Le Freak

by Nile Rodgers

  What I didn’t know as I sat atop that stunning mountain was that the next part of my life was already falling into place in a suburb of Los Angeles.

  WE’VE ALL HEARD THE EXPRESSION “Success has many fathers.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a better example than the making of Madonna’s Like a Virgin. Everyone who had anything to do with it has taken credit for its success. The album had as many fathers as Genghis Khan had descendants, and he probably fathered nearly half of China.

  On a typically smoggy day in “Beautiful Downtown Burbank” (as they used to say on Laugh-In), two local songsmiths, Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, strolled into Warner Brothers Records for a pitch meeting. They were trying to score a deal for i-Ten, the group they’d recently formed. They were successful songwriters, and Tom was a killer L.A. session singer with a great track record of collaborations. But for whatever reason, the i-Ten presentation didn’t wow Warner A&R executive Michael Ostin. Fortunately, Michael not only has good ears, as we say in the business, he’s a nice guy. So before they split, he gave them the chance to play one more song.

  Billy and Tom had a tune they weren’t sure what to do with, or who to give to for recording. It was called “Like a Virgin,” and truth be told, playing it for Warner was a last-ditch afterthought. Just one listen later, Michael said he had the perfect artist for the song.

  MADONNA HAPPENED TO BE IN THE BUILDING to brainstorm with Michael and Lenny Waronker, another Warner heavyweight, about her next album. So far her career was rolling along but hadn’t exploded. Her self-titled debut album had sold a grand total of 700,000 units. OK, but not an earthshaking number back in the days when people actually bought records. At the time, the industry was debating whether Cyndi Lauper or Madonna would ultimately break out and take the heavyweight title. Cyndi was the front-runner. I even heard that one major-label CEO straight out said about Madge: “The bitch can’t sing!”

  But numbers and industry buzz weren’t everything. The suits at Warner knew they had something special in Madonna. She was the classic diamond in the rough—she just needed a few great tunes and the right producer to cut and polish her up.

  Before she got to his office, Michael played the “Like a Virgin” demo for Lenny and Steven Baker, another top Warner exec. They didn’t get the song at all. This was a common response. A lot of people didn’t get “Like a Virgin” at first listen.

  At some point during Madonna’s meeting, Michael played her the song. After one verse and chorus, Madonna made up her mind: “She got it quicker than anybody,” according to Michael, “including me.” She was so buzzed that she decided “Like a Virgin” should be the first single—and title—of her next album. She made this decision in less than two minutes. Classic Madonna. Decisive—and right.

  Inspired, Madonna, Michael, and Lenny wrote a wish list of producers: The top two were Narada Michael Walden and me. Michael and Lenny didn’t know that Madonna and I had already met at her Roxy show or that we had friends in common. So why did Madonna ultimately choose to work with me? Good question. After our first meeting, our mutual acquaintances certainly continued to talk to each other. Knowing how Madonna makes up her mind, I suspect she’d already decided that I was her guy.

  Some rock historians claim that Madonna decided to work with me because David Bowie referred her, but that’s pure and complete nonsense. It’s true that Madonna and I had lots of common friends. But the night we met at the Roxy, David Bowie wasn’t one of them. That said, I wasn’t the least likely choice to produce a record for an opening act with one minor hit. In 1983 not many producers were hotter or more productive than me. Though I didn’t win Producer of the Year honors for Let’s Dance, which became David Bowie’s biggest, I had seven major records out and the U.K. music magazine New Music Express said, “Nile Rodgers should win some sort of award for sheer volume alone.”

  So my confidence was pretty high: I would boast during our negotiations, “She’s going platinum-plus,” because I believed in myself. And by then—after a few meetings where I was fully exposed to her now-legendary blond ambition—I really believed in her. I knew I could take her to the next level.

  The record company and Madonna clearly thought so too, or they never would have agreed to the terms of my contract. The agreement we reached—again, a testament to what Madonna had yet to accomplish in her career—was absurdly in my favor. They ultimately signed off on a deal that paid me as much as any artist would expect to end up with today.

  I’m pretty positive she hasn’t paid a producer that much since.

  Still, I guess you could say that history proved they made a good deal: As I write, Like a Virgin has sold more than twenty million units. And the record continues to sell, every day, almost thirty later.

  OUR DEAL FIRMLY IN PLACE, we got right down to the business of making a record. Madonna was ready to go from day one. The first step was to have her lay out her artistic vision for me, so I could help her realize it.

  One afternoon the doorman rang my intercom. “Mr. Rodgers,” he said, “there’s a young lady here to see you.”

  I overheard him ask her name.

  “Madonna. Tell him Madonna is here,” she said.

  “It’s Madonna, Mr. Rodgers,” said my bemused doorman. He’d obviously never met a Madonna before.

  I opened the door to one of the sexiest, friendliest, and happiest women I’d ever seen—and that’s really saying something. Any number of happy, friendly, and sexy women crossed that threshold in the eighties. She was dressed in her soon-to-be iconic street style with her hair tied in a bow and black rubber bracelets dangling up and down her wrists. She looked very young.

  “Yo, this is a nice place,” she said. My apartment was a combination bachelor pad and nightclub, with Art Deco and Japanese antiques, an old-fashioned jukebox, and a multicolored neon stork, inspired by the famous club of the same name. I offered her a drink. She chose something nonalcoholic. I was already nursing my top-of-the-morning bottle of Heineken.

  She knew a thing or two about art and commented on my posters and gouaches by Paul Colin and Van Caulaert that the now famous jewelry designer Loree Rodkin had sold me. We sat facing each other at the Ms. Pac-man two-player console table in my living room.

  We ran through a few of her demos, never listening to anything twice—I didn’t need to. My time at the Apollo and doing countless recording sessions had taught me to memorize entire songs in one listen, so one listen was enough for me. I didn’t show much emotion; I was only thinking about how the songs connected. In short, what was the album’s DHM? Everything she played was pretty catchy, but songs are just songs, and she had hired me to make an album.

  After I downed a few more Heinies, we listened to the rest of her songs. By the time we were through, the tone of the meeting abruptly changed. Madonna’s metamorphosis from a happy-go-lucky post-teenybopper to a hard-core career woman blindsided me.

  “If you don’t love all of these songs,” she said to me in a very matter-of-fact tone, “we can’t work together.”

  I was shocked. I hadn’t received an ultimatum since that crew of enforcers flashed their guns at me when Chic threatened to sue the makers of “A Rapper’s Delight” for sampling “Good Times.” I liked Madonna a lot, and I knew we’d work well together, but I had no choice but to speak the truth.

  “Well, to be honest with you, I don’t love all these songs,” I said, “but I can promise you this: By the time we’re finished with them I will.”

  I don’t remember if she laughed, but she didn’t break the deal.

  THE FIRST TIME I STOPPED BY Madonna’s apartment in SoHo, I was a little surprised by its modesty. Of course it’s funny today, because she’s a hell of a lot richer now than I am, but at the time I actually felt sorry for her. She was closing in on a platinum album but didn’t have much to show for it. Madonna clearly didn’t roll like my artist friends Peter Beard or Joseph Kosuth, who had spacious designer lofts a stone’s throw away. She didn’t even have a decent sof
a for guests to sit on. The only furniture I can remember was a mattress on the floor, which reminded me of Woody’s Avenue C crash pad, where I bunked when I was a teenage runaway. I was raised in this area when my family was doing well and when we weren’t. Even by Beverly and Bobby’s heroin-chic standards this wasn’t making it.

  A couple days after my first visit, I told my handyman to bring her a leather couch from my Connecticut office. After he helped carried it upstairs, he told me he couldn’t believe that Madonna lived in a place that wasn’t half as decked out as his own suburban home.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, I grew as close to Madonna as I’ve ever been to a woman without being romantically involved. We spent every spare moment we could together until her record hit the streets. When we weren’t working, I picked her up in a vintage forties limo for nights on the town.

  It was usually just the two of us, even though we both had significant others and plenty of friends. We were like Gable and Lombard thrust into the eighties, and our dapper chauffeur completed the retro elegance. When we pulled up to a club, any club, we were treated like stars at a Hollywood premiere.

  I got a big kick out of this role-playing game. I obviously can’t speak for her, but you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that this wasn’t one of the most exciting periods of Madonna’s life. It certainly was for me.

  We’d always hit our favorite spots. My preference was a new club called Area, which featured rotating art installations called themes that would change every few weeks. They ran the gamut of visual fantasies and included work from art stars like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. Indie-punk filmmaker Amos Poe used the club’s installations as eye candy for his film Alphabet City, which I scored. Area fit me like a jumpsuit and I loved it there. During the Area days, I felt as close to being a star as I would ever become. I can’t begin to document the endless coke raps and brief encounters I’d have there—and probably shouldn’t. Area was maybe the most perfect club in the world, second only to Studio 54 when it reigned supreme—but I’m talking a very close second.

  Then there was Madge’s favorite spot, the multileveled Danceteria. As much as I dug it, it didn’t feel as sexy to me as it did to her. It did have a diverse roster of live acts, from the hippest of avant-garde jazz (Sun Ra and others) to the newest of new wave (Devo and others), but it never gave me that “I have to be here and nowhere else” feeling. A great nightclub feels like the center of an otherwise cold and lifeless universe. It makes a seemingly frivolous night out feel necessary, life-giving—it’s a communal space where the people, the art on the walls, the art walking around, the dancing, the conversation, the music, the theater of it all, hit the same vibration—and there you are, your whole being humming at the same frequency. Danceteria didn’t quite do all that for me.

  (Illustration credit 11.1)

  Madge, on the other hand, shook like a tuning fork when she walked into the space—and she tried to convince me of how hip it really was. But I was born in New York, and I’d seen every possible club concept by then. For me, Danceteria—which has gone down in downtown history as one of the essential clubs of the era—was just one of the great club options the vast city had to offer, which I took for granted given the sheer abundance of nightlife on our menu. It’s like the way we New Yorkers feel about visiting the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building: We leave it for the tourists and head for the side streets, where the real action is. I’d go to Danceteria a few times with Madonna, but I’d rarely go on my own.

  We sometimes took in restaurants like Marylou’s in the West Village, whose regular patrons, like Jack Nicholson and various CEOs, hardly constituted Madonna’s normal crowd—at least back then.

  I was never the kind of star who’d have a whole street of strangers rubbernecking when I walked by, but in my hometown I’ve always known a lot of people, especially in my old downtown stomping grounds. Though Madonna was still a relative newcomer from Michigan, her presence dominated any room the moment she walked in. I’ve been around celebrities all my life, but she already had that certain something only a handful of people have. Wherever we showed up, I always heard the same refrain:

  “Who’s that girl with Nile?”

  Madonna didn’t do my kind of drinking or drugging, so I kept my cool around her. I always waited to get truly fucked up at the early-morning clubs like Brownies in Alphabet City and the Toilet (a nickname—I don’t remember the club’s real name) on the Upper West Side, long after I left her somewhere or dropped her back home.

  MADONNA WAS VERY SERIOUS about making her record.

  She was much more intense about the process than I was. Maybe I was more relaxed because I was more experienced or had less at stake—or maybe it was because I knew that I was making a record with an emerging star with a crop of great material, which was the easiest job in the world.

  One of my first responsibilities was to convince Madonna that a digitally programmed record would make her sound too pop and not soulful (i.e., black) enough. Her demos were very pop sounding and could’ve lived and died as fly-by-night hits if we didn’t properly capture the soul at Madonna’s core. The tunes were hooky, but on the radio they might be indistinguishable from every other pop song of the moment. We had to be unique. Since computer sequencing now essentially allowed anybody to be funky and groove, I wanted her record to have the classic R&B-based sound that only live players give you. A true artist approached a breathing groove differently from a computer track. The solution was to use my band Chic as the bedrock.

  She let me have that one.

  Ironically, I was now the one with race-based theories about music. As with Bowie, I figured making hits with Madonna was going to be a piece of cake compared to doing the same with Sister Sledge, Chic, or, the hardest of all, Diana Ross. As with Let’s Dance, Like a Virgin was a walk in the park because I had a stacked deck: Madonna was mainstream pop with just enough urban influence to crowd-please across the board. Whether it’s early Elvis, the Beatles, Tom Jones, Roy Orbison, or even Al Jolson, white people doing black music has always been a tried-and-true formula. Especially when white listeners have no idea they’re really listening to black music.

  It had worked with Bowie and Duran Duran. And now, with this astonishingly charismatic girl who turned on every room of strangers we entered, I was sure that I could deliver the goods.

  THINGS WENT SIDEWAYS ALMOST IMMEDIATELY. The demo for one of the first songs we were set to record, “Material Girl,” which was written by Peter Brown (author of some of the greatest dance-floor records of all time, like “Do You Wanna Get Funky with Me” and “Dance with Me”), was fantastic. Still, we had problems.

  To begin with, the song’s key wasn’t right for Madonna’s natural singing voice. She’s comfortable and very warm sounding between alto and mezzo-soprano (think of her voice on her song “Live to Tell” and the verses of “Holiday”), but this version forced her to sing as a mezzo-soprano going up to a B-flat, which was less than flattering, to my ears. She was singing it all with a slight nasal quality. Unfortunately, she’d learned the song that way and she loved what she was hearing. I tried to convince her to let me change the key, but strongheaded Madonna? She was not having it.

  I knew that it was the artist’s name ultimately on the cover of the record—not mine. I also knew that we were on a budget, and was committed, as always, to working fast and coming in on, or under, budget. In Madonna’s words at the time: “Time is money and the money is mine.” So I had no choice but to help her nail the vocal in the demo’s key.

  We worked long and hard to get “Material Girl” right. It wasn’t easy, but Madonna’s legendary work ethic immediately shone through—she didn’t mind putting in the time to get the song in shape. And we didn’t have auto-tune devices, the now commonly used studio tool that can make a hyena sing on key, to help us. The thing is, Madonna’s voice is actually very in tune. And even when it’s not, she still has enough control of it to make it sound like music. Pitch
is important but expression and emotion make a performance. Remember, the artist is telling a story, one that we must believe—the ability to convey powerful, resonant feelings is the key to pop, not perfect technique. After toiling over the vocals for hours, we finally nailed the performance. “Material Girl,” as you surely know, went on to become a massive hit. But, as usual, it took some convincing before we could get it out to the world.

  At the label’s request, I turned over a rough mix. I also gave one to Madonna’s then manager, Freddy DeMann. Freddy was Michael Jackson’s former rep, and he’d just come off the biggest record of all time, Thriller. Freddy was a terrific manager and an even-keeled thinker, so he dealt me a major blow when he called to ask in a dismayed tone, “What did you do to her voice?”

  “I recorded the shit in the key she insisted doing it in. And I worked my ass off to get her to sound good. Don’t blame me for getting it right.”

  He didn’t exactly thank me, but he chilled out. Once I made it clear that I’d fulfilled his artist’s wishes, he must have taken another listen, because he never complained too much about anything again (which is good, because the vocal for “Like a Virgin” was even further out of the pleasant part of her natural range, in the key of F-sharp, and getting it on tape required the exact same arduous process).

  Our next battle was over song order. When I make a record, I always know the sequence of singles from the moment I start recording. I was positive the first single had to be “Material Girl,” which I knew was a smash. After all, I was hired to give her a smash.

  Madonna had an entirely different point of view. She wanted “Like a Virgin.” It’s funny: I’d worked with so many international superstars, but I’d never come across such an iron will before. On this subject, however, neither of us would budge without a fight. Of course, as I said before, I knew the song order was ultimately Madonna’s choice. It was her career and her record. The problem was, I couldn’t get over the powerful sense that she was making a huge mistake.