by Nile Rodgers
Copyright © 2011 by Nile Rodgers
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rodgers, Nile.
Le Freak: an upside down story of family, disco, and destiny / Nile Rodgers.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64403-3
1. Rodgers, Nile. 2. Guitarists—United States—Biography. 3. Sound recording executives and producers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
ML429.R64A3 2011 781.64092—dc22 2011015885
www.spiegelandgrau.com
Jacket design: Evan Gaffney Design
Front photograph: Lynn Goldsmith
v3.1
contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue The Theory of Relativity
part 1 Can They Be That Close?
one The Ballad of Beverly and Bobby
two Nothing to Fear but the Fear of Fear Itself
three Go West, Young Boy
four Like Fathers, Like Sons—Variations on a Mormon Theme
five Hippie Happenstance
six In Search of the Lost Chord
part 2 Roam If You Want To
seven Chic Sh*t Happens: The Rise and Call of the Disco Revolution
eight The Second Wind
nine Let’s Dance … Again
ten Who’s That Opening-Act Girl?
eleven Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Overdoing!
twelve Vive la Révolution!
part 3 I Made It Through the Wilderness
thirteen The Dance, Dance, Dance of Death
fourteen We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 1996
Epilogue We Are Family
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
prologue
The Theory of Relativity
Life isn’t about surviving the storm;
it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.
—UNKNOWN
“SWEETIE, I NEVER SEE YOU,” MY MOTHER SAID. “IF WE CONTINUE LIKE this, I’ll only see you a couple more times before I die.”
It was eight days after 9/11, the morning of my forty-ninth birthday, and like so many people in America at that moment, my mother was thinking about the importance of relationships, especially among family. Her take on it was a bit darker than most, but it was harder to see on September 19, 2001: The rest of the country had finally caught up to Mom’s gift for morbid melodrama.
The truth is, she was right. I didn’t see her enough—though some people might say I had good reason to never see her again.
But after 9/11, as we all know, everything changed, and I resolved to spend more time with my crazy clan. Not just Mom, but my aunt, uncle, cousins, and the rest of my immediate family, which included the other parental figure who made me what I am, my stepfather, Bobby.
We needed an occasion, of course, and there’s nothing quite like Thanksgiving to gather our tribe. Though they had long since separated, Bobby was still very much in Mom’s life, despite all they’d been through. And in many ways the holiday meal neatly mirrored the mixed makeup of my family. There was the dark meat—me and Aunt Mabel and her offspring, a clue that we were direct descendants of slaves from the South; Mom and my brothers are the same beige as the mushroom stuffing. And Bobby was the white meat—an unrepentant Jewish junkie from the Bronx. Drugs, crime, and love were the gravy that kept us all together.
AND SO WAS BORN our annual raucous all-the-trimmings repast at Mom’s place—the home I bought for her on her fifty-seventh birthday—in that most family friendly of cities, Las Vegas.
Vegas was the perfect place to reunite my parents. It was, after all, Bobby’s town, where he passed bad checks, counted cards, played the ponies, drank like the town drunk, and did heroin. In fact, he got down there with such gusto that during the mid-sixties he was barred from entering the entire state of Nevada. And Mom wasn’t afraid to go all-in in their no-limit game back then either.
By 2001 things were a little different. But Bobby still loved to gamble (except now he slow-played), still loved to get high (and could do so for days at a clip), and still had that same Lenny Bruce beatnik humor. Mom was just as quick on the draw with her scalding quips. They could still go toe-to-toe.
Thanksgiving Vegas-style made us feel like we’d never stopped living together. It was business as usual: fun, laughter, and complete and utter dysfunction—and I don’t think we’d have it any other way. In fact, it was so successful that our newly minted tradition continued unabated with a twist—every year there would be one major revelation retrieved from the family vault of secrets and brought to the dinner table to be examined like an old heirloom. We kept it going until 2009, when once again, things changed.
THAT THANKSGIVING, the family diverged from our annual get-together in Vegas and instead convened at a cousin’s house in Hemet, California—coincidentally, the town where L. Ron Hubbard died and was cremated within twenty-four hours. We had to accommodate my ailing aunt—and to make things easier for Bobby, who now needed our help getting around. Though we were in a different place, the laughter, feasting, and recycled family stories felt as familiar and welcome as ever. One of the reasons our Turkey Day never gets old is because of the yearly Big Secret. Actually, given how open-minded my family is, the real shock of these secrets is how anyone ever managed to keep them under wraps for so long! After fessing up, we’d mercilessly make fun of the secret sharer (which maybe explains why they kept it secret). And that Thanksgiving was no exception.
The next morning we all met at the Marriott Hotel in Riverside, California, for breakfast. In a matter of minutes, the whole joint was caught up in our out-of-control breakfast, with jokes and secrets flying back and forth throughout the rambunctious meal. We might have stayed there for hours, but this morning was different.
Bobby had a very important appointment. And for once, we needed to be there on time.
We all got into our cars. I took the lead. I’d memorized the directions. We drove about eleven miles to 22495 Van Buren Boulevard. We met up with the chaplain from the Veterans Administration home in Barstow, California, Bobby’s most recent residence. It was now 10 a.m. Despite the early hour, we quickly had the chaplain cracking up as loudly as the rest of us. In Mom’s haste to get Bobby there, she’d forgotten to stop at the VA home to pick up his flag, as the chaplain had instructed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ve got you covered.”
The chaplain told us how lucky he was to know Bobby and meet the rest of his family. “He taught me how to have fun again,” he said. “I can see why you’re such a happy family—he seems to have taught you the same thing, too!” We laughed, hugged, and agreed. Then we all started crying.
A three-gun volley went off and the Honor Detail marched away after the bugler blew taps. The sergeant then presented Mom with the flag they’d folded at the end of the ceremony.
At 10:45 a.m. PST on Friday, November 27, 2009, we interred Bobby’s ashes at Riverside National Cemetery. Mom and the family had brought his remains from Las Vegas, where she had protected them since Bobby’s death about six months earlier, so he could join us for the annual family dinner.
I’d wanted all of us to spend a happy Thanksgiving together—one more time.
part I
Can They Be That Close?
one
The Ballad of Beverly and Bobby
IT TOOK ME A LONG TIME TO REALIZE THAT THE THINGS MY PARENTS did were not exac
tly normal. I was about seven years old, and it was the tail end of the 1950s, when it started to dawn on me that they were … well, let’s just say they were different.
For instance: My friends and I got shots when we went to the doctor, and we hated them. But my parents stabbed themselves with needles almost every day, and seemed to enjoy it. Weird.
Most of my friends’ parents sounded like the adults in school or on TV when they talked. People understood them. My parents, on the other hand, had their own language, laced with a flowery slang that I picked up the same way the Puerto Rican kids could speak English at school and Spanish at home with their abuelas.
And then there was the matter of how they talked. My parents and their friends spoke this exotic language very slowly. There were other odd things. For instance, they often slept standing up, and this group narcolepsy could strike right in the middle of the most dynamic conversation. Someone would start a sentence: “Those ofay cats bopping out on the stoop are blowin’ like Birrr …” and suddenly the words would begin to come out slower. And. Slower. Soon they wouldn’t be speaking at all. Eventually our living room would be filled with black-and-white hipsters suspended in time and space, while I ran through the petrified forest of their legs. My favorite game was waiting to see if the ashes from the cigarettes they were smoking would ever drop. Somehow they almost never did.
I can still remember the day when I finally realized that there was a name for this unusual lifestyle. My parents were junkies! And their slow-motion thing was called nodding out.
Oh well—it was nice to be able to name the thing. This was my life, and as far as I was concerned, there was nothing uncommon or uncomfortable about it at all. In fact, for a while at least, it was a carefree Shangri-La.
MY MOTHER, BEVERLY, was a beautiful, brilliant black girl whose family was a generation from southern sharecropping. She got pregnant with me when she was thirteen, the very first time she had sex. Bobby, my stepfather, was white, Jewish, and central-casting handsome. They were an unusual progressive pair: They smoked pipes, dressed impeccably, and read Playboy for the articles. Even in Beat Generation Greenwich Village, New York City, circa 1959, interracial couples weren’t exactly commonplace.
Mom’s maiden name was Goodman. Technically, it was Gooden, but her father, Fredrick, appropriated the name from a huge Goodman’s Egg Noodles billboard that hung outside of the Lincoln Tunnel on the New Jersey side. The family story is that Fredrick had been forced to flee the cotton fields of Georgia after he used a tree branch to beat a white man he’d caught raping his sister. Grandpa Fredrick (never one to let a good story go to waste) told me that he saw the sign for Goodman’s Egg Noodles just after his car exited the tunnel connecting New York to New Jersey, the state where he’d begin a new life. When he emerged from the Hudson River baptism, he was a new man. Better than new: He thought the name would help people up North think of him as a “good man.” In the end, I guess it sort of worked. Twenty long years later, after the Woolworth CEO he chauffeured passed away, Grandpa got the Cadillac as thanks for his devotion and service.
By the time Beverly Goodman was twelve, she was already what they used to call a fast girl. She ran with a street gang called the Taejon Debs. They dated members of two different rival male gangs, the Copians and the Slicksters. But she wasn’t just beautiful and bright. She was hip. She and her cadre of friends were aware of the fact that they knew things that most civilians didn’t. She listened to Nina (Simone), Clifford and Max (Brown and Roach), Julie (London), Monk (Thelonius), TB (Tony Bennett), and Ahmad Jamal on a regular basis, and was so down she called them by a single name (except Jamal, maybe out of respect for the fact that he’d gone through the trouble of changing his name from Freddy Jones). She spoke with confidence, just a peg down from arrogance, which only big-city intellectuals could get away with, even if they were only twelve. She had art, literature, and music all around her.
MY EARLIEST RECOLLECTION of life with my mother is of two young people—one so young he’d barely finished wearing rubber pants—living together as roomies, a strange friendship instead of the standard maternal setup I’d see with other kids and their mothers. I always called her Beverly instead of Mommy. She never asked me to do otherwise. Even as a very young kid, I was utterly convinced that my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. Mom’s looks were a combination of African American, Native American, and Irish. This was no accident. Mom’s bloodline goes something like this: My great-great-grandmother Mary Ellen was the child of a partially African mother, whose slave name was Caroline, and an Irish doctor and slave owner, Dr. Gough, who was, um, intimate with his property. Though he was married to a respectable, proper English woman, he apparently fathered at least more than one child with his slave housekeeper.
As the daughter of a white man, my great-great-grandmother Mary Ellen was more privileged than the average ex-slave’s child, and she was better educated than the darker-skinned blacks around her. This fact was not lost on her. Later, when her own daughters came of age, she passed along some interesting advice: “Protect your children and the benefits you’ve gotten from my being half white,” she told them. “Marry the fairest man you can so your children will have good hair.” My great-great-granny and her husband, Lee Randal, had five children with very good hair. One of them, Mabel Ethel (born October 12, 1891), would marry a man named Percy Stanley Mickens, who was born on December 6, 1888.
Percy’s father was Abraham Lincoln Mickens. One day a woman named Wicke dropped off a child at his home. Abe’s wife, Alice, couldn’t bear children and Wicke had agreed to have Abe’s baby (Percy) for them. She was a full-blooded Indian woman (FBI, as they say back on the rez). Percy’s birthmother was of the Iroquois Nation, so his hair was also very good. Percy’s wife, Mabel, had four children. One was called Alice, after the mom that raised him but couldn’t have children of her own. That Alice is my mother’s mom. Today those Iroquois and Irish genes are very apparent in my family. Most of us resemble to varying degrees Lena Horne, Halle Berry, Cab Calloway, or Lenny Kravitz.
Except for me.
I inherited my biological father’s genes: I’m dark-skinned. “The only spot in the lot” is what some friends and family called me. As screwed up as it is, my great-great-grandmother knew what she was talking about when advising her daughter to “marry light.” It’s hard to describe how horribly ugly I felt as a dark-skinned kid in the fifties. Thank God for the sixties, when black was suddenly beautiful, no matter the shade.
Which brings me to my stepdad: Bobby Glanzrock. It’s not fair to call Bobby a black man in a white man’s body, because his style was genuinely his alone. Bobby was a beatnik Ph.D. His observations had angles and perspectives that would make Miles Davis contemplate his own sense of cool. Bobby spoke with a slow, deliberate syncopation that was constantly modulating through the musical scale. This was the preferred style of speaking amongst the hipster class. Think Mitch Hedberg or Jimi Hendrix.
Some of his black friends called him “White Bobby,” but my stepdad acted more like the black avant-garde jazz musicians he idolized than the haberdashers in his lineage. He only dated soul sisters, most of whom could have doubled for Cleopatra Jones, all Afro and attitude. That included my mom, who sported the latest Carnaby Street duds and a towering nimbus of kinky hair. Bobby’s uncle Lew, who had no sons of his own, groomed his nephew to take over his clothing business. But Lew disowned him for marrying a black woman, even one with a nice Jewish-sounding name. Bobby threw away the glory of the schmate business for Beverly. And in return, he became the love of her life, and she had more than a few lovers. Me, I was their little groupie. I loved them both like crazy.
And “crazy” may be the operative word. Beverly and Bobby may not have been model parents, but they were a really good fit for each other; art, literature and especially their love of music bonded them together. But as they spiraled deeper and deeper into addiction, they were also increasingly self-centered, not infrequently criminal
, and less and less interested in the responsibilities of raising a kid. On some level it was great to be treated like a peer, to be on a first-name basis with my parents, but it wasn’t exactly a substitute for the usual parental cocktail of nurturing and discipline. Respect? Yes, there was plenty of that. If I had a problem, we’d “rap on it.” Then they’d ask me something like: “Are we copacetic?” If I answered, “Yeah, I guess so,” the matter would be settled with a “Solid!” and a five slap or some other affirming gesture.
Bobby always affectionately called me by my nickname, “Pud,” short for “pudding pie.” Once, after I’d accidentally set fire to the apartment while playing with matches, he sat me down. More disappointed than angry, he stared woefully into my eyes for about five minutes or so, then finally broke the uncomfortable silence.
“Pud, dig yourself,” he said.
This was the harshest discipline Bobby ever doled out. My mother then asked me if I wouldn’t mind walking over to her and lying down on her lap. She gave me a few whacks on the behind and asked me if I understood why.
“Yes.”
She looked me in the eyes and said, “Pud, you really have to start digging yourself.”
“OK, Beverly.” I cried more from shock than pain, because she’d never hit me before. Then again, I had set the house on fire.
BUT THAT INCIDENT was an accident, not pyromania. In fact, I was rarely a burden to adults. Our cigarette-fogged living room was regularly dotted with junkies in full nod, like a twisted beatnik version of Ingmar Bergman’s chess game with death: adults of every hue in suspended animation, waiting to move to the next square. Shooting, drinking, snorting, and smoking any and everything right in front of me was all part of the daily script. But I knew better than to mess with anyone’s high.
“Shit, man, little Pud is cool as a muthafucka.” An old family friend and a truly gifted artist, Harold, used to say at an excruciatingly slow tempo. “You don’t have to worry about Pud, man, he’s all right.” Harold was one of the finest gentleman-junkies I’ve ever known.