Nile Rodgers: Still So Chic It Hurts
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Nile Rodgers: Still So Chic It Hurts 03.10.2016 Before Nile Rodgers was a world-class guitarist and producer for some of the biggest acts in music, he was a kid growing up in a bohemian community in Lower Manhattan. His evolving worldview was shaped by one memorable Hollywood film. The 1959 historical film epic Ben Hur tells the tale of a Jewish prince, played by Charlton Heston, who falls from grace in ancient times and gets condemned to the galley of a Roman warship. There, in a pivotal scene, the boat's commander Quintus Arrius speaks these memorable words to Heston: "We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live." It's a line mired in the dark subtext of ancient Roman slavery, but Rodgers, who has a knack for turning negatives into positives, looks back on it in a far more hopeful light: "I always have adopted that strategy," he said. "I live to serve the project. While I'm working with you, you're my artist and I live to serve you and everything is about you being perfect. That's just how I think regardless of who I'm with. It could be Bowie, it could be [Lady] Gaga, it could be a completely unknown person. I look at that person the same way as I would Duran Duran or Madonna. I look at it as, 'Okay, they're the most artistic person I ever met.' Let me see how we can create something together." Speaking to Brief just prior to CBS' February 15 broadcast of the 58th Annual Grammy Awards, Rodgers was getting ready to go into rehearsal for the live David Bowie tribute segment seen above. It was an emotional time for him, and not just because he produced Bowie's bestselling album, 1983's Let's Dance and had recently penned a tribute to the seminal artist that began with the words, "My love for David is immeasurable." He had also been up since 6:00 am, spending another morning at his mother's bedside, who was in the hospital with "very serious health issues." On top of that, he was preparing to go on the road again with his legendary band Chic, whose massive hits from the disco era, such as "Good Times" and "Le Freak," you have definitely heard, and almost certainly danced to. But despite it all, Rodgers was generous with his interview time, and thoughtful with his answers. When the interview was cut short by the start of rehearsal, he promised to call back again later that evening to wrap it up - and did. It was a far cry from one of his musical endeavors, but it felt like Rodgers' Ben Hur strategy was in effect. He had promised a journalist an interview, and he was trying his best to honor that commitment with all the focus left in his overdrawn tanks. "As an artist you have to stay focused on your art and it's almost impossible right now because I really love my mom," he said. "But I have to do the best that I can in each one of these situations, and all of them are big and imposing. I guess that's what life is-you just deal with it. You do what you can." Rodgers' journey through music began, as it does for many children, with playing in his school orchestra. The future guitar visionary's first instrument was the flute, which quickly transitioned to clarinet, which opened the door to many instruments. His first "professional" gig was on the guitar, opening for a group called Elephant's Memory at the Alternate U school in Greenwich Village. "I didn't get paid money, I got paid two albums," Rodgers said, "but for me it felt like I was a professional musician." Elephant's Memory happened to be an early manifestation of the group that would eventually become the Plastic Ono Band. It was one of many times the young Rodgers would brush up next to stardom. In retrospect, his early years look like a prolonged merger of talent and destiny. In addition to the Plastic Ono Band experience, he cleaned Sinatra's learjet while working at the Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles, and hung out with Timothy Leary at an LA mansion party. One day, back in New York, he was roaming the halls of the Manhattan School of Music, trying to decided if he would study classical guitar there, when he came across a bulletin board post for an upcoming tryout for guitarists. He didn't know what it was for, but "I showed up for the audition and I got the job," he said. And so it was that his first sustained professional gig came to be with the Sesame Street traveling stage show. Next, Rodgers worked in the house band for Harlem's world-famous Apollo Theater, but his career didn't truly ignite until he met his future Chic partner, Bernard Edwards, who he once described to Wax Poetic as "the greatest bass player, if not the greatest musician, I ever met." Both jazz-trained, the duo's collaboration began with a jazz-rock-fusion group called the Big Apple Band. They flirted briefly with New Wave, in a band called Allah & the Knife Wielding Punks, before forming Chic in 1977, and hurtling full-on into the genre Rodgers called "The great unifier": Disco. "You couldn't say that a disco person was black, white, gay or Hispanic. It was just everybody," Rodgers said. "Disco accepted everybody, and that's why I switched from being a jazz-classical guy to a disco guy, because I felt like this was the one environment where you could get away with anything. I could play any kind of wacky music that I wanted and whatever the chord changes were, as long as it made people want to dance. So I sat around thinking of complicated chord changes that had simple melodies, that made people dance." Pairing Rodgers' urgent, undulating rhythm guitar riffs with Edwards' sultry bass lines, Chic hit on a formula that redefined what disco could be, adding a lean funk sound that has made huge hits such as "Le Freak" and "Good Times" as fresh-sounding today as they were nearly 40 years ago. Rodgers said his songwriting has always involved "using the nonfictional events of life and coloring it with fictional elements." The lyric "Ahhhhh, Freak Out" in Le Freak," for instance, was originally something much less savory, penned after Rodgers and Edwards were denied entry to a Grace Jones New Year's Eve party at Studio 54 despite being told they were on the list. The bouncer "told us to fuck off," Rodgers said, "so we went home and wrote a song called 'Ahhhh Fuck Off.'" But eventually, Rodgers' penchant for finding the good in life took over, and they made the track less angry. "Instead of writing a song that was negative we actually turned it into a song that was positive about Studio 54," he said. "We praised the people and praised what was going on inside, and it wound up being the biggest single song of my career." It also helped brand him as a hit-maker (a moniker he would apply literally to his famous 1959 Fender Stratocaster, The Hitmaker, which he got as a trade-in at a small Miami pawn shop in the '70s and still plays today), and soon Rodgers was one of the music industry's most in-demand producers. One day, in the early '80s, David Bowie approached him about producing his next album. On the heels of a string of more experimental albums done with Brian Eno, Bowie had one directive: "He said he would like me to do what I do best," Rodgers said. "I asked him, 'What was that?' He said, 'Oh, that's easy. You do hits… I want a hit album.'" The ensuing record, Let's Dance, was the most successful album of the late Bowie's career, with nearly 11 million units sold to date. It's easy to see why: As the record's title suggests, Rodgers' gift for melodic beats infused Bowie's arty song craft with an irresistible groove, making it sound as comfortable in a dance club as in a coffee shop. Being familiar with the scratchy licks of Rodgers' Hitmaker guitar, it's also fun to go back and listen for its presence amidst Lets Dance's lush layers of percussion, horns, keys and background vocals. But more than anything, "Let's Dance" stands the test of time because of its sense of play. David Bowie meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but joy and happiness only sometimes topped that list. Let's Dance was one of those times. Rodgers turned cruel words spoken to Ben Hur into a uplifting life strategy. He turned the experience of getting cruelly bounced into a life-affirming disco song, and he turned disco itself into life-affirming soul music that transcended race, gender and sexuality. And, he helped make one of music's most serious artists, David Bowie, into a fun, maybe even goofy pop star for the masses for at least a moment. Even an introductory video Rodgers made for his website reflects a playful spirit and slightly goofy sense of humor. Pairing literally every word of a self-penned autobiography with a corresponding image, the sequence is a hypnotic, rapid-fire journey in pictures that races through Rodgers' fascinating life in just the way that it should, which is to say, like a runaway freight train.