Le Freak

by Nile Rodgers

  David’s edict forced me to be both Nile and Bernard, complicated and artful enough to satisfy myself (and the former music teachers in my head) but able to throttle back just enough to connect to the masses. This was our tried and tested DHM hit-making formula. All I had to do was exactly what we’d done before. David had chosen the right tool for the right job.

  OUR MUSICAL RELATIONSHIP developed rapidly. David asked me to work on some demos in Switzerland, where he lived part of the time. A few weeks later, I touched down in Geneva, landing right in the middle of a picture-postcard winter wonderland. David picked me up at the airport in a slick Volvo model that wasn’t available in the States. As we zipped along the icy roads, David confided in me: “I’m legally blind in one eye,” he said, or something to that effect. The speedometer seemed to never drop below 100 kilometers per hour. I was scared shitless, but his moves were pretty good.

  We arrived in one piece at his beautiful Swiss chalet in the lovely town of Lausanne, on the banks of Lake Geneva, and immediately started the next level of preproduction on the album that would later be called Let’s Dance.

  By now “dance” was a loaded word for me. The Disco Sucks backlash had given me a post-traumatic-stress–like disorder, and I’d vowed not to write any songs with that word in them for a long time. I was shamed out of using a word—“dance”—that represented one of the most primal sources of joy all over the world and throughout human history, not to mention being the key word in several million-selling records that I’d written myself! It gets even more outrageous: In my early twenties I’d studied dance with famed choreographer Syvilla Fort, who taught the Dunham technique, which was modern with a ballet-training regimen. (Katherine Dunham has been called “the Matriarch and Queen Mother of Black Dance”; she and Ms. Fort are among the most legendary names in American black dance history.) Later in life I even had the Nicholas Brothers tap on a Chic record, out of sheer admiration for them. I had a spiritual and a physical connection to the word “dance.” How could I be afraid of it? It’s not impossible to explain.

  In almost every sphere of life, I’d seen the same pattern: The dominant culture manages to direct less powerful people away from their cultural, financial, geographical, and residential base so that the dominant culture can move in and claim it. They rename those assets and, presto chango, you’ve got gentrification. This dynamic is nothing new: Ask the Native Americans, who had the land they were living on “discovered” right out from under them. So I thought maybe now was a good time to reclaim a word that was already mine as much as anyone else’s. Still, I was nervous about the “D” word, because while I didn’t want to leave the word around for someone to steal, I didn’t want to be seen as a one-trick pony either. It helped that my name wasn’t on the album cover: As a well-regarded white rocker, David had the freedom to use the word if he wanted. And when David said, “Let’s dance,” no one ran into the streets to set records on fire.

  NOT LONG AFTER I ARRIVED IN SWITZERLAND, Bowie strolled into my bedroom with a guitar.

  “Hey, Nile, listen to this,” he said, his skinny frame silhouetted just inside the doorway. “I think it could be a hit.”

  He started strumming a twelve-string acoustic guitar that had only six strings. What followed was a folksy sketch of a composition with a solid melody: The only problem was it sounded to me like “Donovan meets Anthony Newley.” And I don’t mean that as a compliment. It wasn’t bad by artistic standards, but I’d been mandated to make hits, and could only hear what was missing.

  The next few minutes felt like hours. We had spent a fair amount of time together in New York, and I thought I knew what he meant when he said “make hits.” We’d listened to tons of records—even some rare ones that we’d borrowed from famed music producer Jerry Wexler. We’d listened to Henry Mancini’s theme from Peter Gunn over and over—and would later lift its horn line for “Let’s Dance”—and studied Little Richard. We looked at scores of album covers, press photos, and other artwork and talked about what we considered cool. And then this: a strummy folk guitar part with a moving voice in the chords? It didn’t even sound close to what I’d call a hit.

  I called a mutual friend in New York for some advice. I said, “David walked into my room this morning and played a song for me that he says is a hit. I don’t hear it. Is he trying to test me?” Our mutal friend was blunt: “If he says he thinks it’s a hit, then he thinks it’s a hit. He would never trick you; he’s not that kind of person.” With that in mind, I went back to David and asked him to teach me the song. I scribbled down the chords and said I’d take a crack at an arrangement.

  I headed back to my bedroom with a sheaf of manuscript paper and my guitar and started reworking the song. I soon discovered the diamond in the rough. I emerged with the arrangement while David called Mountain Studios in Montreux, which was owned by Queen. He asked the studio manager, or maybe it was Claude Nobs, creator of the Montreux Jazz Festival, to round up a handful of local musicians to do a session. As it turned out, the musicians were jazz cats and they did a pretty solid version of the charts I’d written. Gone were the strummy chords, gone was the moving voice. I’d replaced them with staccato stabs and a strict harmonic interpretation. I used silence and big open spaces to create the groove and kept rearranging it on the spot, like I always did with Chic. David quickly got down with the reshaping of his song. We had a lot of fun and laughter in that Swiss studio with those terrific musicians (whose names I unfortunately can’t remember). Laughter is key to my sessions—the unconditionally loving parent in the room. David dug the session.

  “If you really like that,” I said, “then you’ll love it when we get back to New York and you hear my guys play it.”

  We ended our European sojourn with a big celebratory dinner with the jazz cats at a famous local restaurant in Lausanne. I don’t remember cutting anything else in Switzerland. If that was a test, I passed.

  BACK IN NEW YORK, David booked my favorite recording studio, the Power Station, along with Bob Clearmountain, my favorite engineer, for a three-week stint. I’m pretty sure the concept was to tentatively see how things would go with my crew, which is why he only booked three weeks. He arrived from London packing plenty of ideas. He had three or four demos at various stages of development, and four tunes that were already released that we would cover. He also had “Let’s Dance,” the demo we’d made in Switzerland.

  The cover songs were the group Metro’s “Criminal World,” “Cat People,” a dirgelike ballad he’d already done for the shared-name film with Giorgio Moroder, and “China Girl,” which he and Iggy Pop had written for an earlier project.

  The thumbnails would become the songs “Shake It,” “Modern Love,” “Ricochet,” and “Without You.”

  My first job was to build the morale of the band members, who were playing together for the first time. Though I had my regular Chic keyboardist Rob Sabino, my other go-to players, bassist Bernard Edwards and drummer Tony Thompson, were not on the first session. They’d become less punctual during the last few Chic records. Tony and Nard were so unreliable from drugging, and I was afraid they’d be late for a recording session where David was watching every penny like a hawk. As producer, I was responsible for keeping the project on budget. So I decided they were too risky. They were two of the best players I’ve ever worked with and I was sad not to have them involved, but I had a job to do. So I hired superstar drummer Omar Hakim, and bassist Carmine Rojas, whose main gig at the time was with Rod Stewart. I figured having a multicultural group made up of experienced rockers was a good way to start, since I didn’t know what other material David would be bringing.

  The band was acutely aware of the pressure we were under. The level of scrutiny any new Bowie record was sure to face could have given them jitters, so I worked hard to be the same old Nile they all knew. Part of that meant regularly cracking jokes to remind them that they were working for me, not Bowie. “After his ass goes home, motherfuckers, I’ll still be here,” I
said to the group. It worked. The joke’s purpose was twofold: It made them feel better about being paid single scale (less than what I normally paid session musicians back then), and let them know that I’d make it up to them on our next record together. I had a reputation as a generous contractor, and I had to live with these guys. On every level, I needed them to feel comfortable, and I wanted David to feel comfortable with them, too. So I kicked things off by recording “Let’s Dance,” which I knew David already liked.

  “Let’s Dance” was, as David described it, “a postmodern homage to the Isley Brothers’ ‘Twist and Shout,’ ” one of the many records we’d listened to during the preproduction phase. The band broke into the groove, which was followed by an eight-bar pocket trumpet solo.

  In the words of Billy Idol, “Fuckin’ ’ell!” The moment we finished off that trumpet solo, I knew we were in new territory and could play by different rules—rules that applied only to white rockers and maybe Miles, Prince, or Michael Jackson. Now I had the freedom to venture beyond pop into jazz territory. I was free to allow cats to improvise—on a pop single! It was heaven. I’d played in bands like this before, bands that ranged beyond the usual boundaries of R&B and pop, but we could never get a record deal; the labels always changed their mind when they saw we were black. With Bowie, I finally got to do what so many white rock artists take for granted: just make great music, without worrying about categories. And even if it was only temporary, I was ecstatic.

  My instinct to start with “Let’s Dance” paid off: We cut the song in one or two takes and it set the tone for the rest of the project. The song was going to be a major hit, and we all knew it. David relaxed into my team’s capable, wickedly creative, loving hands.

  We knew we wouldn’t often get chances like this, so we attacked David’s music like an invading army. It was a siege. After years of being denied entry through the front door of rock and roll, we had our battering rams poised to knock down the walls. The rhythm section musicians, who were all black and Latino, were playing like uncaged animals, finally free to push pop to higher levels. After we were solidly into the recording process, I finally brought in Tony Thompson, who struck the drums so hard that the sound pressure levels dimmed the studio lights with each backbeat. It was like, “Yeah, motherfuckers, take that!”

  Actually, Tony’s rage was probably partially directed at me, too. This record would have been a dream come true for the black rocker, but I only called him to play on three songs, even though he was the hardest-hitting rock drummer I’ve ever known. David was impressed by him, and I knew he was wondering why I hadn’t used Tony for the whole record, but David didn’t know about the drug use. To be honest, I was in almost as bad shape as my former bandmates. But this was the opportunity of a lifetime and I only had one chance to get it right. I was always committed to Bernard, and wanted him on my “hit” rock-and-roll album, so once I reached the stage where things had passed the point where he could fatally fuck them up, I called on him. He came through with flying colors.

  Bernard only played on one song on the album: “Without You.” I brought him in to deal with a tricky bass line, one that Carmine Rojas had struggled with.

  Nard walked into the control room (precisely on time), said a quick general hello, unpacked his bass, and went out to the studio. He sat in the bass chair and plugged in his gear. He took a look at the short asymmetrical chart on the music stand and said to me, “Is this the song?”

  I replied, “Yes, that’s it.” David could sense there was something uneasy in the air, because unlike the other sessions, there was no laughing and joking on this one. David knew Bernard was my Chic Organization partner, but Nard treated us like strangers.

  After taking just a few minutes to get Bernard’s technical sound correct (a process that could sometimes take hours, but not with Chic’s A-team and in our home base, the Power Station), Nard told the engineer Bob Clearmountain, “Run the motherfucker.” One take later he glared through the control-room window.

  “Is that what you want?”

  David and I smiled.

  “Yeah, bro, that’s what we want.”

  Prior to that session, I had bet David that Nard would finish the song in fifteen minutes. He did it in thirteen. I was never more proud of him in my life, and it happened on the last day of basic recording. David shrugged his shoulders in approval and disbelief, and I thought to myself: “Chic Organization. That’s how we do it! One take, fifteen minutes. These rhythm tracks are done.”

  Bernard quietly packed up his bass and walked out. He was pissed off that I hadn’t called him for the rest of the album, but he knew that I was proud to show off his genius. David was so impressed with my guys that he took almost everyone, including the background singers, the Simms Brothers, on the “Serious Moonlight” tour that followed.

  A COUPLE OF DAYS before the Nard incident, David played another song for me he said he thought was a hit—Iggy Pop’s version of “China Girl.” I didn’t think it was a radio hit. I liked it, but it was clearly an album cut. We had recorded other smashes earlier that day, and I thought we’d reached a pretty clear understanding on the direction I was trying to steer the project toward. His insistence on this song being a smash was a little discomforting. The original “China Girl” was way overproduced to my tight, minimalist ears, but David insisted that the song was a hit. Confused, I again called that same mutual friend and asked, “Are you sure he isn’t trying to play a trick on me?” And again the friend told me, just as he’d said in Switzerland after David performed “Let’s Dance” solo in my bedroom, “If David said he thinks it’s a hit, he really thinks it’s a hit.”

  Oh my God, what do I do now? I wondered.

  Fortunately, the end of the day was approaching. We were working in half-day sessions, as did most black and jazz acts, to reduce costs. I dismissed the band a little early to buy time to think the “China Girl” dilemma through. I needed to find the song’s DHM.

  At home, I played the song’s verse chords and soon discovered that if I changed the held power chord triad to a major chord that moved down to a major seventh and then to the sixth, it sounded sweeter and more Asian. I did a little more fiddling until—checkmate—I had a catchy Asian-sounding riff I was very pleased with. This was going to work out after all.

  So I did what I usually did when the clock struck 1 a.m.: I went out clubbing all night. I arrived home around 6 a.m., slept about two hours, called Salon De Tokyo health spa and got a culturally sympathetic massage before heading to the studio. I worked on the charts until David arrived, trying to give the song a more Asian vibe, to match the new guitar part I’d come up with.

  I worked the guitar riff into the band’s arrangement. Accustomed to the supercompetitive world of urban dance music, I kept trawling for an edge. My formula always required starting my songs with hooks and using breakdowns or featuring solo instruments—this new guitar riff sounded very hooky and by itself it did all those things. Now the only thing left was to find the song’s DHM. I thought the lyrics of this song sounded like a junkie’s ode if ever there was one. One of the nicknames for heroin among users is “China White.” On the other hand, cocaine is “Girl.” I knew Bowie was sober now, but because the song was old, it might have been about speedballing, combining coke with heroin.

  So I tried to visualize a pop drug song. Aware of Bowie’s commitment to sobriety, I wasn’t sure if he’d go along with all this, but mainly I just focused on making our little “drug ditty” a hit. I wanted David to be proud of his record, whatever he was talking about. At the end of the day it was his record, and my job was to help him realize his vision.

  David arrived at the studio in a very upbeat mood. He looked so normal that it made me more nervous, because at least a wild, wacky, art rocker just might accept my ultra-pop arrangement as absurd, ridiculous, and therefore cool. I was never so scared in my life as when I played that Asian hooky lick for him. He could have easily thought it corny, because compared to the or
iginal song by Iggy Pop, my version was not as hard rocking. To my surprise (and relief), he liked it and told me so with great enthusiasm. I said, “Well, if you like that, then listen to this.” I had the arrangement written out for the entire band. We played it and recorded it right on the spot. There was almost no drama in the recording of the Let’s Dance album. It was fun and full of surprises, the biggest of which was a then-unknown guitarist from Texas named Stevie Ray Vaughan.

  David had seen Stevie play at the Montreux Jazz Festival a few months earlier and knew he wanted to work with him. If you want an example of David’s artistic genius, this is it. He saw newbie Stevie Ray play live once, and that was enough to convince him to invite him to record with a group of relatively unknown rocking rookies.

  Stevie certainly walked into the Power Station as if he belonged there. He was grandiose, gregarious, and generous. At the beginning of every day’s recording session, I would have the assistant take everybody’s lunch order so the food would be there when we took our short lunch break. Stevie, instead of ordering that day’s lunch, got on the phone and ordered tomorrow’s lunch: next-day-air delivery barbecue from Texas, for everybody, and he paid for it all. This was the ultimate bonding gesture. Everybody loved this southern stranger from that moment on. He was the real deal, and he fit right into our little lifeboat. If this record turned out to be a hit, we thought it would be all our passports into the larger world of rock-and-roll pop.

  David and I were the only two musicians on the project whose names were familiar to Stevie prior to his arrival. Though David had brought him in on the project, Stevie and I were the ones who’d form a lifelong bond of love and respect. I still remember the look of astonishment on his face when he heard the first track we played for him, “Let’s Dance.” He could sense this group of anonymous musicians were about to make history. We’d do it again a few years later when I produced and cowrote Stevie’s historical recording with his brother Jimmie, Family Style, but it was Let’s Dance that first exposed the world to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s spectacular virtuosity.