Le Freak

by Nile Rodgers

  “Lot’s of people are fantastic,” I countered. “And I’m not sure she qualifies.”

  (I really didn’t know much about her then. I’d assumed she was Puerto Rican, because I knew she was associated with Jellybean and the freestyle scene. I liked her song “Everybody,” but I didn’t have any reason to believe Madonna was special. She had one okay club hit. Not even Nostradamus himself could have predicted she’d become one of the most successful recording artists of all time.)

  “My friend keeps saying Madonna’s bananas,” I shouted over the club’s pounding sound system to my new B-girl friend. “Are you down with her?”

  “I’m not down with her yet, but my honey says she’s most ill.”

  “OK.” I pointed to the fem girl. I decided to turn her praise into a wager. “You’ve got to give me double my blow back if she’s whack.” Then I laughed and asked, “Word?”

  “Word up,” she answered.

  “Bet!” Then I waved and headed over to the DJ booth. I was trying to kill time and was buzzing pretty nicely. I ran into an old pal of mine, Mike, who was one of the few brothers I knew who was deep into this scene, which was good news: It meant I could check out two acts and square my reaction with a hip black man’s second opinion. “Yo, Mike, how great is this shit?” I said, serving him up the obligatory double bumps of blow.

  He answered, “It’s pretty dope.”

  “Not the toot! I mean getting to check out two acts tonight for the price of one!”

  “Jenny’s most def, but I ain’t clocked Madonna’s show yet.”

  Suddenly someone announced “Madonna!” over the PA, the track dropped, and I recognized the song. I’d heard it the night before at a club, Paradise Garage. A good sign.

  What I saw next startled me: a toothsome white girl stepping (doing dance routines while performing). Stepping is what R&B bands like the Jackson 5 and most others used to do until the likes of Prince, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Isleys, and Rick James moved the scene to more rocklike performances—rock-star poses and spontaneous, improvised movement instead of choreographed moves. By the mideighties many black bands of real significance weren’t stepping at all, but now here was a white girl doing intricate choreography, all while crooning:

  “Holiday-ee, Celebra-eete.

  Holiday-ee, Celebra-eete.”

  Mike, myself, and some of the other patrons of color in the club were momentarily shocked. I wasn’t ready for this. Not only was Madonna stepping, she had a stageful of fly-looking dancers stepping right along with her. She was akin to a young, sexually suggestive, white Gladys Knight—and they were her Pips.

  Black acts rarely used extra dancers, because the musicians themselves danced, making any additions unnecessary. Somehow, Madonna and her crew made it work, sort of. But something was off. The whole thing reminded me of my days at the Apollo and the Chitlin’ Circuit, where singers and dancers had every last detail choreographed. Ah, the missing thing was a live band.

  AFTER HER SHORT SET, which to my surprise included the song “Burning Up,” which I’d heard around town but hadn’t connected to her, I went backstage to meet Madonna. The moment I walked into her makeshift dressing room, I noticed that the cigarette smoke from the club (a no-no for singers) had completely overpowered the room’s ventilation. She was curvaceous and cute, but raw, and her toughness was impressive, even to a homegrown New Yorker like myself. She looked like she was living a hard life, but seemed pleased to meet me—maybe because she knew I had charting records coming out every few weeks. Or maybe she was just being polite.

  “Hey, Madonna,” I said.

  “Yo, what’s up?”

  “Coolin’,” I said. “Your show was pretty tight. By the way, I’m a friend of Michael Zilkha’s and he thinks you’re the shit.”

  She accepted the compliment with a little nod of acknowledgment and a fairly big grin.

  We chatted for a minute and then I headed back out to the floor. I’m sure Jenny’s show was great, but I was too high to remember it at all. And I didn’t know what to make of Madonna. Her short opening act had left me slightly puzzled. I didn’t know of any other white artists that were doing Latin hip-hop–sounding music. It was weird. I was intrigued, but not convinced it worked. I also had another artist I wanted to see that night, so I split.

  From the Roxy, I tore up Tenth Avenue to a new spot called F-Sharp, where the band Bow Wow Wow was giving a press conference. I wanted to meet their stunning Mohawked Burmese singer, Annabella Lwin. F-Sharp was on the West Side Highway in a Hell’s Kitchen enclave dubbed the Trucks, because the city’s garbage trucks parked there, providing cover for the bustling male prostitution trade.

  Bow Wow Wow’s thing was open to fans, and during the course of the press event, the band said something that offended a club employee. All hell broke loose, in a fashionably hip underground New York sort of way. It was a stylish fight. When I walked in, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I went out almost every night and witnessed only a surprisingly small amount of altercations. We were lovers, not fighters.

  When I arrived, the melee was at its apex, and like so many events in my life, a chance encounter occurred: It turned out that the fight was between the band and the club’s DJ, Robert Drake, who was my closest friend in the world next to Nard. Robert had recorded and premiered Chic’s first song, “Everybody Dance,” at the downtown buppie club the Night Owl back in ’76.

  I waded through an ocean of people until I reached Bow Wow Wow and somehow chilled them out. After they calmed down, I told them, “This dude is my friend,” and introduced them to Robert, the guy they were trying to kill moments before. And with that the fight was over. Bow Wow Wow was from the U.K., and like most English bands, they relished a good scrap. But they also respected my work, and talking music and getting high trumped busting heads any day. So I and the band member who’d been fighting moments ago talked tunes and got wasted. I’d become an international peacekeeping force! And much to my delight, I learned that the current crop of new wave bands, especially U.K. bands, were inspired by Chic’s sound.

  After partying with Bow Wow Wow, I left F-Sharp for the downtown hot spots. I skipped the Pyramid and Brownies and wound up at Save the Robots, an after-hours club I loved. It was completely illegal and for that reason alone pushed the party envelope harder than any club I can remember. In those days many clubs were in Alphabet City, an irony that wasn’t lost on me. My old neighborhood still looked the same, but was now called the Lower East Side, and the rents were as high as I was.

  I FEEL ALIVE WHEN I WORK HARD, especially when I have no choice in the matter. Bowie and Chic were both unsigned when we succeeded with Let’s Dance, and the slight air of desperation was great fuel for my work—it was a nice simulation of the struggling atmosphere of most of my life up to that point. So now, even though I had my pick of superstars to work with, I continued to pursue and produce opening acts. I knew that an opening act could end up being the headliner with the right nurturing. I loved turning the Eliza Dolittles into My Fair Ladies, probably because I’ve always felt like the ultimate ugly duckling.

  Chic always considered itself an opening act, regardless of how we were billed—even at our peak in the late seventies we never saw ourselves as stars. And even though we sold millions of records, neither did anyone else. When we performed “Le Freak” on American Bandstand, Dick Clark said something like “This is the biggest act that nobody knows, doing the biggest song about a dance that nobody knows how to do. Ladies and gentlemen, Chic with ‘Le Freak’!”

  Madonna was the opening act for Jenny Burton. A couple of months before, at a Culture Club gig at the Palladium, I met the opening act Spoons, from Canada, whom I later worked with. On that same trip north, I caught a funky new-wave rock band opening for Hall & Oates called INXS. I’d never heard of them. Blown away by their set, I went backstage to meet them and we hit it off immediately.

  Like so many Anglo-Australian bands breaking in the early eighties, INXS
was crazy about Chic, which was hard enough for me to get my head around. But when they said they loved my solo album, I thought they were bullshitting me. To prove me wrong, the band launched into “Yum-Yum,” a song from Adventures in the Land of Good Groove—in four-part harmony no less:

  “Poontang poontang, where you want it?

  Slept all night with my hands on it

  Give me some of that Yum-Yum

  Before I sleep tonight”

  “This is how we warm up our voices at sound check,” they confided.

  “Yum Yum” had flopped commercially, but they dug it so much that they’d even crafted an original arrangement. That sealed the deal. On the spot we decided we had to work together. Later that year I produced a track we cut in one take, called “Original Sin,” the band’s first international hit, and with that, INXS soon moved from opening act to headliner status.

  Michael Hutchence, the lead singer, who died at the tragic age of thirty-seven, was a dazzlingly charismatic front man and a really good bloke. Unfortunately, after we cut “Original Sin,” we rarely spoke, which is what typically happens: I become so engrossed in the next artist that I don’t have time to keep up with the last one. “Original Sin” was not only a monster smash for INXS, but it was an extremely significant project for me because the song brought Duran Duran into my life.

  The band’s lead singer, Simon Le Bon, had heard “Sin” at a party in Australia, and decided he had to work with the producer. At the time, Duran Duran was an opening act, too. I met them on the group’s first U.S. tour—they were opening for Blondie, whose co-leaders Debbie Harry and Chris Stein were two of my best friends—and soon Duran Duran and I were thick as thieves. Though they were openers for Blondie, they already had a series of huge hit singles—“Planet Earth,” “Girls on Film,” “Save a Prayer,” “Rio,” “Is There Something I Should Know?” and “Hungry Like the Wolf”—and were international stars and MTV darlings. They were on their way to headlining status on their own speed.

  After Duran’s masterful show, I introduced myself backstage. We were all flying high, on a number of levels. John Taylor and I were so giddy and stoned that we ran around the theater playing games like tag and hide-and-go-seek. Our sense of mutual respect was so tangible that we immediately began planning our first project together. A few weeks later, I did a remix of a song of theirs called “The Reflex.”

  Unfortunately, as much as Duran Duran liked the remix, their record company wasn’t happy, and I was soon in an oddly similar situation to the conflict Nard and I had had with Diana Ross’s people.

  Nick Rhodes called me moments after the band had excitedly previewed my retooling of “The Reflex” to the suits at Capitol Records. “Nile,” he began, his monotonic stiff-upper-lip English accent barely hiding his despair, “we have a problem.”

  My stomach tightened. “What’s up, Nick?”

  He struggled to find the words. “Capitol hates the record,” he finally said.

  I was stunned. “The Reflex” was a smash. I was sure of it. This was déjà vu all over again.

  “How do you guys feel about it?” I asked a little defensively.

  “Nile, we love it, but Capitol hates it so much they don’t want to release it. They say it’s too black sounding.”

  Too black sounding? I tried not to hit the roof, but in a way it was nice to hear it put so plain. Finally someone had just come out and said it. As far as I was concerned, this was straight-up racist. And dumb. The record was fantastic. And I was in a very different place than when I’d faced this nonsense before. I was no longer so invested in what these people thought.

  “Fuck them,” I told Nick. “If you guys like it, tell them to kiss your ass and put the fucking record out anyway.” Even though I believed what I was saying, I felt bad because I could hear the distress in Nick’s voice. Then he said something that even my too-black ass had never heard before (or ever since, thank God).

  “The label said that if we forced them to put the record out, they’ll want to take points back on our deal because it’s going to cost a lot to promote it, and it’s not fair for them to bear the extra cost of a record that won’t sell.”

  “Tell them OK,” I said with a mix of extreme confidence and total outrage. I was that sure we had a hit on our hands. “Yeah, give them the fucking points back if it doesn’t sell. Fuck ’em, Nick! I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous.”

  “THE REFLEX” WENT ON TO BECOME the biggest-selling single of Duran Duran’s career. And thus was sealed a long and productive partnership. I had a great run with the the Fab Five, as they were dubbed by the U.K. press, producing “The Reflex,” “Wild Boys,” and “Notorious,” collectively selling tens of millions of units.

  Not only were we involved musically, we were partying and shopping buddies. Bassist John Taylor was my main partying buddy; we hit clubs all over New York and London. Keyboardist Nick Rhodes and his then wife, Julie Anne, came next. Together we embarked on gargantuan shopping sprees at the most fashionable shops in eighties London. Nick was tight with the top designers: He hooked me up with Manolo Blahnik, who was turning out a men’s collection, and the queen’s hatmaker Phillip Treacy. Guitarist Andy Taylor and I would also hit the occasional pub and have a few pints together. He’s a solid musician and a highly opinionated dude with a fiery personality. Roger Taylor, the band’s drummer, was the most laid-back in the band, and we mainly had a studio relationship.

  Simon Le Bon and his wife, Yasmin, a successful fashion model, led very different lives than the rest of the band. Simon was a risk-seeking sportsman. He embraced competition as if his life depended upon winning, even through a major motorcycle accident and nearly drowning in the Whitbread Round the World Race when his yacht’s keel broke and the boat capsized. What he had wasn’t a death wish, but a life wish. And he wasn’t alone; we all lived to the limit. It was the first time in my life that I was so completely absorbed in the privileged lives of superstars.

  But it didn’t feel quite right. As exciting as superstardom was, there is something comforting about being an opening act, because you’re very aware that the world doesn’t revolve around you, which at least means that you can take a day off without the planet coming to an end. Perhaps that’s why I embraced Chic’s status as an eternal opening act. As an opening act, you share the same gravity as the rest of the world. Whereas superstars are monitored as closely as the stock market—their value is quantifiable and constantly fluctuating.

  On a hot day, at least hot for London, John Taylor and I stopped for afternoon drinks at the St. James’s Club. At the peak of his popularity, John was constantly mobbed by fans. Once we got past the fans and were inside the club, I noticed Paul McCartney sitting at a table by himself. Not a soul bothered him when he left. John, on the other hand, was swarmed by screaming fans. He needed a bodyguard to protect him. The tumult was just one notch down from sixties Beatlemania. This newly found superstardom had come at a price.

  I still vividly recall a surreal evening in which the band and I were marched off to London police headquarters for our own protection after Scotland Yard issued a high-alert watch. A riot had nearly erupted. Evidently a group of soccer hooligans—not exactly Duran Duran fans—had heard that the band’s studio was next to the Chelsea football stadium, which they didn’t like. We were escorted from the studio by police before a hostile crowd. It was a chilling spectacle of the kind that only English soccer hooligans can conjure, and stays with me all these year later. The crush of love at the St. James’s Club in the same city was only two days away, a vivid demonstration of the whiplash of stardom.

  Over the next few months, Duran Duran ascended globally with a little help from me. We’d all made it to the top. But just when I thought I’d already won the World Series, my biggest opening act ever stepped up to the plate.

  (Illustration credit 10.2)

  eleven

  Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Overdoing!

  THE SUN WAS ALMOST DIRECTLY
OVERHEAD AS I ROLLED UP TO MOM’S condo in Redondo Beach, California. Mom’s place was set near a beautiful spot called the Horseshoe Pier, aptly named for its unusual shape. You could start your stroll over the ocean at one end of the beach and finish it at the other end. The family spent the day in the usual way, laughing and joking—not to mention drinking, smoking, and coking—until I had to head back to L.A. for some music business. I’d just finished a new Duran Duran record and needed to quality-check it before it hit the street. (Unfortunately, no one had thought to quality-check my family before allowing us to hit the street.)

  A few days later, I sent myself off on vacation to Tecate, Mexico, to a health spa called Rancho La Puerta. I was following an equation I thought would make sense of my wacky life: Party like crazy, then go to a spa, lay off booze and drugs, eat health food, and work out like an Olympian. I’d even do those incredibly hard Jane Fonda workout classes, which were made more bearable by the fact that I always seemed to wind up directly behind shapely actress Amy Irving. A recurring coincidence, I’m sure.

  I also spent a lot of time hiking through the surrounding hills, where I could find enough quiet to hear my own interior voice. One day, while hiking along a mountain trail, I was struck by the conviction that all the events in my life were connected: They were bound to happen because they were, in fact, bound—fixed in place and inevitable. Everything that had happened to me was always going to happen.

  I sat yogi-style at the summit and considered this idea and other paradoxes. I saw the mountain I’d just trekked up as a metaphor: It had taken strenuous work to get myself to the top, and the reward was getting to coast all the way down, submitting to the pull of gravity rather than fighting it, just to end up where you started. But in my profession, staying on top was the only option. You never wanted to come down in show business. No one wanted to go back to where they started. If everything in life is connected, like the steps along the trail I’d just hiked, and just as fixed, where was that trail leading next? Would I stay up—or begin the long journey down?