by Nile Rodgers
THE MASSIVE SUCCESS of “Le Freak”—approximately twelve million units worldwide—set Chic officially on fire. Suddenly the money started flowing like water, and our lifestyle changed forever. One day Nard and I were walking down Park Avenue, fresh from our business manager’s office, still processing the scale to which we’d struck it rich, when we happened upon a Mercedes dealership. The store was filled with the entire range of that year’s models; their metallic finishes shining from the showroom stung our eyes. All the browsing customers were white male executive types, except us.
Make no mistake: We didn’t look like vagabonds. We were in the latest designer suits because we always attended every business meeting in character, creating the Chic mystique. We couldn’t imagine KISS ever showing up at the record company without donning their costumes, nor would we!
A salesman charged over to us to try and delicately shoo us out of the store. It was clear to him the likes of us couldn’t afford his wares. “Um, can I help you, ah, gentlemen?” he said in a condescending tone, putting an extra bit of cynical sting on the word.
Bernard, who always had a gift for saying the right thing at the right time, didn’t even look at the salesman; instead he walked over to the mirrored wall of the showroom. While panning himself up and down, he said, “I’m not sure. Which one of these cars goes with a brown tie?” He walked around the showroom and added, “I think that one matches, what do you think?” It was one of the three most expensive cars in the showroom, a 450 SEL. The salesman told him the price to scare him off or just give him a reality check. Bernard retorted, “Well, in that case I’ll take that one over there, too!” It was a two-seat blue sports car. I did my best not to laugh. Finally I couldn’t hold back anymore and started cracking up. Bernard bought both cars on the spot just to make a point. Still pissed off, he sternly said to the salesman, “Be courteous and cool to everybody who walks in, because you never know who they are, or what they’re capable of doing.” He finished the paperwork, made them prep the cars, and we drove them both away, unbalancing their carefully styled showroom.
I DIDN’T BITE THAT DAY, but I certainly did my share to prop up the economy. I was flying pretty high. It was exciting to have money and I figured it would always be that way for the rest of my life. I’d keep writing songs—they were coming easy to me and Bernard—and keep getting big checks. My first two post–“Freak Out” purchases were a Porsche 911 and a Cigarette deep-V ocean racer. Given what we were earning, these toys were hardly extravagant, but for NYC residents in 1978, let alone a former hippie like me, they were waaaay over the top. After all, most people in New York City didn’t even drive. I reasoned it was just part of the job, part of creating the mystique.
Meanwhile, I took the boat out every chance I could. I concentrated on learning the foundations of seamanship, including dead reckoning and celestial navigation. We didn’t have GPS back in those days, only radar and depth finders, so going on trips to ports unknown was very exciting. The racing paint job on my first boat was amazing; it made the vessel look like it was gliding across the water when it was sitting still. The sight of my Afro blowing in the wind while I was speeding around the tristate waterways must have been quite a vision. Another attention grabber was my boat’s massive sound system. It was supplied by my gadget-guru DJ friend Robert Drake and was audible over the Cigarette’s twin engines. I once took Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie out in a fog so thick you couldn’t see two feet in front of you. I had to use radar and listen for the bells on the buoys to pinpoint our location. When we finally got back to port, they were the happiest people in the world, and I was as cocky as Captain Quint in Jaws. Break out the blow, baby!
I also spent a lot of money on clothes: I took the band’s name seriously and elevated my wardrobe accordingly. My garb came from a mixture of cutting-edge high-end stores like Charivari and Maud Frizon (they’ve both long since closed), as well as Skin Clothes and Ian’s (two shops that catered to show-biz punk rockers).
Drugs and alcohol were also a big part of my budget. I had an extremely high tolerance level and never seemed to get drunk, something I now know is an ability most alcoholics have. By that point I was boozing and doing coke all day, every day, but I wasn’t reckless—quite the contrary. Even though I lived life on the edge, I was in total control. For the moment.
STUDIO 54 QUICKLY BECAME my number one hangout. We were homegrown heroes who’d achieved international pop success. I soon became part of Studio’s inner circle of diverse superstars, like David Geffen or Truman Capote. Once I’d achieved that exalted status, I hung out in one of four areas: the basement, the balcony, the women’s bathroom on the ground floor, or Steve Rubell’s office (the ultimate sanctum sanctorum). I spent most of my time in the women’s bathroom—which came to be known as my office.
The women’s bathroom at Studio 54 was the first thing you’d pass after entering the club’s main entrance. I can still remember how exciting it was the first time a girl brought me inside. I was afraid that the women would freak out and call a bouncer, but most didn’t even notice, let alone care that I was there. Women’s bathrooms have long lines and I thought that a guy taking up a valuable stall would be frowned upon, but you see, I had lots of blow. I was never asked to leave, which made me feel very special, so special I’d often spend the entire night in there. All my drinks were brought to me; all my friends met me there. Typically, I’d secure one stall as if it were my own private space. If someone had to use the toilet, I’d let her come in, and she’d pull up her skirt or drop her pants and just go in front of me, even if we were total strangers.
It may seem highly unlikely today, but inside Studio there was a Dionysian sense of belonging and trust. Nothing was taboo. Usually I’d give my visitors a hit of coke if they wanted it. Sometimes we’d have full-on sex, or maybe one or more girls would give me oral sex. If I sound casual about it, it’s because that’s just the way it was. There was never any pressure to do or not do anything other than what one wanted to do. Under the broad category of partying, people could accept or demur based on their proclivities. Nothing was frowned upon. I don’t remember a single girl ever asking me to leave the stall to do her business.
Studio’s basement looked like a modern version of ancient catacombs, scary and secluded. It was restricted to all but the inner circle and employees. In the relative safety of our underground bunker, we acted like lunatics just because we could. There were storage rooms aplenty because the building was CBS Broadcasting’s theater and studio (hence the name “Studio 54”) before it was a club. Many of these rooms resembled the jail cells called holding tanks. When I was downstairs, I acted cool but was always looking over my shoulder. I knew about the vampires who fed off the patrons’ blood—in exchange for keeping the club owners forever young, or so the story went. From the look, feel, and odor down there, any sane person could believe it was true.
The balcony may have been the most mind-blowing, maybe because it was open to anybody. Here they did what the inner circle did behind closed—or slightly ajar—doors for all to see. It reeked like a Tijuana brothel. My first time up there, I caught a major movie star partying to the max. I won’t say her name because later she became a good friend, but I saw her balling in the balcony. Compared to my hijinks in the bathroom, this seemed way over the top. I don’t know why it was so shocking. I guess I’m not as cool as I thought I was.
Rubell’s office was the ultimate VIP room, mainly because it had its own bathroom. Even though I did anything I wanted in my “office,” I had the freedom to ascend to another level of hang when I disappeared inside his private bathroom. One night hit songwriter Paul Jabara (he wrote Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” and many others) and his constant companion, who I assumed was his wife or serious girlfriend, were in the tiny bathroom doing coke with me. In a typically casual way, I peed while we were partying. Paul said, “Nile, you ain’t gonna waste that on no bitch?” Talk about being caught off guard. Not only did I not think
he was gay, but his girlfriend (or wife) was scorching hot in her skimpy body-hugging outfits. The way he’d said the word “bitch” had a hint of disdain, adding to the situation’s awkwardness. I don’t remember the words I used to decline his obvious advance, but I kept the spirit cheerful and we all laughed it off. A few years later, he died of AIDS, as did many of the Studio crowd. But in those early free-love days, we rolled like the Roman Empire before the fall.
Yes, 54 might have been home base, but in an odd development it started to fail my increasingly ravenous appetite. Happening clubs seemed to be opening almost weekly, and I had to be there. One night as I was leaving Studio to check out a new club, I ran into a friend’s wife, who was flying solo. This was odd: She and her husband were one of New York’s then “It” couples, and they were always seen together. She was gorgeous and trendy; he wasn’t just a handsome, muscle-bound sports star—he was as nice as he was popular. I dug them a lot!
“Do you trust me?” she asked. I didn’t get what she meant, but she wasn’t high and the statement wasn’t out of character. I thought she was going to tell me something about her strangely absent husband.
“Of course I trust you,” I said. Then she told me to open my mouth and close my eyes. She placed a tablet on my tongue and said, “You belong to me tonight.”
I didn’t want to look like a chump in her eyes, because I admired her so much. She looked like an exotic cross between film starlets Dorothy Dandridge and Black Orpheus’s Marpessa Dawn, only more brown-skinned. She was impeccably adorned from head to toe in the latest haute couture, and she spoke perfect French and Italian, because she’d been a European runway model. As stunning as she was physically, it was her Mensa-level intellect that made her unique. Standing before her, I felt overmatched and somewhat afraid.
“What did you just give me?” I asked.
“X.”
“Ecstasy?”
“Yeah, ecstasy,” she said.
“Oh wow, I haven’t done that in years.” She held my hand, then kissed me in a reassuring way and said, “This is really good stuff, and I’ve been saving it to do it with someone special.” And with that she turned me around and took me back inside Studio. That’s all I remember her saying. We headed straight out to the floor and danced until the X kicked in. How do I explain the feeling of X? It’s hard, but soon I was enveloped with that familiar feeling that I’d not felt since my teens, like everybody in the world was my best friend. I had absolutely no fear. X always made me feel like I was standing on my tiptoes, seeing above the crowd. I felt like I could look over anyone’s head no matter how tall, my view unobstructed.
Then she took me to a friend’s apartment. Maybe she felt this was less illicit than the balcony, bathroom, or catacombs of Studio. We made coke- and champagne-fueled love until the next morning. I don’t remember what time I went home, or how I even got there, but we never spoke of the incident again. As sexy as this was, something about sleeping with a friend’s wife made me feel like my moral compass had been reset, and not in a good way, and I started doing things that before that night I would never have done. I’d soon break up with my wonderful girlfriend Nefertiti, after I’d fallen hook, line, and sinker for her best friend, Michelle. I even dreamt the entire Chic song “I Want Your Love” while lusting after Michelle in my slumber.
DESPITE ALL MY PARTYING, things were getting better than ever with my day job. The hits kept coming. Over the next two years and a few months, we’d released six albums featuring some enormous hits: “Dance, Dance, Dance,” “Everybody Dance,” “Saturday,” “Having a Party,” “Sorcerer,” “Le Freak (Freak Out!),” “I Want Your Love,” “Chic Cheer,” “He’s the Greatest Dancer,” “We Are Family,” “Lost in Music,” “Thinking of You,” “My Feet Keep Dancing,” “My Forbidden Lover,” and “Good Times.” Most of the singles and all their parent albums were gold. Many were platinum and multiple-platinum.
We were living and thriving in the most progressive and financially lucrative period in the history of art in America, and we knew that to do it, we had to play by different rules. Our Deep Hidden Meaning (DHM) allowed us to be artists, knowing most would at best see us merely as technocrats. We were bards who self-imposed a deceptive masquerade architecture on our lyrics. I’m not trying to make more of our songs than they were. They simply were more than most realized. We were proud and welcomed the challenge, but envisioned a future that we knew would come one day.
We shared Afrobromantic dreams of what it would be like to have real artistic freedom. Freedom—to combine the right words with the right music, to paint the right picture—to represent the brilliance of complex simplicity. We wrote for the masses, but worked tirelessly to make sure there was a deeper kernel that would appeal to the savvier listener.
Let me give you a sense of what I mean:
Paul Simon did it like this:
Why am I soft in the middle?
The rest of my life is so hard.
James Brown did it like this:
Thinking of losing that funky feeling?
Don’t.
David Bowie did it like this:
Let’s dance. Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.
We had to do it like this:
He wears the finest clothes, the best designers, heaven knows,
Ooh, from his head down to his toes.
Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci.
Only the hippest folks knew who those three fashionistic names were and what it meant to use them as lyrics at the time. Today, using designer names in pop songs is somewhat commonplace.
We had to be trendy, but there was always an extra level of insight dedicated to our subjects; it was never one-dimensional. It was like the old joke about the educated slave who drove a buckboard through an intersection because the penalty for literate blacks was death. When the cop stopped him after his action caused a huge accident, he said, “Nigger, are you blind? Are you a goddamned idiot or something, boy? Didn’t you see the stop sign?” The slave answered, “I’m sorry, boss. Do you mean that red and white hexagonal thing?”
WHILE I WAS BUSY CELEBRATING my success, some heads-up record companies started noticing that Chic had captured the magic of Studio 54 in our music, and they thought they wanted to bottle it. One was Jerry Greenberg, the president of Atlantic Records, who thought we could work that same hit-making mojo with other superstars on his label. He offered us everyone from the Rolling Stones to Bette Midler. We were flattered, but since superstars were already superstars, we knew that if we wrote and produced hits with them, no one would know what we did. We also knew only one way of working, which was, Do exactly what we say! This might not go over well with stars. So we suggested instead that they give us a lesser-known talent, so we could prove that we could make our own superstars. Greenberg told us about “a group of sisters that are like family to the label,” he said, adding, “they stick together like birds of a feather.” They were called Sister Sledge. After our meeting we went home and glanced at our notes.
The record exec had delivered almost verbatim the lyrics to “We Are Family,” one of the biggest hits of all time. It seemed like a perfect situation to link to our hit-making technique. We had two concept albums under our belts by now, and we were developing the process and quickly becoming proficient. We agreed and started to conceive what this sister act that we hadn’t even met should be. Their song “Love Don’t Go Through No Changes” had been a popular R&B song, but we knew DHM-based breakdown songs could take them all the way to the top of the charts. Our confidence grew with every song we penned, though by now we’d come to expect we’d make a lot of changes once we got with our band, so basically everything was just a thumbnail sketch. Even our string arrangements would often change on the spot.
The first time we met Sister Sledge was also the first time they ever heard the song “We Are Family.” When they walked into the studio, we were still writing the song as it was blasting over the loudspeakers. This had to be markedly differe
nt from what they’d expected, but it’s how we worked. We didn’t have to have it done, because we understood the song’s DHM and we intrinsically knew what the song had to say. Once we had finished, we gave it to them and basically said, “Here it is and here’s how it goes!”
Our aim was not to be tyrannical, but we only knew that way of working. A song remained malleable until we felt it was right, even if that meant the sisters just had to sit around and wait. Pound for pound, I think We Are Family is our best album hands down. But our method caused some friction between us and the sisters.
The best example of this friction was with the lyrics of their first single, “He’s the Greatest Dancer.” They were religious girls and took offense to singing, “My crème de la crème, please take me home.” They thought clean-cut girls would not have a one-night stand. We explained, “The song is not about you, it’s about him and the power the greatest dancer has over you.” They suggested we change the lyric to “Please don’t go home.” This was in direct conflict with the song’s core truth. We insisted that the lyric stay as we’d written it. They reluctantly sang it (though you couldn’t tell that from Kathy’s breathtaking delivery), but there was a wedge between us because we would not negotiate. After all, this was supposed to be their record. And it was (from our point of view).
Their record came out and went to the top of the charts. The album We Are Family is the best example of DHM perfection. We knew who they were (or certainly who we thought they should be) and crafted a production that revealed that reality on every song. Contractually we didn’t have creative control, but we had it musically, and we were dedicated to protecting our music. This philosophy would ruffle feathers, but sell millions of records.