by Dick Porter
He also produced a single for Walter Steding, helped saxophonist John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards get an album deal and teamed up with Debbie to write some songs for a Canadian cartoon called Rock & Rule, which also featured contributions from Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Cheap Trick. Chris also moved to the other side of the critical fence by writing an account of the recording of Autoamerican for Creem magazine.
In April 1981, Chris and Debbie undertook the most significant side project when they teamed up with Chic’s Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers to record Koo Koo. Although the album was very much a collaborative effort, it would be marketed as Deborah’s solo debut. More importantly, outside the confines of a group format, it allowed the couple free reign to experiment with the elements of black music they were increasingly fascinated by.” By the time we’d finished Autoamerican … Blondie was not changing enough for my tastes,” declared Debbie. “We were worried that it was becoming a static safety thing that was there. Everyone could just step into it and there would be an audience and money. This has never been my goal.”
Glenn O’Brien’s weekly TV Party free-for-all was becoming more chaotic by the week, the range of guests widening to encompass Bernard and Nile, who duly established a rapport with Debbie and Chris. Rodgers spent one show manning the live phone line, handling stunningly ignorant racist calls with grace and cool. As their relationship developed, some form of collaboration seemed logical. To those who knew Blondie and appreciated their downtown New York ethos, it made perfect sense. To disco-hating bigots, however, it was as if they were prostituting their pop purity to Studio 54.
Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards first met in 1970 as session musicians working in the New York area, forming ill-fated rock groups before being joined by former Labelle drummer Tony Thompson and forming a covers band. After gaining singer Norma Jean Wright, soon replaced by the unspeakably sensuous voices of Luci Martin and Alfa Anderson, they started exploring disco. The subsequent demos led to a deal with Atlantic Records, who unleashed a string of epoch-making singles: ‘Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)’, ‘Everybody Dance’, ‘Le Freak’, ‘I Want Your Love’, ‘Good Times’, ‘My Forbidden Lover’ and ‘My Feet Keep Dancing’. By 1979, Nile and Bernard were working further wonders with Sister Sledge, including the anthemic ‘We Are Family’, ‘Thinking Of You’ and ‘He’s The Greatest Dancer’. It was like having a new Motown.
The coolest studio band of the moment and the last word in elegance, Chic broke the disco mould that had solidified after the original Philly soul templates mutated into conveyor-belt corn. Their blend of liquid funk grooves, wittily sensual lyrical flights, monstrous choruses, Robert Sabino’s grand keyboard embellishments and what Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie calls “icy cocaine strings” transformed dance music into heavenly soundtracks of syncopated funk and emotional resonance. To dismiss Chic as emblematic of some anti-rock phenomenon was so thoroughly misguided that it became a crusade in some quarters to spread word of their excellence.
It took Danny Baker, co-founder of punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, Zigzag contributor and NME‘s sharpest young gun, to put everything in perspective: “Chic are that James Brown riff in modern times. They repeat it, always altering and building, and hang the extremely desirable Alfa Anderson/Luci Martin vocals right up front where they can do the most harm … The group is the vehicle for two incredibly gifted musicians in Nile Rodgers, the ace pace flicking rhythm-guitar, and Bernard Edwards, who is the world’s greatest bass player bar none and that’s fact. Between them and the explosive outfit they’ve gathered together and who enrich their ideas – even their string section is a permanent Chic crew – Chic are currently making some of the most exciting and strongest music available in any field or civilisation.”
Inevitably, the rapidly evolving dance scene emulated Chic, in a similar way to how others followed Blondie’s punk-propelled approach to pop. Although appearing to represent polar opposites of the musical spectrum, there were further striking parallels between Blondie and Chic who, along with the ubiquitous Abba, had been probably the biggest chart bands in the world in 1979-80. Apart from both being blessed with a sense of often mischievous humour, both outfits’ twin dynamos felt stifled by the formulas on which their success was predicated. While Debbie and Chris were creating Autoamerican, Nile and Bernard went against their own established grain to produce Real People, their priapic dance-floor glow replaced by personal statements such as ‘Rebels Are We,’ or the title track’s bitter comments on the negative aspects of success: “I’m so tired of hypocrisy … I want to live my life with some real people.”
In hindsight, Real People can be viewed as clearing the air for Koo Koo and the producers’ subsequent career triumphs with Bowie and Madonna. “It was a combination of factors working against us,” Bernard later explained. “The attitude people have to you. Previous to our success everyone was rooting for us. Then all of a sudden, when we made it, they turn against you. Nile and I were hurt and angry. It’s hypocritical, but there’s very little you can do about it. You can decide if you’re going to write about it or not. We decided to write about it.”
Both parties were ready for a new challenge. When it was announced that Debbie and Chris would be working with Chic on an album, many expected a sublime combination of Blondie art-pop and sophisticated disco, a delirious ‘Rapture’/’Good Times’ hybrid that could well have been the biggest record of 1981. Instead, all concerned had a blast by experimenting with many different styles – as long as they weren’t their own. The result was a bold, playful statement that declared how neither party would be defined by commercial expectations.
Shortly before starting the project, The Chic Organisation had turned down a personal request from Aretha Franklin for a disco makeover. “We knew those guys from Chic and went round to see them right after they finished Diana Ross,” explains Chris of the Motown star’s 1980 album Diana, which would yield the hit single ‘Upside Down’. “They played us their production of the Diana Ross record and I thought it was really fantastic. I said, ‘This’ll put Diana Ross back in the charts!’ Then, after that they had all this hassle with Motown wanting to remix it all, which is really stupid, but it was really successful anyway. We had all this in common. Then, when ‘Rapture’, which is really an homage to Chic, crossed over we started getting more of a black audience in the States. We admire them a lot, so [Koo Koo] seemed like the right thing to do. If it wasn’t for linking up with those guys, I don’t think we would have done the solo album so soon.”
‘I don’t think we would have done it if they hadn’t said, ‘Yeah, we got the time,’” agrees Debbie. “It really was fun to do, so much. We had a lot of laughs, I’m telling you. Sometimes my face would hurt from laughing. God, they’re so crazy!”
The sessions, which would last five weeks, commenced with Nile treating Debbie, Chris and the other Chic musicians to an early morning ride along the East River in his speedboat. “We had to hold on for dear life,” recalled Debbie. “I liked it, but I was screaming and Tony Thompson was up front screaming too. Nile was driving us all crazy, because he likes to go so fast, and we were in terror throughout the ride. Suddenly we were at the beginning of the bay heading out toward Long Island. The swells were huge, there was a big wind, and we went right over a huge log … That’s when we realised the water was too high and everybody went berserk, cursing at Nile, who was having a great time, to slow down.”
“It was fun,” says Chris of the sessions. “They started off telling a lot of race jokes and making us feel inferior for being white. The engineer, Chuck Martin, was telling jokes about doing dog barks [as heard on ‘Jump Jump’]. It was worse than Chapman. That’s great. I think a lot of it comes across on the record.”
“To me, each producer produces you differently every time. Michael Chapman always made me very compatible with the Blondie sound. He used to equalise my voice electronically, and do certain things to it to make it have that sound,” Deborah explains. “I
n some ways I insisted on it too because I always used to say, ‘I don’t want to hear a lot of bottom on my voice.’ I went for a more trebly sound so I could cut through a lot of the instruments, because it was like that wall [of sound] business. I think there was a lot more space in the Koo Koo kind of music. Chic just have a different way of doing it. It was pretty much a straighter production, a lot rawer and a lot funkier. I don’t think there’s any equalising on my voice.
“They’re like the cream, those guys. They’re really fucking great. I can’t say it enough; I’m amazed. A lot of people in the States don’t even think they know how to play, think they’re just producers. Yeah well, that’s certainly not the Chic fans. I think people that are not really disco fans think those guys are slick disco producers, but really it’s amazing; their rock history really is funny.”
“We used to get a lot of flack because people didn’t know whether we were white or black,” remembered Bernard of their funk-rock group The Boys. “We’ve always thought that’s why we’ve been successful. We must go against the grain. If we didn’t, we’d turn into just another R&B band, or black guys trying to be a rock’n’roll group.”
“They felt very confident about it,” recalls Debbie of how all concerned sought to broaden their creative horizons. “They were looking for a chance to break out of their format as Chic as much as Chris and I were looking for a chance to break out of our format with Blondie. Really, we were both equally in the same position. They had been totally identified with that sound they had and Blondie had been identified with that sound they had, and then we got the chance to do something together. There are pieces of both those things, and you can hear them. It’s nice, I really like it. I’m nuts about this record. I always do this now, it’s getting to be boring, even to myself: each time we come out with a record I like that record better, but this is the one I like best.”
“The reason why we get along so well with Debbie and Chris is because what we do is something that they’ve been doing and something they like to do,” enthused Nile of the fusion of post-punk rock and funk. Each songwriting partnership wrote four songs and collaborated on two, with a band based around the core Chic trio of Nile, Bernard and Tony Thompson with Chris also contributing guitar. Opener ‘Jump Jump’ features Debbie with a frisky jazz element in her voice as the Chic contingent drop the kind of taut funky backdrop they could do with their eyes closed, Bernard’s ever-probing bass blasting to the fore as Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale add backing vocals to the cross-cultural stew.
Issued as the second single from Koo Koo, Bernard and Nile’s ‘The Jam Was Moving’ is a kind of precursor to Cameo’s 1986 hit ‘Word Up’, with additional spiky shuffle and an ‘Eight Miles High’ guitar quote. ‘Chrome’ is the kind of exotic mid-tempo outing which Blondie had become adept at, in which Debbie sings about “changing colours like a chameleon”. “I wanna become like the chameleon in ‘Chrome’, I wanna do it all, I don’t want to do one thing,” she asserted. “It’s just a fantasy based on Truman Capote’s book [Music For Chameleons – his semi-fictionalised anthology of articles originally commissioned for Warhol’s Inter View magazine, while Debbie’s lyric was a more literal fantasy of physical transformation].”
“It’s old, I’ve had that for quite a while,” revealed Chris. “It was written for Alphaville. It’s supposed to be like flying at night, that kind of imagery.”
‘Surrender’ could be the quintessential Chic outing, a scrub guitar-infused funk-up that sees Nile on blazing form, spliced to a tightrope bass-drum interplay. Harry/Stein’s ‘Inner City Spillover’ flows over Chic’s first and only stab at reggae, its lyrics referencing ‘red card’ – a three-card monte street hustle. “The black kids set up little cardboard boxes and try to get tourists. One kid’s a lookout for police.”
“There’s a big difference in reference points too,” explained Chris at the time. “Because there’s not really such a thing as reggae music with black kids in the States. In the States they listen to Chic and that’s really street music. And there’s the whole rapping movement. [In the UK] kids heavily identify with reggae. In America, it comes out of disco, out of funk. The rapping thing’s the first real black movement that’s come out. It’s thriving. Racially, it’s totally mixed. There’s no segregation in the New York rock scene.”
The album’s debut single, ‘Backfired’, is adorned by Rodgers’ steely guitar sound, which the Edwards/Thompson rhythm section locks into the set’s toughest groove, elaborating on themes found on Real People, as Nile’s lyrics lambast music-industry parasites. “There’s so much bullshit that goes down,” he explained. “People give all this stuff to bands, all these promises. They’re just charlatan-type fast-talkers who try to pull the wool over your eyes.”
Anyone hoping Debbie would drape her velvet tones over one of Chic’s exquisite ballads was rewarded by sepulchral jazz croon ‘Now I Know You Know’; time stands still as the band work their understated, languid majesty. Midway, its curious wind-tunnel resonance blows in a jazz zephyr for a few bars. “That’s one of Nile’s favourites too – maybe ‘cos he wrote it,” smiles Debbie. ‘I’m really perplexed that people haven’t jumped on that more. I thought that was really the most outstandingly, strikingly different thing.”
“Vocally, we really brought her out front,” observed Bernard. “We thought to ourselves, ‘Debbie, sing a ballad?’ But, most of the people we told about it thought it was a really great idea. For Nile and I, it was the exposure. For Debbie, it was something new, something different. She told us she loved our work and wanted to sing on some of our music. And she sounded real sincere. She just didn’t want to keep doing what was expected of her. She’s real aware of what’s going on.”
Interestingly, one of Koo Koo’s two four-way collaborative efforts, ‘Under Arrest’, is the song that veers closest to Blondie’s early signature sound, while Chris and Debbie’s ‘Military Rap’ adds bugle calls to a new-wave gallop that the Chic contingent found challenging. “They’d never recorded anything that fast, not since the days they were a rock band; that blew their minds,” Chris recalls. “They’d never had people telling them what to play before. I did a lot of the basslines.”
Eastern-infused disco closer ‘Oasis’ was the second collective collaboration. “It’s the old Islamic disco song that people have been talking about in New York for years – ‘Let’s have a hit in Tehran,’” offered Chris. “On TV Party we have Islamic disco and stuff like that. TV Party is real crazy … that’s where the Islamic disco thing came from. We did the track and were listening to it and we decided to take the snare drum out, and that was it! Now it sounded authentic.”
“Nile’s working [album] title was The Niggers And The Bitch, which we decided not to give to Chrysalis,” deadpanned Chris. “Doing that album really brought home to us how much fucking racism there is. We were getting – ‘You can’t do that, it’s too R&B.’ The inverse of that is when Chic started out, they were a rock band and they’d send their tapes to the record companies and be invited up. And they’d walk in and when the companies saw what colour they were – forget it. ‘Why don’t you play soul music?’”
“Personally, I don’t think it has anything to do with music. It’s racial,” Deborah asserted.
“I think there’s racism in the rock community that says white people can’t make black music because they’re trying to sound black,” Chris observed. “That was never our point – we’re not trying to be anything, just trying to make music. And there’s another sort of racism that says contemporary black music is not acceptable – that after it’s sat around for 10 years, it’s safe and it’s cool. I mean, at the time of Motown, in the mid-sixties, the blues were accepted, but Motown itself was considered, like, background music. I remember how kids felt about The Four Tops back then.”
Chrysalis threw a lavish party to launch Koo Koo at Covent Garden’s Sanctuary spa in central London on July 27, 1982, laying out an extravagant spread. “It
was something for the journalists,” explains Chris.” We okayed a guest list of 100, then about 500 showed up. What the hell … I don’t know if we would do that again. I guess everybody goes nuts about the expense and Debbie with a bodyguard and all that crap. And it was just too hot. I had a good time. I don’t know if Debbie had a good time. I was prepared to be uncomfortable.”
The Sun tabloid focused on Deborah’s discomfort, rolling out clichés under the headline, ‘It’s too hot for the Blondie Cinderella!’, traducing ‘delicious Debbie’ with the title ‘The Cinderella of Pop’ and describing how she left at midnight, “looking tired and distressed”, having only stayed for a bottle of Perrier water. The tabloid concludes that ‘the wild, wild Debbie Harry party” had to be the last of its kind in terms of expense, describing the buffet and observing how people were making off with whole crabs under their arms. (They also mentioned Chris’ new beard, quoting him as saying, “I just got fed up with shaving. Debbie doesn’t mind the beard. She calls me her bit of rough.”)
Kris Needs was present at the launch:
Meeting my plus-one Jah Wobble in the pub beforehand was always likely to make for an action-packed evening and I later awoke in an industrial dustbin. This was after the back of my head appeared in The Sun next to a green-wigged Debbie and I got to meet Nile Rodgers: charming, larger-than-life and having a blast. It turned out he was an avid Zigzag reader, which clinched a Chic interview later in the year. I asked Bernard Edwards what it was like working with Debbie and Chris.
“The recording wasn’t difficult,” he replies. “Me and Nile used to work with three or four people in a band all the time. This record was going back to that kind of thing. We had a ball. We got real close to each other. There was great communication once we got in there.”