by Nile Rodgers
Both Stevie and David ripped through and completed all their parts in just two days. There was gris-gris sprinkled on every aspect of this record. None of us would ever be the same after its release; all our careers skyrocketed. We were bluesmen at heart, so was Let’s Dance our metaphorical crossroads? Like Robert Johnson at Dockery Plantation, had we unknowingly sold our souls for this massive success?
MAKING A HIT RECORD IS VERY DIFFICULT. The gates are controlled and restricted, and competition is keen, regardless of who or what you are. I’ve made so many hits, so many times, but I’ve made plenty of flops, too—I know that for a record to hit, everything has to line up just right. But making David’s hit album was the easiest job of my life. A hit record without a hitch. True, we had four cover songs, but if it was that simple, then why not put four cover songs on every record? True, David was a superstar, but he wouldn’t have been the first superstar to bomb. There was some unexplainable voodoo on Let’s Dance. I was working with most of the exact same people as always and recording in the exact same place as always, and was, by the way, at the peak of my addiction, but that record worked like nothing I’d done before, even with my long string of gold and platinum records.
In the end we completed Let’s Dance in just seventeen days, mixed and delivered. David was happy and I was in job-well-done party mode. In just over two weeks, I’d reconstructed and rearranged every single song and written all the sweetening charts (horns, backing vocals, and other overdubs), save for Bowie’s “head charts,” where he sang the parts instead of having me write them down on music paper, the first time I’d ever seen that done in a studio situation.
And on top of all that, Bob and I even changed the keyboards on one track without telling David (until now, if he reads this)—he’d given me strict orders not to use a certain keyboard on the album, preferring instead a synthetic version of it. I decided the real one worked better with his voice and we switched it without telling him.
LET’S DANCE WAS THE FASTEST I’ve ever produced an album, and Bowie’s biggest-selling record. Critically acclaimed, it landed him on the covers of Time and Rolling Stone. I got to glimpse another world. It was the perk- and privileged-filled world of the global rock star. Everything was perfect—except for David’s reluctance to give me the same props he’d bestowed upon his previous producers. He seemed almost embarrassed by the mega-success of Let’s Dance, even though all along he’d insisted on “making hits.” It was such a strange turn for me, because we’d been so close during the production. Maybe I made more out of our relationship than I should have, because of my extreme admiration for him as an artist and the fact that he took a chance on me when the industry must have been pressuring him against it ten times harder than Motown and Diana were pressuring Suzanne de Passe on my last hit record. Or maybe it was because in Bernard’s absence, I transferred my feelings for him onto Bowie.
I was hurt by how little I was mentioned in his media coverage and how he tended to prefer discussing his earlier work whenever he was interviewed. Remember, I was working off six consecutive flops and needed the praise and recognition to help rebuild my career. He didn’t have to love the record now, I guess, but I knew he loved it when we were doing it. And I understand that just because something sold wildly, you don’t necessarily have to like it. To date, “Le Freak” is my biggest—though not my favorite—but I have to acknowledge its achievement. I can only speculate that David, being a real artist, sees his entire body of work as the important thing and felt the world was starting to overidentify him with this single album and its hugely popular songs. I could relate: I felt the same about the way the industry pigeonholed me after Chic’s hit singles.
I quickly got over my disappointment. My name was on the record, and the industry—including other artists—recognized my contribution to Bowie’s commercial triumph.
Once again I was in demand.
A little over a year after the release of Let’s Dance, I was named Billboard magazine’s Number One Singles Producer of the Year. Let’s Dance topped the charts in both the U.S. and the U.K., selling eight million records and netting three Top Ten singles. The “Serious Moonlight” tour was David’s biggest ever, grossing over $100 million. It was a huge moment for him, but not his first: He was always the man. But suddenly, at least to those in the know, I was the man, too.
Despite all that, I still needed, for whatever insecure reason, for David to acknowledge me and what we’d done together. Years later, at a charity function for the ARChive of Contemporary Music, he did. We were at a hip little club called S.O.B.’s in New York’s Greenwich Village. While giving his speech, he said, “And this goes out to Nile Rodgers, the only man who could make me start a song with a chorus!” Which of course was my reworking of that little ditty he strummed out for me in Switzerland: “Let’s dance. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues.” That shout-out made my night. I don’t think anybody in the audience had a clue what the hell he was talking about, but I knew, and that’s all that counted. Case closed. I love and respect you, David. Thanks.
* Ironically, my next-door neighbor was Tony Visconti, a producer who’d worked on a number of Bowie records, including Scary Monsters. His office/apartment was in my building, which had thirty-plus floors and at least five units per floor. But his was directly next door! What are the odds of that in a city of more than eight million people?
(Illustration credit 9.1)
ten
Who’s That Opening-Act Girl?
ON THANKSGIVING DAY OF 1983, AROUND THE TIME I WAS STARTING an exciting new phase of my career, my brother Bunchy was starting the next phase of his. “Exciting” might not be the right word to describe Bunchy’s career path. And he was about to involve Mom—who’d been trying her hand at buying and flipping houses—in a new family business.
Like his father, Bunchy was a jack of many trades: musician, comedian, carpenter. Since this was the eighties and everybody was into drugs on some level, Bunchy had decided to switch to narcotics as his main vocation and pretty soon had a fairly profitable business going. Drugs were never taboo in my family, of course, and dealers were always around. It was natural and at times very convenient to have my brother slide into the roster of suppliers for my ever-growing habit.
One day Bunchy had to go to L.A. to drop off two kilos of coke to a customer, only to find that the buyer had suddenly reneged. Unwilling to risk flying back to New York with two bulky keys of blow, he decided to leave the drugs with Mom until he could find another West Coast buyer. In the meantime, Bunchy wasn’t opposed to encouraging Mom’s entrepreneurial streak. “If you can off them,” he told her, “I only want thirty Gs for each key.”
“Okay, baby,” she said. Ever since Bobby had hooked her for good, recreational drugs had never been an issue for Mom. In this way, as in so many others, she was ahead of her time. By the early eighties in America, coke was a status item among the rich and famous, especially when they were of the Caucasian persuasion. Powdered coke was called “the rich man’s drug” in the hood—yes, there were rich black folks and some of them were secure or reckless enough to devote their riches to the acquisition of coke, but let’s keep it real: There were not enough of them to fuel an entire drug industry.
My mom, as you might imagine, had a knack for getting into the action quickly. She sold both kilos within two days. My brother scored the amount he wanted, sixty thousand dollars, and she kept the rest for her effort, a tidy little sum for a couple of days’ work. So they decided to partner again and make it a family business.
My brother delivered the weight and my mother was soon supplying coke to a cream-of-the-crop customer base of top L.A. professionals. She never succumbed to low-level street dealing (and it’s hard for me to imagine her holding down a corner in L.A.). Good times, indeed. Soon she moved to an exclusive enclave called Diamond Bar and started rolling in a cherry red Mercedes with CHICBEV vanity plates.
For a long time, I had no idea what they were up to. I never
questioned Mom’s upscale move, which seemed completely plausible. After all, I was paying the bills—I’d been covering their bills for years now—and she was also involved in different legitimate businesses that I was seeding. Nobody seriously questioned Mom about her lifestyle—even her police detective boyfriend didn’t know how she made her bread.
Yes, here’s another wonderful detail about Mom’s midlife career as a high-end drug dealer: She dealt right under a detective’s nose and he never had a clue. They’d met about a year earlier. He’d been investigating a murder that she’d witnessed in front of her former apartment.
Mom may have managed to deceive her detective boyfriend, but the unsavory neighbors in her former hood were far more savvy, which is how she wound up getting robbed and brutally pistol-whipped.
One afternoon my mother made the mistake of giving a female friend from the old nabe a nickel tour of her new Diamond Bar house. During the tour there was a knock on the door, and before she knew it, three armed masked men had pushed the friend out of the way, stormed straight upstairs to Mom’s bedroom, and pinned her down on the bed. They started pistol-whipping her, screaming, “Where’s the money, bitch?” My mom insisted there was no money in the house, but they kept beating her and demanding cash. Pretty soon blood was running from her head like a fountain. “All I kept thinking to myself,” she told me later, “was, ‘just don’t pass out.’ ”
Mom decided that if she stayed alert, the robbers wouldn’t kill her. So she never stopped talking, which practically drove them nuts.
“The more I talked,” she said, “the more they screamed and hit me with the butt of the gun! They then tied me up and started to ransack the house. They kept saying they’d blow my fucking brains out if I didn’t tell them where the money was. I stuck to my story and repeated there was no money—over and over.”
Even under duress, Mom never let on that the coke money, not to mention a mega-wad of cash from a house she’d just sold, was hidden in the closet—in a pair of boots. After wrecking the house and coming up empty, the interlopers dealt a sharp blow to her head and decided to wait for my brother Bobby, who they knew was on his way over. As it turned out, they’d been casing the house and knew all about my family’s comings and goings. So they hid behind Mom’s bedroom door and waited. When Bobby walked in, they pounced, pointed a gun to his head, and threw a makeshift hood over his face. Then they took him down to the garage and locked him in the trunk of his car, a blue Mercedes, to soften him up for an interrogation.
Before they got to that, someone knocked on the door. It was Jerry, a sometime boyfriend of Mom’s who was also a successful record producer and the partner of Joe Jackson (Michael’s father). When no one answered his knock on the door, he picked up the house key from under the mat and let himself in. When Jerry walked blithely into the living room, surprising the crooks, they panicked and shot him three times. He fell back outside against his Rolls-Royce and collapsed to the ground. Complete pandemonium ensued. The robbers jumped into my brother Bobby’s Mercedes and drove it right through the closed garage door, Grade-B-action-movie-style, abandoning their own Cadillac in front of Mom’s new crib. This was not the Mensa break-and-enter team.
Meanwhile, Bobby was still locked in the trunk. They drove his car to a housing complex, opened the trunk, removed his hood. One of the men pointed a gun to his head and fired. Fortunately for Bobby, the chamber was empty. The gunman tried four more times without a discharge. Undoubtedly exasperated, they untied him, put him behind the wheel of his car, and told him to not look back. A few moments later, Bobby spotted a man walking down the sidewalk and related his ordeal to him. He asked the guy to drive him home as Bobby had no idea where he was. The man instead called the police and gave Bobby five bucks for gas. It turns out the tank was empty.
When Bobby finally got home, the police on the scene told him Mom was in the hospital and that she’d be okay. To everyone’s surprise, the perpetrator’s car was still parked at Mom’s house. This looked to be an easy case to crack. Even the address on the abandoned Caddy’s registration matched the location of the housing complex where the kidnappers had tried to fire a gun in Bobby’s face.
Incredibly, though, the case was never solved. Of course, because of my mom’s drug dealing, she’d never press charges, but the police never seriously followed up on the case even though they had a hot trail leading to the probable perps. For some mysterious reason, they just didn’t seem interested in solving the crime.
Bobby thinks the cops were bent out of shape by the fact that all the black people involved in the story owned high-end cars. A Rolls-Royce, two Mercedes Benzes—hell, even the robbers drove a Cadillac. Most black people with very high-end cars have experienced some problems with the police at some point—it’s one of the things that unite us. My brother Bobby is Big Bobby’s son, so technically he’s half-white—only an occasional advantage. When Jerry recovered from his gunshot wounds, he decided that owning a Rolls was more trouble than it was worth, even though one might speculate that his real mistake in this situation was entering the home of Beverly Goodman. Anyway, he traded the Rolls to my mom for her Mercedes.
Of course, Mom wasn’t entirely disappointed that the police didn’t investigate further. As you might expect, she wasn’t eager for the law to keep digging and possibly sniff out her well-hidden drug business.
So the crime remained unsolved and that was officially the end of it. Mom wound up with just a really bad beating and bouts of anxiety. Bobby walked away unhurt. Mom managed to keep most of the money. She even got the Rolls, which in her eyes was a fantastic trade-up.
JUST AFTER DUSK on a sweltering, muggy evening in 1983, I was in the Power Station’s Studio C. In the early eighties, Studio C was almost exclusively mine. It was new, extremely private, and capable of generating absurd sound-pressure levels, which is how I liked to roll back then.
As my engineer Jason played back a track I’d just overdubbed at excruciating volume, I snorted a couple of hefty lines off the producer’s desk. “Boom!” I said, which meant I approved of my performance. I kept things simple back then. I was heading out to do some quick club hopping.
I jumped behind the wheel of my brand-new fire-engine-red Porsche 911 Targa, turned the key, redlined the engine, and fish-tailed out of the garage. I sped west down Fifty-third Street with music pulsating, a crimson disco on wheels. My hair was cropped in a flat-top style called a fade-away, which was inspired by the underground icon Grace Jones, an exceptional artist whose greatest creation may have been herself; appropriately, I was blasting her classic “Pull Up to the Bumper” as the soundtrack to my ride. I screeched to a halt in front of the Roxy, a popular club that doubled as a roller rink. I strolled right in, past all the civilians waiting in the endless line. The club’s owners, operators, and bouncers were all close friends, which meant I could leave my car out front with the top down.
(Illustration credit 10.1)
Thick with cigarette smoke, the Roxy’s main room was packed mainly with Club Kids, new wavers, and B-boys and B-girls decked out in foxtails and rope chains. They churned in front of a smoky, holographic backdrop.
I was here tonight to check out a performance by a young artist named Jenny Burton, an attractive chanteuse I was interested in producing but had never actually met. I really didn’t need to look for more work: 1983 was right smack in the middle of an especially good stretch for me. That year I’d had at least seven projects come out, many with major artists such as Paul Simon, Hall & Oates, Southside Johnny, and INXS. Soon I’d meet Duran Duran and embark on what would be my longest continuous relationship with a band other than Chic.
But Jenny Burton was hot. She was like a club version of Lena Horne, and had the look of the R&B stars who would conquer the world twenty years later (Beyoncé, Rihanna, etc.). She was the lead singer of C-Bank, an electro-R&B band that was important in what was known as the freestyle movement—a Latin-and-hip-hop-flavored dance music that was threatening to migrate f
rom the clubs to the mainstream. She was as trendy and hot as the Roxy, and she was riding a monster club hit at the time, called “One More Shot.”
Like a real pro, I’d perfectly timed my arrival to sync with her start time, or at least I thought so, but I soon realized that the opening act hadn’t even gone on yet. I walked across the dance floor and openly tooted up next to a cute lesbian Latina B-girl couple. One of the girls had just finished kissing her partner. The kiss was particularly wet and she was licking the excess off the girl’s face when I abruptly asked, “So, um … who’s the opening act?”
“Madonna,” she said, half pissed and half startled by my intrusively timed question.
“Madonna, really? The chick that sings ‘Everybody’ Madonna?”
“Yup, her.” In a very huffy tone.
“Cool! You guys want a bump?” (This instantly redeemed me.)
“Yeah, papi.” They both did a couple of hits, just a little less conspicuously than I did.
Now, this Madonna person wasn’t a total stranger to me. Jellybean Benitez, a hot DJ, producer, and businessman, had told me about her already; he’d probably even mentioned this gig. Before Jellybean, I’d first heard about Madonna from a friend named Michael Zilkha, the owner of alternative music label ZE Records, best known for Was (Not Was), Kid Creole, and Lydia Lunch. Michael had told me about this wonderful artist. Michael’s got a public school, Oxford accent, and when he speaks, every word sounds important, especially adjectives like “wonderful.” I remember him telling me, “Nile, you and Madonna simply must work together, because Madonna’s fantastic and you’re fantastic.”