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I’d been recommended by a guitarist friend as a last-minute substitute for the guitarist in Hack Bartholomew’s better-than-average pick-up band. As a sub, I didn’t know a soul on the stage, but they were playing an RB song called "Sissy Strut" in the key of C, and I hopped right onstage with my arch-top jazz guitar and joined in.
Bartholomew’s band wasn’t top shelf, but Hack’s trumpet playing had soulful flair and he gigged with Joe Simon, a soul charttopper. Hack was a solid front man and knew how to put on a good show: something you had to know to work at the Fairtree, a mid-level gig on the infamous Chitlin’ Circuit, a string of black nightclubs that stretched from Buffalo, New York, to South Florida. The same way Jewish entertainers had the Borscht Belt, soul musicians had the Chitlin’ Circuit. Most RB acts east of the Rockies worked it on some level. There would be no Commodores, Impressions, Marvin Gaye, LaBelle, Hendrix, or Funkadelic without it.
Playing these clubs, which ranged in décor from ghetto-fabulous versions of the bar in Star Wars to tin-roof shacks in the Bible Belt, was the mainstay gig for most of the musicians I knew at the time. This was our equivalent of Class A baseball. You had a long way to go to get to the majors, but it was a necessary step. It may have been the minors, but the Fairtree had a tough crowd that was used to seeing quality acts, some of whom would go on to become big stars. If a patron called out "Chocolate Buttermilk," "Pusher Man," or even "I Want You Back," the band had better play it and play it well.
On any other night, I would’ve already filed the proceedings under "just another gig." Only there was something special about this band: the bassist, Bernard Edwards. We’d actually spoken over the phone a few months earlier about gigging together, and we hadn’t hit it off. Bernard was not impressed with my avant-garde classical-jazz-rock-fusion ideas and told me in no uncertain terms to lose his number. But once we started playing together that night, well, it was like we each telepathically knew what the other was thinking. The two new dudes took command of the unit, and the quality of Hack’s show jumped up a few notches. Now we came off like a fully rehearsed band.
If someone didn’t know the material, Bernard and I called out the changes. We instinctively formed a temporary partnership for the sake of keeping the band tight behind Hack, so he could concentrate on being the show’s star. Little did we know that this was to be our primary role for the rest of our lives.
Thinking back on that first night, I can still vividly see and hear my future partner’s traditionalist soul-brother swagger. Nard was dressed stylishly, but conservatively: He wore silk slacks with back flap pockets, playboys, and a bly. Playboys resembled Hush Puppies with one-inch-thick rubber soles, and blys, if that’s how you spell it, were knitted shirts with elaborate patterns. I was in my usual hippie ensemble. We were as different as night and day, but like night and day, you couldn’t have one without the other.
We became inseparable. If I got hired for a gig, I worked hard to get Nard added, and vice versa. For the next couple of weeks, we did a few consecutive boogaloo gigs (which meant the set list was comprised of current RB pop songs) before getting another call from Hack and moving to a more upscale Italian nightclub where the set list was expanded to include standards. I don’t recall the club’s exact name for sure (I think it was Delmonico’s), but it was on Morris Park Avenue in the East Bronx, a sparsely populated section of town that I’d lived in at various times in my life, with Beverly and Graham.
It wasn’t exactly instant fame and glamour, but it was nicer than our Chitlin’ gigs. For me, alas, it was short-lived. I was fired from Hack Bartholomew’s band our first night there, because my girlfriend Connie came to see me. According to management, they didn’t like the way she was dressed. Bernard saw the trouble coming. "Yo, man," I remember him warning me when he noticed her entering the club, "Connie’s headlights are on high beam." My girlfriend had come to our gig wearing a very revealing low-cut designer dress. Picture a reverse wool corset that laced up the front from her navel. The opening widened the whole way up, until it reached her breasts. Very Sophia Loren. I got sacked and wound up getting paid for a half night’s work. "Hey, man, we can’t have that here," the white club owner told me. He never explained what the "that" was that they couldn’t have there, but he didn’t have to. It was the last time I’d work with Hack, and the beginning of a lifetime working with Bernard Edwards.
Nard and I gigged together on the Chitlin’ Circuit up until 1977. From the back of the bandstand, we learned the fundamentals of how to build a successful music production business. In 1973 Nard landed the gig that would change our lives. He became music director for a vocal group called New York City, which was known for its Philly-sounding soul, despite its name. NYC was signed to a label called Chelsea Records, which was owned by Wes Farrell, who was married to Tina Sinatra. They were both Van Nuys Airport people, an irony I didn’t bother explaining to my friends. We took the name the Big Apple Band as NYC’s backup band.
New York City scored a hit record, "I’m Doing Fine Now," by producer/songwriter extraordinaire Thom Bell, who was best known at the time for his work with the Delfonics, the Stylistics, and the Spinners. We’d soon be gigging all over the world. And for a while, we were on a hot streak. We played large venues with a diverse group of headline RB acts such as the O’Jays and Parliament-Funkadelic; we even did some dates on the American leg of the Jackson 5’s first world tour. NYC’s Philly Soul sound was very happening. Thom Bell was at the top of his game, and his slick, sophisticated soul dominated the RB and pop charts.
Though the Big Apple Band didn’t play on Bell’s recordings, we played the music live very well. Bernard and I always tried to make live music faithful to the records, as we’d done in Hack’s pick-up band the night we initially played together. But this was my first taste of playing in front of people in big-time situations. With Sesame Street, I played in the orchestra pit and was basically hidden. Now I was twenty-one years old and things were changing quickly.
When I started with NYC, I only ate organic food (preferably macrobiotic). I didn’t drink, smoke, or take drugs. I was wholly dedicated to practicing guitar and embraced a monklike celibacy. My personality caused some discomfort between me and my New York City bosses, because they thought I was gay. Of course that could be the only explanation for my strange habits as far as these brothers were concerned.
In retrospect, I can sort of see their point. The band had many willing girls throwing themselves at us, but I wasn’t interested. I just wanted to read books and practice every chance I got. I was very shy on stage, almost to the point of being introverted. I kept my head down and never looked at the people in the audience. New York City wanted to fire me, but Bernard convinced them to keep me.
Slowly but surely my situation forced me to change. I remember the exact day it happened. We were back on the Chitlin’ Circuit, as some time had passed since "I’m Doing Fine" was on the charts. We were in Raleigh, North Carolina, when the tour bus pulled into a McDonald’s and I ordered a fish sandwich, thinking, Well, at least it’s fish! Next, we hit Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I had a one-night stand with an army girl who snuck me into her motel room through the window. Before we had sex, she asked me inquisitively, "You’re really from New York, right? Do you know any Jews?" I replied, "Millions of ’em." I enjoyed the punch line as much as the sex.
To keep costs down, the band shared rooms on the road, and my roommate was the drummer. He had a constant trail of girls and I’d sometimes get the overflow. I dated a number of hot flight attendants and I started to drink wine—but only with my meals! Yes, I was becoming more like the other dudes in the band. I was also becoming much closer to Bernard. Though he never criticized my odd proclivities to my face (other than to joke around), he constantly worked at redesigning me into a soul man. Nard wasn’t the only one giving me the Pygmalion treatment. I had another muse in Miami Beach, Marsha Ratner, leader of a pack of fabulous people in that town’s wild party scene. She was also a single mom who reminded me of my own mother.1 When she first saw me perform, she wondered why I kept turning my back to the crowd and from that point on committed to helping me come out of my shell, and, slowly, it started to work. My final act of transformation also took place in Miami, but this one was musical.
One day, following a gig in Miami, Nard got me to trade in my prized jazz guitar, a hollow-bodied Gibson Barney Kessel, for a sleek solid-bodied Fender Stratocaster, the six-string equivalent of trading in a Range Rover for a Porsche. The local act that opened for us played on our equipment, and their guitar player sounded better than I did on my own amplifier. Nard convinced me it was the guitar that made the difference. His soul-man makeover plan was working. He came to my room to admire my new guitar and showed me the style the other guy had played on my amp. He fingered the chords with his left hand, and his right hand would continuously play sixteen notes to the bar while accenting the main parts of the rhythm. He called it "chucking." Bernard used to be a guitar player before he switched to bass, and one lesson was all I needed. For the next few nights straight, while my roommate pursued all manner of trysts, I was having a love affair in the bathroom with my new ax. In just a few days, I’d emerge as a chucking funk guitarist who knew more jazz chord inversions than most of my RB counterparts.
1. Her young son, Brett, grew up to be a popular film director. Brett is like my brother, friend, and son. Our identities were both formed in the color-blind world of art—and he’s as comfortable with Mike Tyson and the Wu-Tang Chan as I was with the B-52’s or Duran Duran.
Around that time I met a girl named Karen who fit my soulful transformation like a Temptations sharkskin suit. She was one of those girls who was so fine, people just wanted to be around her. She knew everybody from Nicky Barnes, the famed New York gangster, to DJs like Frankie Crocker, Vaughan Harper, and scores of other local radio personalities. With Karen as my girl, a Strat as my guitar, and Bernard as my bandleader, I started to fit into the RB scene more organically. Karen’s friends became my friends and Nard’s music became my music.
New York City was our main gig, but the Big Apple Band sometimes played without them. Truth be told, the Big Apple Band was only one of many monikers we worked under. While NYC was losing its popularity, the backup band was developing a following. Our name changed based on the gigs that our various agents and managers landed. About the only thing that remained consistent among every version of the band was me on guitar and Bernard on bass. (We also had the good fortune of regularly working with two talented up-and-coming young singers: Luther Vandross and Fonzi Thornton, both of whom I’d known ever since the Sesame Street days, and who would appear on records with Bernard and me for the rest of our lives.)
By then I’d been working with Nard for about three years. We were as close as two people could ever be. Our level of artistic trust was high. Every relationship that I’ve had with an artist is a slight structural variation of my relationship with Bernard. We taught each other how to believe in each other’s artistic ideas; we also taught each other how to fight for ideas when we thought they best served the project. And we’d serendipitously created a production technique that would be the foundation for every project we’d do until our last breath. We called it DHM, or Deep Hidden Meaning. Our golden rule was that all our songs had to have this ingredient. In short it meant understanding the song’s DNA and seeing it from many angles. Art is subjective, but if we knew what we were talking about, then we could relay it to others in various disguises while maintaining its essential truth.
By the midseventies, the New York club scene was exploding, and the once trendy Apollo, which used to be the be-all and end-all for RB musicians, was quickly becoming a musical dinosaur stuck in the black music culture of the fifties and sixties.
Meanwhile, there was a mighty storm organizing on the horizon, called disco. My downtown stomping ground was the leading edge of this revolutionary movement. History has reduced this glorious and complex period so badly that it’s often dismissed as a one-line cinematic throwaway—the Saturday Night Fever or Studio
54 era—but it was so much more than that, especially for me.
A new way of living, with a new kind of activism, had emerged, and my new crew—girlfriend Karen, music partner Bernard, and myself—embodied it. As founding members of this fledgling counterculture lifestyle, we held our meetings and demonstrations on the dance floor.
Karen and her stylish comrades all danced their curvy asses off. For them, the movement, in every sense of the word, was as open and communal as the forces driving the hippies of my youth. Karen was black from Staten Island, but her friends were a rainbow coalition from every cultural background and neighborhood. I’d say they were even more expressive, political, and communal than the hippies before them, because they bonded through their bodies, through dance; they were propelled by a new kind of funky groove music. Dance had become primal and ubiquitous, a powerful communication tool, every bit as motivational as an Angela Davis speech or treasured as that eighteen-dollar, three-day Woodstock Festival ticket.
All revolutionary movements are fueled by a desire for change to an unsustainable status quo. This revolution’s warriors were engaged in a battle for recognition. "Sex, drugs, and disco" was the new battle cry. The underground, now ethnic and more empowered than ever before, was becoming mainstream.
For the first time since Chubby Checker separated dancing couples with "The Twist," it was now cool again to touch your dancing partner. A whole slew of touchy-feely dance moves were introduced into the mainstream clubs—a consequence of gay sex coming out of the closet and onto the dance floor. People enjoyed intimate interaction with multiple partners, often with the same sex, while still maintaining the appearance of dancing. The names of some of the new dances revealed the new openness of the times: the Hustle, the Freak, and the Bus Stop. Think about it: a "hustle" is a drug deal, con, or a hooker’s transaction; a "freak" is a sex or drug addict; and the "bus stop" is where it all took place. It was all a far cry from the foxtrot or rumba.
The funky disco movement was spreading through the atmosphere like volcanic dust, and everybody was dancing all around the world. Unfortunately, the music that we played with New York City was no longer happening. We were on the road gigging when the band decided to break up, the result of its second album failing to produce any hits. Karen also decided to break up with me while I was on this tour. NYC played our final show in England. My hotel room had been broken into the night before the band was to return stateside. It was a Friday night and my passport was gone. Since I couldn’t go to the U.S. embassy until Monday, my bandmates left me behind and headed home.
I was cool with all that. Since Karen dumped me, I’d been seeing a girl named Carey, a hostess at a prestigious London club called Churchill’s. We’d met at the London gig where New York City played on this last tour.
Carey had London on lockdown. She knew everybody, especially all of the newly wealthy Arab oil sheiks, who were the most dominant force in the London social scene since the Beatles. Because of her blond cover-girl Swedish looks and status as a Churchill’s hostess, we had carte blanche at every trendy spot. The combination of London and Carey was so exciting that even after I got my passport replaced, I decided to stay.
One atypically clear London night, Carey took me to a club to see a band that I’d been hearing about, but had never actually heard. They were called Roxy Music. Coincidentally, they were playing at a venue called the Roxy. Their glamorous fans looked like a cross between the fashion, music, art, and sex industries. My old band NYC’s last few gigs were mostly on army bases that were spread throughout Europe during those Cold War times, but this was nothing like those gigs, which felt like extensions of the Chitlin’ Circuit. The combination of crowd, setting, and music blew me away. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it. It was as mind-blowing as my first acid trip back in L.A.
Roxy Music’s front man, Bryan Ferry, was suave and oozed elegance. Their music was a diverse offering of eclectic rock with changing time signatures and ethereal textures. Though I’d never heard them before that night, I could hear their sound was evolving.
It was a totally immersive art experience that felt like I was absorbing more than just music.
After the show Roxy Music’s songs stayed in my head for the next few days. I needed to hear them again. I bought their last two albums, Stranded and For Your Pleasure. When I pulled the two LPs from the record bin, the sight of Playmate of the Year Marilyn Cole and London jet-setter Amanda Lear on the respective covers gave me a eureka moment: The visuals of the covers were an essential part of the band’s imaging and marketing, almost as important as the music itself. After seeing the records, I made a 360-degree connection and had my first glimpse of an idea that would ultimately result in my band Chic. I was closing in on our DHM.
After I picked up the Roxy Music records, I called Bernard at home and simply said, "I got it." "Got what?" he replied. "The concept for our next band." We both knew we’d have to make a living sans the luxury of New York City’s regular paychecks. He was surprised that I was still in London. I explained how I’d been living in a hotel and Carey was picking up the tab. I was sitting in with different acts at a string of clubs and superimposing my chucking style over everyone’s music, which instantly made them sound funky. I had quickly become the talk of the town—well, sort of. Carey’s influential friends had taken a liking to my style and thought maybe I could be the funk version of Hendrix. Music industry types wanted to link me with some of the local artists and create a new London-based RB funk rock unit.
Funk rock had just made its way across the pond, and bands like Ian Dury and the Blockheads and others were starting to reflect the influence. The leaders of the current wave of London tastemakers, who’d seen me sit in with the likes of General Johnson ("Give Me Just a Little More Time") and others at a club called Gulliver’s, thought I could be the next big thing. But I knew that whatever I was going to do musically, it had to include Bernard. Since he was married and lived in New York, I took the next plane out.
Almost as soon as I touched down, the Big Apple Band started to make our sophistofunk rock dream a reality. In a scene straight out of The Magnificent Seven, we hunted down willing musical gunslingers. First to join up was a drummer named Tony Thompson, who’d just finished working with the all-female funk-fantasy-fusion act LaBelle. Tony could play all styles. He had great technique that was very aggressive, not ideal for the slick stuff, but smoking on our rock-flavored songs. I’d known Tony from pick-up gigs on the then hip Persian scene, which included artists like Jamshid Alimorad, Aki Banaii, and superstar Googoosh.
Next we added keyboardist Rob Sabino, one of the truly underreported heroes of our funky jazz-rock sound, and a solid pillar in our new organization. It was mostly he who played all those brilliant acoustic piano parts in the small openings in between Bernard and me chucking later in Chic.
Finally, we added an outstanding male lead singer named Bobby Cotter, who had just finished a stint in Jesus Christ Superstar. Bobby was a great front man, handsome with incredible vocal range and abilities. We were ready to rule the world, or so we thought.
Our new unit gigged regularly and eventually recorded a hot demo, which was produced by Saturday Night Live’s music director, Leon Pendarvis. The music got a lot of attention from the labels, but no offers after they saw we were black. Bobby’s voice was supersoulful, and before they saw us, they were probably imagining we were like a funkier Queen or Journey. The demo’s sound leaned more to the rock-funk side rather than the smooth-groove side, so the labels assumed we were white. It was clear after months of meetings that our funk-rock formula didn’t work, so we went back to the drawing board.
We knew many local bands. Our keyboard player was friendly with one particularly odd new group called KISS. They wore whiteface makeup onstage and looked like deranged superheroes. At some point we started checking out KISS’s live shows. There was something very cool about the way their theatrical whiteface roles were so defined onstage, and that nobody had any idea what they looked like offstage.
One auspicious night a lightning bolt of an idea hit me: "What if we played the faceless backup band professionally?" I asked Bernard. It wasn’t crazy to me. Actually, it made a lot of sense. The Big Apple Band originally was the faceless backup band for the vocal group New York
City, who were the stars. Though we had hired Bobby Cotter to be our singer, he was clearly our band’s front man. He looked like a star and we looked like his band. This faceless role fit us perfectly. We knew we didn’t know how to come off like stars even if we tried. When we had meetings with record labels, they’d direct the questions to our keyboardist, Rob. They assumed he was the leader simply because he looked white! He was Puerto Rican and always used to tell the ecs, "Hey,I just got here, it’s their band. Talk to them!"
Taking our cue from the few KISS shows we took in, Nard and I started to reason everything out. We didn’t look like our music. The labels all loved us until they saw us. We weren’t stars—but our music was! The answer had been right in front of our faces: KISS! We realized KISS’s art direction was just as important as their music, much like Roxy Music. Both bands presented completely immersive theatrical experiences, albeit in diametrically opposed ways. How could that translate to us? Nard and I thought it over and came up with some answers via "band logic," not to be confused with actual logic:
Then Bernard and I tried to figure out how to mesh KISS’s anonymity with Roxy Music’s musical diversity and sexy cover-girl imagery. This concept stuck in our minds no matter how many survival gigs we had to take in the meantime. For the next few months, we were consumed with this.
Nobody around us had any idea what Bernard and I were obsessively up to. Even our drummer, Tony Thompson, couldn’t see the big picture of what we were trying to do. And who could blame him?
KISS and Roxy Music were rock bands. No matter how inspiring they were conceptually, they were clearly rock. But musically, I found my inspiration in jazz. Many of my jazz heroes were enjoying hit records—only they were doing it by making RB dance music. Roy Ayers, Herbie Hancock, Joe Beck, the Jazz Crusaders, Norman Connors, and others were topping the pop charts. So we developed a new sound that was a fusion of jazz, soul, and funk grooves with melodies and lyrics that were more European influenced.
Just when we thought we had everything together, things started falling apart. Our lead singer suddenly left. Then another group called the Big Apple Band put out a phenomenal disco reworking of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It was an instant smash called "A Fifth of Beethoven," by Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band (who were also faceless). Our phone started ringing off the hook with congratulatory messages from our studio musician friends. Problem was, they had the wrong Big Apple Band. Walter was a New Yorker, born within a couple months of Nard and me. He gigged on the same circuit, doing RB covers, but his Big Apple Band got a hit record first.
We had no choice but to start over with a new name—and try and connect our small but reliable mid-level-bar-band following to it. In those days word of mouth was exactly that, one person to another, and if you weren’t a signed act with a press agent it could take months before folks got the news. Back when I’d originally talked about Roxy Music’s style, Bernard suggested we call the group Chic. Tony and I laughed and shot him down, but we had the luxury of being the Big Apple Band, and were doing gigs! Now, because of Walter’s hit record and the loss of our lead singer, we had to call ourselves something different. "Chic" still sounded funny, but I decided to at least give it a try.
Bernard thought of the name, so as the group’s main writer at that time, I did my part and wrote the first song, "Everybody Dance." Only a handful of bassists on earth could play the bass line I wrote for the song, but a few years had passed since the night Nard and I had met in the Bronx, and by now I knew what he was capable of. The jazz-influenced song was really complicated: It had a mixture of harmonically extended chords, and the latter half of the progression incorporated two strict chromatic movements in the bass. I compensated by writing an insanely simple hook: "Everybody da-nce, do- do- do, clap your hands, clap your hands." I sang it to Bernard, and he liked it, but asked me, with great earnestness, "Uh, my man, what the fuck does ’do-do-do’ mean?" I responded with equal seriousness, "It means the same things as ’la-la-la’ motherfucker!" I’ve never laughed as much in my life as I did with Bernard.
As I said earlier, the band had acquired a little following, and our ex–lead singer Bobby had a friend named Robert Drake, who’d become one of our biggest fans. Robert was a true audiophile who owned a personal recording studio and worked as a maintenance man at a larger professional studio called Sound Ideas. He booked our first session as the new band there. We worked at the studio after hours when it was supposed to be closed, and the only person we had to pay was the elevator operator, ten bucks, to keep his mouth shut about the secret session. Robert engineered the record and also charmed the studio’s assistant engineer to kick in her time free, too!
The backbone of this life-changing session was our four-man Big Apple Band rhythm section, but we also reached out to some good friends to help make the song sound more like a record. Luther Vandross brought along his crew of singers; Eddie Martinez (Run-DMC’s "King of Rock") played the guitar overdubs with me; and two top jazz studio cats, David Friedman and Tom Copolla, played the vibraphone and clavinet, respectively. This crew of thrown-together friends became a template that has never changed for the Chic Organization’s productions. Luther’s vocal arrangements of my basic song taught us what to do and how to do it from that point on. We had never produced a record before that night and didn’t realize we were producing one then. I was the composer/ arranger/orchestrator/guitarist, and Bernard was the bassist/ bandleader, and we acted accordingly. In this setting Robert Drake was the session’s engineer/producer, if you will.
We all had done enough sessions to know to let the engineer get the sounds first, and after he’d done that, we’d rehearse, then we’d record. It quickly became apparent that the two people who were most in charge were Bernard and me, despite the fact that we were not calling ourselves producers yet. It was clear I had written the song, and he was directing the musicians. We started changing and rearranging parts based on the ensemble’s interpretation of the music.
Nard changed his bass line to a chucking part, so I simplified my original part because it complemented his. Prior to that session, only I had actually played the song, but now we were all playing it together and this new arrangement took the song to a higher level. After we knew we had the arrangement exactly right, we started recording.
From the first downbeat, we knew it was hot. I had fully orchestrated the lengthy song, which was a series of different instrumental sections, highlighted with "breakdowns." A breakdown is accomplished by taking out major parts of the composition and featuring the basic elements of the groove, then adding more instruments until finally the whole band is playing again. The concept is to deconstruct the song and rebuild it in the listener’s ears. I knew that this formula worked at live RB shows, and believed it would work on records. We completed the entire song in one night. Mind you, the first incarnation of "Everybody Dance" had no lead vocal, only Luther’s choral arrangement of my hook. Robert did a rough mix at the end of the night, and what happened next is too weird for words.
We did this recording session before cassettes existed, so the only time we got to hear the song was when we listened to the playback a few times after recording it, very late that night. I didn’t hear it again until three weeks later, when I got an "emergency" phone call that demonstrated the effect that our faceless breakdown music had on people.
By 1976 there was a new social and cultural phenomenon that Americans were just becoming aware of—buppies (black urban professionals)—and their stronghold was New York City. The musical engineer on "Everybody Dance" was also the DJ at one of the city’s hottest buppie clubs, the Night Owl, which happened to be in Greenwich Village.
At this time I was temporarily living in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, at my then girlfriend Rosalia’s apartment. We’d met a few weeks earlier on a gig I was doing near the Brooklyn Navy
Yard. I had written "Everybody Dance" at her crib, because she had a day job that allowed me to compose alone uninterrupted. A mere three weeks after we’drecorded it, Robert, who had made a few lacquers (lacquer records that could be reproduced quickly), made an "emergency" call to me because he was DJing and had to be sure he’d get me between records. "Hey, Nile, you’ve gotta come over and see this," Robert said.
"See what?"
"I can’t explain it, you just have to see it. Come to the Night Owl, and when they stop you, tell them you did ’Everybody Dance.’ "
The fact that I’d be stopped was inevitable. The Night Owl catered to an upscale black crowd that adhered to a strict dress code. I didn’t have the duds or the dough to get in, so I asked Robert, "What do you want me to do?"
He repeated his instructions, then emphasized, "Tell them you are the one who did ’Everybody Dance.’ That’s all you have to do, no matter who stops you. You got it?"
"OK, cool. See you in a couple hours."
I’d started dressing while still on the phone because the curiosity was killing me. I ran to the subway and rushed to the club to see whatever it was that I had to see. As soon as I got to the door, the huge bouncer said, "Hey, man, you can’t come in here dressed like that."
"I’m a friend of Robert Drake."
"I don’t give a damn if you are Robert Drake, you ain’t getting in here dressed like that."
"Oh, I almost forgot. I did ’Everybody Dance.’ "
" ’Everybody Dance?’ Brother, let me shake your hand. What’s your name?"
"I’m Nile."
"Yo, this is Nile. Let him in," the bouncer told another bouncer inside, working the ticket booth. I took the elevator up. The door opened, and the next bouncer said, "Hey, you can’t come in here looking like that." Right away I said, "My name is Nile, and I did
’Everybody Dance.’ "
" ’Everybody Dance?’ Damn, no shit? Come in, brother man. Can I buy you a drink? Hey, Tom," he shouted to the white owner of the black club, who was smoother than a gravy sandwich. Tom was the seventies version of my stepdad, Bobby: sartorial perfection, slick rap, and an appetite for sisters. "This is the dude that did ’Everybody Dance.’ "
"Hey, man, my name is Tom, and this is my place. You can come here anytime you want and it’s on the house."
This all seemed like Robert was playing a practical joke, because I’d never met any of these people and they were treating me like I was the man. Tom and I chatted for about ten minutes about his new club in my old hood, and then he escorted me through a heavily cigarette-smoke-clouded room over to the DJ booth. Robert was talking to a beautiful buppie hottie who worked on Wall Street. "Yo, Nile," he said as soon as he saw me. He didn’t spend any time with idle chitchat. He screamed over the music, "You’ve got to check this out," and started laughing.
The stylus dropped onto the lacquer, and after Tony’s opening drum fill, Bernard’s killer bass line came in. I hadn’t heard this for almost a month, but I knew the song right away because I’d written it. The Night Owl patrons let out an almost bloodcurdling "Oww www." Then my guitar entered along with Rob’s piano, David’s vibes, and Tom’s clavinet. The room filled with voices—"Everybody da-ance, do-do-do, clap your hands, clap your hands." A frenzied crowd of dancers, playing air guitar and air bass on the dance floor, lasted through seven continuous replays of Robert’s two lacquers— approximately an hour of the same song. I’d been into dancing and nightclubbing since my days with my ex-girlfriend Karen, and I understood why DJs played a popular record repeatedly to keep the dance floor hopping, but this was ridiculous._ An hour of the same song, and it was my demo!_
Did I really just witness this? It was so overwhelming that while I outwardly pretended to accept it, inwardly I questioned it. But I reasoned that Robert couldn’t have staged this, and if he could, why would he? Everything was feeling completely absurd.
To further highlight the absurdity of the scene, Robert said, "Now watch this," and played the No. 1 record on the Billboard chart that week in October 1976, "A Fifth of Beethoven," by none other than Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band: the group who just a few months earlier had forced us to change our shared name. All the people started booing and threatening to leave the dance floor. Robert replayed "Everybody Dance" at least another four times before the crowd would accept "A Fifth of Beethoven." How ironic was that? While Walter’s record played, I ran to a corner telephone in the club and called Bernard, who was at home asleep with his wife and kids. I said, "Get up and come down here. You’ve got to see this."
"See what?"
"I can’t explain it. You just have to come down to the Night Owl. Oh, and remember to tell them at the door you did ’Everybody Dance.’ " A little while later, I saw Bernard’s puzzled face as he approached the DJ booth in the smoke-filled room with the club’s owner, Tom.
The rebuilding of our new band had begun. But as positive and fantastic as the Night Owl was, it would take quite some time to get a Chic album deal. We’d bring many industry people to the Night Owl to witness the crowd’s reaction to our breakdown music, but it never went anywhere, so we just kept working at it.
Bernard and I liked to gig together, but that wasn’t always possible. Bernard got a gig, playing bass on a session with a producer/ arranger/musician named Kenny Lehman, who was also introduced to us by Robert Drake; the song was a sappy but hooky single called "I Love New York," or something like that. In those days singles had to have an A and B side in order to be sold. Typically B sides were filler, but every now and again you’d get a song like Gloria Gaynor’s "I Will Survive," which might be the biggest B side of all time. Kenny just had the band jam and would finish the filler song later.
At that point I had been the sole writer in Chic, so Kenny came to me with the B-side jam, whose musicians were Jimmy Young on drums and Bernard on bass. Based on a number of factors, including the originality of the bass line, Kenny and I agreed we should bring Bernard back in as a writing partner.
I had written a hook that went, "I just dance, dance, dandan-dance, all of the time. I just dance, dance, dance . . . all the time." When Bernard heard it, he said, "That’s too complicated." He suggested we change it to "Dance. Dance, dance, dance."
From that moment on, Bernard was my official songwriting partner. It was his very first song, and it was right. Nard was a bandleader and was accustomed to changing parts to bring out the best in everyone for live shows. When he became a songwriter, he did the same thing. His philosophy was simple and pragmatic: Fix it now, so we don’t get booed off the stage later. It’s really why we worked so well together. I would always overwrite and he’d always simplify it. Countless times he told me, "Damn, you’ve got the whole album in that song." He had a knack for understanding what a song was trying to say, then getting the song to say it.
I had already written the song’s verses more or less, and after Nard simplified the hook, we thought it was ready to record. Once again we hired my old Sesame Street friend Luther Vandross as the vocal contractor. In the seventies we followed the professional rules of recording, even if the gigs were nonunion. The unions had established pay scales, and people were paid according to their responsibilities. The leaders or contractors of a group of musicians were paid higher fees and had greater responsibilities, primarily hiring, conducting, and filling out the contracts.
After Luther and his crew had recorded the song, the chorus was a little too simple for me, so I wrote the phrase "Keep on dan-cing," following the pattern of rewriting in the studio that we’d established working on "Everybody Dance." This completed the chorus and the song’s vocals. Kenny Lehman did the orchestral sweetening on "Dance, Dance, Dance," and my original hook was relegated to the role of a secondary counterpoint melody, played on a Micromoog synthesizer during the verse. We used every complex musical idea that I had written for the song, but we rearranged them according to Nard’s sense of balance and logic, which perfectly checked and balanced my impulse to overdo it.
"Dance, Dance, Dance" was our first complete song. We had discovered our formula for operating as long as we called ourselves Chic, a name that was slowly growing on me. We wrote more and more songs together based on our own golden rule: Every song had to have Deep Hidden Meaning. Bernard agreed. Armed with our new concept, we went out to conquer the world again—one dance floor at a time. There was a method to our madness: We felt that audiences would be more receptive to multilevel messages, just as long as they liked the groove. We also loved showing the essence of our grooves, by breaking down. Chic lived to break down. We used to have an inside joke between us that went, "A song is just an excuse to go to the chorus, and the chorus is just an excuse to go to the breakdown."
It took the record business a bit longer to pick up on the joke. But eventually they got it.
Atlantic Records in New York had started out as a pure RB label, with artists like Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, and Aretha Franklin, but by the time of Woodstock, they had many cutting-edge rock acts too, including powerhouse groups like Cream, Led Zeppelin, Yes, and the Rolling Stones. If you were a New York recording artist, you wanted to be on Atlantic or Columbia, the top of the food chain.
Through our growing group of connections, we’d made contact through intermediaries with all the New York–based labels. The entire AR staff of Atlantic Records passed on "Dance, Dance, Dance" because they didn’t believe the song would play well on the radio, owing to its longer-than-average breakdown. That opinion was shared across the board.
One day one of our ecutive producers, Tom Cossie, finally got the record to the president of the label, Jerry Greenberg.
After hearing it only once, Jerry said, "Cossie, it’s a smash. I got to have it."
There was just one small problem: We had already gotten a deal. We were technically signed to Buddah (sic) Records, a label best known for teenybopper pop acts like the 1910 Fruitgum Company. To make matters worse, Tom worked at Buddah and he’d gotten us signed there. So why were we out shopping for a deal? Buddah had contractually agreed to get our single "Dance, Dance, Dance" out in time for Billboard magazine’s big annual disco convention. Tom knew this was the place to break our song. For whatever reason, Buddah missed the pressing date, and it looked like they wouldn’t get our record to the convention in time.
Tom Cossie was an old-school promotion man and there was no way he was going to miss the heat the convention could provide. So he took a second-generation copy (magnetic tape loses fidelity when it’s copied) of the master to Atlantic. He told Jerry, "If you can get the record out first, it’s yours." Never one to turn down a challenge or a smash, Jerry commissioned the Warner/Atlantic helicopter to fly the pressings back from the plant the same day, and had limos deliver the records throughout the eastern region, all the way up to Boston (ah, the good old days of the record business). This was a huge contract breach, but it was worth the risk to both Tom and Jerry.
Not only did we make the convention (the song was pumping out of every conventioneer’s hotel suite), it was also playing in the important (chart-reporting) clubs, with Atlantic’s label on it. We had added the name of one of the top DJs at the ber-disco Studio 54, Tom Savarese, as the mir (in truth he did an edit that we never used), which was an important move because Studio 54 was the center of the disco universe. And with that, we were off and running.
By the time Buddah got wind of it, it was too late; they could only play catch-up. "Dance, Dance, Dance" was the hit of the disco convention. And that second-generation master is the version Atlantic put out. As they used to say, "If it’s grooving, who cares what it sounds like?" Buddah had the high-fidelity master, but Atlantic had the momentum. Clive Davis, then an ec at Buddah, called Jerry up and asked him, "Hey, Jerry, how can you do that to us?" So Atlantic agreed to let Buddah put out the single out of goodwill, and to avoid a lawsuit. We went gold on both labels but only got paid for the Atlantic sales.
We’d certainly taken a circuitous route, and it was far from overnight, but we’d finally achieved everything we wanted. Back then, most RB acts wore flamboyant clothes, but we created believable alter egos: two men in impressively labeled but subtle designer business suits, which effectively gave us the anonymity of KISS. We put sexy girls on our album cover, which was suave like Roxy Music, and we tooled a new form of Euro-influenced RB that also still passed the smell test of my jazz police friends. Then we put together a corporation that would manage and develop this entity and its future enterprises, the Chic Organization Ltd. We were born out of the studio, but now that we were real (at least contractually and on records) we had to (1) go out on the road and prove this was an immersive artistic experience and (2) demonstrate that the two young ramrods at the helm could make this a viable new business.
"Dance, Dance, Dance" was formally released to radio in the summer of ’77 and started climbing the charts. It was an instant hit and gig offers were coming in fast and furious. Atlantic picked up our album option, and we created one very quickly. We wrote four more songs2 and put vocal verses on "Everybody Dance," and had an album literally in a matter of days. Bernard and I were signed as individuals, and had agreed to provide the services of an entity we called Chic.
We set out to cast the lead role, a sexy female, and we were going to be the suave backup band. If it worked out, to the public we’d look like a corporate version of Rufus featuring Chaka Khan.
We had hired a lead singer who wasn’t part of the New York studio scene, Norma Wright, her obscurity further adding to our mystique. We got her to insert her middle name, which happened to be Jean, to pay homage to the real name of legendary movie siren Marilyn Monroe. We then formally hired our drummer Tony Thompson to role-play. He was very handsome and looked good in anything. Though he’d take our first press photo with us, he’d only wear a sport jacket; he wasn’t feeling the suit thing because he saw himself as a rocker. But he loved playing with us and went along with it as best he could.
Tony still didn’t believe this concept was going to work, even after we’d made the album and were paying him a salary. When we told him to get ready for rehearsals for a tour, he responded with, "Really? What songs are we gonna play?" It may seem odd now, but in his defense it’s important to remember that Tony didn’t even play on "Dance, Dance, Dance," and wasn’t part of the initial Chic experience.
Bernard and I always tried to sound as close to records as possible when playing live (unless we changed it intentionally). So we hired Luther Vandross, one of the people who sang on the record, tocomeout on tour with us. Luther brought along Alfa Anderson from his own group. (Bernard and I were in Luther’s backup band, playing at Radio City Music Hall, the night we made the ten-dollar recording of "Everybody Dance.")
Norma Jean and Tony hadn’t participated in the song that had gotten us the deal. They weren’t involved in any of the decision making or art direction. Had they been, maybe one of them would have stated the obvious: Hire two girls to headline Chic to match our art direction. We’d only find out this was a problem after doing our first few live gigs after our debut album was everywhere.
"Dance, Dance, Dance" was clearly two girls singing lead, and our album cover featured two hot female models. Since Chic was a new group, it wasn’t a giant leap to think the two cover girls (one of whom was early black super model Alva Chinn) were singing. On the road playing with us, we had Luther’s crew, two keyboard players, string and horn sections, and we sounded perfect, but we didn’t look like our music. We made it through the first tour okay, but we soon recognized that people thought they were being short-changed. This had to be fid tout de suite. We needed to bring in another front girl.
Norma Jean introduced us to a friend of hers named Luci Martin, and she and Norma worked the front line together. Finally we looked like our music! We’d successfully become a completely immersive artistic experience. Our art direction would remain as important as our music, and our next two album covers would prove this definitively, so much so, we even got Mr. Hard Rocker Tony to wear a suit.
When Norma left the group to go solo, Alfa, who’d been singing with us since the first tour as part of Luther’s crew, took on Norma’s role. Alfa and Luci became the two girls who’d be most associated with Chic, mainly because of the huge success of our next record, C’est Chic. It netted Atlantic their only six-million-selling single, and one of the only two records to go No. 1 on the Billboard chart three times, "Le Freak." For a brief period, Chic was volcanically hot.
In my haste to tell you about us, I’ve skipped over what was simultaneously happening to me. Our first show to promote our debut album was at a large nightclub in Atlantic City called Casanova’s. It was dimly lit and the crowd was very receptive. We’d broken on radio in that region and were greeted like family. That was a relatively easy experience to handle. Our very next gig, on the other hand, was on the West Coast as part of a summer festival, for which Chic was about to play its first stadium. We’d gotten very big, very fast—and now we were facing some seventy thousand people in Oakland, California, in broad daylight. I was racked with terrible stage fright.
I was backstage, literally shaking with fear. The sight of this quaking mass of humanity was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, at least not from this point of view. Sure, I’d been to huge rallies and every manner of hippie tribal celebration, but I’d never been on this side of the microphone. I’d had a nice trail of professional gigs, but I’d always been in the backup band; I was not prepared to address seventy thousand people. Fortunately, a cure was at hand. My roadie said to me, "Hey, boss man, try this." He passed me a Styrofoam pint-sized cup of Heineken. I gulped down that beer, and all was suddenly right with the world. I felt a warm wave of confidence spreading over me.
I ran onstage, faced the crowd, and screamed out, "OAKLAND!!!!!!!!"
The crowd responded with "CHIIIIIIIIIIIC!!!!!!!!"
It’s a cliché. I know it’s a cliché. I was a musician beginning his downward spiral into alcoholism. I was an addict—I mean, I’d been sniffing glue since I was old enough to cross the street, and had dropped acid before I started high school. I loved drugs. I’d grow to need alcohol daily. I won’t drag out the suspense—for a lot of my adult life, drugs and alcohol were there; a lot of my adult experiences took place while I was under the influence of one mind-altering substance or another. I loved them. They nearly killed me. But I couldn’t have done it any other way.
Back in the dressing room after the show, I instructed my roadie to always have a drink on stage for me. I’d started out that first day
with just one cup of beer. By the end of the tour, Heinekens encircled the drum riser in a beautiful symmetrical pattern of bioregrettable white cups. This functional sculpture’s elixir helped me play a new role, that of an accidental rock star—designer threads and shoes, a guitar over my shoulder, and alcohol coursing through my veins.
Our greatest early ally at the label was our PR person, named Simo Doe. We’d do extensive promotional tours that she’d arrange and for which she showed us how to reduce detailed answers to sound bites. At first it made us feel like liars, but then we learned that sound bites were all they wanted. This was a medium that had only small openings in their programming schedule for humaninterest stories. "Make them short and sweet," is what Simo taught us. Our success required us to replay this jovial spin game. In order to overcome my shyness, I started to drink before every interview, then during. I became accustomed to hearing myself talk on TV and radio, and would even go to DJ booths and shout out to the crowd on the dance floor.
Though Chic rarely played clubs (which couldn’t accommodate a band of our size), clubs all around the country welcomed us with open arms as guests. This was not just limited to the hip clubs of New York, where new ones seemed to open nightly; club life was spreading around the world like nuclear winter. Our music was crossing over into every sector of society. We played in places that didn’t usually have live black acts. One town we played in hadn’t had a public pop concert (black or white) since Elvis had caused a riot two decades earlier. Chic not only played there, we got a police escort. I couldn’t believe how almost everywhere I went, once people found out I was the guy from Chic, they’d treat me like a rock star.
And where does a fledgling rock star hang out? Back in the seventies, there was only one place that fit the bill: Studio 54.
The first time I went to Studio 54, I was not treated like a star. My music pumping on the dance floor, the supermodels on our album’s cover, DJ Tom Savarese (who had mix credit), and my then girlfriend Nefertiti were the stars. Nefi had graduated from the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology. Many FIT people partied at Studio, and I was Nefi’s guest. The club had only been open a few months, but it was already the hottest spot on earth.
It made sense that I wasn’t treated like a star that first night, because no one knew what Chic looked like, and Studio was all about who you were and how you looked. Nefi was really into how to achieve the look; she was a stylist who could design and make clothing. It was she who taught me about high fashion. Before I met Nefi, I’d never heard of Fendi, Fortuny, or Fiorucci. I learned about haute couture and met many top designers, like Calvin Klein and Roy Halston, at Studio.
I had many great nights in Studio, but none as important as the night I tried to get in without Nefertiti and failed: New Year’s Eve, 1977.
Bernard and I rounded the corner at Eighth Avenue onto Fifty-fourth Street. The first thing I saw was a massive mob, herded like cattle onto a sidewalk that couldn’t possibly contain them, and spilling onto the street. There was a good explanation for this mayhem: If those people could be anywhere in the world, this was the place. I can still picture the redecorated hallowed halls of what used to be CBS’s broadcast studios: coke-carpeted bathrooms, flat-blackpainted walls, elaborate neon disco lights that dropped from the ceiling, ear-assaulting speakers, and churning sex nooks. And over the next nine years, I became a part of the club’s inner circle.
By the end of ’77, everyone in the club world was talking about our new breakdown sound, and we had become so popular that Grace Jones, who was a huge star at the time, had invited us to Studio for her show on a freezing New Year’s Eve. Grace told us to go to the stage door. But for some reason, we were turned away by the doorman, who promptly told us to "fuck off !" (Funnily enough, the guy contacted me about thirty years later on Facebook to apologize!) After he slammed the door in our faces, we decided, Oh, maybe Grace left our names at the front door. It took us forever to swim through the crowd and get the attention of the soon-to-be-famous front doorman Marc Benecke.
2. *My ex-girlfriend Patty translated one of them ("Est-ce Que c’est Chic?") into French for extra sophistication.
Bernard and I announced that we were personal guests of Grace. He told us, "Yeah right." When we politely yet urgently asked him to please check the list, he actually stopped, looked it up and down, scanned all the pages (which seemed courteous and respectful), and then said, in a clear, precise, definitive voice, "I looked, and you aren’t on the list." He returned to scanning the crowd for notables. We knew that was the end of the negotiation. We were dressed to the nines, but after contemplating our options, we just sloshed through the snowy streets, around the corner to the cozy apartment of our DJ friend Robert Drake. I was living there while he was gigging in Rome.
We downed a few bottles of vintage Dom Pérignon, and a little coke, which I’d started snorting while touring on the road. I picked up my guitar, started jamming on a guitar riff and singing the words that the stage doorman had said to us earlier, "Fuck off," and Nard added, "Fuck Studio 54—aw, fuck off." He grabbed his bass and we played this over and over, grooving and laughing. We developed the groove and even wrote a bridge, then came the chorus again: "Awww, fuck off—fuck Studio 54—fuck off."
"You know, this shit is happening!" Bernard said, while pulling his sunglasses down his nose in order to achieve genuine eye contact with me. He did this whenever he was serious, because almost everything was a joke to us.
"We can’t get this song on the radio. ’Fuck off ’ is pretty hard-core for Top Forty," I said, laughing. But Bernard was serious. And I’d learned to listen to him when he was serious. He had a great ear for hooks, and realizing that this little riff and chant sounded good, we changed "fuck" to "freak." "Awww, freak off," we sang energetically. It was horrible, but we tried to make it work.
"Hey, man, this is not lifting my skirt," I said to Bernard.
"Yeah, I know what you’re saying," he responded.
Suddenly the proverbial lightbulb went off. "Hey, man, we should say, ’Awww, freak out.’ "
" ’Freak out’?"
"Yeah, like when you have a bad trip, you freak out."
That wasn’t the best reference for Bernard, since he was the last person who’d take LSD. So I quickly added, "Like . . . when you’re out on the dance floor losing it, you know you’re freaking out."
"Yeah, plus they have that new dance called ’the Freak.’ That could be the DHM," he said, referring to our flare for Deep Hidden Meaning, now a must for the Chic song formula.
"Yeah!" he added, his voice rising with excitement. "It would be our version of ’Come on, baby, let’s do the Twist.’ "
Bernard was really into it, and we were in sync. After playing and singing for a while, Bernard made it completely ours by adding, "Le freak, c’est chic" in place of "fuck Studio 54." Maybe the reason why this came to us so quickly was because we were composing the songs for our next album, which was basically finished until we came up with this off-the-cuff ditty. Chic released "Le Freak" in the summer of ’78. It featured Luther Vandross along with our signature double-female-lead-vocal sound, this time performed by Alfa Anderson and Robin Clark. It was a worldwide hit, and we got our first seven-figure check for the label’s only triple-platinum single (six million in those days). The Zen of it was, by not getting what we wanted, we got more than we ever imagined.
The massive success of "Le Freak"—approximately twelve million units worldwide—set Chic officially on fire. Suddenly the money started flowing like water, and our lifestyle changed forever. One day Nard and I were walking down Park Avenue, fresh from our business manager’s office, still processing the scale to which we’d struck it rich, when we happened upon a Mercedes dealership. The store was filled with the entire range of that year’s models; their metallic finishes shining from the showroom stung our eyes. All the browsing customers were white male ecutive types, except us.
Make no mistake: We didn’t look like vagabonds. We were in the latest designer suits because we always attended every business meeting in character, creating the Chic mystique. We couldn’t imagine KISS ever showing up at the record company without donning their costumes, nor would we!
A salesman charged over to us to try and delicately shoo us out of the store. It was clear to him the likes of us couldn’t afford his wares. "Um, can I help you, ah, gentlemen?" he said in a condescending tone, putting an extra bit of cynical sting on the word.
Bernard, who always had a gift for saying the right thing at the right time, didn’t even look at the salesman; instead he walked over to the mirrored wall of the showroom. While panning himself up and down, he said, "I’m not sure. Which one of these cars goes with a brown tie?" He walked around the showroom and added, "I think that one matches, what do you think?" It was one of the three most expensive cars in the showroom, a 450 SEL. The salesman told him the price to scare him off or just give him a reality check. Bernard retorted, "Well, in that case I’ll take that one over there, too!" It was a two-seat blue sports car. I did my best not to laugh. Finally I couldn’t hold back anymore and started cracking up. Bernard bought both cars on the spot just to make a point. Still pissed off, he sternly said to the salesman, "Be courteous and cool to everybody who walks in, because you never know who they are, or what they’re capable of doing." He finished the paperwork, made them prep the cars, and we drove them both away, unbalancing their carefully styled showroom.
I didn’t bite that day, but I certainly did my share to prop up the economy. I was flying pretty high. It was exciting to have money and I figured it would always be that way for the rest of my life. I’d keep writing songs—they were coming easy to me and Bernard— and keep getting big checks. My first two post–"Freak Out" purchases were a Porsche 911 and a Cigarette deep-V ocean racer. Given what we were earning, these toys were hardly extravagant, but for NYC residents in 1978, let alone a former hippie like me, they were waaaay over the top. After all, most people in New York City didn’t even drive. I reasoned it was just part of the job, part of creating the mystique.
Meanwhile, I took the boat out every chance I could. I concentrated on learning the foundations of seamanship, including dead reckoning and celestial navigation. We didn’t have GPS back in those days, only radar and depth finders, so going on trips to ports unknown was very exciting. The racing paint job on my first boat was amazing; it made the vessel look like it was gliding across the water when it was sitting still. The sight of my Afro blowing in the wind while I was speeding around the tristate waterways must have been quite a vision. Another attention grabber was my boat’s massive sound system. It was supplied by my gadget-guru DJ friend Robert Drake and was audible over the Cigarette’s twin engines. I once took Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie out in a fog so thick you couldn’t see two feet in front of you. I had to use radar and listen for the bells on the buoys to pinpoint our location. When we finally got back to port, they were the happiest people in the world, and I was as cocky as Captain Quint in Jaws. Break out the blow, baby!
I also spent a lot of money on clothes: I took the band’s name seriously and elevated my wardrobe accordingly. My garb came from a mixture of cutting-edge high-end stores like Charivari and Maud Frizon (they’ve both long since closed), as well as Skin Clothes and Ian’s (two shops that catered to show-biz punk rockers).
Drugs and alcohol were also a big part of my budget. I had an extremely high tolerance level and never seemed to get drunk, something I now know is an ability most alcoholics have. By that point I was boozing and doing coke all day, every day, but I wasn’t reckless—quite the contrary. Even though I lived life on the edge, I was in total control. For the moment.
Studio 54 quickly became my number one hangout. We were homegrown heroes who’d achieved international pop success. I soon became part of Studio’s inner circle of diverse superstars, like David Geffen or Truman Capote. Once I’d achieved that exalted status, I hung out in one of four areas: the basement, the balcony, the women’s bathroom on the ground floor, or Steve Rubell’s office (the ultimate sanctum sanctorum). I spent most of my time in the women’s bathroom—which came to be known as my office.
The women’s bathroom at Studio 54 was the first thing you’d pass after entering the club’s main entrance. I can still remember how exciting it was the first time a girl brought me inside. I was afraid that the women would freak out and call a bouncer, but most didn’t even notice, let alone care that I was there. Women’s bathrooms have long lines and I thought that a guy taking up a valuable stall would be frowned upon, but you see, I had lots of blow. I was never asked to leave, which made me feel very special, so special I’d often spend the entire night in there. All my drinks were brought to me; all my friends met me there. Typically, I’d secure one stall as if it were my own private space. If someone had to use the toilet, I’d let her come in, and she’d pull up her skirt or drop her pants and just go in front of me, even if we were total strangers.
It may seem highly unlikely today, but inside Studio there was a Dionysian sense of belonging and trust. Nothing was taboo. Usually I’d give my visitors a hit of coke if they wanted it. Sometimes we’d have full-on sex, or maybe one or more girls would give me oral sex. If I sound casual about it, it’s because that’s just the way it was. There was never any pressure to do or not do anything other than what one wanted to do. Under the broad category of partying, people could accept or demur based on their proclivities. Nothing was frowned upon. I don’t remember a single girl ever asking me to leave the stall to do her business.
Studio’s basement looked like a modern version of ancient catacombs, scary and secluded. It was restricted to all but the inner circle and employees. In the relative safety of our underground bunker, we acted like lunatics just because we could. There were storage rooms aplenty because the building was CBS Broadcasting’s theater and studio (hence the name "Studio 54") before it was a club. Many of these rooms resembled the jail cells called holding tanks. When I was downstairs, I acted cool but was always looking over my shoulder. I knew about the vampires who fed off the patrons’ blood—in exchange for keeping the club owners forever young, or so the story went. From the look, feel, and odor down there, any sane person could believe it was true.
The balcony may have been the most mind-blowing, maybe because it was open to anybody. Here they did what the inner circle did behind closed—or slightly ajar—doors for all to see. It reeked like a Tijuana brothel. My first time up there, I caught a major movie star partying to the max. I won’t say her name because later she became a good friend, but I saw her balling in the balcony. Compared to my hijinks in the bathroom, this seemed way over the top. I don’t know why it was so shocking. I guess I’m not as cool as I thought I was.
Rubell’s office was the ultimate VIP room, mainly because it had its own bathroom. Even though I did anything I wanted in my "office," I had the freedom to ascend to another level of hang when I disappeared inside his private bathroom. One night hit songwriter Paul Jabara (he wrote Donna Summer’s "Last Dance" and many others) and his constant companion, who I assumed was his wife or serious girlfriend, were in the tiny bathroom doing coke with me. In a typically casual way, I peed while we were partying. Paul said, "Nile, you ain’t gonna waste that on no bitch?" Talk about being caught off guard. Not only did I not think he was gay, but his girlfriend (or wife) was scorching hot in her skimpy body-hugging outfits. The way he’d said the word "bitch" had a hint of disdain, adding to the situation’s awkwardness. I don’t remember the words I used to decline his obvious advance, but I kept the spirit cheerful and we all laughed it off. A few years later, he died of AIDS, as did many of the Studio crowd. But in those early free-love days, we rolled like the Roman Empire before the fall.
Yes, 54 might have been home base, but in an odd development it started to fail my increasingly ravenous appetite. Happening clubs seemed to be opening almost weekly, and I had to be there. One night as I was leaving Studio to check out a new club, I ran into a friend’s wife, who was flying solo. This was odd: She and her husband were one of New York’s then "It" couples, and they were always seen together. She was gorgeous and trendy; he wasn’t just a handsome, muscle-bound sports star—he was as nice as he was popular. I dug them a lot!
"Do you trust me?" she asked. I didn’t get what she meant, but she wasn’t high and the statement wasn’t out of character. I thought she was going to tell me something about her strangely absent husband.
"Of course I trust you," I said. Then she told me to open my mouth and close my eyes. She placed a tablet on my tongue and said, "You belong to me tonight."
I didn’t want to look like a chump in her eyes, because I admired her so much. She looked like an exotic cross between film starlets Dorothy Dandridge and Black Orpheus’s Marpessa Dawn, only more brown-skinned. She was impeccably adorned from head to toe in the latest haute couture, and she spoke perfect French and Italian, because she’d been a European runway model. As stunning as she was physically, it was her Mensa-level intellect that made her unique. Standing before her, I felt overmatched and somewhat afraid.
"What did you just give me?" I asked. "X."
"Ecstasy?"
"Yeah, ecstasy," she said.
"Oh wow, I haven’t done that in years." She held my hand, then kissed me in a reassuring way and said, "This is really good stuff, and I’ve been saving it to do it with someone special." And with that she turned me around and took me back inside Studio. That’s all I remember her saying. We headed straight out to the floor and danced until the X kicked in. How do I explain the feeling of X? It’s hard, but soon I was enveloped with that familiar feeling that I’d not felt since my teens, like everybody in the world was my best friend. I had absolutely no fear. X always made me feel like I was standing on my tiptoes, seeing above the crowd. I felt like I could look over anyone’s head no matter how tall, my view unobstructed.
Then she took me to a friend’s apartment. Maybe she felt this was less illicit than the balcony, bathroom, or catacombs of Studio. We made cokeand champagne-fueled love until the next morning. I don’t remember what time I went home, or how I even got there, but we never spoke of the incident again. As sexy as this was, something about sleeping with a friend’s wife made me feel like my moral compass had been reset, and not in a good way, and I started doing things that before that night I would never have done. I’d soon break up with my wonderful girlfriend Nefertiti, after I’d fallen hook, line, and sinker for her best friend, Michelle. I even dreamt the entire Chic song "I Want Your Love" while lusting after Michelle in my slumber.
Despite all my partying, things were getting better than ever with my day job. The hits kept coming. Over the next two years and a few months, we’d released six albums featuring some enormous hits: "Dance, Dance, Dance," "Everybody Dance," "Saturday," "Having a Party," "Sorcerer," "Le Freak (Freak Out!)," "I Want Your Love," "Chic Cheer," "He’s the Greatest Dancer," "We Are Family," "Lost in Music," "Thinking of You," "My Feet Keep Dancing," "My Forbidden Lover," and "Good Times." Most of the singles and all their parent albums were gold. Many were platinum and multiple-platinum.
We were living and thriving in the most progressive and financially lucrative period in the history of art in America, and we knew that to do it, we had to play by different rules. Our Deep Hidden Meaning (DHM) allowed us to be artists, knowing most would at best see us merely as technocrats. We were bards who self-imposed a deceptive masquerade architecture on our lyrics. I’m not trying to
make more of our songs than they were. They simply were more than most realized. We were proud and welcomed the challenge, but envisioned a future that we knew would come one day.
We shared Afrobromantic dreams of what it would be like to have real artistic freedom. Freedom—to combine the right words with the right music, to paint the right picture—to represent the brilliance of complex simplicity. We wrote for the masses, but worked tirelessly to make sure there was a deeper kernel that would appeal to the savvier listener.
Let me give you a sense of what I mean:
The rest of my life is so hard._
Don’t._
Ooh, from his head down to his toes. >
Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci.
Only the hippest folks knew who those three fashionistic names were and what it meant to use them as lyrics at the time. Today, using designer names in pop songs is somewhat commonplace.
We had to be trendy, but there was always an extra level of insight dedicated to our subjects; it was never one-dimensional. It was like the old joke about the educated slave who drove a buckboard through an intersection because the penalty for literate blacks was death. When the cop stopped him after his action caused a huge accident, he said, "Nigger, are you blind? Are you a goddamned idiot or something, boy? Didn’t you see the stop sign?" The slave answered, "I’m sorry, boss. Do you mean that red and white hexagonal thing?"
While I was busy celebrating my success, some heads-up record companies started noticing that Chic had captured the magic of Studio 54 in our music, and they thought they wanted to bottle it. One was Jerry Greenberg, the president of Atlantic Records, who thought we could work that same hit-making mojo with other superstars on his label. He offered us everyone from the Rolling Stones to Bette Midler. We were flattered, but since superstars were already superstars, we knew that if we wrote and produced hits with them, no one would know what we did. We also knew only one way of working, which was, Do exactly what we say! This might not go over well with stars. So we suggested instead that they give us a lesser-known talent, so we could prove that we could make our own superstars. Greenberg told us about "a group of sisters that are like family to the label," he said, adding, "they stick together like birds of a feather." They were called Sister Sledge. After our meeting we went home and glanced at our notes.
The record ec had delivered almost verbatim the lyrics to "We Are Family," one of the biggest hits of all time. It seemed like a perfect situation to link to our hit-making technique. We had two concept albums under our belts by now, and we were developing the process and quickly becoming proficient. We agreed and started to conceive what this sister act that we hadn’t even met should be. Their song "Love Don’t Go Through No Changes" had been a popular RB song, but we knew DHM-based breakdown songs could take them all the way to the top of the charts. Our confidence grew with every song we penned, though by now we’d come to expect we’d make a lot of changes once we got with our band, so basically everything was just a thumbnail sketch. Even our string arrangements would often change on the spot.
The first time we met Sister Sledge was also the first time they ever heard the song "We Are Family." When they walked into the studio, we were still writing the song as it was blasting over the loudspeakers. This had to be markedly different from what they’d expected, but it’s how we worked. We didn’t have to have it done, because we understood the song’s DHM and we intrinsically knew what the song had to say. Once we had finished, we gave it to them and basically said, "Here it is and here’s how it goes!"
Our aim was not to be tyrannical, but we only knew that way of working. A song remained malleable until we felt it was right, even if that meant the sisters just had to sit around and wait. Pound for pound, I think We Are Family is our best album hands down. But our method caused some friction between us and the sisters.
The best example of this friction was with the lyrics of their first single, "He’s the Greatest Dancer." They were religious girls and took offense to singing, "My crème de la crème, please take me home." They thought clean-cut girls would not have a one-night stand. We explained, "The song is not about you, it’s about him and the power the greatest dancer has over you." They suggested we change the lyric to "Please don’t go home." This was in direct conflict with the song’s core truth. We insisted that the lyric stay as we’d written it. They reluctantly sang it (though you couldn’t tell that from Kathy’s breathtaking delivery), but there was a wedge between us because we would not negotiate. After all, this was supposed to be their record. And it was (from our point of view).
Their record came out and went to the top of the charts. The album We Are Family is the best example of DHM perfection. We knew who they were (or certainly who we thought they should be) and crafted a production that revealed that reality on every song. Contractually we didn’t have creative control, but we had it musically, and we were dedicated to protecting our music. This philosophy would ruffle feathers, but sell millions of records.
During the height of Chic’s success, I never quite realized how big our music had gotten, mainly because we more or less lived in the studio. When I wasn’t clubbing, I was recording or watching movies. That was my entire existence. We rarely did live shows. But when we did, well, they were something to remember. If there’s one live gig that captures what Chic was capable of onstage, it’s the show we did at the Padres’ stadium, in San Diego, during a festival, when we opened for Marvin Gaye.
Rick James and Marvin Gaye were backstage in Marvin’s dressing room. According to Rick, who told me this story—he was a good friend before drugs took him out—Marvin was getting ready to go onstage and the two of them were partying, laughing, joking, and having a blast. Marvin lifted his glass to take a drink and all of a sudden an earthquake hits. Earthquakes are not unfamiliar in California, so Marvin did what he instinctively knew to do during this type of emergency: He dove under the nearest desk and screamed to Rick, "Come on, man, get the fuck down here!"
Rick starts laughing. "That ain’t no earthquake," he says, "That’s just Chic."
"What’s chic?" Marvin says.
"The band Chic. You know, your opening act. Chic, muthafucka. Chic. Damn, where you been?"
Marvin regained his composure, put on his performance clothes, and waited to be summoned to the stage.
Meanwhile, we’re in our dressing room drying off, trying to come down from the rush of performing. Those of us who did drugs started doing drugs. All of a sudden, there was a loud knock at the door, loud enough to compete with the noise of the still-cheering crowd. Cops. We quickly hid our illegal substances and opened the door. It was the sheriff ’s officers and the stage manager. But instead of arresting us, they said something totally unexpected: "We need you to come back and do an encore. If you don’t, there’s going to be a lot of trouble."
How could there be any trouble? we thought. We’d fulfilled our contract. They didn’t see the drugs. We figured everything was cool.
Then the cops explained why they were so insistent. "You have to do something or there’s going to be a riot, and I’m sure you don’t want people to get hurt."
We had no choice but to go back onstage. The minute we did, the earthquake started again. I remember looking out at the upper deck. You could see and feel the entire concrete structure swaying like a palm tree in a light wind. The entire crowd was performing the vocal chant from our song "Chic Cheer." It basically just goes "Chic-Chic" endlessly, over the groove.
But there was a problem: We were still a relatively new band at that point, without much of a back catalog. We only had a handful of songs and we’d played them all. That was that.
We hadn’t gigged much as Chic, but were seasoned enough entertainers to know the golden rule of show business: It’s better to leave them wanting more than to leave them wishing you’d stop. Besides, we had way too much pride to repeat a song. Nor did it help that Luther—our main background vocalist—and the rest of the crew had already gotten onto the bus for the drive back to L.A. It was just Bernard, our two front singers, Luci and Alfa, our drummer Tony Thompson, and me.
So here was the dilemma: We couldn’t play, and standing on the stage blowing kisses wouldn’t calm down the crowd.
Bernard and I had a quick little plebiscite with our team and we found a solution: We asked a groundskeeper to bring out the golf cart that ferries the pitcher in from the bullpen during a baseball game. We proceeded to ride around the perimeter of the field, waving to the people like a bunch of popes and queens of England. We drove around until it got stale to us; truthfully, we felt a little foolish, so we returned underneath the stadium to our dressing rooms.
We figured that was it. This still didn’t quell the crowd. The cops came back and asked us to please do it again. So we did, as stupid as the stunt felt. There are so many things in my life that I can’t explain. Marvin was an international superstar, a personal hero of mine, far more famous and important to pop culture than Chic will ever be, yet many people booed him. He didn’t do anything wrong, in fact he didn’t get a chance to. I don’t think that booing was about Marvin at all, it was about Chic being the flavor of the moment. (And don’t worry about Marvin—many more people cheered him on, as always. He was still Marvin Gaye.) We could only imagine what Marvin was feeling. (Ironically, a similar thing happened to us a few years later when a brand new hip-hop artist called Kurtis Blow opened for us.) We were the new kids with the hot new sound, and we took another awkward victory lap. People who saw that show still catch me off guard to this very day. When I least expect it, a stranger will come over to me, shake my hand, and say with a knowing expression, "I was in San Diego." I feel like I’m part of some clandestine funk society whose underground members are waiting for the signal to rise up again.
In two short years, we’d forgotten how special it was to sell a million copies of a single song. It wasn’t because we were arrogant; we were just on a hit-making treadmill, with no time to savor the accomplishments. Within a few years, we’d learn just how important the gold and platinum records were, because for Chic they’d stop coming.
There’s a line I like from the film Highlander: "There can be only one." Truer words have never been spoken. Around the time we found ourselves too busy to pick up yet another platinum record (yawn) for our latest hit single "Good Times," there was another song tracking neck and neck with us. It was a catchy ditty called "My Sharona," by a new band called the Knack. "Sharona" ’s meteoric rise in the summer of ’79 happened to coincide with a circuslike novelty event called Disco Demolition Night, in which the participants lost control and almost destroyed the Chicago stadium where it took place. It all started as a prank by a DJ from a local radio station who’d been fired when they changed the format from rock to disco, and morphed into a movement called Disco Sucks.
Now, I love silly gags and satirical entertainment and enjoy cheap thrills. I’m liberal, understand the right to protest, and am open-minded, with a pretty good sense of humor (I sound like I’m a beauty pageant contestant), but what happened during the Disco Sucks phase was astonishing to me.
Bernard and I always believed that most pop music fits into the broad category called rock and roll. Rock and roll was ever changing, and this art form had different genres of classification for the benefit of consumers, like sections in a library or bookstore. Once any genre—folk, soul, rock, or even some jazz—reaches a certain position on the pop charts, it does what’s known in the music business as crossing over, and gets played on the Top Forty stations. That’s the reason so many of us own songs by artists from genres we normally wouldn’t—their hit songs crossed over into the pop Top Forty mainstream.
When a genre repeatedly crosses over and comes to dominate the Top Forty, what had originated as an insurgency becomes the new ruling class. This was the path disco had taken—from the margins where it started, a weird combination of underground gay culture and funk and gospel-singing techniques and, in the case of Chic, jazz-inflected groovy soul. But it was basically all rock and roll, historically speaking, as far as we were concerned.
But the media and the industry pitted us against the Knack—the disco kings in their buppie uniforms versus the scrappy white boys. But we never saw it that way. We thought we were all on the same team, even if our voices and songs followed different idioms.
Boy, were we naïve.
And boy, did things change.
I would love to say things went downhill just because our records weren’t good enough, and I do think our later work wasn’t as commercial (or good) as our earlier work. But Bernard and I always fought our battles with our music itself. Since we were not stars, this wasn’t an easy battle to wage. The Disco Sucks campaign started gaining momentum, and the Knack (through no prompting of their own) were positioned as the saviors of rock and roll. Chic, on the other hand, were the enemy of it. It was like we were in some Gothic tale of elves, dragons, warriors, and monarchs. One group would continue to befoul the throne under the dark rule of Disco (the music of blacks, gays, women, and Latinos), and the other would try to return it to its rightful rulers (the white guys).
We didn’t realize this war was industry-wide until a party one night in 1979. Cashbox was a music-trade publication like Billboard, chock-full of sales figures, charts, and stats. Bernard and I were invited to the magazine’s annual soiree, though most attendees were businesspeople, not artists. The party was in a restaurant that had two rooms, one of which was used as a nightclub. This was the perfect place for a music industry shindig in ’79. After a sumptuous meal, we’d all dance and party well into the night. Our industry was very healthy at that time. The music scene in general was robust, but it was especially great for an artist who specialized in dance music.
Donna Summer, Anita Ward, Samantha Sang, and Andy Gibb singles routinely outsold the legendary rock giants of the pop industry. It was a magical time. There was one Cinderella story after the next; check out any reference guide that gives you record sales statistics. Little-known groups like Taste of Honey and Chic could compete head-to-head with the big acts. In fact, at that time the biggest-selling records of artists like the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart were dance records. Dance music was inclusive music, because it was more about the music itself than rock’s often-bloated cults of personality, and this naturally resulted in a larger sales base. Example: A person who normally wouldn’t buy a big Bee Gees record like "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" would buy "Night Fever" in a heartbeat. The latter song was even played in underground clubs. The music reached across all social, racial, and political boundaries.
By now, just around thirty months after the release of our first single, Nard and I had collected seven singles that were certified gold (one million units), six that were platinum (two million units), three that were double platinum, and one that was triple platinum. Those are only domestic numbers; typically in our business you’d double that to get a good indication of your worldwide sales.
The magazine’s party was in full swing. Everybody was packed into the restaurant side of the establishment, and no one was in the nightclub room. This was our first Cashbox party, and Bernard and I thought folks wanted to stay in the restaurant and talk about business. After about an hour or so, the restaurant had become unbearably overcrowded and ridiculously hot. We couldn’t figure out why nobody was going to the nightclub, which seemed to be the logical thing to do.
"Maybe they’re not going in because they’re nervous?" Bernard ventured.
"What?" I said.
"You know, like kids at a party waiting for someone to get the courage to be the first to ask a girl to dance."
I responded, "OK, let’s be first." We thought if we led the way everybody would follow. No one did! And when I say no one, I mean not one single person.
Nard looked at me and said, "Damn, man, does my breath stink? I know yours does, but I thought my mouthwash was cool."
After hanging by ourselves for about twenty minutes, we knew something stronger than our breath was keeping people out of the spacious, air-conditioned room. Maybe we didn’t understand in-
dustry protocol, being relative newcomers. So we drifted back to the stifling restaurant to join our friends. We looked back at the nightclub and noticed a small neon sign above the room’s entrance. This simple little sign explained why the hip, nonconformist rock-and-roll rebels were terrified to go into the room.
The sign only had five letters: D I S C O.
The Disco Sucks movement and its backlash were so toxic, people in the industry—people who were eating off of the record sales coming from dance music—were all afraid to be associated with anything disco, even the word on a small sign above a door. Something about that really enraged me. Until then I believed I was part of a wonderfully elite group who marched to their own beat. I had worked hard to get there. We were free. We all did what we wanted, said what we meant. We were the music business. Music people gave voices to the voiceless.
Chic never considered itself a disco band. Not because "disco" was a bad word or beneath us, but because it was slightly disingenuous. The accurate etiology of Chic is rooted in bands that more closely share our musical DNA: the Fatback Band ("Backstrokin’ "), Brass Construction ("Movin’ "), BT Express ("Express"), the Joneses ("Love Inflation [Part 2]"), Crown Heights Affair ("Dreaming a Dream"), Kool and the Gang ("Hollywood Swinging," which was the inspiration for "Good Times"), Hamilton Bohannon ("Foot Stompin’ Music"), and so many other jazz-funk and RB instrumentalist acts that wrote hit records. (One day I’ll write the definitive playlist that influenced Chic, a treasure trove of the funkiest grooves on earth.)
Bernard and I defiantly stood in the disco room all by ourselves. "Look at the brave rebels," I said to Bernard. I was very disappointed.
I know there is bad music in every genre, but to classify all of it as, well, sucking is absurd. Many of the people at that party didn’t care much for classical or Celtic, but they’d never say it sucked across the board. All artists at the top of their art form’s food chain are specialists. I’m not a roots music aficionado, but the sheer virtuosity of the cream-of-the-crop bluegrass artists should be obvious and jaw-dropping to anybody.
The anger I felt at the party wasn’t because I knew this situation would have an effect on me (I thought the "My Sharona" thing was a singular event) or my career, but because of what this situation looked like to me. What I saw was classic hypocrisy: people who’d been making a fortune off of this music willingly throwing it under the bus, rather than standing up for it when it became uncomfortable or politically inconvenient. To put it another way, they milked it when it was up and kicked it when it was down.
Chic soon lost its footing and we broke one of our promises to each other: Never use our music for direct protest. We couldn’t do that very well, because it wasn’t what Chic stood for. The statement about the "brave rebels" was the inspiration for "Rebels Are We," the first single from our Real People album. At the time, we said we were parodying a satirical Woody Allen song of the same name, but that was only partially true. We were angry.
It didn’t matter. Our band was over commercially. We’d no longer be seen as the funky groundbreaking group with clever lyrics and audio-processing magic, thanks to the mega engineers we worked with: We were now a disco band, a band that, like disco, sucked.
I’m not complaining, I’m just sayin’. We always knew that once we’d made it in show biz, our downfall, like that of most groups, was preordained. It was just a matter of when. We tried but we never had another hit with Chic. What we didn’t know at the time was that the owners of the Chic Organization Ltd. would go on to make even more hits than we’d had in the early years. Only now we’d be making them for mainly rock acts. And the songs, strangely, were no longer called disco. They were new wave, dance, new romantic, and modern or even traditional rock. I’d learn that altering names to revalue a product hadn’t changed much since my grandfather changed his name to Goodman.
_From the Book, _LE FREAK by Nile Rodgers. Copyright © 2011 by Nile Rodgers. Reprinted by arrangement with Spiegel Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.