Le Freak

by Nile Rodgers

  DURING THE HEIGHT of Chic’s success, I never quite realized how big our music had gotten, mainly because we more or less lived in the studio. When I wasn’t clubbing, I was recording or watching movies. That was my entire existence. We rarely did live shows. But when we did, well, they were something to remember. If there’s one live gig that captures what Chic was capable of onstage, it’s the show we did at the Padres’ stadium, in San Diego, during a festival, when we opened for Marvin Gaye.

  Rick James and Marvin Gaye were backstage in Marvin’s dressing room. According to Rick, who told me this story—he was a good friend before drugs took him out—Marvin was getting ready to go onstage and the two of them were partying, laughing, joking, and having a blast. Marvin lifted his glass to take a drink and all of a sudden an earthquake hits. Earthquakes are not unfamiliar in California, so Marvin did what he instinctively knew to do during this type of emergency: He dove under the nearest desk and screamed to Rick, “Come on, man, get the fuck down here!”

  Rick starts laughing. “That ain’t no earthquake,” he says, “That’s just Chic.”

  “What’s chic?” Marvin says.

  “The band Chic. You know, your opening act. Chic, muthafucka. Chic. Damn, where you been?”

  Marvin regained his composure, put on his performance clothes, and waited to be summoned to the stage.

  Meanwhile, we’re in our dressing room drying off, trying to come down from the rush of performing. Those of us who did drugs started doing drugs. All of a sudden, there was a loud knock at the door, loud enough to compete with the noise of the still-cheering crowd. Cops. We quickly hid our illegal substances and opened the door. It was the sheriff’s officers and the stage manager. But instead of arresting us, they said something totally unexpected: “We need you to come back and do an encore. If you don’t, there’s going to be a lot of trouble.”

  How could there be any trouble? we thought. We’d fulfilled our contract. They didn’t see the drugs. We figured everything was cool. Then the cops explained why they were so insistent. “You have to do something or there’s going to be a riot, and I’m sure you don’t want people to get hurt.”

  We had no choice but to go back onstage. The minute we did, the earthquake started again. I remember looking out at the upper deck. You could see and feel the entire concrete structure swaying like a palm tree in a light wind. The entire crowd was performing the vocal chant from our song “Chic Cheer.” It basically just goes “Chic-Chic” endlessly, over the groove.

  But there was a problem: We were still a relatively new band at that point, without much of a back catalog. We only had a handful of songs and we’d played them all. That was that.

  We hadn’t gigged much as Chic, but were seasoned enough entertainers to know the golden rule of show business: It’s better to leave them wanting more than to leave them wishing you’d stop. Besides, we had way too much pride to repeat a song. Nor did it help that Luther—our main background vocalist—and the rest of the crew had already gotten onto the bus for the drive back to L.A. It was just Bernard, our two front singers, Luci and Alfa, our drummer Tony Thompson, and me.

  So here was the dilemma: We couldn’t play, and standing on the stage blowing kisses wouldn’t calm down the crowd.

  Bernard and I had a quick little plebiscite with our team and we found a solution: We asked a groundskeeper to bring out the golf cart that ferries the pitcher in from the bullpen during a baseball game. We proceeded to ride around the perimeter of the field, waving to the people like a bunch of popes and queens of England. We drove around until it got stale to us; truthfully, we felt a little foolish, so we returned underneath the stadium to our dressing rooms.

  We figured that was it. This still didn’t quell the crowd. The cops came back and asked us to please do it again. So we did, as stupid as the stunt felt. There are so many things in my life that I can’t explain. Marvin was an international superstar, a personal hero of mine, far more famous and important to pop culture than Chic will ever be, yet many people booed him. He didn’t do anything wrong, in fact he didn’t get a chance to. I don’t think that booing was about Marvin at all, it was about Chic being the flavor of the moment. (And don’t worry about Marvin—many more people cheered him on, as always. He was still Marvin Gaye.) We could only imagine what Marvin was feeling. (Ironically, a similar thing happened to us a few years later when a brand new hip-hop artist called Kurtis Blow opened for us.) We were the new kids with the hot new sound, and we took another awkward victory lap. People who saw that show still catch me off guard to this very day. When I least expect it, a stranger will come over to me, shake my hand, and say with a knowing expression, “I was in San Diego.” I feel like I’m part of some clandestine funk society whose underground members are waiting for the signal to rise up again.

  IN TWO SHORT YEARS, we’d forgotten how special it was to sell a million copies of a single song. It wasn’t because we were arrogant; we were just on a hit-making treadmill, with no time to savor the accomplishments. Within a few years, we’d learn just how important the gold and platinum records were, because for Chic they’d stop coming.

  (Illustration credit 7.4)

  There’s a line I like from the film Highlander: “There can be only one.” Truer words have never been spoken. Around the time we found ourselves too busy to pick up yet another platinum record (yawn) for our latest hit single “Good Times,” there was another song tracking neck and neck with us. It was a catchy ditty called “My Sharona,” by a new band called the Knack. “Sharona” ’s meteoric rise in the summer of ’79 happened to coincide with a circus-like novelty event called Disco Demolition Night, in which the participants lost control and almost destroyed the Chicago stadium where it took place. It all started as a prank by a DJ from a local radio station who’d been fired when they changed the format from rock to disco, and morphed into a movement called Disco Sucks.

  Now, I love silly gags and satirical entertainment and enjoy cheap thrills. I’m liberal, understand the right to protest, and am open-minded, with a pretty good sense of humor (I sound like I’m a beauty pageant contestant), but what happened during the Disco Sucks phase was astonishing to me.

  Bernard and I always believed that most pop music fits into the broad category called rock and roll. Rock and roll was ever changing, and this art form had different genres of classification for the benefit of consumers, like sections in a library or bookstore. Once any genre—folk, soul, rock, or even some jazz—reaches a certain position on the pop charts, it does what’s known in the music business as crossing over, and gets played on the Top Forty stations. That’s the reason so many of us own songs by artists from genres we normally wouldn’t—their hit songs crossed over into the pop Top Forty mainstream.

  When a genre repeatedly crosses over and comes to dominate the Top Forty, what had originated as an insurgency becomes the new ruling class. This was the path disco had taken—from the margins where it started, a weird combination of underground gay culture and funk and gospel-singing techniques and, in the case of Chic, jazz-inflected groovy soul. But it was basically all rock and roll, historically speaking, as far as we were concerned.

  But the media and the industry pitted us against the Knack—the disco kings in their buppie uniforms versus the scrappy white boys. But we never saw it that way. We thought we were all on the same team, even if our voices and songs followed different idioms.

  Boy, were we naïve.

  And boy, did things change.

  I would love to say things went downhill just because our records weren’t good enough, and I do think our later work wasn’t as commercial (or good) as our earlier work. But Bernard and I always fought our battles with our music itself. Since we were not stars, this wasn’t an easy battle to wage. The Disco Sucks campaign started gaining momentum, and the Knack (through no prompting of their own) were positioned as the saviors of rock and roll. Chic, on the other hand, were the enemy of it. It was like we were in some Gothic tale of elves,
dragons, warriors, and monarchs. One group would continue to befoul the throne under the dark rule of Disco (the music of blacks, gays, women, and Latinos), and the other would try to return it to its rightful rulers (the white guys).

  We didn’t realize this war was industry-wide until a party one night in 1979. Cashbox was a music-trade publication like Billboard, chock-full of sales figures, charts, and stats. Bernard and I were invited to the magazine’s annual soiree, though most attendees were businesspeople, not artists. The party was in a restaurant that had two rooms, one of which was used as a nightclub. This was the perfect place for a music industry shindig in ’79. After a sumptuous meal, we’d all dance and party well into the night. Our industry was very healthy at that time. The music scene in general was robust, but it was especially great for an artist who specialized in dance music.

  Donna Summer, Anita Ward, Samantha Sang, and Andy Gibb singles routinely outsold the legendary rock giants of the pop industry. It was a magical time. There was one Cinderella story after the next; check out any reference guide that gives you record sales statistics. Little-known groups like Taste of Honey and Chic could compete head-to-head with the big acts. In fact, at that time the biggest-selling records of artists like the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart were dance records. Dance music was inclusive music, because it was more about the music itself than rock’s often-bloated cults of personality, and this naturally resulted in a larger sales base. Example: A person who normally wouldn’t buy a big Bee Gees record like “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” would buy “Night Fever” in a heartbeat. The latter song was even played in underground clubs. The music reached across all social, racial, and political boundaries.

  By now, just around thirty months after the release of our first single, Nard and I had collected seven singles that were certified gold (one million units), six that were platinum (two million units), three that were double platinum, and one that was triple platinum. Those are only domestic numbers; typically in our business you’d double that to get a good indication of your worldwide sales.

  The magazine’s party was in full swing. Everybody was packed into the restaurant side of the establishment, and no one was in the nightclub room. This was our first Cashbox party, and Bernard and I thought folks wanted to stay in the restaurant and talk about business. After about an hour or so, the restaurant had become unbearably overcrowded and ridiculously hot. We couldn’t figure out why nobody was going to the nightclub, which seemed to be the logical thing to do.

  “Maybe they’re not going in because they’re nervous?” Bernard ventured.

  “What?” I said.

  “You know, like kids at a party waiting for someone to get the courage to be the first to ask a girl to dance.”

  I responded, “OK, let’s be first.” We thought if we led the way everybody would follow. No one did! And when I say no one, I mean not one single person.

  Nard looked at me and said, “Damn, man, does my breath stink? I know yours does, but I thought my mouthwash was cool.”

  After hanging by ourselves for about twenty minutes, we knew something stronger than our breath was keeping people out of the spacious, air-conditioned room. Maybe we didn’t understand industry protocol, being relative newcomers. So we drifted back to the stifling restaurant to join our friends. We looked back at the nightclub and noticed a small neon sign above the room’s entrance. This simple little sign explained why the hip, nonconformist rock-and-roll rebels were terrified to go into the room.

  The sign only had five letters: D I S C O.

  The Disco Sucks movement and its backlash were so toxic, people in the industry—people who were eating off of the record sales coming from dance music—were all afraid to be associated with anything disco, even the word on a small sign above a door. Something about that really enraged me. Until then I believed I was part of a wonderfully elite group who marched to their own beat. I had worked hard to get there. We were free. We all did what we wanted, said what we meant. We were the music business. Music people gave voices to the voiceless.

  Chic never considered itself a disco band. Not because “disco” was a bad word or beneath us, but because it was slightly disingenuous. The accurate etiology of Chic is rooted in bands that more closely share our musical DNA: the Fatback Band (“Backstrokin’ ”), Brass Construction (“Movin’ ”), BT Express (“Express”), the Joneses (“Love Inflation [Part 2]”), Crown Heights Affair (“Dreaming a Dream”), Kool and the Gang (“Hollywood Swinging,” which was the inspiration for “Good Times”), Hamilton Bohannon (“Foot Stompin’ Music”), and so many other jazz-funk and R&B instrumentalist acts that wrote hit records. (One day I’ll write the definitive playlist that influenced Chic, a treasure trove of the funkiest grooves on earth.)

  Bernard and I defiantly stood in the DISCO room all by ourselves. “Look at the brave rebels,” I said to Bernard. I was very disappointed.

  I know there is bad music in every genre, but to classify all of it as, well, sucking is absurd. Many of the people at that party didn’t care much for classical or Celtic, but they’d never say it sucked across the board. All artists at the top of their art form’s food chain are specialists. I’m not a roots music aficionado, but the sheer virtuosity of the cream-of-the-crop bluegrass artists should be obvious and jaw-dropping to anybody.

  The anger I felt at the party wasn’t because I knew this situation would have an effect on me (I thought the “My Sharona” thing was a singular event) or my career, but because of what this situation looked like to me. What I saw was classic hypocrisy: people who’d been making a fortune off of this music willingly throwing it under the bus, rather than standing up for it when it became uncomfortable or politically inconvenient. To put it another way, they milked it when it was up and kicked it when it was down.

  Chic soon lost its footing and we broke one of our promises to each other: Never use our music for direct protest. We couldn’t do that very well, because it wasn’t what Chic stood for. The statement about the “brave rebels” was the inspiration for “Rebels Are We,” the first single from our Real People album. At the time, we said we were parodying a satirical Woody Allen song of the same name, but that was only partially true. We were angry.

  It didn’t matter. Our band was over commercially. We’d no longer be seen as the funky groundbreaking group with clever lyrics and audio-processing magic, thanks to the mega engineers we worked with: We were now a disco band, a band that, like disco, sucked.

  I’M NOT COMPLAINING, I’m just sayin’. We always knew that once we’d made it in show biz, our downfall, like that of most groups, was preordained. It was just a matter of when. We tried but we never had another hit with Chic. What we didn’t know at the time was that the owners of the Chic Organization Ltd. would go on to make even more hits than we’d had in the early years. Only now we’d be making them for mainly rock acts. And the songs, strangely, were no longer called disco. They were new wave, dance, new romantic, and modern or even traditional rock. I’d learn that altering names to revalue a product hadn’t changed much since my grandfather changed his name to Goodman.

  * Her young son, Brett, grew up to be a popular film director. Brett is like my brother, friend, and son. Our identities were both formed in the color-blind world of art—and he’s as comfortable with Mike Tyson and the Wu-Tang Chan as I was with the B-52’s or Duran Duran.

  * My ex-girlfriend Patty translated one of them (“Est-ce Que c’est Chic?”) into French for extra sophistication.

  (Illustration credit 7.5)

  eight

  The Second Wind

  ONE SUMMER DAY IN 1979, AROUND THE TIME THE DISCO SUCKS movement put a bullet into Chic’s career just a couple of fast and furious years after it had exploded, I took a long walk along the famous Santa Monica Pier. We had a gig that evening at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—a very special gig, as it would turn out—and I had about an hour to kill before sound check.

  It was early afternoon when I arrived at th
e pier, which was as familiar to me as the South Bronx. Back when L.A. was my hometown, the pier, which jutted up from the beach like the trestle in the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, used to be called Pacific Ocean Park (POP), and I’d come here a lot, my young and often addled mind filled with glue fumes and images of the surfer/beach-party films that were shot there. That afternoon Santa Monica felt about ten degrees cooler than Beverly Hills, where I was staying.

  When I was a kid, I used to obsess about the final episode of a TV series called The Fugitive, which was also filmed there. This was the very spot where the hero, Dr. Richard Kimble, fought a life-and-death struggle with the one-armed murderer on a ride called the Mahi Mahi, high above the pier. I’d gotten so into it that as a kid I used to ride the Mahi all the time. When it reached top speed, you’d be at a ninety-degree angle over the pier, looking straight down about a hundred feet above the ocean, a great view and a perfect symbol for my life back then, when drugs and sex were like flying and suicide all at once.

  Now, at twenty-seven years old, I was on a very different kind of ride. Bernard and I had won the lottery. We were living the musician’s dream—pretty much everyone in the country had heard our music, most of them had loved it, and we’d gotten rich from it. I could stop working that day and live forever on what I’d already earned if I chose to. It had all happened at warp speed, a real-life roller coaster. But now it seemed like everything we’d worked so hard to achieve was fading away.