The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh

74 GOOD TIMES, Chic Written and produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards Atlantic 3584 1979 Billboard: #1 (1 week)

Little Richard once threatened to call his autobiography "I Got What I Wanted But I Lost What I Had." Chic's story is quite the opposite. Guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards began playing together in various New York-based soul and funk groups in 1970. By 1976, they'd met Tony Thompson. a like-minded drummer, and formed the Big Apple Band to play metalloid fusion-rock. But nobody in the record industry wanted to know about black guys bashing such heavy grooves. So they changed their name to Chic (Walter Murphy had already appropriated Big Apple for "A Fifth of Beethoven" anyway), added vocalists Norma Jean Thompson and Alfa Anderson and concocted a semiserious disco confection, "Dance Dance Dance (Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah) ," which several labels rejected before Atlantic agreed to give it a shot. It sold a million copies in less than a month and established Chic - as the Edwards-Rodgers production team would be forever known - as one of the most creative and influential entities of the seventies. "Good Times", which cost about five times as much to make, paid off in even greater sales success. ---- not only for Chic but for the Sugar Hill Gang, which used the track as the basis for "Rapper's Delight," the first rap hit, and for Queen, whose "Another One Bites the Dust" completely ripped it off, right down to Edwards's imponderably liquid bass line. For a couple of years, Chic's grooves were everywhere, partly as a result of their outside productions ("Upside Down" for Diana Ross and "We Are Family" for Sister Sledge were the best) but also because rewriting Chic became almost as great a pastime of the late seventies as rewriting the Beatles was in the late sixties. And no wonder. Edwards was one of the half-dozen most inventive electric bassists ever, the true successor of James Jamerson and Duck Dunn. Tony Thompson's drumming was as powerful as it was straight-ahead and with enough feel to land him art-rock and jazz work as well as dance sessions. Though Rodgers, separated from Edwards, could become so mechanical his work was almost brittle (listen to his production of David Bowie's Let's Dance), within Chic his guitar rode the bottom brilliantly. And though the focus was never really on them, the singers were among the most underrated that disco produced, lending Soul to beats too often rendered heartlessly in other production schemes. "Good Times" perfectly captures the heady, disintegrating atmosphere of New York in the late seventies, as both local and national government abandoned any hope of social equity and opened the door for the ruthless laissez-faire heyday of upper- and lower-class criminality that characterized the eighties. "Good Times! These . . . are . . . the . . . good , . . times . . . / Our . . . new . . . state . . . of . . mind . . . ," sing Alfa Anderson and Norma Jean Thompson as if they've learned to grit their teeth by rote, while Rodgers's nasty guitar zips in and out like a premonition of the nasty crack-and-contra era to come, and Edwards throbs underneath, imperturbable as he is implacable. "Dance as desperation? Dance as survival? Or just useful noise?" asked critic Robert Christgau. Answer: All of the above.

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