Le Freak

by Nile Rodgers

  Playing these clubs, which ranged in décor from ghetto-fabulous versions of the bar in Star Wars to tin-roof shacks in the Bible Belt, was the mainstay gig for most of the musicians I knew at the time. This was our equivalent of Class A baseball. You had a long way to go to get to the majors, but it was a necessary step. It may have been the minors, but the Fairtree had a tough crowd that was used to seeing quality acts, some of whom would go on to become big stars. If a patron called out “Chocolate Buttermilk,” “Pusher Man,” or even “I Want You Back,” the band had better play it and play it well.

  On any other night, I would’ve already filed the proceedings under “just another gig.” Only there was something special about this band: the bassist, Bernard Edwards. We’d actually spoken over the phone a few months earlier about gigging together, and we hadn’t hit it off. Bernard was not impressed with my avant-garde classical-jazz-rock-fusion ideas and told me in no uncertain terms to lose his number. But once we started playing together that night, well, it was like we each telepathically knew what the other was thinking. The two new dudes took command of the unit, and the quality of Hack’s show jumped up a few notches. Now we came off like a fully rehearsed band.

  If someone didn’t know the material, Bernard and I called out the changes. We instinctively formed a temporary partnership for the sake of keeping the band tight behind Hack, so he could concentrate on being the show’s star. Little did we know that this was to be our primary role for the rest of our lives.

  THINKING BACK ON THAT FIRST NIGHT, I can still vividly see and hear my future partner’s traditionalist soul-brother swagger. Nard was dressed stylishly, but conservatively: He wore silk slacks with back flap pockets, playboys, and a bly. Playboys resembled Hush Puppies with one-inch-thick rubber soles, and blys, if that’s how you spell it, were knitted shirts with elaborate patterns. I was in my usual hippie ensemble. We were as different as night and day, but like night and day, you couldn’t have one without the other.

  We became inseparable. If I got hired for a gig, I worked hard to get Nard added, and vice versa. For the next couple of weeks, we did a few consecutive boogaloo gigs (which meant the set list was comprised of current R&B pop songs) before getting another call from Hack and moving to a more upscale Italian nightclub where the set list was expanded to include standards. I don’t recall the club’s exact name for sure (I think it was Delmonico’s), but it was on Morris Park Avenue in the East Bronx, a sparsely populated section of town that I’d lived in at various times in my life, with Beverly and Graham.

  IT WASN’T EXACTLY instant fame and glamour, but it was nicer than our Chitlin’ gigs. For me, alas, it was short-lived. I was fired from Hack Bartholomew’s band our first night there, because my girlfriend Connie came to see me. According to management, they didn’t like the way she was dressed. Bernard saw the trouble coming. “Yo, man,” I remember him warning me when he noticed her entering the club, “Connie’s headlights are on high beam.” My girlfriend had come to our gig wearing a very revealing low-cut designer dress. Picture a reverse wool corset that laced up the front from her navel. The opening widened the whole way up, until it reached her breasts. Very Sophia Loren. I got sacked and wound up getting paid for a half night’s work. “Hey, man, we can’t have that here,” the white club owner told me. He never explained what the “that” was that they couldn’t have there, but he didn’t have to. It was the last time I’d work with Hack, and the beginning of a lifetime working with Bernard Edwards.

  Nard and I gigged together on the Chitlin’ Circuit up until 1977. From the back of the bandstand, we learned the fundamentals of how to build a successful music production business. In 1973 Nard landed the gig that would change our lives. He became music director for a vocal group called New York City, which was known for its Philly-sounding soul, despite its name. NYC was signed to a label called Chelsea Records, which was owned by Wes Farrell, who was married to Tina Sinatra. They were both Van Nuys Airport people, an irony I didn’t bother explaining to my friends. We took the name the Big Apple Band as NYC’s backup band.

  New York City scored a hit record, “I’m Doing Fine Now,” by producer/songwriter extraordinaire Thom Bell, who was best known at the time for his work with the Delfonics, the Stylistics, and the Spinners. We’d soon be gigging all over the world. And for a while, we were on a hot streak. We played large venues with a diverse group of headline R&B acts such as the O’Jays and Parliament-Funkadelic; we even did some dates on the American leg of the Jackson 5’s first world tour. NYC’s Philly Soul sound was very happening. Thom Bell was at the top of his game, and his slick, sophisticated soul dominated the R&B and pop charts.

  Though the Big Apple Band didn’t play on Bell’s recordings, we played the music live very well. Bernard and I always tried to make live music faithful to the records, as we’d done in Hack’s pick-up band the night we initially played together. But this was my first taste of playing in front of people in big-time situations. With Sesame Street, I played in the orchestra pit and was basically hidden. Now I was twenty-one years old and things were changing quickly.

  WHEN I STARTED WITH NYC, I only ate organic food (preferably macrobiotic). I didn’t drink, smoke, or take drugs. I was wholly dedicated to practicing guitar and embraced a monklike celibacy. My personality caused some discomfort between me and my New York City bosses, because they thought I was gay. Of course that could be the only explanation for my strange habits as far as these brothers were concerned.

  In retrospect, I can sort of see their point. The band had many willing girls throwing themselves at us, but I wasn’t interested. I just wanted to read books and practice every chance I got. I was very shy on stage, almost to the point of being introverted. I kept my head down and never looked at the people in the audience. New York City wanted to fire me, but Bernard convinced them to keep me.

  Slowly but surely my situation forced me to change. I remember the exact day it happened. We were back on the Chitlin’ Circuit, as some time had passed since “I’m Doing Fine” was on the charts. We were in Raleigh, North Carolina, when the tour bus pulled into a McDonald’s and I ordered a fish sandwich, thinking, Well, at least it’s fish! Next, we hit Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I had a one-night stand with an army girl who snuck me into her motel room through the window. Before we had sex, she asked me inquisitively, “You’re really from New York, right? Do you know any Jews?” I replied, “Millions of ’em.” I enjoyed the punch line as much as the sex.

  To keep costs down, the band shared rooms on the road, and my roommate was the drummer. He had a constant trail of girls and I’d sometimes get the overflow. I dated a number of hot flight attendants and I started to drink wine—but only with my meals! Yes, I was becoming more like the other dudes in the band. I was also becoming much closer to Bernard. Though he never criticized my odd proclivities to my face (other than to joke around), he constantly worked at redesigning me into a soul man. Nard wasn’t the only one giving me the Pygmalion treatment. I had another muse in Miami Beach, Marsha Ratner, leader of a pack of fabulous people in that town’s wild party scene. She was also a single mom who reminded me of my own mother.* When she first saw me perform, she wondered why I kept turning my back to the crowd and from that point on committed to helping me come out of my shell, and, slowly, it started to work. My final act of transformation also took place in Miami, but this one was musical.

  One day, following a gig in Miami, Nard got me to trade in my prized jazz guitar, a hollow-bodied Gibson Barney Kessel, for a sleek solid-bodied Fender Stratocaster, the six-string equivalent of trading in a Range Rover for a Porsche. The local act that opened for us played on our equipment, and their guitar player sounded better than I did on my own amplifier. Nard convinced me it was the guitar that made the difference. His soul-man makeover plan was working. He came to my room to admire my new guitar and showed me the style the other guy had played on my amp. He fingered the chords with his left hand, and his right hand would continuously pla
y sixteen notes to the bar while accenting the main parts of the rhythm. He called it “chucking.” Bernard used to be a guitar player before he switched to bass, and one lesson was all I needed. For the next few nights straight, while my roommate pursued all manner of trysts, I was having a love affair in the bathroom with my new ax. In just a few days, I’d emerge as a chucking funk guitarist who knew more jazz chord inversions than most of my R&B counterparts.

  Around that time I met a girl named Karen who fit my soulful transformation like a Temptations sharkskin suit. She was one of those girls who was so fine, people just wanted to be around her. She knew everybody from Nicky Barnes, the famed New York gangster, to DJs like Frankie Crocker, Vaughan Harper, and scores of other local radio personalities. With Karen as my girl, a Strat as my guitar, and Bernard as my bandleader, I started to fit into the R&B scene more organically. Karen’s friends became my friends and Nard’s music became my music.

  New York City was our main gig, but the Big Apple Band sometimes played without them. Truth be told, the Big Apple Band was only one of many monikers we worked under. While NYC was losing its popularity, the backup band was developing a following. Our name changed based on the gigs that our various agents and managers landed. About the only thing that remained consistent among every version of the band was me on guitar and Bernard on bass. (We also had the good fortune of regularly working with two talented up-and-coming young singers: Luther Vandross and Fonzi Thornton, both of whom I’d known ever since the Sesame Street days, and who would appear on records with Bernard and me for the rest of our lives.)

  By then I’d been working with Nard for about three years. We were as close as two people could ever be. Our level of artistic trust was high. Every relationship that I’ve had with an artist is a slight structural variation of my relationship with Bernard. We taught each other how to believe in each other’s artistic ideas; we also taught each other how to fight for ideas when we thought they best served the project. And we’d serendipitously created a production technique that would be the foundation for every project we’d do until our last breath. We called it DHM, or Deep Hidden Meaning. Our golden rule was that all our songs had to have this ingredient. In short it meant understanding the song’s DNA and seeing it from many angles. Art is subjective, but if we knew what we were talking about, then we could relay it to others in various disguises while maintaining its essential truth.

  BY THE MIDSEVENTIES, the New York club scene was exploding, and the once trendy Apollo, which used to be the be-all and end-all for R&B musicians, was quickly becoming a musical dinosaur stuck in the black music culture of the fifties and sixties.

  Meanwhile, there was a mighty storm organizing on the horizon, called disco. My downtown stomping ground was the leading edge of this revolutionary movement. History has reduced this glorious and complex period so badly that it’s often dismissed as a one-line cinematic throwaway—the Saturday Night Fever or Studio 54 era—but it was so much more than that, especially for me.

  A new way of living, with a new kind of activism, had emerged, and my new crew—girlfriend Karen, music partner Bernard, and myself—embodied it. As founding members of this fledgling counterculture lifestyle, we held our meetings and demonstrations on the dance floor.

  Karen and her stylish comrades all danced their curvy asses off. For them, the movement, in every sense of the word, was as open and communal as the forces driving the hippies of my youth. Karen was black from Staten Island, but her friends were a rainbow coalition from every cultural background and neighborhood. I’d say they were even more expressive, political, and communal than the hippies before them, because they bonded through their bodies, through dance; they were propelled by a new kind of funky groove music. Dance had become primal and ubiquitous, a powerful communication tool, every bit as motivational as an Angela Davis speech or treasured as that eighteen-dollar, three-day Woodstock Festival ticket.

  All revolutionary movements are fueled by a desire for change to an unsustainable status quo. This revolution’s warriors were engaged in a battle for recognition. “Sex, drugs, and disco” was the new battle cry. The underground, now ethnic and more empowered than ever before, was becoming mainstream.

  For the first time since Chubby Checker separated dancing couples with “The Twist,” it was now cool again to touch your dancing partner. A whole slew of touchy-feely dance moves were introduced into the mainstream clubs—a consequence of gay sex coming out of the closet and onto the dance floor. People enjoyed intimate interaction with multiple partners, often with the same sex, while still maintaining the appearance of dancing. The names of some of the new dances revealed the new openness of the times: the Hustle, the Freak, and the Bus Stop. Think about it: a “hustle” is a drug deal, con, or a hooker’s transaction; a “freak” is a sex or drug addict; and the “bus stop” is where it all took place. It was all a far cry from the foxtrot or rumba.

  THE FUNKY DISCO MOVEMENT was spreading through the atmosphere like volcanic dust, and everybody was dancing all around the world. Unfortunately, the music that we played with New York City was no longer happening. We were on the road gigging when the band decided to break up, the result of its second album failing to produce any hits. Karen also decided to break up with me while I was on this tour. NYC played our final show in England. My hotel room had been broken into the night before the band was to return stateside. It was a Friday night and my passport was gone. Since I couldn’t go to the U.S. embassy until Monday, my bandmates left me behind and headed home.

  I was cool with all that. Since Karen dumped me, I’d been seeing a girl named Carey, a hostess at a prestigious London club called Churchill’s. We’d met at the London gig where New York City played on this last tour.

  Carey had London on lockdown. She knew everybody, especially all of the newly wealthy Arab oil sheiks, who were the most dominant force in the London social scene since the Beatles. Because of her blond cover-girl Swedish looks and status as a Churchill’s hostess, we had carte blanche at every trendy spot. The combination of London and Carey was so exciting that even after I got my passport replaced, I decided to stay.

  One atypically clear London night, Carey took me to a club to see a band that I’d been hearing about, but had never actually heard. They were called Roxy Music. Coincidentally, they were playing at a venue called the Roxy. Their glamorous fans looked like a cross between the fashion, music, art, and sex industries. My old band NYC’s last few gigs were mostly on army bases that were spread throughout Europe during those Cold War times, but this was nothing like those gigs, which felt like extensions of the Chitlin’ Circuit. The combination of crowd, setting, and music blew me away. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it. It was as mind-blowing as my first acid trip back in L.A.

  Roxy Music’s front man, Bryan Ferry, was suave and oozed elegance. Their music was a diverse offering of eclectic rock with changing time signatures and ethereal textures. Though I’d never heard them before that night, I could hear their sound was evolving. It was a totally immersive art experience that felt like I was absorbing more than just music.

  (Illustration credit 7.1)

  After the show Roxy Music’s songs stayed in my head for the next few days. I needed to hear them again. I bought their last two albums, Stranded and For Your Pleasure. When I pulled the two LPs from the record bin, the sight of Playmate of the Year Marilyn Cole and London jet-setter Amanda Lear on the respective covers gave me a eureka moment: The visuals of the covers were an essential part of the band’s imaging and marketing, almost as important as the music itself. After seeing the records, I made a 360-degree connection and had my first glimpse of an idea that would ultimately result in my band Chic. I was closing in on our DHM.

  After I picked up the Roxy Music records, I called Bernard at home and simply said, “I got it.” “Got what?” he replied. “The concept for our next band.” We both knew we’d have to make a living sans the luxury of New York City’s regular paychecks. He was surprise
d that I was still in London. I explained how I’d been living in a hotel and Carey was picking up the tab. I was sitting in with different acts at a string of clubs and superimposing my chucking style over everyone’s music, which instantly made them sound funky. I had quickly become the talk of the town—well, sort of. Carey’s influential friends had taken a liking to my style and thought maybe I could be the funk version of Hendrix. Music industry types wanted to link me with some of the local artists and create a new London-based R&B funk rock unit.

  Funk rock had just made its way across the pond, and bands like Ian Dury and the Blockheads and others were starting to reflect the influence. The leaders of the current wave of London tastemakers, who’d seen me sit in with the likes of General Johnson (“Give Me Just a Little More Time”) and others at a club called Gulliver’s, thought I could be the next big thing. But I knew that whatever I was going to do musically, it had to include Bernard. Since he was married and lived in New York, I took the next plane out.

  ALMOST AS SOON as I touched down, the Big Apple Band started to make our sophistofunk rock dream a reality. In a scene straight out of The Magnificent Seven, we hunted down willing musical gunslingers. First to join up was a drummer named Tony Thompson, who’d just finished working with the all-female funk-fantasy-fusion act LaBelle. Tony could play all styles. He had great technique that was very aggressive, not ideal for the slick stuff, but smoking on our rock-flavored songs. I’d known Tony from pick-up gigs on the then hip Persian scene, which included artists like Jamshid Alimorad, Aki Banaii, and superstar Googoosh.