Nile Rodgers (2018)
Interview Background
In 2018 I had the fantastic opportunity to chair a Q&A with super-producer Nile Rodgers, who was touring Australia with his band Chic as the support act for Lionel Richie. Nile was suffering from a cold and had some concerns about his voice holding up for our 45 minute session, however he was fulsome with his responses to the questions posed to him. I wasn’t aware exactly how remarkable his story was until in 2013 I picked up a copy of his autobiography Le Freak, which has to be one of the top 20 musician bios of all time. I spoke with Nile ahead of our Q&A session about approaching our initial time on stage with a chronological overview of his musical career, before opening up to audience questions. Despite his mild illness, in the record company’s green room he was in a buoyant mood. After mention was made of my Bowie fandom, he began excitedly discussing the then-unannounced remaster of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance set for inclusion in the October 2018 Loving The Alien box set. “Oh man, you’re going to love it!” he recommended, his grin as expansive as his discography. Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran once said “Nile Rodgers can talk forever”, and after spending part of the day in the company of the Chic maestro I can see his point. After a brief discussion with Nile about our proposed discussion, I walked to the stage, introduced Nile to the audience of music industry professionals and kicked off a very memorable dialogue with one of pop music’s most important producers.
The following is an edited version of an unpublished 2018 Q&A session. You can view footage from the event at I Like Your Old Stuff here.
Your first professional job was in the Sesame Street live band in the early 1970s. Children can be bad at sitting still at the best of times, so did you learn any skills in those early days of playing to the Sesame Street audience you still put to use in your live show today?
“Dude, you missed our shows! Children were amazing [to play to]. They were singing along with us, dancing along with us. Matter of fact, we’ve stolen a bit that we used to do with Sesame Street where the kids come up to dance. I do that on stage with Good Times to this day. Actually, Prince stole it from us, then we stole it back from Prince and we’ve turned it into a thing, but it started with Sesame Street.”
A few years later you met Bernard Edwards, who became such an important part of Chic as your collaborator and co-producer.
“Did you say coke producer? [Big laughs from the audience] I swear you said that, or else I’m just weird this morning…”
I read you didn’t initially hit if off with Bernard because you liked Jethro Tull and he didn’t want to have anything to do with someone who liked Jethro Tull?
“Well don’t blame it Jethro Tull specifically! It was more Country Joe & The Fish, but I probably threw Jethro Tull in there too. I was a super-hippie wearing patched ripped up patchwork jeans and spoke like, ‘If we’re going to put this band together, man, if we could fuse together Fairport Convention man and Country Joe & The Fish that would be really cool’… you know, that kind of shit.”
One of the early names for Chic was Allah & The Knife-Wielding Punks - I think history could have been a lot different if you’d kept that moniker?
“The thing is that I used to work with a lot of Persian bands and in those days, I know it might sound weird to you guys, but Iran was happening. The whole Persian music scene was totally happening. When this band came out called Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, we thought if we called ourselves that people would think we were totally cutting edge. But some guy pulled us aside and said, ‘Excuse me brother, why do you defame the name of the prophet?’ We were like, ‘Defame the name of the prophet? Naw man, it’s like Teenage Jesus & The Jerks!’ The dude wasn’t into it and we were like, big deal - what’s in a name? We changed it pretty much instantly.”
Le Freak is pretty much THE disco song, yet ironically it was inspired by being turned away by THE disco club, Studio 54. Can you tell us a bit about that?
"Yeah, so what happened we had had nothing but success in our super early career. Every single song we put out in America was gold, platinum or multi-platinum and it was all Chic-driven. It was all either Chic, Norma Jean or Sister Sledge. We then had the opportunity to work with Grace Jones on what would have been her next album at the time. Now we had never spoken to or met Grace Jones before that phone call. It was a short call where she just says, ‘Look darling, the only way you can really understand me artistically is to come and see me live, because that is wear I express myself. Just knock on the back door of Studio 54 and tell zem you are personally friends of Miss Grace Jones’. We knock on the door and sound like a cross between Bela Lugosi, Marlene Dietrich and Bob Marley: ‘Hello, we are personal friends of Miss Grace Jones’. The security dude has since apologised to me on Facebook, which is hysterical, but he slammed the door in our faces and said, ‘Oh fuck off, man’. We said, ‘Wait a minute, no!’ We had to knock higher than the decibel of the music inside, we were banging. He opens the door again and says, ‘Didn’t I already tell you to fuck off?’. We weren’t getting into Studio 54 that night, but luckily my apartment was only one block away from Studio 54. We walked back to my apartment and we were looking so amazing. We were dressed to the nines but my shoes were getting messed up because of the snow. We walked past the liquor store and bought two bottles of Dom Perignon champagne, which we called ‘rock’n’roll mouthwash’. We drank our two bottles of rock’n’roll mouthwash and now we’re feeling really good. We started jamming, because music is our entertainment as well as our livelihood. We’re like, ‘Awwww fuck off! Fuck Studio 54’… Finally after doing this for around half an hour, we wrote a middle eight where every response was ‘fuck off’ - ‘If a cab driver cuts you off… Awwww, fuck off! If your mother asks you to do homework… Awwww, fuck off!’
So my partner finally says to me, ‘My man, you know this shit is happening’. I was like, ‘Come on, Bernard’. This was two years before hip hop, we weren’t getting this on the radio. We changed it from Fuck Off to Freak Out after initially using Freak Off with ‘Freak’ as a euphemism for ‘Fuck’. It wasn’t lifting my skirt as it sounded so silly. ‘Freak Off’. I went into my hippie mode and Bernard didn’t know what the hell I was talking about: ‘Oh you know man, like when you drop acid man, you freak out, sometimes when you’re out of control and you don’t know what’s going on, you know what I’m saying man?’. I caught myself and instead said, ‘You know when you’re on the dancefloor and see a really awesome woman and you lose it?’ Bernard had a lightbulb moment and said, ‘Yeah! And it’s like that new dance that my kids are doing called The Freak’. Woah. So we decided to write a song about a dance we didn’t even know how to do. But it seemed to work."
In the early ‘80s after a long run of success, you met someone else in a club: David Bowie. Apparently the first time you ever heard his music you were naked on a beach.
"Ha ha! You’ve done your homework. We were the opening act on a Jackson Five tour for a very short stint and we were down in the Miami Beach area and we went to this Hawaiian club, you know, where they put umbrellas in the drinks? It was so corny but we thought it was cool. We went to this club called The Luau and there was a woman taking photographs of all the people. It was sort of a scam: they’d take your photo and then come back and sell it to you. You can’t really say no, since she’s already taken the shot. She took a photograph of me - I’m amazed she didn’t break the camera - and then asked if I wanted to buy this photo. I felt like such a jerk drinking this drink with an umbrella in it, but I said, ‘Sure, what the hell’. We started talking and she was really cool. She says, ‘Hey - want to spend the night together?’. Wow! Where the hell did that come from? I say, ‘Sure! Yeah! Whatever’. She says to me, ‘We have this really cool beach and I’d love to listen to my favourite artist, who has a new album and I want to check it out.’ I was like, ‘Sure, you’re twisting my arm - let’s go’. So we went to Dania Beach between Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale. She had a boombox and she played… Oh God, it changed my life man. She played Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars. That shit was amazing! It was amazing. And of course we were naked and there were stars, but the music was amazing too. It was, you know, ’Ziggy played guitar, jammin’ good with Will and Gilly (sic) and the Spiders From Mars’. I was like, ‘Wow! What is this???’ Amazing. Fast forward to 1982 I walk into a bar and this dude is sitting there by himself. I go up and I’m like, ‘Man, David! You live in the same building with all my best friends - Luther Vandross, Carlos Alomar - the Young Americans! It’s really cool’. We hit it off like that, love at first sight."
One of the things he asked of you when you were producing the Let’s Dance album was that he wanted a commercial hit. Years later it became quite apparent that at the time, due to legal issues with former management and bad record label deals he was quite close to bankruptcy in the early ‘80s…
(Nods)
…Did he talk about his financial state as was that also part of the reason why he wanted to have that commercial hit?
"He didn’t talk about that part at all, but he made it very clear to me that every penny counted. I thought that was so funny coming from David Bowie. In America, black records had this budget (makes tiny motion between index finger and thumb) and white records had this budget (throws arms wide), even if they suck and some A&R person thinks they’re amazing. We WERE amazing and our budget for the first album was $35,000. We had the New York Philharmonic on it, but that’s because they are all kids I went to school with. So Bowie told me that every penny counted, which I thought was weird because white guys made more than us. I took the bull by the horns and was just totally methodical. If you listen to the Bowie album and look at the credits and track sheets, there are no two copies of any song. If there are two copies, it’s because it’s at the end of a take or something we were going to start the next day, so we just practised it. It was a total one-take album, just like the Sister Sledge album. You guys own the tapes, look at the damn track sheets - one We Are Family, one He’s The Greatest Dancer, one Let’s Dance, one China Girl. We were a one-take band, that’s what we’d do."
One of your next projects was producing Madonna’s Like A Virgin. Was it a similar situation where she was also efficient and knew what she wanted in the studio, because I know at one point you did actually quit the project.
"Yeah, but that was a stupid quitting. I quit for all of twenty seconds! Madonna was a different animal. There’s no one on Earth like Madonna and I’ve tried to compare her to everyone I’ve ever worked with, but she’s the only one. Every time I’d try to get to work before her, she would be there before me. Everything was a competition for her - and she always had to win! Finally I just relegated to the fact I was second place, that was all there was to it, and I got into it. One argument I did win was having Chic play as her band. I argued, ‘Since all your demos are sequenced, if you let my band play on the album only you will sound like that. To me, these songs are okay, but if we play them they are going to sound great’. She was like, ‘Okay, cool’, since it sounded like a plausible argument to her. The love and admiration I have for Madonna is boundless and will never go away. Whatever she has become, she deserves it. She worked so hard, unlike with Bowie, where we cut the album in 17 days. Don’t get me wrong, Madonna’s album, we did it in two months, not much longer than that, but most of the album was cut with her doing vocal after vocal after vocal after vocal. No matter how much I gave her she would not stop, she was relentless. She never said, ‘Oh Nile, I think it’s done - let’s go’. She would always do whatever I wanted."
[Audience question] Could any of today’s technology have improved tracks you produced earlier in your career?
"Maybe, but I think that because of the fact we had to work around these problems that existed with the audio limitations at the time, I wouldn’t have thought of this stuff. I don’t think I would have thought of going ‘No-no-notorious’, cutting the tape down the middle, having the left side go forward and the right side go backward. It was one of those kind of things where I was working on the [Duran Duran] song and felt it wasn’t quite hooky enough. You can do that sort of effect easy enough today, but would it sound as cool? I don’t know. When you can do stuff easily I don’t think it has the same impact. Look at music now and go back to Stevie Wonder records, Led Zeppelin, Earth, Wind & Fire when bands were players who were extraordinary. Do we walk around now going, oh wow, so and so is incredible! How did they think of that part? Unbelievable. No, our records now are stark and bare. Someone sings, ‘I don’t know a place where’ and the keyboards go hang and it’s not the same. Before there were big productions and everything had to have a nice space. I think the reason for it is that we know when we are inundated with these very complicated passages they didn’t have to hire orchestrators or go to school to learn how to create them, they can just take them off another record, take them from a program or push a button. Don’t get me wrong, I do it, but it doesn't have the same spiritual feeling. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. When I work on records now I probably work on them twice as long as I would have worked on a record in the old days."
Now you’re working in Abbey Road as the Creative Chief Advisor, which is an interesting circle of life, given you learnt to play guitar to A Day In The Life, now you’re in the studio where The Beatles recorded it…
"…And Sir Paul is my man! It’s amazing. At President Obama’s final party, which went to about 6.30 in the morning, I look over and Paul and his wife have a dance circle going to ‘I want your love, I want your love’. I’m looking over going (excited shrill) ‘Dude, I played your shit!’ My life is, man, it’s taken so many incredible turns. Even now the fact that I’m here in Australia opening for Lionel Richie. When I was a kid, the last thing you wanted to do was be on any stage anywhere near where Lionel and The Commodores were - they’d blow everybody out of the water, they were that amazing. Okay Lionel, let’s see what happens now…"
[Audience question] On Let’s Dance, when Stevie Ray Vaughan comes in with that one note…
"The B flat? Byeeewww…"
…Hearing how quick the recording was, was that something which just happened or did you have other options for that passage?
"Totally from his soul. Let’s Dance was the first song he played on. You will all see the worksheets at some point in time when we put together the [Loving The Alien] package and you will not believe what we did, but it’s totally accurate. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I’ve said before one of the greatest moments of my life was seeing the look on Stevie Ray Vaughan’s face when we first played Let’s Dance for him. He was looking at that track going, ‘It’s perfect. What the hell do I do?’ I know artists. He’s hearing the 12”, starts with a pocket trumpet battle, he’s hearing the whole thing and thinking ‘wow, what am I going to do?’. So he just goes ‘byeeewwww’ - ‘how do you like that B flat guys?’ His tone was so remarkable and so beautiful, when I now go back and listen to it I just can’t believe it. Especially now that I’ve remastered it over at Abbey Road. You will now get to hear a representation as close to what it sounded like when we were standing right next to each other. At the time, Let’s Dance was my first CD and because of the limited bandwidth and what we had to go through to get it to sound that good was really difficult, but now when you hear what we’ve done, it’s just magnificent. It’s as cool as shit. It’s as cool as Roo Poo, which someone sent me - chocolate Roo Poo!"
[Audience question] Your music is so celebratory, your catalogue contains so many party songs that have probably soundtracked the high points in life of everybody in this room. You’re so generous with your time coming in here today and you seem to be always emanating a happy feeling. Where do you get your joy for life from?
"I honestly love my job so much and I developed an incredible work ethic when I was very young. Not to mention I am a two-time cancer survivor, so when I had my first bout of cancer, the amount of work I had to put in to recover from the disease and the traumatic treatment was so intensive that this stuff is a piece of cake, this is wonderful that I get to do this. Dude, I didn’t mean to bring you down."
[Audience question] You met Daft Punk in the late ‘90s, but were you aware of their music before then?
"When they invited me to their listening party, I knew one song - I knew their single Da Funk, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, it sure sounds like a bunch of Chic samples in there’. When I met them [at the party], they pulled me aside the moment I walked in the door. No one knew what they looked like, but they knew what I looked like, so they snatched me up and we started chatting. Bernard Edwards my former partner had just passed away and they said to me they quietly dedicated the album to him. I was like, ‘okay, cool’. There was something about Daft Punk’s honesty and coolness that made me go, ‘Okay, fine’ - no one cleared the samples and they’d try to do interpolations and change stuff around, but it was just so damn cool. That vibe the first night was so magical. We subsequently tried to get together over and over again, but France being France every time we got there there was a general strike of this and a general strike of that. When they came to New York they gave me a buzz - Americans never strike anymore - and I was at home. They asked if they could come over to my house and play demos. I said, ‘Sure, why not’. I don’t think they played one song. If they did, I don’t have any independent memory of it. All I remembered was the concept. When they talked about the concept I was sold. They told me that they had never done a studio album in their life until they did the Tron soundtrack, they had never worked with people. They said, following the arc of the concept of Daft Punk, now they are interacting with more and more people they are becoming human after all. They wanted to work with humans. I loved it and I was all romantic about the concept. I get down to the studio and I say to them, ‘Do you know you are standing in the exact same spot Bernard Edwards was standing when we cut the very first Chic hit single?’ ‘What are you talking about, you did everything at the Power Station?’ ‘No, Power Station was being built, so we had a singles deal with Atlantic Records. Our first record had to be a smash, otherwise we would never have been gotten an album deal. So we did Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah) standing right in that spot. Bernard was here, I was there, Tony [Thompson] was over in the booth, and that’s how we cut the record’. They were like, ‘Oh my God, how did you cut Chic records?’ I said, ‘Oh, basically what we do is we block out the chords, I come up with a single note part and then we play over the top of it’. They’re like, ‘Show us’. I play what ends up becoming Get Lucky, but it wasn’t called Get Lucky at the time. It was originally a pre-amble of another song. Poof! They cut it off, played it to me and said, ‘Check this out!’. When Pharrell got to Paris, he called the guys up. ‘Hey Pharrell, what are you working on right now?’ ‘Well, I’m working on this Nile Rodgers stuff.’ They looked at each other and went, ’Check this out!’ as they had this Nile Rodgers stuff too. If you watch the Collaborators music videos he says he has no memory of writing the lyrics, he has no memory at all. But of course he wouldn’t have written that lick without my original guitar part, which is still on the record."
The Chic Organization 1977-1979 (Atlantic)
Unpublished Interview Material
Since this was a live event there isn't additional unpublished material, however here is the introduction I presented before Nile Rodgers joined me onstage.
"Today we are joined by one of the most influential artists and producers of all time. A professional musician since he was a teenager in the early 1970s, Nile Rodgers' band Chic held the record for Atlantic’s highest selling single of all time with the disco perennial Le Freak for more than 30 years, selling more than six million copies in the US, 12 million worldwide. His productions with David Bowie, The B-52's and Diana Ross sparked million-selling comebacks, and his work with artists including Madonna, Duran Duran and Australia’s own INXS acted as their international breakthroughs to the next level of success. The younger demographic in the audience may have first heard his songs sampled in big hits by The Notorious BIG, Will Smith, Basement Jaxx and Beastie Boys, while 2013 saw him return to the top of the charts as a songwriter and performer on Daft Punk’s impeccable Get Lucky single and its parent album Random Access Memories. Since then he’s collaborated with a new generation of artists including Janelle Monae and Bruno Mars and has recently taken up a new role at Abbey Road Studio in London. None other than David Bowie referred to him as the Disco King, can we please welcome to the stage Nile Rodgers..."
More details about this event at I Like Your Old Stuff here.
In 2018 I had the fantastic opportunity to chair a Q&A with super-producer Nile Rodgers, who was touring Australia with his band Chic as the support act for Lionel Richie. Nile was suffering from a cold and had some concerns about his voice holding up for our 45 minute session, however he was fulsome with his responses to the questions posed to him. I wasn’t aware exactly how remarkable his story was until in 2013 I picked up a copy of his autobiography Le Freak, which has to be one of the top 20 musician bios of all time. I spoke with Nile ahead of our Q&A session about approaching our initial time on stage with a chronological overview of his musical career, before opening up to audience questions. Despite his mild illness, in the record company’s green room he was in a buoyant mood. After mention was made of my Bowie fandom, he began excitedly discussing the then-unannounced remaster of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance set for inclusion in the October 2018 Loving The Alien box set. “Oh man, you’re going to love it!” he recommended, his grin as expansive as his discography. Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran once said “Nile Rodgers can talk forever”, and after spending part of the day in the company of the Chic maestro I can see his point. After a brief discussion with Nile about our proposed discussion, I walked to the stage, introduced Nile to the audience of music industry professionals and kicked off a very memorable dialogue with one of pop music’s most important producers.
The following is an edited version of an unpublished 2018 Q&A session. You can view footage from the event at I Like Your Old Stuff here.
Your first professional job was in the Sesame Street live band in the early 1970s. Children can be bad at sitting still at the best of times, so did you learn any skills in those early days of playing to the Sesame Street audience you still put to use in your live show today?
“Dude, you missed our shows! Children were amazing [to play to]. They were singing along with us, dancing along with us. Matter of fact, we’ve stolen a bit that we used to do with Sesame Street where the kids come up to dance. I do that on stage with Good Times to this day. Actually, Prince stole it from us, then we stole it back from Prince and we’ve turned it into a thing, but it started with Sesame Street.”
A few years later you met Bernard Edwards, who became such an important part of Chic as your collaborator and co-producer.
“Did you say coke producer? [Big laughs from the audience] I swear you said that, or else I’m just weird this morning…”
I read you didn’t initially hit if off with Bernard because you liked Jethro Tull and he didn’t want to have anything to do with someone who liked Jethro Tull?
“Well don’t blame it Jethro Tull specifically! It was more Country Joe & The Fish, but I probably threw Jethro Tull in there too. I was a super-hippie wearing patched ripped up patchwork jeans and spoke like, ‘If we’re going to put this band together, man, if we could fuse together Fairport Convention man and Country Joe & The Fish that would be really cool’… you know, that kind of shit.”
One of the early names for Chic was Allah & The Knife-Wielding Punks - I think history could have been a lot different if you’d kept that moniker?
“The thing is that I used to work with a lot of Persian bands and in those days, I know it might sound weird to you guys, but Iran was happening. The whole Persian music scene was totally happening. When this band came out called Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, we thought if we called ourselves that people would think we were totally cutting edge. But some guy pulled us aside and said, ‘Excuse me brother, why do you defame the name of the prophet?’ We were like, ‘Defame the name of the prophet? Naw man, it’s like Teenage Jesus & The Jerks!’ The dude wasn’t into it and we were like, big deal - what’s in a name? We changed it pretty much instantly.”
Le Freak is pretty much THE disco song, yet ironically it was inspired by being turned away by THE disco club, Studio 54. Can you tell us a bit about that?
"Yeah, so what happened we had had nothing but success in our super early career. Every single song we put out in America was gold, platinum or multi-platinum and it was all Chic-driven. It was all either Chic, Norma Jean or Sister Sledge. We then had the opportunity to work with Grace Jones on what would have been her next album at the time. Now we had never spoken to or met Grace Jones before that phone call. It was a short call where she just says, ‘Look darling, the only way you can really understand me artistically is to come and see me live, because that is wear I express myself. Just knock on the back door of Studio 54 and tell zem you are personally friends of Miss Grace Jones’. We knock on the door and sound like a cross between Bela Lugosi, Marlene Dietrich and Bob Marley: ‘Hello, we are personal friends of Miss Grace Jones’. The security dude has since apologised to me on Facebook, which is hysterical, but he slammed the door in our faces and said, ‘Oh fuck off, man’. We said, ‘Wait a minute, no!’ We had to knock higher than the decibel of the music inside, we were banging. He opens the door again and says, ‘Didn’t I already tell you to fuck off?’. We weren’t getting into Studio 54 that night, but luckily my apartment was only one block away from Studio 54. We walked back to my apartment and we were looking so amazing. We were dressed to the nines but my shoes were getting messed up because of the snow. We walked past the liquor store and bought two bottles of Dom Perignon champagne, which we called ‘rock’n’roll mouthwash’. We drank our two bottles of rock’n’roll mouthwash and now we’re feeling really good. We started jamming, because music is our entertainment as well as our livelihood. We’re like, ‘Awwww fuck off! Fuck Studio 54’… Finally after doing this for around half an hour, we wrote a middle eight where every response was ‘fuck off’ - ‘If a cab driver cuts you off… Awwww, fuck off! If your mother asks you to do homework… Awwww, fuck off!’
So my partner finally says to me, ‘My man, you know this shit is happening’. I was like, ‘Come on, Bernard’. This was two years before hip hop, we weren’t getting this on the radio. We changed it from Fuck Off to Freak Out after initially using Freak Off with ‘Freak’ as a euphemism for ‘Fuck’. It wasn’t lifting my skirt as it sounded so silly. ‘Freak Off’. I went into my hippie mode and Bernard didn’t know what the hell I was talking about: ‘Oh you know man, like when you drop acid man, you freak out, sometimes when you’re out of control and you don’t know what’s going on, you know what I’m saying man?’. I caught myself and instead said, ‘You know when you’re on the dancefloor and see a really awesome woman and you lose it?’ Bernard had a lightbulb moment and said, ‘Yeah! And it’s like that new dance that my kids are doing called The Freak’. Woah. So we decided to write a song about a dance we didn’t even know how to do. But it seemed to work."
In the early ‘80s after a long run of success, you met someone else in a club: David Bowie. Apparently the first time you ever heard his music you were naked on a beach.
"Ha ha! You’ve done your homework. We were the opening act on a Jackson Five tour for a very short stint and we were down in the Miami Beach area and we went to this Hawaiian club, you know, where they put umbrellas in the drinks? It was so corny but we thought it was cool. We went to this club called The Luau and there was a woman taking photographs of all the people. It was sort of a scam: they’d take your photo and then come back and sell it to you. You can’t really say no, since she’s already taken the shot. She took a photograph of me - I’m amazed she didn’t break the camera - and then asked if I wanted to buy this photo. I felt like such a jerk drinking this drink with an umbrella in it, but I said, ‘Sure, what the hell’. We started talking and she was really cool. She says, ‘Hey - want to spend the night together?’. Wow! Where the hell did that come from? I say, ‘Sure! Yeah! Whatever’. She says to me, ‘We have this really cool beach and I’d love to listen to my favourite artist, who has a new album and I want to check it out.’ I was like, ‘Sure, you’re twisting my arm - let’s go’. So we went to Dania Beach between Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale. She had a boombox and she played… Oh God, it changed my life man. She played Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars. That shit was amazing! It was amazing. And of course we were naked and there were stars, but the music was amazing too. It was, you know, ’Ziggy played guitar, jammin’ good with Will and Gilly (sic) and the Spiders From Mars’. I was like, ‘Wow! What is this???’ Amazing. Fast forward to 1982 I walk into a bar and this dude is sitting there by himself. I go up and I’m like, ‘Man, David! You live in the same building with all my best friends - Luther Vandross, Carlos Alomar - the Young Americans! It’s really cool’. We hit it off like that, love at first sight."
One of the things he asked of you when you were producing the Let’s Dance album was that he wanted a commercial hit. Years later it became quite apparent that at the time, due to legal issues with former management and bad record label deals he was quite close to bankruptcy in the early ‘80s…
(Nods)
…Did he talk about his financial state as was that also part of the reason why he wanted to have that commercial hit?
"He didn’t talk about that part at all, but he made it very clear to me that every penny counted. I thought that was so funny coming from David Bowie. In America, black records had this budget (makes tiny motion between index finger and thumb) and white records had this budget (throws arms wide), even if they suck and some A&R person thinks they’re amazing. We WERE amazing and our budget for the first album was $35,000. We had the New York Philharmonic on it, but that’s because they are all kids I went to school with. So Bowie told me that every penny counted, which I thought was weird because white guys made more than us. I took the bull by the horns and was just totally methodical. If you listen to the Bowie album and look at the credits and track sheets, there are no two copies of any song. If there are two copies, it’s because it’s at the end of a take or something we were going to start the next day, so we just practised it. It was a total one-take album, just like the Sister Sledge album. You guys own the tapes, look at the damn track sheets - one We Are Family, one He’s The Greatest Dancer, one Let’s Dance, one China Girl. We were a one-take band, that’s what we’d do."
One of your next projects was producing Madonna’s Like A Virgin. Was it a similar situation where she was also efficient and knew what she wanted in the studio, because I know at one point you did actually quit the project.
"Yeah, but that was a stupid quitting. I quit for all of twenty seconds! Madonna was a different animal. There’s no one on Earth like Madonna and I’ve tried to compare her to everyone I’ve ever worked with, but she’s the only one. Every time I’d try to get to work before her, she would be there before me. Everything was a competition for her - and she always had to win! Finally I just relegated to the fact I was second place, that was all there was to it, and I got into it. One argument I did win was having Chic play as her band. I argued, ‘Since all your demos are sequenced, if you let my band play on the album only you will sound like that. To me, these songs are okay, but if we play them they are going to sound great’. She was like, ‘Okay, cool’, since it sounded like a plausible argument to her. The love and admiration I have for Madonna is boundless and will never go away. Whatever she has become, she deserves it. She worked so hard, unlike with Bowie, where we cut the album in 17 days. Don’t get me wrong, Madonna’s album, we did it in two months, not much longer than that, but most of the album was cut with her doing vocal after vocal after vocal after vocal. No matter how much I gave her she would not stop, she was relentless. She never said, ‘Oh Nile, I think it’s done - let’s go’. She would always do whatever I wanted."
[Audience question] Could any of today’s technology have improved tracks you produced earlier in your career?
"Maybe, but I think that because of the fact we had to work around these problems that existed with the audio limitations at the time, I wouldn’t have thought of this stuff. I don’t think I would have thought of going ‘No-no-notorious’, cutting the tape down the middle, having the left side go forward and the right side go backward. It was one of those kind of things where I was working on the [Duran Duran] song and felt it wasn’t quite hooky enough. You can do that sort of effect easy enough today, but would it sound as cool? I don’t know. When you can do stuff easily I don’t think it has the same impact. Look at music now and go back to Stevie Wonder records, Led Zeppelin, Earth, Wind & Fire when bands were players who were extraordinary. Do we walk around now going, oh wow, so and so is incredible! How did they think of that part? Unbelievable. No, our records now are stark and bare. Someone sings, ‘I don’t know a place where’ and the keyboards go hang and it’s not the same. Before there were big productions and everything had to have a nice space. I think the reason for it is that we know when we are inundated with these very complicated passages they didn’t have to hire orchestrators or go to school to learn how to create them, they can just take them off another record, take them from a program or push a button. Don’t get me wrong, I do it, but it doesn't have the same spiritual feeling. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. When I work on records now I probably work on them twice as long as I would have worked on a record in the old days."
Now you’re working in Abbey Road as the Creative Chief Advisor, which is an interesting circle of life, given you learnt to play guitar to A Day In The Life, now you’re in the studio where The Beatles recorded it…
"…And Sir Paul is my man! It’s amazing. At President Obama’s final party, which went to about 6.30 in the morning, I look over and Paul and his wife have a dance circle going to ‘I want your love, I want your love’. I’m looking over going (excited shrill) ‘Dude, I played your shit!’ My life is, man, it’s taken so many incredible turns. Even now the fact that I’m here in Australia opening for Lionel Richie. When I was a kid, the last thing you wanted to do was be on any stage anywhere near where Lionel and The Commodores were - they’d blow everybody out of the water, they were that amazing. Okay Lionel, let’s see what happens now…"
[Audience question] On Let’s Dance, when Stevie Ray Vaughan comes in with that one note…
"The B flat? Byeeewww…"
…Hearing how quick the recording was, was that something which just happened or did you have other options for that passage?
"Totally from his soul. Let’s Dance was the first song he played on. You will all see the worksheets at some point in time when we put together the [Loving The Alien] package and you will not believe what we did, but it’s totally accurate. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I’ve said before one of the greatest moments of my life was seeing the look on Stevie Ray Vaughan’s face when we first played Let’s Dance for him. He was looking at that track going, ‘It’s perfect. What the hell do I do?’ I know artists. He’s hearing the 12”, starts with a pocket trumpet battle, he’s hearing the whole thing and thinking ‘wow, what am I going to do?’. So he just goes ‘byeeewwww’ - ‘how do you like that B flat guys?’ His tone was so remarkable and so beautiful, when I now go back and listen to it I just can’t believe it. Especially now that I’ve remastered it over at Abbey Road. You will now get to hear a representation as close to what it sounded like when we were standing right next to each other. At the time, Let’s Dance was my first CD and because of the limited bandwidth and what we had to go through to get it to sound that good was really difficult, but now when you hear what we’ve done, it’s just magnificent. It’s as cool as shit. It’s as cool as Roo Poo, which someone sent me - chocolate Roo Poo!"
[Audience question] Your music is so celebratory, your catalogue contains so many party songs that have probably soundtracked the high points in life of everybody in this room. You’re so generous with your time coming in here today and you seem to be always emanating a happy feeling. Where do you get your joy for life from?
"I honestly love my job so much and I developed an incredible work ethic when I was very young. Not to mention I am a two-time cancer survivor, so when I had my first bout of cancer, the amount of work I had to put in to recover from the disease and the traumatic treatment was so intensive that this stuff is a piece of cake, this is wonderful that I get to do this. Dude, I didn’t mean to bring you down."
[Audience question] You met Daft Punk in the late ‘90s, but were you aware of their music before then?
"When they invited me to their listening party, I knew one song - I knew their single Da Funk, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, it sure sounds like a bunch of Chic samples in there’. When I met them [at the party], they pulled me aside the moment I walked in the door. No one knew what they looked like, but they knew what I looked like, so they snatched me up and we started chatting. Bernard Edwards my former partner had just passed away and they said to me they quietly dedicated the album to him. I was like, ‘okay, cool’. There was something about Daft Punk’s honesty and coolness that made me go, ‘Okay, fine’ - no one cleared the samples and they’d try to do interpolations and change stuff around, but it was just so damn cool. That vibe the first night was so magical. We subsequently tried to get together over and over again, but France being France every time we got there there was a general strike of this and a general strike of that. When they came to New York they gave me a buzz - Americans never strike anymore - and I was at home. They asked if they could come over to my house and play demos. I said, ‘Sure, why not’. I don’t think they played one song. If they did, I don’t have any independent memory of it. All I remembered was the concept. When they talked about the concept I was sold. They told me that they had never done a studio album in their life until they did the Tron soundtrack, they had never worked with people. They said, following the arc of the concept of Daft Punk, now they are interacting with more and more people they are becoming human after all. They wanted to work with humans. I loved it and I was all romantic about the concept. I get down to the studio and I say to them, ‘Do you know you are standing in the exact same spot Bernard Edwards was standing when we cut the very first Chic hit single?’ ‘What are you talking about, you did everything at the Power Station?’ ‘No, Power Station was being built, so we had a singles deal with Atlantic Records. Our first record had to be a smash, otherwise we would never have been gotten an album deal. So we did Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah) standing right in that spot. Bernard was here, I was there, Tony [Thompson] was over in the booth, and that’s how we cut the record’. They were like, ‘Oh my God, how did you cut Chic records?’ I said, ‘Oh, basically what we do is we block out the chords, I come up with a single note part and then we play over the top of it’. They’re like, ‘Show us’. I play what ends up becoming Get Lucky, but it wasn’t called Get Lucky at the time. It was originally a pre-amble of another song. Poof! They cut it off, played it to me and said, ‘Check this out!’. When Pharrell got to Paris, he called the guys up. ‘Hey Pharrell, what are you working on right now?’ ‘Well, I’m working on this Nile Rodgers stuff.’ They looked at each other and went, ’Check this out!’ as they had this Nile Rodgers stuff too. If you watch the Collaborators music videos he says he has no memory of writing the lyrics, he has no memory at all. But of course he wouldn’t have written that lick without my original guitar part, which is still on the record."
The Chic Organization 1977-1979 (Atlantic)
Unpublished Interview Material
Since this was a live event there isn't additional unpublished material, however here is the introduction I presented before Nile Rodgers joined me onstage.
"Today we are joined by one of the most influential artists and producers of all time. A professional musician since he was a teenager in the early 1970s, Nile Rodgers' band Chic held the record for Atlantic’s highest selling single of all time with the disco perennial Le Freak for more than 30 years, selling more than six million copies in the US, 12 million worldwide. His productions with David Bowie, The B-52's and Diana Ross sparked million-selling comebacks, and his work with artists including Madonna, Duran Duran and Australia’s own INXS acted as their international breakthroughs to the next level of success. The younger demographic in the audience may have first heard his songs sampled in big hits by The Notorious BIG, Will Smith, Basement Jaxx and Beastie Boys, while 2013 saw him return to the top of the charts as a songwriter and performer on Daft Punk’s impeccable Get Lucky single and its parent album Random Access Memories. Since then he’s collaborated with a new generation of artists including Janelle Monae and Bruno Mars and has recently taken up a new role at Abbey Road Studio in London. None other than David Bowie referred to him as the Disco King, can we please welcome to the stage Nile Rodgers..."
More details about this event at I Like Your Old Stuff here.