just so happened I got called for a pick-up gig and the bass player was phenomenal. So I said to him at the end of the night, “Every gig I play on I want you to play with me.” And he said, “I was thinking the same thing about you.” So we started calling each other for gigs and became friends. One day Bernard and I were riding the subway together. My girlfriend’s mum got on the same car and walks past me and says hello to Bernard: “I see you cats finally hooked up together.” And he looked at me and said, “That was you? What happened to all that Country Joe & The Fish and Fairport Convention?”
What was the next step towards Chic?
Bernard and I toured England in the band backing a group called New York City who had
one hit record. When the second album failed they broke up after another tour in England [1974]. When they were loading up the coach to take us to the airport someone stole my bag. It had all my money and my passport in it. So I couldn’t get on the plane ’cos they wouldn’t let me back into America. So I had to wait until Monday when the American Embassy opened. The girlfriend I had at the time says, “I got the night off. I wanna go see my favourite band called Roxy Music.” We went to see Roxy Music and I was blown away because they were dressed in, like, couture clothing and it was all, like, gorgeous and I had only been in rock’n’roll bands that wore whatever we woke up in. I couldn’t believe how fabulous this whole Roxy Music thing was. I called Bernard and said, “Man, we gotta do the black version of this.”
Back in the US, did you start the project straight away?
As New York City‘s band we were called The Big Apple Band, and we got this singer named Bobby Carter who had just come off the road from doing Jesus Christ Superstar and he was doing the role of Judas and that’s an incredible vocal role, so we were killing. We were so good people could not believe this unsigned, unknown band. We were basically a trio with a singer. The only reason there’s four guys in the video [see YouTube] is because we hired one white guy, hoping that if we had a white guy we’d get the high school proms. Tony Thompson was playing drums, so we still hadn’t added a keyboard player yet but we didn’t need one. We really sounded good as a trio.
You were still busy doing sessions too?
Yeah, we were all gigging. Tony Thompson, he was with Labelle and had just gotten fired, so I had played with Tony in a number of ‘Persian’ bands. I used to play with this superstar named Googoosh. She was, and she still is, the biggest star Iran has ever had. This was before the revolution so everybody was partying and cool and Persian girls were fabulous, Iran was amazing. We were just international dudes…
And combined with your New York friends…
Right. So now, Luther [Vandross] hires The Big Apple Band. We were gigging with Luther at Radio City. And we had one original song I’d written called Everybody Dance. We couldn’t afford to record it so my friend, who was the maintenance engineer at a studio, paid the elevator operator $10 to ferry us up and down and not tell the boss we were recording after hours. He made two copies of Everybody Dance and played it at this one club, the Nite Owl, for a couple of weeks [then] told me, “Nile, you’ve got to come down and check this out.” It was the most unbelievable experience of my life. From that first drum fill when Tony goes “tuch-tickka-tuch” and Bernard “dum-bada-doo-dum” the crowd just let out a blood-curdling scream and started singing, “Everybody dance, do-do-do-do…”
Your distinctive chording guitar style was very different for pop. Where did that come from?
That’s because I was mixing this classical technique, this dampening effect called étouffée, which I still do now. A lot of the pieces I played were percussive pieces by composers like Boccherini, like “dink donk dink dank”, very, very percussive so you’d have to cut the sound off. And the intro of Dance, Dance, Dance is exactly that – it’s dampening the strings. And the record worked, somehow it stuck and we picked up the radio stations so the record company [Atlantic] exercised our option.
The early albums – Chic, C’Est Chic and Risqué – came thick and fast…
Since I’d already been writing songs, we recorded the rest of the first Chic album in less than a week. A song like At Last I Am Free, on the second Chic album, I had written that as a teenager when I went to Woodstock. So we had a lot of material, but Bernard had never really co-written with me. So after Dance, Dance, Dance was so successful, I said, “Hey man, let’s do all this stuff together.” So he and I got signed to Atlantic. I still have our original contract and it said we were The Big Apple Band. But then Walter Murphy [& The Big Apple Band] came out with A Fifth Of Beethoven [US Number 1 single, 1976] so we did a lot of pencilling on our original contract and it said we would provide the services of an entity called Chic. Chic was basically built to perform our compositions. It was like Steely Dan or something like that.
Le Freak was enormous…
The biggest-selling single in the history of Atlantic records is Le Freak. The label told us that it sucked and did we have anything else on the album that was better? We played I Want Your Love, which is clearly better compositionally but is it gonna make people go crazy? We didn’t think that. We didn’t think it would be anywhere near as successful as
“We went to see Roxy Music and I was blown away. I called Bernard and said, ‘Man, we gotta do the black version of this.’”
Le Freak and we were right. But because we were right it was almost like, “You guys are smart alecs and you think you know more than we do and we’re in the record business and we do this all the time, you just happened to be lucky…” Over and over and over again.
Were C’Est Chic and Risqué conceptualised or just collected tracks?
They were planned as albums because we were still in the era of the concept album, we were still in the era of The Beatles‘ ‘White Album’ and Disraeli Gears and the Cream double album Wheels Of Fire, the long-assed Ginger Baker solo and stuff (laughs). We were into that sort of thing. But we also were at the beginning of the disco era and clubs were starting to put in sub-woofers and we wanted our records to have more bass than other records. When we listen to ’em now they’re like thin-sounding but in those days, you put a Chic record on the whole place would be booming. The first Chic album, Atlantic wouldn’t even put out here because we only had seven songs on the record and they said, “We can’t put out a record in the UK with only seven songs on it. There’s no way we can do that.” So [it] came out in the UK as an import and they waited until the second album and they put both records together [Très Chic was C’Est Chic plus the first two hit 45s]. It was weird. They had that girl [on the cover] with that neon tube. Totally didn’t represent us.
Soon everyone was trying to sound like Chic. Flattering or annoying?
Didn’t even think about it. We’re just musicians, everybody was influenced by everybody else. The only time I really paid attention to it was when Good Times came out and all of a sudden there was Another One Bites The Dust [Queen], Radio Clash, Need You Tonight [INXS], Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll [Vaughan Mason & Crew] and all of a sudden every record went “dun dun dun, da-da-da-da da da-da”. All right, already! For us it was fun and flattering because we would do it in the show, we’d go into Another One Bites The Dust and the crowd would go bananas.
Was it always your plan to produce others – starting with Norma Jean Wright and Sister Sledge – or did that happen because artists wanted a sprinkling of Chic magic?
It was always our intention. The original concept of the Chic Organization was it was a production company and we were gonna
“The biggest-selling single in the history of Atlantic is Le Freak. The label told us that it sucked and did we have anything better?”
make records. Atlantic suggested The Rolling Stones, Bette Midler, and we thought, If we got a hit with The Rolling Stones, people are gonna think it’s just another really good Rolling Stones record. So we said, We’ll take a complete unknown and if we give them a hit record then the record company’s gonna treat us like gold. But in fact in a weird way [the success of Sister Sledge] created a huge amount of animosity because we were like this independent entity within a very organised, structured company. When Sister Sledge worked, they were shocked. But one thing they knew was that one day it wouldn’t work. And they were all waiting for that day. We couldn’t understand why our own record company, which we had made gazillions of dollars for, had so much animosity towards us.
The racist/homophobic backlash of Disco Sucks enabled them?
The Disco Sucks thing happened in ’79, so they didn’t have to wait that long. Our whole reign was just two short years. It was just two short years we came up with all those hit records.
Did producing others become a refuge after that furore?
After, certainly. Even though we had been doing other records all along, because we liked the sound of dance music. I like doing dance records. I like uptempo music played by a live band. I like the way it sounds, the way it feels.
You were offered Aretha. What happened?
That was funny. We met with Aretha and she sort of tells the story, (whispers conspiratorially) not really the truth. She says I’m Coming Out and Upside Down would have been her songs. But they would not have been her songs. They were specifically composed for Diana Ross.
How far down the line with her were you?
We only had one meeting but she wanted to write the songs. And she played this song I’m Gonna Be The Only Star Tonight Down At The Disco [later recorded as Only Star], because for some reason somebody had convinced Aretha Franklin that disco was so happening she had to do a disco record. And I told her, point blank, “There’s no way I’m going down in history as the guy who wrote Aretha Franklin’s disco hit,” at least not that one. She had written it and the guy who did The Hustle, Van McCoy, a terrific arranger, he did the album [1979‘s La Diva with co-producer Charles Kipps]. I couldn’t believe he did it. It’s just not a good song… [but] I gotta tell you, that one meeting with her I don’t think I ever experienced anything so beautiful in my life. Just sitting next to Aretha Franklin at the piano and have her sing. As much as I hated the song, it sounded like an angel was singing in my ear.
After Believer in 1983 Chic stopped. How hard were the years after?
The drinking and the drug problem between us had gotten out of control. The thing is, I was probably a bigger drug addict and had a higher tolerance level therefore I missed fewer jobs. And it shows in the work. Like, why would I not have Bernard and Tony playing on every song on Let’s Dance? [Madonna’s] Like A Virgin was like the last real Chic album. And the only reason why that was so successful was because the days that they didn’t show up I had an instrument called the synclavier and I would still get the work done. Madonna would force me. She would say, “Well hell, you’re Nile Rodgers, why don’t you play the damn thing?”
You reconnected with Bernard at the start of the ’90s. How was everyone?
That was Bernard and I reconciling our relationship. We knew we had grown as musicians and as composers and as people… Also, at that point Tony had had a really bad accident, he almost died, so he wasn’t quite the same musician. I was embarrassed because I didn’t know. I had gotten better and they were on a different arc. When we got together to do [1992’s] Chic-ism Bernard finally told me. “Tony is not really the way he should be.” And we looked for a different drummer. Bernard now had real serious credits on his own. Out of all those James Bond films and all those great themes, there’s only one person who’s produced a [US] Number 1 – that’s Bernard Edwards with View To A Kill [Duran Duran, 1985], and he had a real career with Robert Palmer. So now we’re like, real guys without each other, what would we be together? Because we saw that that experiment had gone awry with Debbie Harry. On paper KooKoo [1981] should have been the biggest record in the world, because Blondie was amazing and Chic were amazing. Us coming together should have been incredible but for some reason it did not work. So we tried to figure out how do we work together again. And we were getting there.
Soon after Chic-ism, Bernard died on tour in Japan in 1996. How did that affect you?
That changed the course of my life. I didn’t feel the need to play Chic songs without Bernard. If I was gonna do live gigs I had enough of a repertoire with other artists… But when Bernard passed away a Japanese promoter called and said can we come back to Japan and pay tribute to Bernard? I was like, “OK, but what are we gonna play?” He said, “You’re gonna play the music that you play with Bernard – that’s how you pay tribute to him. It’s just as much yours as it’s his.” I had never thought of it that way. Once I played that show I went, “Wow! People like this. It actually works. It sounds different to people than a DJ playing.” Live dance music and pre-recorded dance music sounds different, makes people feel different, I’m gonna try and keep doing that.
In 2013 your three co-writes on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories brought you up to date with the most contemporary sound possible, yet Get Lucky et al were still definably Chic.
Daft Punk recognised what I recognised. That live dance music actually does sound different, and it does sound good and people really like it. I remember so many DJ friends getting really nervous because Daft Punk seemed to set this new bar that these other guys couldn’t do. And I said, “No, it’s just different.” Daft Punk proved that live dance music is really cool and does make you feel different than the dance music they had done.
The title of your new record, It’s About Time, is ironic because it is about time a new Chic record appeared. What’s been the delay?
I was gonna do it the year before last and it wasn’t gonna be about the anniversary of Chic really, it was about the people that had helped me get to become me. A long time ago Bernard and I wrote a song that Fonzi Thornton sang on a Chic record called You Can’t Do It Alone [Real People, 1980]and that’s what we’ve always felt like. I’ve always been a part of this community of musicians, this ensemble-oriented group of musicians that we needed. We needed Luther Vandross to make those records, we needed Sister Sledge to prove that we didn’t have to work with stars. We needed Diana Ross to prove that we could work with a star. I needed Bowie to prove that I was not just the Disco Musician. So the concept of needing other people and saying thank you became a big deal to me. A few years ago I did this speaking engagement with Stephen Hawking and we talked about A Brief History Of Time, and time as the important measurement in the universe, and everything in my life has really been about time and about the timing. Meeting Bernard, having lost my passport and seeing Roxy Music… Convergence, these things that happen out in the universe that I have nothing to do with. All I do is make the best record I can make and then all this other stuff out there happens that either makes it a hit or not. When we finished Random Access Memories, we all thought the monster single was Lose Yourself To Dance. It’s just so incredible, a guitar trio, with no keyboard on it, and it’s just funky as hell, an amazing sound, but Get Lucky wound up being the monster, the smash monster. Timing is everything. It’s all about time.