by Nile Rodgers
THE CITY’S UNDERGROUND CLUB scene seemed to feel a collective responsibility to blow the seventies away. I was with it. I’ve always been the weird-looking guy in the room, and every decade had an alternative movement that fit me like a glove. I was now planting my freak flag in the eighties art scene, and the Continental was one of the artiest spots of them all. The décor was composed of odds and ends that looked like they were plucked from thrift shops and the Broadway sets of Pal Joey or West Side Story, but its random-generated eclecticism felt paradoxically futuristic. It was the era of post-punk “Club Kids”—goth music and multicolored hair were all the rage. This colorful menagerie, somewhere between Théâtre de l’Absurde and Dadaism, was the new normal in the early eighties New York demimonde, which would introduce styles in fashion, art, and, for lack of a better word, lifestyle, that the mainstream would eventually rip off and domesticate.
ANYWAY, AFTER BILLY AND I walked in and my pupils adjusted to the club’s dim light, I noticed something strange enough to catch my eye, even in this den of weirdness: David Bowie was sitting at the back bar, all by himself, soaking up the bizarre scene. Bowie, who’d spent the last decade dressing as an androgynous alien, a harlequin, and an albino “duke,” seemed almost mundane in this environment. Even for someone as cool as David Bowie, it was probably a strange brew.
After saying hello to some friends, Billy finally noticed David. I’d been clocking the rock legend all along but pretended to be cool about it. Meanwhile, Billy, never what you might call a wallflower, shouted, “Fuckin’ ’ell, that’s David Booooowiiiieeeee!” and started heading in David’s direction, his progress only slightly slowed by a violent spasm of vomiting. Billy wiped his mouth on his sleeve and marched on.
In the dim light, Bowie’s hair looked darker than in any picture I’d seen of him. He was quietly sipping orange juice. Compared to the rest of us, he looked laid-back and only mildly interested. I could tell his artist’s brain was taking it all in and filing away anything that was worthy of occupying space in his vastly rich conceptual vault.
I studied him for a while. He looked to be in good shape for a dude his age and seemed proud of it (I’d later find out he was taking boxing lessons). I wasn’t intimidated by his legend and it wasn’t his celebrity that drew me—at that point I’d worked with Diana Ross, clubbed with Andy Warhol, and sold millions of my own records with Chic. But to me, Bowie was on the same level as Miles and Coltrane, James Brown and Prince, Paul Simon and Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone. In other words, he was a genuine creative artist, doing what I called “that real shit.”
I walked up to the bartender, Scotty Taylor, and asked him to introduce me to Bowie. He silently mouthed back, I don’t know him. This was odd because Scotty had been a popular bartender since the early days of Studio 54, and he knew everybody. I was on my own. I walked over to Bowie and sat on the stool next to him and just started talking. Before I knew it, we’d spiraled into a passionate conversation about music. Just then Billy arrived, none the worse for wear for his eventful journey across the club. I can’t recall if he shook Bowie’s hand with the one he wiped his mouth with, but it didn’t matter; everything was cool. I guess it’s a British thing: Drunken barfing is all in a night’s hang. At any rate Billy couldn’t get in a word edgewise because David and I had already locked into such a heavy conversation.
“Damn,” I said, “I had no idea you were so seriously into jazz.” Bowie had just recited a veritable who’s who of cats that he was into, including Lester Bowie (no relation), the trumpeter from the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
“Nile, I grew up in England, where we have BBC Radio,” he said. “They played everything that was popular—soul, blues, jazz, R&B, and rock. We don’t separate the music on the radio by race or genres.” We wound up talking all night about all sorts of music. I don’t remember anyone ever bothering us; we were like old friends sitting on a couch in someone’s living room. The wide-ranging, reference-heavy, autodidactic rap made me feel like I was back in the mix of the beatniks, hippies, and jazzers of my youth. At some point I must have given him my phone number, but I don’t remember doing so.
SOMETIME IN THE LATE SEVENTIES, I bought a house in Westport, Connecticut, and I was renovating it at the time. One day I went up to check on its progress and Al, the general contractor, told me, “Hey, Nile, some guy pretending to be David Bowie called up. I knew it was a prank, so I hung up. He kept calling back, so I kept hanging up.” I laughed and didn’t take this seriously at all. Then, out of the clear blue, I got a call from Bernard Edwards. Nard and I were a little on the skids at the time. Chic’s sales were dwindling with every release and I was working on my solo album, Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove. Nard and I knew that my going solo meant the beginning of the end of Chic, and the phone conversation between us had a very uncomfortable tone.
“Yo, man,” he said, speaking very quickly, “David Bowie called my house and after he talked to me for a while I realized he must have thought I was you. So I gave him your telephone number up at the crib in Westport, and I figured that the shit was probably cool.”
I just said, “Yeah, it’s cool.” Then we hung up.
Our relationship was clearly changing. Nard, who was always the stronger one, seemed to be more affected by the industry’s snubbing. The person who’d always been the bandleader was becoming more and more unreliable. His drug habit made him a hermit. In retrospect, I think he was afraid of failing, so he did everything not to finish our records. I felt like he didn’t believe in me anymore, so I set out to prove that I was better than ever and worked at a pace that he simply couldn’t match. Of course, I had an unfair advantage—most of our song ideas started with me (and the best ones ended with him), I was an insomniac, a bachelor with no kids, and thrived on anxiety.
I reflected on the abrupt phone call and the distance growing between us, took two heaping hits of blow, and then shouted from my balcony down to the construction crew:
“The next time that dude calls saying he’s David Bowie, give me the phone.”
Eventually, Bowie called again.
DAVID AND I AGREED to meet at the ritzy Bemelmen’s Bar at the Carlyle Hotel. When I mentioned I was meeting Bowie, my then girlfriend and her friends insisted on planting themselves in the bar just to get a glimpse of him.
To be honest, I was a little excited, too.
This meeting was the flip side of our first. We weren’t in the dark and throbbing Continental at 5:30 a.m., but at the elegant Carlyle in the middle of the afternoon. The sudden shift in context must have thrown us, because we each walked in and sat silently, a few barstools apart, for at least twenty minutes. I’d gotten there a couple of minutes after our scheduled rendezvous time, and I truly didn’t recognize the thin white man at the bar with his head down.
Eventually I walked out to the lobby pay phone and called David’s office.
“What time is he getting here?”
“He’s been there for at least half an hour.”
At which point I went over to the only sort of Bowie-looking guy in the place and introduced myself. We shared a good laugh at the absurdity, but our missed connection only made me like Bowie even more. It wouldn’t have been racist or odd for Bowie to assume the only black man in the exclusive Carlyle bar that afternoon was Nile Rodgers. After all, we had scheduled a meeting. But David must have thought there was just another young black man at the Carlyle, since in my designer day clothes I didn’t look like the Nile Rodgers he’d met at an after-hours bar.
I CALL BOWIE THE PICASSO OF ROCK and roll (much to his embarrassment and discomfort) because of his prodigious creativity, but also because he looks sort of like Picasso drew him. Famously, one of his eyes is blue and the other gray-green. He’s extremely handsome, of course, but his features are slightly unbalanced and draw you to him, with a touch of vulnerability or danger in his otherwise aristocratic mien. He changed me, helped me, and supported me almost as much as Bernard did, but more
dramatically: With Bowie my metamorphosis was accelerated and compressed, and came about, improbably, at a moment when the music industry considered me unworthy of working with an iconic figure in the business.
This time around, unlike my run with Diana Ross, my partnership with musical royalty would be even more blasphemous: The sovereign was a white rocker.
ONCE WE CLEARED THE AIR at the Carlyle and exchanged some small talk, Bowie made his proposition. “I’m wondering what it would be like to do a record together,” he said.
Bingo. I’d been thinking the same thing. At the time, I was deep into my own experimental new record and assumed our musical ambitions were perfectly aligned. The concept of my new album had taken me a little out of my comfort zone—and for the first time, I didn’t have a partner to work through it with me. I leaned into Bowie, feeling like I’d found a kindred artistic spirit. “Yeah. I’m trying to develop new ideas like I did when I started, and I have a young engineer and we’re working on altering music in new ways, creating new sounds,” I said.
Bowie responded that he’d always felt the freedom to be flexible and do music the way he wanted. He was never afraid to change, and never wanted to limit himself to a certain audience, class, or sound. David’s position felt artistic without a hint of egotism. It almost sounded as if he had no choice. He was compelled to find what was beyond the horizon. His words were literally music to my ears—just what I needed to hear to carry on my experimental solo project with gusto.
Which is not to say that I didn’t already have a healthy sense of the importance of my solo work. By the time I’d met David, I hadn’t had a hit since Diana Ross, way back in 1980, but I was feeling self-assured. Bowie’s bravery seemed to come from being clearheaded and sober, but it was drugs and booze that gave me the confidence to take chances again after five flops in a row. I believed my mission was to get everybody to see music my way. “A kite flies highest against the wind,” I had read when I was younger, and time had proven it out. Almost all my commercial success had been a struggle. I’d always managed to find the guts to embark on the things I was most afraid to tackle. Whenever I had to screw up the courage to do something risky—but right—I repeated to myself a famous movie line:
“Courage is being scared to death—but saddling up anyway.”
—JOHN WAYNE
So while I knew instinctively that I had to keep following my own vision, David’s independent spirit was infectious and helped me refocus.
Unlike Diana Ross, David Bowie didn’t have a record company to answer to, because, believe it or not, he didn’t have a record deal at the time. And I didn’t have Chic. While we were in the middle of working on our seventh studio record, our record company decided not to renew our contract. So Bowie and I were in the same boat, both a bit lost at sea. We’d have to figure it out together—but without a record company breathing down our necks, everything could be done on our terms. I’d always loved collaborating. And because I hadn’t learned how to edit consistently yet—to keep the good and toss the bad—the Bowie project came at the perfect time in my artistic development.
I was in heaven. A new liberator had entered my life. Just as Diana’s pedigree allowed Chic to compose pop music on another level, Bowie’s history, innovation, artistic brilliance, and white-English-rocker status bestowed upon me a freedom that was almost unimaginable. For a while I started to think like him, compelled and committed to change and transform.
IN THE MINDS OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, Chic’s technical facility was below that of rock artists, or at least that’s the way it felt to me. Maybe it’s because we weren’t flashy or because we played so effortlessly. Or maybe it was just because we were considered disco, which most people experienced in a club, played by a DJ, not by a live band swinging their instruments around. But where did they think those records came from? The whole thing was full of irony. Many of rock’s biggest superstars can’t even play the basic chord changes on our very first record, “Everybody Dance,” because they don’t understand the fundamentals of harmony and chord theory, let alone the countless jazz inversions on our later compositions. Still, we were deemed musically inferior to most three-chord rock musicians by music critics. But not by Bowie.
He respected what I did and, more important, what I thought. David decided to fund our project himself. A few days later, he came over to my apartment at 44 West Sixty-second Street, a building called Lincoln Plaza Towers, and we started formal preproduction, which typically involved conceiving, writing, and arranging the material. At the time, Bowie wasn’t especially theatrical looking, a far cry from the redheaded, heavily made-up bloke who appeared on the cover of Scary Monsters.* His day-to-day appearance was natty but unassuming, which helped me get used to dealing with him as a friend and partner, not a rock icon. After a few meetings, this new guy in the nice suits was just … David. His seemingly casual appearance was actually the flowering of his next drag: He was delving into the eighties metrosexual world of high fashion, a precursor to what’s called “Executive Realness” in vogueing competitions, where men sashay down the runway in a stylized version of the archetypal businessman’s suit.
There was one thing I noticed about David’s appearance that was a little freaky: a tattoo on his lower leg. When I asked him what it meant, he said, “It’s the Serenity Prayer in Japanese.”
I said, “What’s the Serenity Prayer?”
“It’s how I remember to stay sober.”
I thought to myself, Wow, he has to be seriously committed to that concept to have it inked on his body for the rest of his life. So out of respect for David’s sobriety, I changed my behavior around him—as best I could.
DURING ONE OF MY MANY MEETINGS with David at my apartment, the test pressing arrived for my just-finished solo record. We listened to the entire record together. “Nile,” he said afterwards, “if you make a record for me half as good as that, I’ll be very happy.”
I was flattered but a little bewildered. I knew it was a flop right away. I’d been so afraid of being labeled a disco musician that I was too tentative about the album’s direction. And the songs weren’t hooky enough. Over all, I wasn’t clear philosophically or sure what I was trying to say. But during the recording, the cocaine reassured me the record was cool. The problem was, I’d started to believe the coke.
In a Bill Cosby skit, he asks a cocaine user at a party, “Hey, man, why do you do that stuff?” And the user answers, “Because it intensifies my personality.” Cosby retorts, “Yeah, but what if you’re an asshole?”
Now that I had the record in hand, I had begun to suspect that I was becoming an asshole. I was trying to make an innovative and commercial solo record, but I knew I hadn’t gotten it right. It would be my sixth consecutive flop in a row. Black radio was the only available outlet to me as a solo artist—I was definitely not getting spins on rock or pop-oriented stations—and the format was not supportive of my experimentation. To make matters worse, the new trend at black radio was rap, which was youthful and street oriented, the exact opposite of old-school, couture-designer culture. I knew my record was over before it started. My only consolation was that David dug it. We continually riffed on the state of the music industry and the world in general. At the end of all this musing, we believed that if we did a record together that was artistic, primal, and made us feel good, that’d be a job well done.
Then David really threw me a curveball.
“Nile, darling,” he said, using a typical British expression, “I’d like you to do what you do best.” His voice had a lyrical power that could mobilize me like Churchill. After his initial praise of my solo record, I thought he was talking about the two of us expanding my new experimental approach to composition. I was beaming with expectant pride—until he finished the sentence: “I want you to make hits. ”
“You want me to make hits?” I was a little taken aback.
“Yes, hits. I want you to make hits. That’s what you do best. You make hits.”
&nb
sp; “How do you know that’s what I do best?” I said, slightly irritated.
“Because you do. It’s a fact. I can even hear it in this record, and that’s what I’d like you to do.”
“Really?” I hid my disappointment. “Okay. Cool. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.”
I WAS A PROFESSIONAL who hadn’t had a hit in six attempts, and who dearly wanted a shot at producing Bowie. Still, I felt a little hurt, like after all of our conversations about music and freedom I was being ordered back to the hit-making plantation. David was the last person on earth I thought I’d be making hits with. To be honest, I assumed David’s cachet would change the industry’s concept of me from disco artist and producer to just artist and producer, a big difference. I was sure this conversion would give me the freedom to write what I wanted without worrying about getting radio play on the handful of urban stations.
Plus, what was it that he liked about the solo record, which was anything but a hit? Maybe he could hear something I couldn’t? Maybe he was ignoring the fact that it was a black man’s record, and to him, trained by the BBC’s eclectic format, it was just music, and by that standard, it was actually successful “hit” music? These thoughts rambled through my mind and lingered for a moment, and then reality kicked back in.
I’ve always believed that a producer’s job is a service job. I don’t get paid to give you what I want; I get paid to give you what you want. Even if I have to show you what you want, because you don’t always know that you want it. David’s directive was clear and he was not interested in doing Scary Monsters 2 (no offense to Tony Visconti). He wanted to make hits. The professional producer in me was like the Terminator. I would not stop until my mission was completed.