Disco opportunist, Black Panther, producer, performer, composer, party animal, activist – remembering the old days is proving time-consuming for Nile Rodgers of Chic
FOR NILE RODGERS, it all began on Sesame Street. "Straight up, that's true," he says, chuckling. "The first job where I got paid for making music was with the Sesame Streetband."
Rodgers, though, didn’t hang around too long providing music for various Muppets. A hop and a skip took the talented young guitarist from there to the house band at Harlem’s fabled Apollo Theatre, where he backed Aretha Franklin and James Brown, and then on the road supporting The Jackson Five in the early 1970s. It was at this point that he met a young buck called Bernard Edwards. They started an ensemble called The Boys, got a few knock-backs, decided to take a different route, and Chic was born. The rest is a history best reviewed under a glittering discoball.
Chic went on to produce a string of solid-gold classic tunes, such as Le Freak, Good Times, Dance Dance Danceand Everybody Dance. When Rodgers and Edwards weren't doing that, they were transforming an also-ran vocal group called Sister Sledge with blockbuster hits ( We Are Family, Lost in Music) or reinventing Diana Ross as a glamorous diva with Upside Downand I'm Coming Out.
After Chic, Rodgers applied his magic touch to the work of David Bowie, Duran Duran, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Paul Simon and many more. The good times rolled for quite some time.
Recently, Rodgers has been doing a lot of reminiscing about the old days as he works on his autobiography. “I’m supposed to be on vacation at the moment, but I’m here at my villa on the Turks and Caicos Islands with a writer working on the book,” he says. “Some vacation, huh?” There has also been a slew of interviews to promote Chic’s appearances on the festival circuit (the act plays the Electric Picnic in Stradbally on Saturday week). Rodgers is still gigging under the Chic banner, but playing on a stage in a muddy field with a bunch of other acts is not how he usually pays the bills. “We do tour quite a bit, but it’s mostly private gigs,” he says. “The bulk of our gigs are where a brand or company are throwing a big shindig and know we’re coming with a huge bunch of party songs and everyone will have a good old time. We’ve built up a reputation as the world’s most expensive bar-mitzvah band.”
CHIC MAY ALWAYS be associated with the disco movement of the late 1970s, but Rodgers, interestingly, doesn’t buy that one.
"We were never a disco band and it would be disingenuous of me to say that we were. At the time, we knew who the real disco artists were, and we weren't one of them. We were opportunistic. We used the fact that our r'n'b and jazz heroes were getting hit records all of a sudden and went in the same direction. If you looked at the charts prior to Chic, you had Herbie Hancock with Rockit, you had Joe Beck with What A Difference A Day Makesand you had Herbie Mann doing Hijack. They were all artists I'd grown up listening to. Roy Ayers and Ubiquity? They were a jazz-fusion band and then, boom, Everybody Loves the Sunshinecame along and they were on the r'n'b chart.
“It was the first time that jazz artists could compete with big pop artists. You’d Herbie Hancock taking on Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull, and it was all down to this all-inclusive genre called disco. To people of colour in America, that was massively liberating and we jumped on board.”
Back when Chic were starting out and looking for a break, Rodgers maintains many labels wouldn’t give the band the time of day because of their colour. Such racism, according to the former member of the Black Panther Party, has not gone away. “Look at America right now,” he says. “We have an African-American president and yet it seems the racial divide is getting wider much quicker. Instead of rallying around this president, who is brilliant and bright and charming and all that stuff, people seem to concentrate more on the differences than our commonality.”
Rodgers found working with British acts, such as Bowie and Duran Duran, to be a breath of fresh air in this regard. "Bowie's Let's Dancerecord was massive for us," he says. "It was the first time you'd a big pop/rock star with a largely non-white band. English acts never experienced the same racial compartmentalisation of music. Bowie explained it to me perfectly: 'Nile, in England, we have BBC Radio 1 and they play whatever they want to play.' To him and Duran Duran, music was just music. In the case of Duran, the band they were most trying to be was Chic."
The British acts proved to be easier clients, too, than some others who came seeking Chic and Rodgers's assistance. " Dianawas the most difficult record of Chic's entire career," he states firmly. "Nothing was more challenging on every level than that record. She was a big superstar and she was also the first superstar we worked with, so we had the responsibility of delivering a hit record for her and elevating her career. That's a tough ask for new guys. It was easier to beat up on us because we were new. We hadn't proven ourselves by working with someone else – all we'd done then was Chic and Sister Sledge."
In between all that studio work, Rodgers just kept partying on. Everyone else was doing it, he argued, so why shouldn’t he join in? “The partying that went on, that was par for the course. The hedonism seemed to be a natural reaction to political gains we thought we had achieved. We ended the Vietnam war, it was the beginning of the women’s liberation and gay rights movements, and it seemed like we were one big organisation.
“If you look at photos from those days, you could see people like me, from a group like the Black Panthers, marching with gay groups or Vietnam vets. We all felt like one big liberal, open-minded coalition. When the war ended, there was nothing to do but celebrate, and the party went on for a very long time.”
It was a time when Rodgers felt he wasn’t the only one who thought normal rules were suspended. “Man, there were no rules! It seemed artists were rewriting the rules and we became the new power elite. And we all know that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
“It was insane. All these very hedonistic, artistically driven kinds of recreation became the norm for an awful lot of people. Other people either turned a blind eye to it or just accepted it. I don’t remember anyone complaining when they saw me having sex with a girl on an airplane, for instance. And remember, I was not unique, I wasn’t some egotistical guy who had some exclusive right to have sex on airplanes.”
BUT THE PARTY couldn’t go on forever. Rodgers can instantly recall when it came time for him to go home. “My party ended at Madonna’s house at her birthday in August 1994. I was out of control. I don’t remember 99.9 per cent of it. What I know about that day is what people told me afterwards. The 0.1 per cent I do remember is me and Mickey Rourke in the bathroom until seven in the morning, trying to save the world with all sorts of ridiculous notions in between doing hits of blow.”
The drinking and drugging stopped right away. Two years later, Rodgers got another reality check when his old Chic buddy, Bernard Edwards, died of pneumonia. It was time to dial things down even more.
The work continued to come in and Rodgers took a few diversions. These days, when Chic isn't playing for the corporate paycheque or he's not remembering the old days, he's working on the music for forthcoming Broadway shows or soundtracks for video games such as Haloand Hitman. "It's in my DNA," he says of the latter. "I grew up playing video games, but I also went to school to learn classical music, so this is a way I get to speak the language of classical music with a new audience and teach them about the old masters. I talk to them about some of the motifs and themes in the current crop of video games and show them the lines between old and new."
Yet put Rodgers and Chic in front of an up-for-it audience and sparks will fly. “Our live show is about energy and intensity,” he says proudly. “When we play live, we want to play music you can dance your heart out to. You can just forget about everything else and be free.”
Chic play the Electric Picnic on Sept 5
