Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

by Peter Shapiro

  More important, the success of “Everybody Dance” at Chic’s earliest gigs provided the group with its overarching concept and signature style. “‘Everybody Dance’… was the perfect Chic kind of song,” Rodgers told Marc Taylor, giving another version of the Chic creation myth. “The chord changes were real sophisticated, very jazzy, the bass playing was phenomenal, the groove infectious, and we used to play this record over and over again at this black after-work club in New York. Our song ‘Everybody Dance’ became one of the hottest cuts in New York but no one could buy it because we just recorded it in our little studio. We realized that the people who were dancing to our music had a certain look. They were all wearing suits and the girls were fine and made up. We looked at them and it was like, ‘Damn, what if we looked like that?’ ‘Everybody Dance’ was pumping in this club for three or four months. At the time Bernard and I were still musicians, working with other people. We would go to this club every night and see the black urban professionals dancing to our music and we decided, ‘What if we started to look like the people who were relating to our music?’ That’s how we came up with the idea for Chic. We didn’t have any name, we were just doing music. When we looked at the people we said, ‘Damn, there’s the concept right in front of our faces.’”56

  The concept wasn’t just mirroring the new class of black urban professionals but also providing a grounding for a group of people that were torn from their roots and thrust into mainstream white society. “Everything about Chic is based on the black musicians from the Depression Era, the black musicians who were allowed to entertain for whites but couldn’t stay in the same hotel that they were performing in,” Rodgers says. “The thing is, though, they emulated the people they were working for. So they had royalty, Duke Ellington, Count Basie; they were emulating, they were trying to assimilate. A person doesn’t want to think of themselves as beneath somebody, they want to think of themselves as an equivalent. So in that era, that’s when the black jazz musicians were really coming out, like, ‘I’m royalty. I’m special. I’m this, I’m that.’ Sophisticated, high society, that’s what they wanted to be like. They wanted to live on Park Avenue, they wanted to have private clubs because they were playing at those places, they knew that they existed. Like they say, ‘How are you gonna keep ’em on the farm once they’ve seen Paris?’ Once you’ve been exposed, you want it. Everything about Chic was trying to achieve that kind of class struggle for recognition based on who you were and who you’ve become as a human being, and we wanted to be proud; we were proud of other people who wanted to be proud. And that’s what Chic is all about, to this very day. That’s why our lyrics seem braggadocious, but they’re not braggadocious, they’re hopeful, they’re ambitious.”57

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  No matter how chic Chic was, however, Edwards and Rogers still couldn’t get into Studio 54 that fateful New Year’s Eve. And, while they may have changed the words to the snarling, popping funk vamp that even James Brown wouldn’t have touched, the attitude was still there. With Luci Martin replacing Wright, the disembodied vocalists who served as narrators once again could not be trusted, and they seemed to mock the disco-as-liberation ethic with odd, stilted language sung in a deadpan that had no place in a record about a dance craze: “Night and days, uhhh, stomping at the Savoy / Now we freak, oh what a joy”; “Big fun to be had by everyone / It’s up to you, surely it can be done.” Although that characteristic Chic vocal style seemed to ooze ambivalence and alienation, Rodgers claims that it was purely functional. “That was the Chic robotic thing,” he says. “We did that so they would get out of the way of the band [laughs] … Chic is about the music. The vocals and the hooks and the arrangements are just part of an overall musical experience. It’s not a group where the singing is the star, so to speak. That’s our philosophy. Cab Calloway, Count Basie, those guys were musicians. They would hire singers, but it was those musicians that made those things happen. If the singer went up there and sang a cappella, the club would empty out. That’s our philosophy, it’s about what we play … When we talk about the early days, ‘stomping at the Savoy,’ and the big bands and the struggles they went through and the dignity that they still felt within, that’s the glorious period in black music to us. Those people are glamorous and wonderful to us … When we talk about stuff like that, we’re not protesting as much as we’re acknowledging and understanding that in the midst of struggle, in the midst of being a second-class citizen, in the midst of slavery, in the midst of being an entertainer for rich white people—but you have come in through the servants’ entrance—you still feel good. Cab Calloway loved being up on that stage, that was the time when you were equal. Maybe, at the point, you might even be considered above. At that point, they were looking at you with awe. That’s what we mean: ‘Like the days of stomping at the Savoy, now we freak.’ It’s exactly the same. In those days you used to do the jitterbug or the black bottom or whatever, but now we do this dance called the freak. In those days you were second-class citizens, but you did these things to release yourself and feel good about who you were. Now we do the freak. It’s sexual, just like in those days, those guys got criticized for those dances, which they said were too sexual … That’s what we talk about. We say times haven’t changed. I’m not criticizing as much as I’m being observant.”58

  “Le Freak” was the most obvious example of Edwards and Rodgers’s ingenious songwriting technique. Where most pop songs are structured strictly according to the verse-chorus-verse blueprint, Chic picked up on the standard jazz pattern of intro-theme-solos-theme but reworked for the pop market. They would begin with an intro, then go straight into the chorus, then the verses and the bridge/solos. As they had intuited, disco wasn’t about deferring pleasure for the one big payoff; it wanted to keep it up all night. By putting the chorus up front, Chic’s records hit you right off the bat; there was no build, no rising tension, just forward momentum the whole way.

  “Le Freak” anchored C’est Chic, but, as if to prove once and for all that they weren’t a real disco group, the conceptual genius and impossible grooves continued through the entire record. Like the Roxy Music fans they were, Rodgers and Edwards dressed the band up in Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci, and laid the ambiguity/distance schtick on thick. “At Last I Am Free” continued where “Le Freak” left off, only with a crawling tempo and Anderson and Martin, sounding alternately like zombies and angels, chanting the mantra, “At last I am free / I can hardly see in front of me.” Even more of an incantation and just as caustic was “Chic Cheer,” a five-minute vamp with fake crowd noise, the most heavily miked cymbals ever, and the cheerleaders at Disco High exhorting the crowd, “If you’re fans of Chic / Consider yourself unique.” Chic’s great theme would be the disco lifestyle’s inherent fatalism, and “I Want Your Love” was one of their finest love-as-addiction tales, complete with gloomy bells and an itching guitar part that never gets relieved.

  For all their smarts and oddball touches, though, it was the grooves that everyone listened to. Rodgers is quite possibly the greatest rhythm guitar player ever and Bernard Edwards was certainly one of the five most creative bassists to have slapped some round wounds in anger. With Tony Thompson, “the human metronome,” behind them, the two distilled and updated Motown, James Brown, Stax, and Miles Davis into the most lethal rhythmic attack of the last quarter century.

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  The group’s third album, Risqué, led off with disco’s crowning achievement, “Good Times.” Not only a brilliant single and one of the most influential records of the era (it helped kick off hip-hop when it was sampled on Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and Grandmaster Flash’s “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” and was ripped off almost note for note by Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”), it worked perfectly in the context of the album. Like all of their best work, Chic had it both ways on “Good Times.” With Bernard Edwards’s stunning bass line and Nile Rodgers’s seething guitar work, the record bumped lik
e a motherfucker. However, the scything strings and ghostly piano gave the game away. With vocalists Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin intoning catchphrases like they were in a Valium haze, the pep rally that “Good Times” seemed at first became harder and harder to believe. Its evocation of the good life (“Clams on the half shell and rollerskates, rollerskates”) was so absurd that not even Carly Simon would have sung the lyrics seriously. Then, when they repeat the second chorus, the song’s sense of impending doom becomes clear: “A rumor has it that it’s getting late / Time marches on, just can’t wait / The clock keeps turning, why hesitate? / You silly fool, you can’t change your fate.”

  During the disc’s second half, sadism keeps cropping up in the lyrics (“Love is pain and pain could be pleasure”; “The way you treated me, you’d think I were into S&M”; “Used me, abused me / Knocked down and walked all over me”). Perhaps even more revealing are the lines, sounding like slogans at a political rally or from the transcripts of the Iran-contra trial, that leap out fully formed from the disembodied vocals: “Now you’ve got yours, what about me?”; “That sinister appearance and the lies / Whew, those alibis.” Even the seemingly celebratory “My Feet Keep Dancing” revolved around a riff on the old racist chestnut that black people’s brains are in their feet.

  The filler fluff of “Warm Summer Night” is the only breath of fresh air on the album, the rest deals with the impossibility of changing your fate and railing against sadistic lovers—a more perfect metaphor for the Thatcher-Reagan era was never found. “We were thinking about all those old mystery movies—Charlie Chan, the whole 40s thing—the Agatha Christie books,” Bernard Edwards told Blues & Soul magazine in 1979. “So the essence of what Risqué is about is ‘who done it?’”59 Accompanied by strings that sound like the stabs in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho, Anderson and Martin sing the title phrase of “My Feet Keep Dancing” over and over again, either like they were hypnotized or like a mantra to keep the bogeyman away. Maybe they were right about the lemmings.

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  After Chic had basically bankrolled Atlantic for the next few years with 1978’s “Le Freak,” Edwards and Rodgers were offered the choice of producing anyone on Atlantic’s roster. They could have chosen Aretha Franklin, the Spinners, Donny Hathaway, Roberta Flack, heck, even Crosby, Stills & Nash. Like the iconoclasts they were, however, Chic picked a journeywoman girl group that barely had a hint of a hit during its five years at the label. Chic wanted to work with a group that didn’t have an identity yet, but with Sister Sledge they didn’t quite get a blank slate.

  Kathie, Joni, Debra, and Kim Sledge were the granddaughters of opera singer Viola Williams, who started recording as Sisters Sledge as teenagers in 1971. Based in Philadelphia, they released some material on the Money Back label and worked as backup singers for Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International operation. As Sister Sledge, they signed to Atlantic in 1973 and had a small amount of success with “Love Don’t You Go Through No Changes on Me” in 1975, but for the most part they toiled in the background for half a decade until Chic rescued them from terminal obscurity. Based on an impression of the group given to them by Atlantic president Jerry Greenberg, Rodgers and Edwards subtly changed the standard Chic formula. Instead of crafting the strangely cryptic, ambivalent songs they did for Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin, Rodgers and Edwards gave Sister Sledge undeniably anthemic songs that downplayed Chic’s disembodiment in favor of full-blooded disco-gospel release. “[Greenberg] talked about them in the most celebratory, uplifting kind of way,” Rodgers remembers. “That’s why we came up with ‘We Are Family.’ He talked about when these girls come, they’re sisters and they’re just so much fun; if one walks down the hall, they all walk down the hall. Which was how we thought of ‘And we flock just like birds of a feather,’ stuff like that. Everything he said about them gave us a picture of them. You’ve got to remember, we never even met them. When we met them it was like, ‘Okay, here’s how the song goes.’ They just had to walk into the studio and hear these two strangers define the rest of their lives … All of the content on that record came from that one day with the president. It may have happened in an hour or half an hour, I’m not sure. But to us that was our picture of Sister Sledge. Think about it. ‘Lost in Music,’ ‘Thinking of You,’ these are all about this group of girls that we thought had this incredible, musical, wonderful, loving life. They’re religious girls, blah blah blah, which is very unlike me. I’m mister party guy, stay out all the time, so I was fascinated and enthralled by the concept of people who loved music who could be ‘nice girls’ in the midst of the whole disco era. It was fabulous to me. It was the greatest experiment to me because the kind of women I was used to were like Grace Jones [laughs].”60

  The first single from We Are Family was “He’s the Greatest Dancer.” Led by an amazing, popping, almost slap-bass-sounding guitar figure from Rodgers, “He’s the Greatest Dancer” became the group’s first major hit, reaching the pop Top 10 and #1 on the R&B chart. The record featured some of the Chic Organization’s best playing—Rodgers’s guitar, Edwards’s fluid if horribly undermixed bass line, Tony Thompson banging the skins harder than anyone this side of John Bonham, Raymond Jones’s best Fender Rhodes lines, impeccable stuff from concert master Gene Orloff’s Chic Strings, and one of the great disco breakdowns—but it also highlighted Rodgers and Edwards’s songwriting prowess. Lines like “Arrogance, but not conceit / As a man he’s complete” and the immortal internal rhyme, “Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci,” were evidence of their gift for absurdist, plain speech lyrics. Despite all this, the song almost didn’t make the record. “We had a huge fight in the studio over the lyrics to ‘He’s the Greatest Dancer,’” Rodgers recalls, “and we refused to change them because we knew the world that we were writing about obviously more than they did because they had never even been in a disco. There’s a lyric that says, ‘My crème de la crème please take me home,’ and they were furious because to them that made them seem like loose women. To this very day, when you see Sister Sledge sing that song live, they say what they had suggested to me in the studio, which was, ‘My crème de la crème, please don’t go home.’ I said, ‘That’s lame, what do you mean, “Please don’t go home”? He ain’t going to go home because he’s the greatest dancer and it doesn’t make any sense. Why would he go home?’ [laughs] I said, ‘Guys, you’re making this song about you. It ain’t about you, it’s about him. “My crème de la crème, please don’t go home”—what are you talking about? You just nullified the whole meaning. He wears the finest clothes, he’s the greatest dancer, he’s gonna stay there longer than you.’ They just didn’t want to sing it because all they kept thinking about was them. I said, ‘Guys, listen to the song, you’re telling a story. It’s “He’s the Greatest Dancer,” he’s the subject matter, not you.’ No matter how much I kept explaining it to them, they kept saying, ‘My God, my mother’s gonna think we’re whores.’ For me, songs are important, lyrics, everything. There’s not one word that’s not very, very important to me. And it has to be a complete story to me: a beginning, a middle, and an end. If the logic is all of a sudden thrown away, I can’t appreciate that.”61

  The album’s best writing, however, was to be found on “Lost in Music.” One of the few songs about music to live up to its claims, “Lost in Music” may not have been released as a single, but it struck such a universal chord that it was covered fifteen years later by the cantankerous, Mancunian postpunk band the Fall, which joined Robert Wyatt (who covered Chic’s “At Last I Am Free”) as the group’s most unlikely fans. Where Chic would have emphasized the “Caught in a trap / No turning back” part of the lyric with haunted vocals and deep spaces in the groove, Sister Sledge embodies the “I feel so alive / I quit my nine to five” refrain with Kathie’s swoops and curlicues and Rodgers’s surging, uplifting chicken-scratch riffing.

  For all of the brilliance of “Lost in Music,” the album’s biggest song was the title track. Based on a riff stolen from, o
f all people, Children of God, a group that Rodgers used to dig when he was a hippie, “We Are Family” might have been a gospelesque get-happy tune about the joys of sisterhood, but it quickly became an all-purpose anthem that was used by everyone from feminists to gay rights activists marching on Washington, D.C., to NAACP conventions to the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team. Its almost universal appeal was largely due to Kathie Sledge’s infectious, utterly delightful lead vocals. “Whatever I write, the musicians make it better,” Rodgers says. “In other words, yeah, when I wrote ‘We Are Family’ it was a pretty great song to begin with, but when Kathie Sledge came in and heard it for the first time, she got so inspired that her first take was the one that we know and love. All that ad-libbing and stuff, it’s just because she was so overwhelmed by the track: ‘Come on, Bernard, wooo!’ She was just reacting. She wasn’t doing ad-libs necessarily, she was listening and hearing it for the first time.”62 There are other gems on We Are Family, like the very fine disco love songs “You’re a Friend to Me” and “Thinking of You,” but it was the Pirates, who won the World Series with “We Are Family” as their theme song, who offered proof of Chic’s greatness.

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  As the across-the-board appeal of “We Are Family” intimated, “Disco has been the one source of music where everyone is equal, where you can have a good white disco group and a good black disco group and people that come to see you couldn’t care less,” Rodgers told journalist Geoff Brown in 1979. “All of the black people in America had the Bee Gees record. Everybody buys Chic records, everybody buys Donna Summer. Disco has almost given us the opportunity to just be normal. It’s the product that’s important. And I like that … it’s difficult for me to talk about it because it means a lot to me inside, but it just really gives us the chance to be the same as everybody else and it’s a really fantastic feeling to actually compare our record sales with Foreigner and the Rolling Stones and Firefall and the Beatles. We never would have had this opportunity with an R&B record … Before disco you couldn’t really be like that. You could be like Otis Redding, and that’s great. But if he were around today I doubt if he could compete with the Bee Gees doing just regular soul music because it’s too alienating.”63