Roy Cox

Guitarist and producer Nile Rodgers’ impressive and astounding musical credits reads like a history of popular music. In the mid ’70s, with the late Bernard Edwards, Rodgers founded Chic, the great R&B/funk band who had a string of smash hits during the disco era, such as ‘Le Freak,’ ‘I Want Your Love’ and ‘Good Times’; both he and Edwards also wrote and produced the hits ‘We are Family’ for Sister Sledge and ‘I’m Coming Out’ and ‘Upside Down’ for Diana Ross. After Chic’s career wound down in the early ’80s, Rodgers became a superstar producer and has worked with numerous acts including David Bowie, Madonna, Duran Duran, the B-52s, the Thompson Twins, the Vaughan Brothers and Mick Jagger.

Rodgers’ recently published memoir, ‘Le Freak,’ talks about his musical achievements, but it only tells a part of his life story. Like his biological father, Rodgers success as a producer was accompanied by a serious drug addiction. When it got out of control in the early ’90s, Rodgers went into rehab and has since become clean and sober for almost 20 years. But then, in October 2010, he revealed he was battling another obstacle: An “aggressive” form of prostate cancer.

In this interview with Spinner, Rodgers talks about the origins of Chic. working with Bowie, Madonna and Duran Duran, the cocaine-fueled moment that turned him around and his cancer treatment.

How are you feeling since your cancer surgery?

It’s up and down, in and out. It’s really weird for me. There’s no straight line to recovery and healing. Especially for the first five years, it’s sort of an up and down rollercoaster. Right now, you caught me in the middle of a cycle where I had a test a week or a two ago and I haven’t gotten the results yet. It’s a weird period.

Was the book already in the works when the cancer happened?

You won’t believe this. I handed in the book — it was done. Two days later I get a phone call from my doctor — I’m on my way to Rome to do a concert. And he tells me to sit down. I said, “I can’t sit down I’m late.” “You got to sit down because you have very aggressive cancer and we need to discuss your options.” It freaked me out but I caught the plane, went to Rome, played a great show and came home and said, “Now what were you saying, doc?”

I’m pretty optimistic. You just don’t feel great, especially when you’re waiting for test results. Not knowing in a way, that sort of it stinks, but it’s easier not knowing because you can project anything you want. And typically I project something really great.

Spiegel & Grau

In ‘Le Freak,’ you talk about growing up with a hip mother and stepfather and your childhood shuttling between New York City and Los Angeles. How much did your family background influence the way you lived the rest of your life?

They absolutely influenced the way that I live my life. The good part of it was that my parents were very open-minded [and] super intellectual. They could see any subject from any point of view, so we can talk, talk, talk. So it was a great environment, but in another ways it was also sad because I was a loner. I was rarely around other kids. So I gravitated towards adults and adult-types of teachings and adult types of entertainment. I loved being into Nina Simone, Clifford Brown, Max Roach and bebop. I liked the fact that we had this sort of hip house.

Your biological father had a profound influence on you, and the parts in the book that mention him are pretty heartbreaking to read.

My biological father was amazing. But he was really strung out on heroin and he was really strung out on love with my mother. My mother just didn’t love him. She really liked him a lot because he was a really nice guy and he was generous as he could possibly be with me and everybody else.

Flash forward to when you were in your teens and met Bernard Edwards before Chic happened. What were your early impressions of him?

We met on the telephone [and] we didn’t get along at all. In fact he told me to lose his number and to never call him again. And then we met accidentally on a pickup gig, not realizing that we were the same people who had spoken months earlier. When we met at the pickup gig, it was musical love at first sight because he and I were two totally different types of people. I was a complete hippie, skintight jeans with the embroidery and big platform shoes; Bernard was a total R&B guy, dressed very conservatively.

Bernard was a genius. He had this musicality that was just infused in his bone and his whole persona, his whole being. He was able to sort of reel me in and say, “Hey man, with your knowledge, you could be one of the most commercial guys in the world, because not many people know what you know. Now let’s put that into practice in a way that the masses can consume it.” That’s what made our partnership so unique, was because like with any artists, the genius is never in the writing, it’s always in the rewriting. So I would give him so much stuff that he’d always say to me me, “Man you got 10 records in here.”

I go see Roxy Music and coincidentally they were playing at a place called the Roxy in London. It was the most sophisticated, slick, atmospheric, textural rock ‘n’ roll that I had ever seen. I remember saying it to Bernard that I had seen a completely immersive artistic experience. I’m like, “Roxy Music, they got this thing, they have chicks on the cover and they’re dressed up in high fashion outfits and costumes and it was all hip.” I flew home a few days later and we started to put together this concept. We didn’t’ know what it was going to be, but we needed a starting point. So we started with Roxy Music.

When we hired our keyboard player Rob Sabino, he was good friends with Ace Frehley from Kiss, and this was before Kiss blew up. We would go to these different nightclubs around New York in the early punk scene. We’d see different bands and the one band that was more outstanding than any of the other bands were Kiss. We just thought it was so amazing that they were so anonymous off stage, and on stage they were so recognizable and identifiable. We thought, “Let’s mix that with Roxy Music and do it as a black band.” We started to dump it out on the table and it looked like this thing called Chic and we just started to cast it.

You later produced David Bowie’s 1983 album ‘Let’s Dance.’ It was a partnership that was mutually beneficial: It gave him hit singles and you recovered from a string of less-successful Chic albums.

After ‘Good Times,’ Chic never had another hit. Even though Atlantic let us finish all the albums on our contract — that means we did four more albums — all were flops. Then I meet David Bowie at an after-hours club and we talk and just hit it off. We convinced each other that we were supposed to be working together. He came to my apartment and listened to my solo record, which was a total flop, but he thought it was amazing. And like they say, the rest is history. We worked hard on ‘Let’s Dance’ before we recorded a record. We didn’t even write music, we just talked concept. David is a great conceptual guy. And being around him was like being around my parents. They can talk in these abstract terms and you know exactly what they were talking about.

Before you later worked with Madonna on the ‘Like a Virgin’ album, you first saw her perform as the opening act for Jenny Burton at the Roxy in New York in 1983. As you write in the book, at the time you were intrigued about Madonna but didn’t know what to make of her. What turned you around?

Madonna herself. I have never met anyone in my lif — and this is an absolute statement, so it’s almost science — that was more certain that they were gonna make it and spend more energy devoted to making it than Madonna ever in my life. And I’ve been around superstars. Nobody under the sun was like Madonna. She was positive and clear and wholly dedicated to achieving everything that she’s achieved. And I thought I was positive, I thought that I knew what I wanted to do.

I love Duran Duran. I think that we were the right paring — it was the right thing at the right time. I don’t like to overly take credit for anything, but since they said it first … When we did ‘Notorious’ [and] when the two other Taylors [Roger and Andy] left, that’s a heavy blow to a band at the top of their career. I think I was the glue that held that together. I used to say to the guys, “People don’t realize how great you are because you’re still like this boy band and the girls are still talking about your looks, and the music becomes sort of an added bonus. Now it’s time to go in the direction where you can become more like a U2 that’s really classic and solid artistically. You got to build that foundation and let’s take the fans along with us.” And that’s what the ‘Notorious’ album was supposed to do.

You had serious drug addiction throughout the years. At one time in Miami, around Madonna’ 36th birthday party, you went through a cocaine psychosis because there was a contract out on your life. You write in the book that you armed yourself with a samurai sword and a .45 automatic for protection.

I was on a three-day bender. I hadn’t slept at all. By the time I got to Madonna’s [party] the next night, I was completely out of control. I was absolutely the last person to leave Madonna’s house. [My friends] were carrying me to the Marlin Hotel on South Beach and I slept for about an hour or so. When I woke up, I had my first and only bout of cocaine psychosis. I called my home in New York and heard my answering machine tell me clearly that there was a contract out on my life. Then I went into in this crazy downward spiral for the next two to three hours. I really don’t know how long it was, but it felt like an eternity. I was actually hearing voices that were whispering in my ear and they were clear as a bell.

That incident and finding out about Keith Richards’ decision to get help for his substance abuse problem convinced you to get treatment.

I was so afraid, I didn’t know what to do. I was calling people to come down and rescue me — a bunch of private detectives I knew who were ex-homicide cops. While I was waiting, I read an article in some magazine where Keith Richards was talking about how he was going to give up drugs because music was more important to him than drugs. I went into rehab and I gave it up. That was more than 17 years ago and I never had another drink or drug since.

Along with the book, are you working on any other projects?

My life is as artistically exciting as it’s ever been. You know how when you’re writing you get in a zone? I’ve been in a zone for quite a while now. I’ve been working on a Broadway show for about the last five years. And notice I call it a Broadway show, even though it’s not on Broadway, just because I focus on the end game. We’re in the process of being picked up — we haven’t signed the contract yet, so I don’t want to make something go wrong. [The] Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where we put up the work in a sort of workshop/reading form this past summer, we got a 20-minute standing ovation. So they’re in the process of picking up our option and becoming our partners in this Broadway musical that I have composed called ‘Double Time.’ It’s about a guy named Leonard Harper, who was the first and only African American to bring the Harlem Renaissance revue to Broadway in 1929.

Chic have been nominated several times to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but have yet to be inducted. What are your thoughts on that and do you think you’ll get in?

Of course. In my opinion, when we were coming up, it was all rock ‘n’ roll. In other words, rock ‘n’ roll was the classification of all of this kind of contemporary pop music and you just figure out what type of rock ‘n’ roll it was. We weren’t doing show music, we weren’t doing classical music. We weren’t even doing jazz. We were doing this pop thing that was under this broad banner of rock ‘n’ roll.

We’re a funk/R&B band, we’re a groove band that other people happened to like and gravitate towards. We were being very opportunistic because we saw that in the discos, they would play music by jazz musicians — all you had to do was have a great groove. These guys figured out how to get in and so that’s what we were. We were these jazz fusion instrumentalists who learned how to write songs.

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Source: http://www.spinner.com/2011/10/25/nile-rodgers-cancer-book/

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