by Nile Rodgers
LIKE A VIRGIN HIT THE STREET on November 6, 1984, after a seemingly endless wait. It went quickly to No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart and hit No. 6 on the R&B chart. The white-artist-singing-black-music formula worked better than with any previous artist of mine. The single stayed on the pop Top 40 chart for three months. The album became the biggest-selling record of both of our careers.
I knew Madonna was a superstar-in-waiting, but even I was surprised by Like a Virgin’s unprecedented success. A few months earlier, I’d taken her to Madison Square Garden to see Duran Duran, and she sat relatively unnoticed in the audience. Only a couple of girls in the upper level screamed and waved at her. Seven months later she’d return as a headliner, and didn’t dare step into the audience. Her near-riotous fans were completely uncontrollable.
I saw Madonna at a party after she played the Garden, in a club we both loved called the Palladium, and I’ll never forget the statement she made to me: “Nile, I can’t believe this shit,” she said. “Every time I go outside, there’s always fucking reporters and photographers, and it really pisses me off.”
I’d never met anyone—ever—who worked so hard to become famous, which is why I did a double take. So I said the first thing that popped into my mind: “Madonna, get the fuck out of here. The day you’re going to be really pissed off is the day you come outside and they’re not there.”
ON A MONDAY MORNING IN JULY OF 1985, I awakened in my New York apartment from my typical two- to three-hour slumber. I contemplated skipping work, thinking I’d better stay in bed because the room was spinning. I didn’t even remember going to sleep. And regardless of how hard I tried, I couldn’t recognize the names and numbers on the paper scraps that littered my night table, except one.
The only name that registered was Madonna’s. But the number was written in a very different hand, so I knew I hadn’t written it. I could only assume she must have. How long had I had the number? Since the Palladium party? Who knew? At some point during the day, I called her and we spoke about our upcoming gig—Live Aid. Despite my increasingly foggy mind, I was still in good enough shape to work all the time. My latest project was with the Thompson Twins.
I was surprised by how pumped up Madonna was about the gig—she was close to obsessed. Live Aid, as most people know, was the second phase of the charity project that recorded the song “We Are the World.” Six months earlier the newly dubbed Material Girl had been snubbed from the original project, even though the “We Are the World” organizers chose participants from American Music Awards attendees, which included Madonna. On the night of the recording session, a group of us stopped at Morton’s Restaurant in L.A. for dinner to celebrate Madonna’s performance on the AMAs. Afterwards Michael Ostin and I headed over to A&M Studio for the session. Madonna didn’t join us. She was keenly aware of the slight. As I said earlier, I could always tell when she was hurt—that night she was hurt and furious.
We were all perplexed. By then Madonna was a household name. The only explanation was a breaking controversy about some racy photos that were supposedly about to come out. The chatter about it dominated industry gossip. And maybe the “We Are the World” organizers were just worried about bad press.
Like many struggling artists, Madonna had indeed posed nude a few years earlier. No big deal. Now that she was a star, the pictures were coming out in Playboy. Sort of a big deal. And they were full-frontal shots. Okay, that was kind of a huge deal. Though I never saw the pics, I remember the frenzy they caused. Who cares? In my opinion, she should have sung on that record. But then, she was my artist, so what else would I say?
Of course, instead of derailing her career, the scandal propelled her into the stratosphere.
MADONNA TOOK THE LIVE AID STAGE overdressed for the scorching summer heat in a classic eighties pantsuit complete with shoulder pads and a Nehru collar. Her opportunity to address the swirling controversy was immediate: A voice broke through the cacophonous crowd noise, yelling “Take it off!”
Without missing a beat, she replied, “I ain’t takin’ shit off today!”
The rest of her set was almost irrelevant. Nothing could top that zinger. With one line she told us she was human. She’d been poor and had to do a job for money to make ends meet, and who can’t relate to that? But she wasn’t anybody’s boy toy, no matter what her belt buckle said. After her set was through, she graciously played tambourine and sang backing vocals with the Thompson Twins. Most of the day’s musical press was about Bob Geldof, David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s “Dancing in the Streets” (which I also produced as a single), the band Queen’s historic London performance, and Phil Collins’s transatlantic London-and-Philly adventure (he performed his own set in both venues, and in Philly also played with Led Zeppelin alongside Chic’s drummer Tony Thompson). But Madonna’s perfect one-liner captured a moment in its own right. It was never just the music with Madonna.
It’s too bad that she’s become so good at being a star that I doubt she’ll ever tell anyone what she really thinks about anything now. Certainly not in public, on a stage, in front of the world. She has too much to lose. That’s the downside to all those paparazzi and press stalking her, who still haven’t gone away: Maybe by now she really wants to be free to walk out of her house without a supernova of flashbulbs exploding around her. But I doubt it. She’ll likely be a perfect promotion machine to the very end.
Madonna used to call me about the silliest shit in the world, and no matter how inconsequential, it always felt substantive.
“Hey, Nile,” she said one time, calling me from Morocco or somewhere in the Middle East, if I remember correctly.
“What’s up, Madonna?”
“Freddie [her manager] put me in a fucked-up seat on the plane,” she began, and the story went from there, never quite working its way to a larger point. I was in a recording session half a world away, but I took a break to hear her long-distance melodrama. I have no idea what she thought I could do to help and I don’t know why I stopped the session to try, but Madonna had a way of making her interests feel vital, especially during the period before Like a Virgin came out. During that phase I watched her transform from what she was into what she’d become. I’ve worked for many famous people, but Madonna was very different—and still I can’t quite put my finger on why. In a low-res world, she was high-definition hyperrealism, as if her body had greater atomic density, every strand of her hair and thread of her clothing brighter and more colorful, more real.
MADONNA’S FIRST VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS appearance was pure pop history, the equal of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk on Motown 25, or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Though her vocal performance wasn’t pristine—remember, the song is out of her natural range and difficult to sing—she gave a do-or-die effort that shocked the world at a moment when the whole world was watching.
I watched the performance with Mick Jagger and another friend in a recording studio lounge—at the time I was producing Mick’s solo record She’s the Boss. After Madonna performed “Like a Virgin,” my friend said, “Madonna is just style and no substance.” I said, “You just don’t get it, do you? This is show business—style is substance!” Mick nodded in agreement. I was a little ticked off and wanted to make my friend understand me—and get a laugh out of Mick.
“I wish I could bottle what she’s got and give you a drink of that shit,” I said. “Then I could produce your ass and we’d both have a lot more money.”
I DIDN’T GO TO THE VMAS with Madonna that night because Jagger’s project was close to missing our deadline. Mick had taped a speech for the event so we could keep working. But my then girlfriend Nancy was at the VMAs to support her. Madonna had really connected with Nancy while waiting for Virgin to come out. For a while they were extremely close. Madonna realized she needed a cram course in the folkways of the upper classes. Nancy was the perfect tutor.
Nancy was born in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. Her Social Register parents were sticklers for manners and proper behavior. Nancy’s thank
-you notes were written promptly, her handshake was firm and came with solid eye contact, and she knew which fork to use. She’d attended a snotty all-girls private school and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, then lived in Rome and Paris, where she became famed socialite Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild’s pet protégée and observed firsthand how the truly rich and titled lived.
Madonna’s nose for advancement picked up the scent of Nancy’s blue blood. The two women were fascinated with each other. Madonna, I believe, reminded Nancy of Dickens’s Artful Dodger when she first met her. Madge dressed like a hip ragamuffin and lived in an empty loft; Nancy’s digs at Eightieth and Fifth were lavishly decorated and full of antiques. The midwestern college dropout was about to get schooled. She seemed to prefer Nancy’s fancy uptown Victorian digs to her downtown boho loft, and often stayed there with Sean Penn. Nancy hardly minded. An interior designer, she had hooked up my new pad and often crashed at my place.
Madonna soon developed a taste for Denning & Fourcade sofas and especially loved the richly embroidered sheets that adorned Nancy’s ornate bed. When she got engaged to Sean Penn, Nancy told her, “We need to register at Tiffany’s. And Frette.”
Madonna chose very tasteful china and silver and fancy Frette linens. She even got engraved Rizzoli stationery for the notes that Nancy taught her how to write. She was an apt pupil all right, but she must have missed a couple of Nancy’s classes on life at the top. At her ’85 bridal shower, she received all sorts of presents, from her downtown friends as well as Nancy’s uptown friends. A pair of berry spoons from James Robinson’s antique shop awoke the Detroit girl in her.
“Berry spoons! What the fuck are berry spoons?” shouted Madonna.
I bet she knows now. At Sting’s birthday party a few years ago, she greeted me with an English accent, and certain guests were talking about her love of shooting pheasant. I’ve heard she had one thousand unlucky birds delivered to her estate for that sole purpose. I believe I’ve seen photos of her gleefully partying on “the Glorious Twelfth” (August 12), the first day of the shooting season for grouse and ptarmigan. On that day many poor unsuspecting birds lose their lives, and culinary delicacies are served up at grand parties throughout the British Isles with beautifully engraved antique sterling-silver berry spoons.
“Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel.”
—MADONNA LOUISE CICCONE
(Illustration credit 11.2)
twelve
Vive la Révolution!
BACK IN 1970, GIL SCOTT-HERON SAID, “THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT be televised.” With all due respect to the great poet and musician, he was wrong. In the searing summer heat of 1985, a televised event called Live Aid, a music-superstar-driven, dual-stage concert to help save Africa, became the largest pop event of all time—and I was part of the core band.
Live Aid certainly felt like revolution, kind of, sort of, or at least what passed for a revolution in 1985. It was definitely a huge moment in my life—proof that everything I’d devoted my career to truly had the power to change the world. The good news for me was that Live Aid wasn’t exactly a call to arms or a demand for any personal sacrifice. Since I was now over thirty, developing a little paunch, and getting high daily on toot and common store-bought grog, it’s probably all the revolution I could handle.
In retrospect, I see that ’85 was certainly a revolutionary year for me. I was at war with myself, in the middle of an epic personal identity crisis of sorts. Who was I? Was I an over-the-counter countercultural zealot who’d achieved some higher state of cool? Or was I just a humdrum alcoholic with enough money to buy tons of coke and enough talent to still hang on to a good job? It was a tough call.
Eventually I’d have many occasions to question my path toward garden-variety alcoholism, but July 13 wasn’t one of them. Live Aid was the payoff for a lifetime of hard work. I was practically tripping over music legends—Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Ashford & Simpson, Tom Petty, Hall & Oates, Teddy Pendergrass, Duran Duran, and Madonna—all gathered together like a walking collection of Rolling Stone covers.
I’d admired almost every artist here since I was a teen. Now I was a peer, which was hard for me to believe.
LIVE AID SHOULD HAVE REPRESENTED the highest peak in my professional life, but for some reason I kept pressing on, in search of a higher mountaintop.
Like a Virgin, the biggest record of my career, guaranteed a certain amount of financial security and freedom. After that my life started changing very quickly. I was now working exclusively as an independent producer. Chic was officially dead. Since I no longer had Chic for my artistic expression, I started pouring even more of myself into my own career. I left the Power Station for Skyline Studios, in Koreatown at 36 West Thirty-seventh Street (which later became the Wu-Tang Clan’s famed “36 Chambers”).
At Skyline, life was very different. My cars were repeatedly broken into, my assistants were mugged, and Koreatown was dangerous after dark. Still, I loved it there. I was completely fearless. Instead of lamenting the loss of security, my former partner Nard, and the band, I reveled in my newfound freedom. I was morphing into an odd and fairly dangerous hybrid addict: the junkie workaholic.
As the eighties pressed on, I started to become more and more cavalier about my health and safety. I was like a ravenous vampire at dawn. I consumed everything as if it was my last night on earth. I piloted my various speedboats as wildly as a Roaring Twenties daredevil, maneuvered my exotic sports cars like I was in the Indy 500, ingested more drugs than I ever had before, had tons of sex in a convenient room that overlooked the studio, and began to believe in my own immortality.
I took on more projects than one human being could manage, forcing myself to work ungodly hours, aided by coke and liquid courage. Though Bernard wasn’t around to edit me, I’d started to overcome my natural instinct to overcomplicate my music. I became very confident in my abilities, and backed that hubris up by churning out a Herculean number of TV commercials and film scores, not to mention dozens of records and the occasional live gig. Surprisingly, they were all good—well, almost all.
My career was smoking hot, but the truth is, no matter how successful I was, I knew I was never the first choice for the easy gigs, or “layups,” as we call them. I was usually a label’s last resort. I don’t know why this has always been the case, but I believe most labels categorized my sound as too black or offbeat. Maybe I don’t play the political game well; or perhaps the absence of a manager promoting me behind the scenes while I toiled in the studio kept me from the choicest projects. For the most part, I got called in from the bullpen to save a losing game, like when music business legend Clive Davis called me in to rescue the Thompson Twins record Here’s to Future Days (which went on to be a hit).
I pretended this was the way I liked it. I would have definitely welcomed a Céline or Whitney record thrown my way. But, hey, c’est la vie. My hard-partying, fast-living style probably wouldn’t have suited them anyway. Well, maybe.
By then I’d basically met every big rock star I’d ever admired as a teenager. It’s funny what happens when you meet the people you’ve idolized as a kid. For one thing, I quickly discovered that I wasn’t the only one with hearty appetites. I was often amazed by the drinking-and-drugging blackout stories I’d hear from stars I was working with. I would be deep into a story about how their work had profoundly influenced me, how touched I’d been, only to learn that he or she didn’t even remember making the work!
“No way this amnesia could be real,” I thought to myself. “Bullshit, you don’t remember recording the song that changed my life. It’s just feigned humility.” But the truth is, shockingly long-term blackouts are not uncommon among the creative set. Dozens of iconic superstars I’d meet lacked any genuine memories of their own groundbreaking achievements. They had zero recall of events that had gone on to become rock-and-roll history. As I moved in more rarified circles, the Lost Weekender
list continued to grow.
Don’t believe me?
1. When I first met David Bowie, I mentioned that I’d loved many of his infamous glam-rock records. When I asked him about Pin Ups specifically, he said: “Nile, I don’t remember doing that album. I know it’s my work. I know it’s my picture on the cover. But I have no independent recollection of doing it.” At the time, I believed his memory loss was a by-product of the traumatic childhood incident that altered the color of his eyes.
2. My fear from the Let’s Dance sessions finally came true during the recording of Like a Virgin, when my ex-partner and bassist extraordinaire Bernard Edwards got so high one day that he completely missed a session. When he showed up the next day, Nard had no idea that a full day and a session had gone by. In fact, he was almost confrontational, as if I’d made the whole thing up. I sincerely believe he didn’t know that he’d gotten so high that he lost a day of his life.
3. Speaking of Nard: In an attempt to keep our increasingly diminishing friendship intact, I once invited him to see Paul McCartney at Madison Square Garden. Nard had recently had his own big hit, producing the Power Station and Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” and I’d wanted to introduce him to new prospective relationships in the rock world. We were seated in the VIP section next to Chris Squire, bassist of the group Yes. I’d seen Chris at the Garden at least twice in the early seventies, and more recently, performing Yes’s recent smash “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” After we’d discussed how great Sir Paul’s sound was, the legendary musician said to me, “Do you think we [meaning Yes] should play this place, too?”
I thought he was joking, so I comically replied, “Oh, for sure. You’ll sound a lot better when you play here now.”
“What d’you mean, mate?” he asked seriously. Was he joking?