Nile Rodgers and Chic

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons. Each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect. All right, enjoyed the episode. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Broken Record. You've probably heard that riff before. Producer now Rogers. He's made so many of the classic hits for the last forty years, Good Times, the Freak, Everybody Dance. He collaborated with Dinnah Ross, like a Virgin with Madonna, Get Lucky by Daft Punk. He's produced everyone Deran, Duran, Grace Jones, the Thompson Twins, Lady Gagoff. For goodness sake, he's a legend. Here's what you might not know about now Rogers. His mother was just thirteen when he was born. Both his parents were drug addicts. He sniffed glue starting at age ten and sometimes slept in flop houses, but he found salvation in music, first in a school band, then as a jazz guitarist, and finally as a partner in Chic with a great bass player Bernard Edwards on this episode A Broken Record Now Rogers sits down with my podcast partner Bruce Hadlam at New York's Power Station studio in Hell's Kitchen, in the very same room where he and David Bowie created the album Let's Dance. That's the original guitar. Yeah, this is it. You still only use one guitar? This is it? I only use one guitar. Do you only have one? No, I've about two hundred. Okay, do you have nice hollow bodies? Mainly I have guitar. Yeah, I'm just going to make sure Diangelico the Cristo's L five Super four hundred. But this one was win. Did you buy that nineteen seventy three? Wow? What wasn't It wasn't an expensive one? You put it in? No, it's cheap. I didn't actually, So I traded my jazz guitar and they gave me this and three hundred dollars. So if in nineteen seventy three, imagine them giving me three hundred dollars plus a strap, Like what was a jazz guitar worth in those days? Who I mean, even though it's a strat, it's not like any other strap Yeah, it's light as a feather. It's thinner than anything you've ever seen. It's the nineteenth strat that they made in nineteen fifty nine. Look at Look at the difference, and just look at Look at the thickness of the headstock there. Just check it out. Look at that. You can see it all the way from there. Look at this one. Big hands though, you don't need a you don't need a thin Wow, No, I got small hands? You do? Oh man, Jesus. You ever see real guitar players like these guys like Steve Y and Shit and Hendrix. Like for me when I'm when I'm playing classical guitar, I really have to get this stretch in certain pieces. That's a big deal for me. Like I have my fingerway down here. Most classical guitar players can still you can still see some of their thumb. But me, you still practice classical. Not really, no point. But I just did an orchestral version of Let's Dance, and I had an idea of playing classical guitar, but it felt better to have Bully singing with the strings. Was amazing. Oh yeah, because unbelievable. I want to ask you about all the songs but let's start with Let's Dance. I want you to tell me about the first time you heard the song. Yeah, the very first time David played Let's Dance for me. He walked into my bedroom. We were in Switzerland, and I believe that he had said he had just written it the night before, and he walked into the studio and he played something something that sounded like that, and it was like and I was like, that was and he was into it, and he had the lyrics as well well. He just he was singing very true to it, like he knew what it was. He was singing, it's almost hard for me to do it. What was he doing? No, I did that. That's what he's going, Let's dance the radio some like, that's way, that's up your face. And then I asked him if I could do an arrangement. So I fooled around with it. I was going and I knew that he liked jazz, so I could put in the jazzy chord and I could tell that he would like it right away. But then when I moved it from A minor up to B flat, it actually had a different vibe. It it got brighter and like and funkier sounding, so I started going, you can already hear it like, oh, and by the way, when I started playing it, I only imitated his just for a few bars. I started going, but that still sounded dark, So then I moved it up and octave and I went. But because of the whole disco sucks backlash, I didn't want to do chucking on David Police album, So you ended up slowing it down after that, yeah, and only playing like So, if you hear the demo that I did in Switzerland, I'm chucking. I'm actually playing, you know, when you hear the original demo, I'm doing the not Roger's thing. But when we got to America, I made a conscious decision not to do that and had the horns sort of doubling me and giving it some punch. And when Bowie and I walked into the studio, Bob Clearmountain was getting the different delays that he was going to use on the various instruments. On the drums, so we wound up having a multi tap delay happened on the guitar. So even though all I played was the rhythm that you hear, winds up sounding something like now, let's dance as many fans. It has one very famous fan who always wanted to play with you. Oh my god, Prince, is that what you? Oh my god? Yeah, So for years, I mean, I can't even tell you how many years, maybe since the first time I met Prince. He had asked me to play Let's Dance live together somewhere. So we had played live together in London at a little club in Camden, and we did not play Let's Dance that night, I'm positive of that. We played a bunch of James Brown songs and maybe the Ohio Players and some funk songs. When I walked into the club, he was playing with Ron Wood and I don't know what they were playing. I don't remember. I was really pretty high in those days, but they were probably playing the blues or jamming on a popular rock song Sunchina Your Love or something like that. And then when I walked in, Prince said, whoa, now, Rogers, Now this man has the funk, and he gave me his guitar and he sat down on the keyboards and we just jammed for like I don't even know how long, but that felt like one of the most amazing nights of my life. And I remember calling the concierge at my hotel and asking him if they had purple roses. I didn't know if there was, if there was anything as the purple rose, if they existed. So I said, figure out a way to make them purple, either spray paint them or put food coloring in them and send. I don't know, I was pretty absurd in those days. I may have sent like a hundred purple roses to Prince's room. Nice, that's crazy, But you ended up playing the song. Yeah, eventually. So years later he tricked me a couple of times. We both were living sort of in Turks and Keikos a bit. He bought a house down there and I was part of a resort project and one New Year's Eve we played and oh it was cool, and John bon Jovi came when John got his start here. So John bon Jovi and Prince came to the show, and Prince said to me, oh, wow, tonight is the night. Now I'll get to play. Let's stand with you in the band. So we set set up his vamp and everything, did the whole soundcheck. We're ready for Prince to come out and play New Year's Eve. The place is crowded, everybody's having a good time, and we're doing our thing, and I get into the middle of the set and I say, ladies and gentlemen, we have a special guest coming out tonight. I think you're gonna love this, Prince, and I introduced him and the band. We're just standing there, No Prince. He doesn't come out, and I keep introducing it and I go, uh, Prince. I don't know if I start screaming friends, because I knew he was there, and someone told me that he actually ran and hid because he wouldn't come out. So after a while we just said to hell with him. We played the song, and then at the end of the night, I didn't even ask him. Maybe I asked him why he didn't come out or something I don't even remember, but we wound up playing. It was great, everybody had a good time, but I was embarrassed as hell. So now fast forward a year or two later and we're playing a show with him at the Superdome in Louisiana in New Orleans, and he told us that he was going to come out. Now we're in front like seventy thousand people, and I'm not going to be this idiot and make the same mistake again, and ladies and gentlemen, we have a special guest for you tonight. Friends. And then he doesn't come out. And I'm standing in front of seventy thousand people and he doesn't come out. At least at the resort, there was only about two hundred, so I didn't introduce him, even though we went through the same steps we did soundcheck. Yet this am there in a whole bit. So when we get into the part of the song where Ralph tells the whole crowd to jump, jump, Jump, I'm standing on the stage and I'm jumping up and down, and then I hear this crowd like, give this loud roar, and I look to my left and there's Prince jumping with me, jumping up and holding his hand up in the air, and the crowd freaks out. And then we go into the next bit and he takes over and starts sewing and it's just killing. It's so good. So he did a little bit of like the sort of Stevie ray Vaughn kind of thing, but then he went into like just chucking with me, and that's when he got nuts. And you can go online and see it. It's on YouTube. It's so great. More of Bruce and Nile Rogers. After this break, we're back with Bruce Headlam Now Rogers and Chic. Now. I looked up and this is for the music nerds out there. I looked up the chords too, everybody dance, and it's a C minor seventh, B flat eleven, a B flat eleven. I should let you tell the chords, you know, the chords being an idea C minus seven B flat eleven to C eleven A flat major seven. Now this chord you can spell it a number of ways. I like to think of it as a minor seven with a raise five, or a minor a minor seven flat thirteen. But most people would probably call it a D minor eleven with an A in the base to a B flat eleven. And the reason for that is because I wanted to have this chromatic movement. So, okay, you're a serious jazz guy. Nobody else would do it that way? Do you do? You do all your songs that way? Is it that kind of chording? I like to think so, I mean, look at let's dance. How cool that is? I mean, that's that I guess that's somewhat of a trademark of mine, putting different types of jazzy chords and cool voicings in pop songs. You know, look at Diana Ross and I'm Coming Out and all that stuff. And you also, was everybody dance the first time you used a break down? No, breakdowns were actually quite common in our live shows. It was just the first time I did it when I was recording and I was the boss. Every other time that I recorded, I was not the boss, so I didn't have any control over what it. Yeah, and was that from jazz? Like breaking it down like that? It's an R and B thing. It's an R and B disco thing. It's a common R and B move. You would hear a lot of R and B bands breakdown and go now, I want to talk to ladies for me, or I want to talk to you, or like earth Wind and Fire when you hear them say pop, I want to talk to you about things I see every day, you know, and they break down on the record. It's all about So it was very common in R and ME to do that. I want to talk a bit about good times. You said in an interview once that all your songs are nonfiction, absolutely, and they're often about things that you want to see happen. Can you tell me what good Times? Yes? So when we wrote Good Times in America at the time, we were in the midst of the greatest financial recession since the Great Depression. We had gas rationing, you know, I mean if you lived in New York State, I remember, if you're a license plate ended with an even number, you can get gas on a certain day or an odd number of a different day. So times were sort of hard, and we thought, well, what other period in American history seemed to feel like that? And we went, Wow, you know, the Roaring twenties and the you know, the Great Depression. In that sort of jazz, you're a whole thing about dance marathons. And that's why we came up with the whole yas Yauza thing on dancing stance. The whole concept of the first few Chic albums was all jazz era stuff and on risque. When we finally did Good Times, we were confident enough in our band to now sort of expose our formula to the world. So the lyrics to Good Times were sort of ripped off from Al Jolson and the song that they used to sing after Prohibition when they were happy, Dang I hand run and then drink time and evening about quarter to nine, So we go right, it was cool, We start right with it, so we are obvious. Good Times came out at a particular political time because the Disco Sucks movement had come that had the riot in Chicago summer of seventy nine. What did that feel like for you? Well, it was really interesting because it was sort of like a bi phasic kind of feeling because when we found out about it, we were on an airplane flying from Europe back to America, so it happened while we were away, and we didn't think of ourselves as a disco band. I mean, listen to every album. We have ballads, everyone has an instrumental there's always a jazzy, you know type of thing. The Diana Ross album is incredibly as far as a composer's I got to say that that's really unique. There's nothing I've ever written that sounds like that before or after that was purely written for Diana Ross. I mean, you listen to a song like I'm coming Out, and I mean I have a fanfare in there, I mean, when we first saw Diana Ross Bernard walked with me and said, wow, look at that. She's like our black queen. So I kept that in my head and when I wrote that fan fare, I said to Diana, I said, look, you know when the President of the United States walks in the room, they go Hail to the Chief. I said, this is your fanfare. I told her. I says, you will never start a show without this song ever the rest of your life. And now we see thirty five years later, I was right, you never start the show without playing I'm coming out at the beginning of her show. Although one of your most famous songs, the Freak, is actually about being rejected at a disco. Correct, Can you tell that story? Qua? Yeah. So our first song, Everybody Dance was the real sort of super cool club song on our first album. Even though Dance Dance Dance was popular and was big on the radio and it was platinum twelve inch, I mean, it was huge. It was Everybody Dance that really secured our vibe as a cool, hip, underground dance group. And so Grace Jones had heard Everybody Dance and she was a fan of that song, and she was thinking about having these two young new producers do what would then be her next album. She said that the only way we could truly understand her artistically is to see her live show. Then we really would understand who Grace Jones is. But the problem was we had only spoken to her that one time. We never met her. We were on the phone. So Grace has a very unique accent. She's the only one on earth that sounds like that, and she says, so darling, but you go to the back door and you tell them your personal friends of miss Grace Jones and they would let you in. So we did that with that accent, and the guy slams the door in our faces. And while he's slamming the door, he's going, oh, fuck off, And we said no, no, no, no no. We keep kicking the door again because now we had to be above the level of the music. Now. Once we finally got his attention, so we wanted to get him before he walked away from the door. So we kicked really hard and he said, you know, he reiterated what he had said, I told you to f off, So we knew we weren't going to get in. It was New Year's Eve, seventy seven going into seventy eight, and we were walking back to my apartment, which is on fifty second Street between eighth and ninth, and to get there we had to pass a liquor store, so we bought two bottles of Don Perignon, which in those days we called it rock and roll mouthwash. We bought two bottles of DP, and we went to my house and we downed them so fast we got really lightheaded, and we turned his rejection phrase f off into freak out. We went well. When we first wrote it, we wrote a whole song using the original lyric and thinking of every situation where the appropriate response would be fuck off. So we're playing no, no no, no, they if a cab driver and cut you off, don't, don't fuck off. I remember saying if your mother asked you to do homework, fuck up, and we were into laughing, feeling great, and then finding my partner, Bernard's a man you notice is happening and I'm like, well, Bernardo, you know this is two years before hip hop. We can't get you know, record on the radio that's got the F bomb in it, But somehow we wound up would freak out. We'll have more of Bruce and now Rogers. After this break, we're back with Bruce Hadlam, now Rogers and Chic. You mentioned that you and Bernard didn't see yourselves as stars as front man, and you saw Chic very much as this organization. Yes, you've built this incredible career. You've had hits literally in every decade since you started by being this great collaborator. Why does collaboration seem to mean more to you than being the front man? Because as a composer, I write for ensembles, That's what I hear. The only time I could ever think of writing a composition that was actually recorded and performed for either a soloist, a solo instrument, or maybe a duet. It's just for films I can come into America. I write this queue where they go the Royal Penis is glean your Highness, and it's just like a pan flute, you know, pan flute and harp. And then in the movie called Soup for One, I do this thing called Tavern on the Green and it's just me playing classical guitar along with a Yamaha CSAD synthesizer with my keyboard player. But those are the only duets that I've ever really recorded. Everything else is for a bunch of a room full of people. But in your autobiography, which I'm going to recommend everybody because it's it really is the incredible life story, and it is it's sort of James Baldwin and Charles Dickens wrote a book together. It may start to approach your You know, you had a very you come back to this a very lonely life. You're around your parents or your stepfather and your mother, whom you love dearly, but who would send you on bus rides across the country by yourself, who often left you alone. And they were heroinautics. I mean they were that they were in pursuit of their number one love. And when when someone first tuned your guitar and you played I think a day a day in the life, right, and you thought I'm going to be Were you thinking I want to be a star? I want to be up on Sto no no. Prior to that, I had only really played classical music, so I just wanted to be part of a symphony orchestra. I used to play the clarinet, which is funny now because if I tried to play the clarinet, it would probably sound hysterical, but my dream when I was a kid was to be a part of Maybe that's what it's all about it because I've always wanted to be part of an orchestra, to be part of an organization, and because in a big symphony orchestra, basically you could hide, but you know every now and you might get a great solo, you know. So that was sort of my dream growing up. I wanted to emulate my biological father, who was always just a percussionist with bands, who was never like the guy out front, like Tito punt there or something. But you like that sense of anonymity, yeah, because it was the way that I never felt attractive or anything like that. And when you looked at stars, stars were always like, you know, they walk into the room, you know, you go. I remember I used to walk into a club with Madonna. Now I'm born in New York, knew every club owner in town, and I'd walk into a club with Madonna and she was relatively unknown and people go, hey, who's that girl with? Now who's that girl? You hear a din like, who's that girl? Who's that girl? Now? Who's that girl? And she was unknown, but that's because she was a star. She felt like a star from the moment you met her. She You know, they just have that thing, Bowie, it's a star. He walks in the room and like wow, they just you know, you could feel it, so I knew. I never It's funny. I always laugh. I say, you know, if I walk into a room with Lady Gaga, people go, oh my God, it is Lady God. Then he goes, wow God. Then he goes, hey, Nile, you want to be the hey Nile guy. I like, so like I've done, you know, maybe almost like I mean I heard the other day they said like fifteen thousand, eight hundred and fifty eight recording something insane, but still like walk in the room, Hey, now you name man? How you doing? I think the friend might beat me up. If you guys go any farther, then we're any and I would stay here all day. We only have one more song to talk about that staff Punk, but I think we're okay. All right. That was Brooks Unplugged. That was just fantastic. Oh thank you you all day. Broken Record is produced by Mielobel and Jason Gambrell, with help from Bruce Headlam. Jaquita Paskill, Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, Justin Richmond, Jacob Weisberg, and of course l Hefe Rick Rubin. To hear all the songs featured in today's episode, check out Broken Record podcast dot com. This show is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Baba