by Nile Rodgers
ONE NIGHT IN THE FALL of ’79 while out partying, I made a pit stop at a club called the Gilded Grape, the pinnacle of trendy sleaze, and took in the crowd: transvestites and transsexuals, lesbians and gays, bis and heteros. The place’s main attractions were its underground vibe, music, and Hell’s Kitchen location (the neighborhood’s nickname comes from Davy Crockett, who said the people who toiled in the area were “too mean to swab hell’s kitchen”). Even the toughest New Yorkers would’ve felt slightly nervous in this part of town, at this spot, at this hour. For me it was a sanctuary, the wonderful underbelly to snobby spots like the 21 Club, just a few blocks away.
On a trip to the bathroom, I noticed a number of Diana Ross impersonators lined up on either side of me, peeing. I felt like I was in an unscripted La Cage aux Folles number. Suddenly it dawned on me that Diana was an iconic figure in the gay community.
“What would it be like,” I wondered, “if Diana celebrated her status among gay men in a song?” I shared the anecdote with Bernard, who agreed that it would be a cool idea to have Diana talk to her gay fans in slightly coded language.
“I’m Coming Out” was the smash result. We originally envisioned the song as the opening to Diana’s live show for the new album. The horns in the song’s intro were a soul fanfare for the pop diva. To this day Diana opens with it. The last time I saw her in concert, I’m sure I had a Cheshire Cat–like grin spread across my face through the entire song. For me, the best feeling in the world is seeing an idea or fantasy become a reality. Since I don’t have children, my songs are my children—real creations that I nurture and cherish like a parent.
Diana was a deeply personal project for me, and the songs I wrote for that album were more important than any of the ones that had preceded them. By the summer of ’79, I was freed by the knowledge that I’d never have to work again. The royalties from “We Are Family,” “Le Freak,” and “Good Times” alone confirmed that. I was doing this record because I wanted to do it. I wanted to get it right—to push the envelope. Diana’s clout gave us the opportunity to compose bolder songs.
The first single, “Upside Down,” was different from anything we’d written before. Its structure was angular and its groove’s chords were staccato, this time without a smooth keyboard pad underneath, unlike our past hits. We started the song with the hook, like almost all Chic songs do, but cut to the verse with a modulating chromatic progression. It was a complex but interesting way of performing this unorthodox but simple key change.
We included excessively polysyllabic words like “instinctively” and “respectfully” in the lyrics, because we wanted to utilize Diana’s sophistication to achieve a higher level of musicality. Along with the complicated verse, we deliberately made the chorus rhythmically more difficult to sing than the catchier, one-listen song hooks for Chic. We weren’t working with talented session singers this time, we were working with a star. We wanted to give her more ambitious, intricate material to work with and interpret, to fill with her own intelligence and skill. Despite the departure from our tested style, we knew “Upside Down” was a monster hit.
Unfortunately, not everyone agreed.
Nard and I considered ourselves seasoned rejection vets. The powers that be had frequently reacted negatively to our music. When we played “Le Freak,” Atlantic Records’s first reaction was, “Do you have anything better on the album?” “Le Freak” went on to become their only triple-platinum single. But that was then. This was a whole new ball game. We were more seasoned now. We were in the zone, and we’d written our finest work for maybe the greatest pop star of her generation. We never expected to run into problems.
It all started with a guy named Frankie Crocker (“the Chief Rocker”), an influential New York DJ at the urban-music-formatted radio station WBLS. Back then WBLS was the number one station in America, and Frankie was the number one DJ at the station. Diana was eager to give Frankie a first listen, so they decided to meet over dinner. Excited, we made a tight rough mix for her, happily waved goodbye, and said, “Have a nice time and give Frankie our best.” I remember watching a mink-clad Diana almost float out the studio door.
About three hours later, when she returned to the studio, her mood had dramatically changed. She seemed to have fallen into some sort of emotional abyss. I mean she was extremely low, I’m talking Marianas Trench low. “What happened?” we asked.
“Frankie said this song is going to ruin my career,” she told us. “He was very serious and very worried about what you’re doing with me.” She paused for a moment and then added, “Why are you guys trying to ruin my career?”
“What are you talking about?” Bernard said.
“Frankie talked about a lot of other records and told me that they had the hot new sound.”
We were shocked. Shocked and stunned.
“Frankie’s our friend, Diana,” I said. “He likes our music. He’d never say that about us. He knows we’re not trying to ruin your career, ’cause we’d also be ruining ours!”
I like to believe Frankie’s concerns were genuine. And I guess I understand, at least in theory, where he was coming from. “Upside Down” was unlike any song we’d ever written at the time, and it was unlike any song Diana Ross had ever recorded. But we were sure we hadn’t lost our compositional magic; in fact, it was getting better. We absolutely knew the record was a tour de force. But no matter how much we tried, we could never fully console or convince Diana.
And to make matters worse, Motown reacted the same way as Frankie Crocker. We expected them to get it, but they just reinforced the negativity. We were about to get torpedoed. On some level, we always understood when white-owned labels didn’t understand us, but we weren’t prepared for what Motown was about to do to us.
“ ‘Upside Down’ is not a Diana Ross record,” said Berry Gordy, “and neither is the rest of the album.” And that scorched-earth response appeared to be unanimous at the label. I had no idea what kind of heat Suzanne must have been getting. After all, it was her project. I have to believe that she was continuously raked over the coals by Berry, and probably Diana as well. We actually knew that Suzanne liked the record, but now we couldn’t even get her feedback because we suddenly had no further contact with her (after our attorney contacted the Motown brass in response to Motown’s sudden change of heart).
We were devastated. This was the most important project since our debut, and everybody hated it—everybody except us. Motown stopped communicating with us altogether. We didn’t merit so much as a single reassuring word. Not even from Diana. Then Motown demanded all the tapes back from the session and we finally got it:
We’d been fired.
EONS SEEMED TO PASS. Then one day a test pressing of Motown’s “mix” of our record arrived, which was a completely different aural experience than what we’d intended. It didn’t have the same punchy big bottom end and used different edits and vocal composites. We hated it and were furious about what had happened to our masterwork. Between the interviews with Diana and all the meetings, planning, and rewriting, we’d worked harder than we’d ever worked on any record. We simply couldn’t fathom how a black label could treat us so disrespectfully. Besides, Diana Ross was our queen, and like loyal subjects, we’d given her our very souls. We tried to rationalize her and Motown’s response, and decided that everybody was just afraid to be associated with anything that was even slightly associated with disco. We were certain it wasn’t the music.
We played the Motown mixes for everybody at the Power Station recording studio. They loved them. We played it for Gene Simmons from KISS, who was recording next door, and he told us it was great. We respected Gene, but he was dating Diana Ross at the time, so what else would he say? Chic’s original engineer, Bob Clearmountain, told us, “Guys, they can’t mess this record up. It’s impossible. The songs are so good it doesn’t matter what they do to them.” We still didn’t agree. When we listened to Motown’s version, all we could hear was what could have been. This hijack
ing of our work was a travesty. So we held our ground.
Ultimately, Motown decided to put out the record they hated.
ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1980, “Upside Down” hit the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts and stayed there for four weeks, about a year after the Disco Sucks movement. Diana went six times platinum in America alone and remains her biggest-selling album of all time.
Ironically, the song that followed “Upside Down” into the No. 1 slot was Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” which sounded remarkably similar to Chic’s “Good Times,” which had gone No. 1 a year earlier at the height of the disco backlash. “Good Times” would also go on to inspire INXS’s “New Sensation,” the Clash’s “Radio Clash,” Vaughan Mason’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll,” and Blondie’s “Rapture,” among many others. The song’s greatest accomplishment may be its role as the bedrock for hip-hop’s first mega-smash, “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang. Obviously, disco didn’t die, it just grew up and changed its name and address.
DIANA’S SUCCESS REDEEMED BERNARD and me as artists, but Chic continued to spiral downward. We were still stigmatized as an artifact of a now defunct movement. At the same time, paradoxically, we were the serendipitous vanguard of the next cultural phenomenon, hip-hop, through the “Good Times” sample on “Rapper’s Delight.” This was new and unprecedented territory—after all, there is no “Rapper’s Delight” without “Good Times”—and we had to fight a copyright infringement lawsuit to defend our “borrowed” contribution to someone else’s hit. You might be able to “sample” a piece of candy, but we weren’t ready to let someone else get all the cash from dining off of something we’d built from scratch.
(Illustration credit 8.1)
The mogul at the end of the Sugarhill Records trail was Morris Levy. Levy was about as powerful as they come in the music business. His vast entertainment empire included nightclubs, record labels, artist management, and the biggest cash cow, music publishing. It was our publishing interest in the song “Rapper’s Delight” that we were protecting when we sued to regain our stolen property.
When we went to the CEO of Atlantic to back us in the suit for reclamation of their asset, they declined. They were not willing to take on the man who had sued John Lennon and won. So we had to go it alone against this industry titan. But as luck would have it, our attorney, Marty Itzler, was one of Morris’s ex-attorneys and knew Levy very well. Though we’ve never discussed this aspect of it, I’m sure Marty hoped that in the end there’d be enough money to go around and that we’d all be able to do business once cooler heads prevailed.
(Illustration credit 8.5)
We fired the opening salvo and contacted Sugarhill Records, threatening a lawsuit. Lawsuits are part of almost every successful business, so we continued doing what we normally did, which was make records.
The expected legal formalities followed. But that’s when things really got interesting. What happened next is so strange I still don’t know who was really behind it.
IT WAS A HOT AUTUMN AFTERNOON and we were in the middle of a session at the Power Station, our home base for years, when the owner burst in and yelled, “I have to get my people out of here!” He instantly stopped the session and forced his employees to leave the room. Before we could say “What the fuck,” three large well-dressed black men entered the now empty studio, led by a guy who’d years ago unsuccessfully tried to sign Chic to a major label.
The situation was strange, but since we thought of this dude as a friend, we had no reason to be nervous. The mood changed when the fellow we knew introduced the three large dapper strangers to us as our friends. At some point I realized that the biggest of the four dudes was clearly packing. His tailored jacket was opened to reveal glimpses of his gat. This didn’t exactly square with what he was saying, which had something to do with the idea that he was “there to look out for us.” Apparently, our “friend” had heard that we were threatening to sue Sugarhill Records. What followed was a lengthy and puzzling diatribe about how things were going to play out if we continued pursuing legal recourse. “Even if you win, you’ll lose,” he concluded. “Seriously, brothers, we’re here to help you.” And with that, our new “friends” exited the room as quickly and mysteriously as they’d entered.
We were completely baffled. They were so well spoken, dressed, and mannered, it wasn’t clear if they were actors playing gangsters or genuinely concerned citizens who just happened to be carrying concealed handguns. We called our attorney right away and told him about what had just gone down. He gave us a new and worrisome laundry list to keep track of, from hang-up calls to mysterious phone threats. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said to Bernard.
What followed was one of the most sober band meetings ever. Someone was trying to intimidate us, and we simply couldn’t give in. We decided we had no choice but to go through with the suit. So Marty put in a call to the powers that be and said his clients were not backing down. Could we have? Sure. But all we knew was that it had taken a lifetime of experience to come up with “Good Times.”
If someone could take what it had taken our entire lives to create, then what value did any of it have, anyway? If we didn’t fight for our art, then why should we expect Atlantic to? Forget about the fact that it was legally recorded property we were protecting in the first place.
In the end I’ll never know exactly how much backroom wrangling took place, but at the end of the day we got equal billing on the copyright—and a lot of money.
A few months later, after the matter was settled, we got a call for one last deal point: We had to buy Morris two round-trip tickets to Paris on the Concorde and a pair of his-and-hers Rolex watches. When Marty asked, “Why?” Morris responded with a classic so ridiculous, it was funny even to us. “Come on, Marty,” he said. “I gotta fuck ya!”
Talk about an offer we couldn’t refuse.
In the final analysis, “Rapper’s Delight” turned out fine for us. Ironically, though, given the song’s historic influence on music, musicians, and the world at large, Chic never really got the credit it deserved. Hip-hop was rapidly becoming the new black. Despite the major role our song had played in the movement, we still made “live” music, which marked us as creatures from a different generation. The writing was on the wall. Despite our massive string of hits, barring some supernatural act, we’d soon become irrelevant.
I WAS TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, ancient in the music business in the early eighties, especially for a black male.
Black male musicians can sell as many records and perform with the top white male acts when they’re young, but a black equivalent to Elton, Sting, Bruce, James Taylor, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, David Bowie, the Eagles, the Stones, Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon, etc., doesn’t exist. Prince is probably the only one who’s close. Even a true American legend, Stevie Wonder, doesn’t have the earning potential of anyone on that list. My options were limited by the nature of the business.
Atlantic Records let us record every album left on our contract. On some level Jerry Greenberg knew we still had it, and that we’d figure out how to be successful in the anti-disco aftermath. It was just a matter of time. He let me do a solo album called Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove, and gave us a movie soundtrack, Soup for One. Both were commercial flops by Chic standards, but Jerry hung in there through these experiments. I was searching for something, but whatever it was, it was eluding me.
As I say to vocalists who are singing a little flat, sharp, or out-of-the-pocket, “We’re in the neighborhood, but we haven’t found the house yet.”
David Bowie helped me find the house.
(Illustration credit 8.7)
nine
Let’s Dance … Again
ON A TEMPERATE EARLY AUTUMN NIGHT IN 1982, I WATCHED THE closing credits of Saturday Night Live from the mirrored platform bed of my West Side apartment. SNL wraps at 1 a.m. In those days, that was when my evenings were just getting started. A
ll I needed to get the show on the road was a bump and a few mouthfuls of vodka.
By ’82 I was a full-blown daily drug user, something I’d vowed never to be, given the devastation it had wreaked upon my parents’ lives. The drugs were one thing. But I was actually more surprised that I’d morphed into a daily drinker. I was disappointed with myself. Since I was so aware of my habits, I thought I could exercise control over them by setting some ground rules. Chief among them was, Never drink too much brown liquor, because that’s what alcoholics do. I might have had a taste for the clear stuff, but as a matter of hippie pride, I figured I would never be an alcoholic as long as I kept away from whiskey, the preferred drink of dead-end rednecks and Connecticut gentry in denial.
I headed down the garage ramp to choose from one of four cars I used for club hopping. That night felt right for my 1977 blue Maserati Bora. I slid into the cockpit of its cream-colored interior, the most luxurious to ever grace a derrière, and the perfect ride in this new decade of opulence and extravagance. Wherever I pulled up, the Maserati tended to create something of a minor spectacle, which was the point.
In the early eighties, much like today, most Manhattanites didn’t drive, let alone own a car. Little more than a decade earlier, I’d ridden the subways and marched half the length of our fourteen-mile island daily doing community work. But now I rarely walked anywhere. I had a stable of cars and drove everywhere. As a result I’d often find myself chauffeuring a strange variety of stars from club to club. For instance, on this night (technically the early morning), my guest of honor was Billy Idol, who in ’82 was at the peak of his celebrity from his smash “White Wedding.” He and I used to hit clubs pretty regularly together. To be honest, I can’t remember if Billy was actually riding with me or if he just arrived as I pulled up to the Continental. Either way, we walked in together.