by Nile Rodgers
“Dance, Dance, Dance” was our first complete song. We had discovered our formula for operating as long as we called ourselves Chic, a name that was slowly growing on me. We wrote more and more songs together based on our own golden rule: Every song had to have Deep Hidden Meaning. Bernard agreed. Armed with our new concept, we went out to conquer the world again—one dance floor at a time. There was a method to our madness: We felt that audiences would be more receptive to multilevel messages, just as long as they liked the groove. We also loved showing the essence of our grooves, by breaking down. Chic lived to break down. We used to have an inside joke between us that went, “A song is just an excuse to go to the chorus, and the chorus is just an excuse to go to the breakdown.”
It took the record business a bit longer to pick up on the joke. But eventually they got it.
ATLANTIC RECORDS IN NEW YORK had started out as a pure R&B label, with artists like Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, and Aretha Franklin, but by the time of Woodstock, they had many cutting-edge rock acts too, including powerhouse groups like Cream, Led Zeppelin, Yes, and the Rolling Stones. If you were a New York recording artist, you wanted to be on Atlantic or Columbia, the top of the food chain.
Through our growing group of connections, we’d made contact through intermediaries with all the New York–based labels. The entire A&R staff of Atlantic Records passed on “Dance, Dance, Dance” because they didn’t believe the song would play well on the radio, owing to its longer-than-average breakdown. That opinion was shared across the board.
One day one of our executive producers, Tom Cossie, finally got the record to the president of the label, Jerry Greenberg.
After hearing it only once, Jerry said, “Cossie, it’s a smash. I got to have it.”
There was just one small problem: We had already gotten a deal. We were technically signed to Buddah (sic) Records, a label best known for teenybopper pop acts like the 1910 Fruitgum Company. To make matters worse, Tom worked at Buddah and he’d gotten us signed there. So why were we out shopping for a deal? Buddah had contractually agreed to get our single “Dance, Dance, Dance” out in time for Billboard magazine’s big annual disco convention. Tom knew this was the place to break our song. For whatever reason, Buddah missed the pressing date, and it looked like they wouldn’t get our record to the convention in time.
Tom Cossie was an old-school promotion man and there was no way he was going to miss the heat the convention could provide. So he took a second-generation copy (magnetic tape loses fidelity when it’s copied) of the master to Atlantic. He told Jerry, “If you can get the record out first, it’s yours.” Never one to turn down a challenge or a smash, Jerry commissioned the Warner/Atlantic helicopter to fly the pressings back from the plant the same day, and had limos deliver the records throughout the eastern region, all the way up to Boston (ah, the good old days of the record business). This was a huge contract breach, but it was worth the risk to both Tom and Jerry.
Not only did we make the convention (the song was pumping out of every conventioneer’s hotel suite), it was also playing in the important (chart-reporting) clubs, with Atlantic’s label on it. We had added the name of one of the top DJs at the über-disco Studio 54, Tom Savarese, as the mixer (in truth he did an edit that we never used), which was an important move because Studio 54 was the center of the disco universe. And with that, we were off and running.
By the time Buddah got wind of it, it was too late; they could only play catch-up. “Dance, Dance, Dance” was the hit of the disco convention. And that second-generation master is the version Atlantic put out. As they used to say, “If it’s grooving, who cares what it sounds like?” Buddah had the high-fidelity master, but Atlantic had the momentum. Clive Davis, then an exec at Buddah, called Jerry up and asked him, “Hey, Jerry, how can you do that to us?” So Atlantic agreed to let Buddah put out the single out of goodwill, and to avoid a lawsuit. We went gold on both labels but only got paid for the Atlantic sales.
We’d certainly taken a circuitous route, and it was far from overnight, but we’d finally achieved everything we wanted. Back then, most R&B acts wore flamboyant clothes, but we created believable alter egos: two men in impressively labeled but subtle designer business suits, which effectively gave us the anonymity of KISS. We put sexy girls on our album cover, which was suave like Roxy Music, and we tooled a new form of Euro-influenced R&B that also still passed the smell test of my jazz police friends. Then we put together a corporation that would manage and develop this entity and its future enterprises, the Chic Organization Ltd. We were born out of the studio, but now that we were real (at least contractually and on records) we had to (1) go out on the road and prove this was an immersive artistic experience and (2) demonstrate that the two young ramrods at the helm could make this a viable new business.
“DANCE, DANCE, DANCE” was formally released to radio in the summer of ’77 and started climbing the charts. It was an instant hit and gig offers were coming in fast and furious. Atlantic picked up our album option, and we created one very quickly. We wrote four more songs* and put vocal verses on “Everybody Dance,” and had an album literally in a matter of days. Bernard and I were signed as individuals, and had agreed to provide the services of an entity we called Chic.
We set out to cast the lead role, a sexy female, and we were going to be the suave backup band. If it worked out, to the public we’d look like a corporate version of Rufus featuring Chaka Khan.
We had hired a lead singer who wasn’t part of the New York studio scene, Norma Wright, her obscurity further adding to our mystique. We got her to insert her middle name, which happened to be Jean, to pay homage to the real name of legendary movie siren Marilyn Monroe. We then formally hired our drummer Tony Thompson to role-play. He was very handsome and looked good in anything. Though he’d take our first press photo with us, he’d only wear a sport jacket; he wasn’t feeling the suit thing because he saw himself as a rocker. But he loved playing with us and went along with it as best he could.
Tony still didn’t believe this concept was going to work, even after we’d made the album and were paying him a salary. When we told him to get ready for rehearsals for a tour, he responded with, “Really? What songs are we gonna play?” It may seem odd now, but in his defense it’s important to remember that Tony didn’t even play on “Dance, Dance, Dance,” and wasn’t part of the initial Chic experience.
Bernard and I always tried to sound as close to records as possible when playing live (unless we changed it intentionally). So we hired Luther Vandross, one of the people who sang on the record, to come out on tour with us. Luther brought along Alfa Anderson from his own group. (Bernard and I were in Luther’s backup band, playing at Radio City Music Hall, the night we made the ten-dollar recording of “Everybody Dance.”)
Norma Jean and Tony hadn’t participated in the song that had gotten us the deal. They weren’t involved in any of the decision making or art direction. Had they been, maybe one of them would have stated the obvious: Hire two girls to headline Chic to match our art direction. We’d only find out this was a problem after doing our first few live gigs after our debut album was everywhere.
“Dance, Dance, Dance” was clearly two girls singing lead, and our album cover featured two hot female models. Since Chic was a new group, it wasn’t a giant leap to think the two cover girls (one of whom was early black supermodel Alva Chinn) were singing. On the road playing with us, we had Luther’s crew, two keyboard players, string and horn sections, and we sounded perfect, but we didn’t look like our music. We made it through the first tour okay, but we soon recognized that people thought they were being short-changed. This had to be fixed tout de suite. We needed to bring in another front girl.
Norma Jean introduced us to a friend of hers named Luci Martin, and she and Norma worked the front line together. Finally we looked like our music! We’d successfully become a completely immersive artistic experience. Our art direction would remain as important as our music, and our next two
album covers would prove this definitively, so much so, we even got Mr. Hard Rocker Tony to wear a suit.
When Norma left the group to go solo, Alfa, who’d been singing with us since the first tour as part of Luther’s crew, took on Norma’s role. Alfa and Luci became the two girls who’d be most associated with Chic, mainly because of the huge success of our next record, C’est Chic. It netted Atlantic their only six-million-selling single, and one of the only two records to go No. 1 on the Billboard chart three times, “Le Freak.” For a brief period, Chic was volcanically hot.
IN MY HASTE TO TELL YOU about us, I’ve skipped over what was simultaneously happening to me. Our first show to promote our debut album was at a large nightclub in Atlantic City called Casanova’s. It was dimly lit and the crowd was very receptive. We’d broken on radio in that region and were greeted like family. That was a relatively easy experience to handle. Our very next gig, on the other hand, was on the West Coast as part of a summer festival, for which Chic was about to play its first stadium. We’d gotten very big, very fast—and now we were facing some seventy thousand people in Oakland, California, in broad daylight. I was racked with terrible stage fright.
I was backstage, literally shaking with fear. The sight of this quaking mass of humanity was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, at least not from this point of view. Sure, I’d been to huge rallies and every manner of hippie tribal celebration, but I’d never been on this side of the microphone. I’d had a nice trail of professional gigs, but I’d always been in the backup band; I was not prepared to address seventy thousand people. Fortunately, a cure was at hand. My roadie said to me, “Hey, boss man, try this.” He passed me a Styrofoam pint-sized cup of Heineken. I gulped down that beer, and all was suddenly right with the world. I felt a warm wave of confidence spreading over me.
I ran onstage, faced the crowd, and screamed out, “OAKLAND!!!!!!!!”
The crowd responded with “CHIIIIIIIIIIIC!!!!!!!!”
IT’S A CLICHÉ. I know it’s a cliché. I was a musician beginning his downward spiral into alcoholism. I was an addict—I mean, I’d been sniffing glue since I was old enough to cross the street, and had dropped acid before I started high school. I loved drugs. I’d grow to need alcohol daily. I won’t drag out the suspense—for a lot of my adult life, drugs and alcohol were there; a lot of my adult experiences took place while I was under the influence of one mind-altering substance or another. I loved them. They nearly killed me. But I couldn’t have done it any other way.
Back in the dressing room after the show, I instructed my roadie to always have a drink on stage for me. I’d started out that first day with just one cup of beer. By the end of the tour, Heinekens encircled the drum riser in a beautiful symmetrical pattern of bioregrettable white cups. This functional sculpture’s elixir helped me play a new role, that of an accidental rock star—designer threads and shoes, a guitar over my shoulder, and alcohol coursing through my veins.
Our greatest early ally at the label was our PR person, named Simo Doe. We’d do extensive promotional tours that she’d arrange and for which she showed us how to reduce detailed answers to sound bites. At first it made us feel like liars, but then we learned that sound bites were all they wanted. This was a medium that had only small openings in their programming schedule for human-interest stories. “Make them short and sweet,” is what Simo taught us. Our success required us to replay this jovial spin game. In order to overcome my shyness, I started to drink before every interview, then during. I became accustomed to hearing myself talk on TV and radio, and would even go to DJ booths and shout out to the crowd on the dance floor.
Though Chic rarely played clubs (which couldn’t accommodate a band of our size), clubs all around the country welcomed us with open arms as guests. This was not just limited to the hip clubs of New York, where new ones seemed to open nightly; club life was spreading around the world like nuclear winter. Our music was crossing over into every sector of society. We played in places that didn’t usually have live black acts. One town we played in hadn’t had a public pop concert (black or white) since Elvis had caused a riot two decades earlier. Chic not only played there, we got a police escort. I couldn’t believe how almost everywhere I went, once people found out I was the guy from Chic, they’d treat me like a rock star.
And where does a fledgling rock star hang out? Back in the seventies, there was only one place that fit the bill: Studio 54.
THE FIRST TIME I WENT to Studio 54, I was not treated like a star. My music pumping on the dance floor, the supermodels on our album’s cover, DJ Tom Savarese (who had mix credit), and my then girlfriend Nefertiti were the stars. Nefi had graduated from the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology. Many FIT people partied at Studio, and I was Nefi’s guest. The club had only been open a few months, but it was already the hottest spot on earth.
It made sense that I wasn’t treated like a star that first night, because no one knew what Chic looked like, and Studio was all about who you were and how you looked. Nefi was really into how to achieve the look; she was a stylist who could design and make clothing. It was she who taught me about high fashion. Before I met Nefi, I’d never heard of Fendi, Fortuny, or Fiorucci. I learned about haute couture and met many top designers, like Calvin Klein and Roy Halston, at Studio.
I had many great nights in Studio, but none as important as the night I tried to get in without Nefertiti and failed: New Year’s Eve, 1977.
BERNARD AND I rounded the corner at Eighth Avenue onto Fifty-fourth Street. The first thing I saw was a massive mob, herded like cattle onto a sidewalk that couldn’t possibly contain them, and spilling onto the street. There was a good explanation for this mayhem: If those people could be anywhere in the world, this was the place. I can still picture the redecorated hallowed halls of what used to be CBS’s broadcast studios: coke-carpeted bathrooms, flat-black-painted walls, elaborate neon disco lights that dropped from the ceiling, ear-assaulting speakers, and churning sex nooks. And over the next nine years, I became a part of the club’s inner circle.
By the end of ’77, everyone in the club world was talking about our new breakdown sound, and we had become so popular that Grace Jones, who was a huge star at the time, had invited us to Studio for her show on a freezing New Year’s Eve. Grace told us to go to the stage door. But for some reason, we were turned away by the doorman, who promptly told us to “fuck off!” (Funnily enough, the guy contacted me about thirty years later on Facebook to apologize!) After he slammed the door in our faces, we decided, Oh, maybe Grace left our names at the front door. It took us forever to swim through the crowd and get the attention of the soon-to-be-famous front doorman Marc Benecke.
Bernard and I announced that we were personal guests of Grace. He told us, “Yeah right.” When we politely yet urgently asked him to please check the list, he actually stopped, looked it up and down, scanned all the pages (which seemed courteous and respectful), and then said, in a clear, precise, definitive voice, “I looked, and you aren’t on the list.” He returned to scanning the crowd for notables. We knew that was the end of the negotiation. We were dressed to the nines, but after contemplating our options, we just sloshed through the snowy streets, around the corner to the cozy apartment of our DJ friend Robert Drake. I was living there while he was gigging in Rome.
We downed a few bottles of vintage Dom Pérignon, and a little coke, which I’d started snorting while touring on the road. I picked up my guitar, started jamming on a guitar riff and singing the words that the stage doorman had said to us earlier, “Fuck off,” and Nard added, “Fuck Studio 54—aw, fuck off.” He grabbed his bass and we played this over and over, grooving and laughing. We developed the groove and even wrote a bridge, then came the chorus again: “Awww, fuck off—fuck Studio 54—fuck off.”
“You know, this shit is happening!” Bernard said, while pulling his sunglasses down his nose in order to achieve genuine eye contact with me. He did this whenever he was serious, because almost everything was a j
oke to us.
“We can’t get this song on the radio. ‘Fuck off’ is pretty hard-core for Top Forty,” I said, laughing. But Bernard was serious. And I’d learned to listen to him when he was serious. He had a great ear for hooks, and realizing that this little riff and chant sounded good, we changed “fuck” to “freak.” “Awww, freak off,” we sang energetically. It was horrible, but we tried to make it work.
“Hey, man, this is not lifting my skirt,” I said to Bernard.
“Yeah, I know what you’re saying,” he responded.
Suddenly the proverbial lightbulb went off. “Hey, man, we should say, ‘Awww, freak out.’ ”
“ ‘Freak out’?”
“Yeah, like when you have a bad trip, you freak out.”
That wasn’t the best reference for Bernard, since he was the last person who’d take LSD. So I quickly added, “Like … when you’re out on the dance floor losing it, you know you’re freaking out.”
“Yeah, plus they have that new dance called ‘the Freak.’ That could be the DHM,” he said, referring to our flare for Deep Hidden Meaning, now a must for the Chic song formula.
“Yeah!” he added, his voice rising with excitement. “It would be our version of ‘Come on, baby, let’s do the Twist.’ ”
Bernard was really into it, and we were in sync. After playing and singing for a while, Bernard made it completely ours by adding, “Le freak, c’est chic” in place of “fuck Studio 54.” Maybe the reason why this came to us so quickly was because we were composing the songs for our next album, which was basically finished until we came up with this off-the-cuff ditty. Chic released “Le Freak” in the summer of ’78. It featured Luther Vandross along with our signature double-female-lead-vocal sound, this time performed by Alfa Anderson and Robin Clark. It was a worldwide hit, and we got our first seven-figure check for the label’s only triple-platinum single (six million in those days). The Zen of it was, by not getting what we wanted, we got more than we ever imagined.