The Full Cover Story With Nile Rodgers

1977 was an auspicious year for rock and pop: it was the year Hot Press launched, and across the Atlantic, Nile Rodgers’ Chic kickstarted the disco revolution with their self-titled debut album. Containing classics like ‘Dance Dance Dance (Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah)’ and ‘Everybody Dance’ – both titles indicating Rodgers’ primary aim with Chic’s output – the album was a landmark in ‘70s music.

Cut to Dublin 2010. I’d gone along to Tripod – one of the city’s best venues, now sadly gone – to see Chic in action. I knew that the band had created the aforementioned disco hits (and many others), and that Rodgers had one of the most immaculate production CVs in pop history, having overseen iconic hits for the likes of David Bowie, Madonna, Duran Duran and many others.

Excitingly, there would be a generous helping of those tunes in the set, and I was expecting an impressive show. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what a special evening it proved to be. By song three or four, I was out of my seat and dancing. I remained in a blissful trance for the next several numbers, hypnotised by the group’s infectious rhythms.

Around the midway point, I looked around and realised that the entire venue was up and gyrating – which remained the case for the rest of the show. At the conclusion, there was a euphoric feeling in the air. It was an addictive feeling, and having caught Chic a number of times since – at Vicar Street, the Iveagh Gardens and, most recently, 3Arena last year – they are a strong contender for the best live act I’ve ever seen.

A few years after that Tripod show, of course, Rodgers’ career went truly supernova once again. This was courtesy of his contributions to both Daft Punk’s global smash ‘Get Lucky’ and its parent album, Random Access Memories. However, Ireland always retained a special place in his heart. Indeed, at that 3Arena gig with Chaka Khan last year, he took the time to address the crowd and explain how the band’s renaissance commenced here.

When I catch up with Rodgers ahead of Chic’s hotly anticipated upcoming Malahide Castle show, I ask if he remembers that Tripod gig nearly a decade ago.

“Of course!” replies the affable singer and producer, speaking down the line from the US during a break between tour dates. “It was a few years before ‘Get Lucky’. Ireland was where our comeback began – it and Japan were the two countries that were booking Chic at festivals quite early on, before other promoters started to believe in us.”

A couple of weeks before our chat, Rodgers – who in 2017 came through cancer surgery having been first diagnosed with prostate cancer seven years ago – actually broke his nose after a nasty fall in his studio.
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“The doctor said that I was probably the luckiest guy in the world,” he reflects of the incident. “I fell with such force that I could have gone into a coma, maybe even died. He also said that if it had been an inch lower, I would have lost all of my front teeth.

“I was running up the steps in the studio – I had just finished a song with Black Eyed Peas. (Laughs) I was excited about hearing this idea that I was going to try out, and my foot caught the top step. I went flying all the way across the room and hit my nose at a 90 degree edge on the lip of my library.

“I have this seated area that’s really there so you don’t have to use a ladder to get books from the top shelf. (Laughs) I’ve now reconsidered and I might tear it down and just put a ladder up!”

Reading a recent interview with Rodgers prior to our chat, he mentioned that the last time he saw Prince was a few months before the iconic musician’s death, when the two had a jam session at a New Year’s Eve bash in the Caribbean territory of Turks and Caicos. Did he and Prince ever consider recording together?

“It’s funny,” considers Nile, “as many times as we got together, and as much as we loved each other, we never talked about recording together, which is strange. He always gave me advice on what I should do, and when Prince talked, you sort of listened!

“Just to show you how much love there was between us, when we released the last Chic record, more than 20 years ago, the biggest promotion we got was in the video for ‘Sexy Motherfucker’ – Prince was dancing with our CD jewel-case in front of a yellow Lotus car.

“Our album cover was also yellow, and he was dancing with it in the parking garage in the video. That was shown all over the world. I don’t think people realised that was the new Chic record – I don’t know what they thought it was. But of course we knew, and if you look at the video now, you can easily see it – it’s plain as day.”

With regard to their last appearance together, Prince – who was famously averse to letting his material appear on YouTube – happily allowed it to remain online.

“Not only did he leave it up,” notes Rodgers, “he reposted it and said no word, because he was so proud. He and I were playing David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’, jamming together, and it was incredible – the crowd went bananas.

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“I didn’t even know he was going to do that, because he had pulled that trick on me a few times. When the crowd started screaming, I didn’t realise that Prince had come out onstage. And then I looked and he was standing next to me. He jumped into the air and started ripping into this Stevie Ray Vaughan-style guitar solo, and it was amazing. That was the last time I saw him.”

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The night before interviewing Rodgers, I caught the brilliant opening night of the Rolling Stones’ European tour at Croke Park. Notably, the Chic frontman co-produced Mick Jagger’s 1985 solo debut, She’s The Boss. How did he find the experience?

“It was great,” enthuses Nile. “As a matter of fact, it was so great that he even introduced me to Keith and wanted me to produce the Rolling Stones. We got along fantastic. Keith lives in the town next to me in Connecticut. I’ve known him and his wife Patti for a long time; my ex-girlfriend, who’s a great interior decorator, did their place in New York City. So we’ve all been very friendly and travelled in the same circles. “But producing the Stones didn’t come about, and I don’t know why. I think I handed it off to Don Was, because I’d also handed off a couple of songs by The B-52s. I’d already promised Diana Ross that I’d do something, and I’d also probably promised someone else that I’d do something. So it was just bad timing, it wasn’t because we didn’t get along or anything like that.”

With regards to his own material, the long-in-gestation new Chic album is undoubtedly one of the most keenly awaited LPs currently in development. So how exactly is it coming along?

“It’s pretty great,” says Nile. “I could consider it finished at any moment if I wanted to. I’ve been writing with so many people and I love what I’ve been doing recently, so I may include some of the newer stuff. It fits the theme of the album – which is collaboration.

“What happened is that originally I was talking about David Bowie and Prince, and their unfortunate deaths made me rethink those two songs and pull them from the record. Obviously I had to replace them with other stuff, but I’m really pleased with what I’ve done.”

Speaking of Bowie, earlier this year saw the demo version of the Rodgers-produced ‘Let’s Dance’ get a special release for Record Store Day. Remarkably, when Bowie first played the producer the song, it was a folk composition on acoustic guitar. As such, the final recording ended up being a perfect melding of their two styles.

“When they released the demo version, they cut the chatter at the beginning,” says Nile. “I actually left it on. You can hear David talking to the band, who were actually just seeing the charts for the first time. What had happened was, David had walked into my bedroom the day before and said, ‘Nile darling, I think this is a hit.’ And he played something that was not quite a hit! But he was hitting me with complete conviction – he was totally into it. So I asked him to sing it exactly the way he did in my bedroom, and let me do an arrangement. The thing that was really cool about David is that in the first couple of weeks of our relationship, we were listening to nothing but jazz records.

“He knew that I had the capability to do proper jazz arrangements, with horns, strings and all the rest. I’m just giving you a little more detail than I’ve ever given people before. When he heard the word ‘arrangement’, he wasn’t quite sure what I meant by that.”

However, when Rodgers elaborated on his ideas, Bowie eagerly seized on the concept.

“I was really talking about rearranging the rhythm section,” says Nile. “But I didn’t play it for him, and he didn’t read music, so he didn’t know what it would sound like. He did know basically the melody he was going to sing – he had that mapped out in his head. He had been playing that probably all night, if not a couple of days.

“When I arrived in Switzerland, I don’t know how long he had been working on it. My recollection was almost that he had done it the night before, and woke up that morning and said, ‘Here you go.’ But he really did have the vocal idea down, and you can hear on the demo that it’s very much like what he wound up doing. Especially when we got into it and he started really feeling the groove, a lot of what ended up on the record were the ideas that we cut that very first day.

“The band never played it again, it was only that one time. Typically when musicians are doing something for the first time, they look at the chart and check out the most complicated part of the arrangement. They practice that bit so that when they get there, they have a good idea of what to do.”

The producer actually had to assemble the band for the album’s demo recordings in double quick time.

“I didn’t know any of these guys,” recalls Nile. “They were recommended to me by Claude Nobs, the CEO of the Montreux Jazz Festival, who was a great friend of Queen and Freddie Mercury. He knew that these local jazz guys were really good music readers. You can hear David at the beginning tell them, the only thing you can do is make a mistake. His exact words were, ‘The only thing that can happen is it’ll just go wrong.’

“Then he said, ‘Don’t worry – if it goes wrong, I’m going to fine you 200 francs. We’re the James Brown band!’ Bowie was really into it, ‘cause he had no idea what it would sound like. I had a vague idea that it would be pretty cool, but of course you don’t know until you hear people playing it, or how they’re going to interpret what you’ve written.

“When they were jamming, you can hear someone who you think is Bowie going, ‘Woo!’ But it’s actually me, because when the drummer and I play in sync – which is how I wrote his chart – I was actually shocked that it sounded that good! And of course, David was singing while we were actually playing, because that’s how we used to make records in the old days, especially R&B records. The singer would groove along with us and everybody would take the spirit of each other’s vibe.”

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At the time in the midst of a hedonistic lifestyle, Nile remarkably mapped out the arrangements for the entire album – the biggest selling of Bowie’s career – in just two days.

“I thought we had only done ‘Let’s Dance’, but one of the engineers who did the demos with me – many years later before he passed away, he told me that I did the whole album in two days. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t remember, because in those days I was still drinking and drugging.

“I just remembered the track ‘Let’s Dance’, because for me that’s what it was all about. When David said to me he thought it was a hit, he walked in my bedroom with a lot of confidence. I just said, well, it’s my responsibility to make that the single.”

The song still sounds totally contemporary – it could have been produced by The Neptunes last week.

“That was our plan,” nods Rodgers. “David and I had been doing a lot of research, going to different museums and things like that. We didn’t have the internet, so in order for us to hear music, we had to physically be in the place where the records were. So we went to the Library of the Performing Arts, which has a huge record collection, and then we went to the apartment of Jerry Wexler, the co-owner of Atlantic Records – he also had a huge collection.

“We just sat and listened to records, and looked at rock and roll and jazz iconography. We didn’t write a lick of music or any kind of arrangements until we got to Switzerland. And I can’t believe it – I wrote it all out on one night and we played it all in two days.”

One of the few acts I’ve ever seen on a par with Chic in the live arena is James Brown. In terms of their precision and attention to detail, was the Godfather of Soul a big influence on the band?

“Absolutely,” replies Nile, emphatically. “You can really trace my style of guitar playing to him. Some of the biggest hits that I’ve done for rock acts, my guitar parts were really James Brown-style guitar parts. Duran Duran’s ‘Notorious’, ‘Original Sin’ by INXS – they were both chordal progressions based on a classic James Brown type of groove. (Laughs) Very classic James Brown.

“Look, when it comes to music, everybody talks about originality, and the truth of the matter is that there really is no such thing, because we all learn our music from some other source that already existed. The key to what we would call originality is to make the song sound like it’s really original.

“Not to make it sound like a famous James Brown type of guitar riff; to do it in a way where it feels like it’s Duran Duran’s ‘Notorious’. I even did it in D – and James did ‘funky D, dirty D’. But we don’t do it quite the James Brown way; we do it the Duran Duran way.”

Was ‘Sex Machine’ the most influential Brown song for Rodgers?

“Not to me,” he responds. “‘Sex Machine’ is awesome, but I really like ‘Hot Pants’ a lot. And the reason why is because of the lyrical content. I always talk about the poetry of James Brown and the concept of what I call ‘complex simplicity’. Dylan has it, Bowie has it, James Brown has it.

“I’ve never been able to do that, because unfortunately with dance music – or at least my style of dance music – it has to be more like country, in that the lyrics have to be more cinematic. You have to paint a very vivid picture, whereas James Brown could do something really funky and just do the sparsest lyric. One of my favourites is when he says, ‘Thinkin’ of losin’ that funky feelin’ – don’t.’ It’s like James Joyce, and the last sentence of Finnegans Wake.

“Read Joyce and look at how he does that sort of thing. It’s amazing – it really reminds me of that. Just check it out: look at the lyrics of ‘Hot Pants’ and compare the two. It’s great.”

What’s exciting Rodgers musically these days? Is he a Kendrick Lamar fan?

“ I love Kendrick,” he says. “Oh my god, he’s amazing. I have to say that I am super-impressed with Childish Gambino. I think his new record is just genius, and the video is really pushing the envelope, just like Kendrick’s latest stuff. That’s the power of lyrics, and typically what I’ve relied on was not the poetry of being direct. I’ve relied on the double entendre.

“All of our lyrics have two meanings, almost like a painting by Klimt. The real painting is underneath and then he paints on top of it. That’s the thing I do – the real meaning is the secondary one. That’s the one that’s most heartfelt to me as a writer, but the frontal message is the most catchy one. That’s the one everyone thinks they’re hearing, because most of the time when people are singing your songs back, they’re singing the wrong lyrics anyway!

“There’s this comedian over in the UK, and when Cathy Sledge says on ‘We Are Family’, ‘Just let me state for the record’ – which to me is clear as a bell – he makes a joke about her singing something like, ‘Just let me play for the vicar!’”

To wrap up, I mention that I’ve been listening recently to Robert Palmer’s classic ’80s hit ‘Addicted To Love’, the iconic video to which made it one of the most perfect pop-cultural moments of the decade. I only recently learned that the song was produced by the late Bernard Edwards, Rodgers’ long-time production partner and bandmate in Chic.

“It’s amazing,” says Nile of ‘Addicted To Love’. “Think about this: we somehow learned the art of production so well and so fast, and honestly, a lot of it had to do with Luther Vandross. He was our band leader, so to speak – he was our employer and we worked for Luther. During an intermission at one of his concerts, we ran off and cut the first Chic single. Our single became a big hit and then he became our employee!

“But he’d already had the experience of doing Young Americans with Bowie. He was probably the most called-upon background singer in New York, and what we would call section leader for vocal sections. He was that guy. He taught us so much about arranging that after we developed Chic, we knew how to do it for other people. That’s really the truth.

“When I was with the Apollo band and stuff like that, I was sitting in the chair and of course they taught me a lot, but they didn’t teach me about arranging for other people – they taught me about accompanying other people. Luther Vandross actually taught me about the art of making records, and that was really, really special – because the art of making records is also the art of performing live.

“We took what we used to do live and put it in records. That’s why our stuff has breakdowns – because in our live stuff, we like to break down and talk to the audience, or just groove. That became our trademark.” Before we sign off, Nile has one more thing he wants to point out about Edwards’ achievements.

“I am really proud of this. James Bond films have only had one song that’s ever been number one on the Billboard Top 100. They’ve had a few songs that hit number two, like ‘Goldfinger’ and Paul McCartney’s ‘Live And Let Die’. But only Duran Duran’s ‘A View To A Kill’ was number one – and that was done by Bernard Edwards. He’s the only record producer to have a number one James Bond theme.”