By Brian Ives
Every time I interview Nile Rodgers, I’m amazed by how quickly the time goes by, and that I only get to a fraction of my questions. There are always new things to discover about his incredible history: there’s always another story about working with Diana Ross or David Bowie or Madonna or Stevie Ray Vaughan.
But the man always has a ton of projects going on, and that’s more true now than ever. Since returning to the zeitgeist via his collaborations with Daft Punk on their GRAMMY winning Random Access Memories album, he’s been busier than ever, having spent time in the studio with country, EDM and pop artists.
We spoke to him about all of his upcoming projects, including the Freak Out Let’s Dance Festival, taking place in Riverhead, New York on August 4-5. Rodgers is the curator and will perform with Chic; other acts on the bill include Beck, Duran Duran, Q-Tip, Chuck D of Public Enemy, Chaka Khan and Keith Urban, among others. (Buy tickets here)
Then, there’s also the next Chic album, which will be their first since 1992. The album has been in the works since 2010, when Rodgers got a box of tapes with unfinished Chic sessions, featuring now-deceased members of the group, including basssist Bernard Edwards and one-time singer Luther Vandross. Those tapes made up the nucleus of the album, which doesn’t have a release date yet.
We talked to him about all of the above, as well as his relationship with Duran Duran, his love of Nashville and country music, his love of ’60s psychedelic music, and that time he produced Bob Dylan covering Johnny Cash. But first, there’s the matter of his health: Rodgers is a cancer survivor, who wrote about his experiences in his Planet C blog.
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How are you feeling today?
I actually feel great. Music seems to be my therapy. Because I’m so ensconced, or drowning, in musical projects right now. These deadlines give me energy. I have to do this, so I don’t let people down. I just finished Duran Duran’s album, I’m going in with Beck, I’m in right now with Keith Urban, Paloma Faith, I just finished with Kylie Minogue, Jake Shears, Nervo, Nicky Romero, it’s just been record after record after record. So, every morning when I wake up, I have a job to do.
Music changed my life. When I was diagnosed with cancer, it really hit me that my life on this planet is quite finite. So I just said, “OK, I’m going to do everything to take my mind off cancer.” I wanted to put everything I had into my art, for as long as I could. And the first thing I did was “Get Lucky,” around that time. That put me on a path to working and gigging more. The doctors were unclear about my diagnosis, which made me unclear. But I thought, “Here’s what I know: I can write songs and play guitar, that’s what I’m gonna do.” Now, I’m what they call “cancer-free.” But I look at it like this: the day before I was diagnosed, I was “cancer-free.” I don’t celebrate, and I don’t lament. It is what it is.
[youtube-https://youtu.be/5NV6Rdv1a3I&w=620&h=349]
Now, this feels like my normal life. The only difference is, prior to having cancer, I had the bravado of a youngster who didn’t think about the finality of life. But I’ve done more live gigs recently than I’ve ever done. That’s the thing that’s felt like a lot. I also wrote an autobiography that took four years, I am now writing two Broadway shows, that takes a lot of time, but I can do all of this because I only sleep two to three hours a night and I’ve done that since I was five and a half years old!
You’ve often tweeted about your insomnia.
It’s funny, someone said to me the other day that my very first tweet was complaining about sleep. And I looked at my tweet from the other night, and I said, “Same as it ever was.”
So tell me about your Freak Out Let’s Dance Festival.
I have a charity called the We Are Family Foundation, and the thing that takes our galas so robust, is that I curate them. So I tell the artists what songs they’re going to play, and they like that. I have a knack for how to keep the program going so there are no dead zones. So I decided I was going to program festivals. I did this in Montreux [at the Montreux Jazz Festival] a few years ago, it was like a festival within a festival, I had Mark Ronson, Grace Jones, Martha Wash, Cerrone, Felix da Housecat, and one thing that I saw was something that I inherently knew: that we all love dance music, we all love pop music. Even if you lie about it, you love it!
So I did a festival two years ago in Long Island, with Adam Lambert, Avicii, Chromeo and some others. and it was a success. I believe it has nothing to do with the genre. I’m sure this year the people who flip out to Chuck D will be the same people who flip out to Beck.
One thing I’ve always noticed and respected about you is that you seem absent of snobbery; you can produce people like David Bowie and Madonna who are considered cool, but then also work with Michael Bolton who is not; it’s all music to you.
You make an amazingly great point. What did I do after I worked with Bowie on Let’s Dance? INXS. No one ever heard of INXS before that. Once we got together, that was their first #1 record, they were a small act before that. After that, I worked with a [Canadian] band called Spoons, then I worked with Duran Duran, and then Madonna and then Paul Simon, David Lee Roth, Ric Ocasek, B-52s, Al Jarreau. Everyone I work with, I feel like we have an artistic connection, and that I can learn something from, and that I can give them a didactic experience. My favorite songwriting partner, currently, is Avicii. People really get on my case about that. Why? They say, “Because he’s just 24 years old.” How old do you think I was when I wrote “Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out?” I was around his age when I wrote those songs, and “We Are Family,” “Good Times.”
So will you get up and jam with the bands that you booked for your festival?
[nods/gestures “of course”]
Is Chic the house band, or will, say, Beck play with his own group?
Beck’s bringing his own band. This is the beginning of the Beck tour! When you look at the poster for the festival, it looks like Beck and Duran Duran are headlining. No: The reason I did that is to say “thank you” to them, because these are the first shows that they’re doing; it’s also the first show on the Duran Duran tour.
Chuck D is billed without Public Enemy; Eric B obviously isn’t with Rakim. Are you the backing band for them?
Let’s see what happens! These guys are my bros. I would like to have Public Enemy come and play, and that may be a possibility.
Duran Duran seem to be the group you return to most recently, outside of the Chic organization.
Duran Duran is truly like my second band. If you look at the album Notorious, I was the guitar player in the band on that album. I’m so proud of them: from their begininngs to where they’ve come to now. Their earliest stuff was amazing: “Girls on Film,” “Rio,” those were fabulous records. But now, there’s a maturity that I was trying to bring out of them when I did the song “Wild Boys.” I was very conscious and aware of the fact that they had sort of this “pretty boy” image and they were the MTV band, and I knew what they were capable of, given the right direction. There’s no Duran Duran record that sounds like “Wild Boys,” this was a real departure. And we did unbelievably well with it. So I thought, “Once they feel this vibe, and this kind of excitement from this semi-avantgarde record, now we’re in the Bowie neighborhood.” And when you hear their new record, you’re gonna say, “They finally got it!” It’s very semi-underground… until that hook kicks in.
Did you work with Mark Ronson on the album?
Mark and I have known each other since he was five years old. Mark’s step-dad is Mick [Jones] from Foreigner, we became friends when Foreigner and Chic were the biggest bands on the label, we’ve been friends since then. And Mark, I’m so proud of him, he’s killin’ it. Mark invited me to work on the album.
You’ve just released a new Chic song and you’re working on a new album which started when you got a box of unused Chic tapes in the mail. Who sent you that box?
Some diligent dude at Warner Brothers Records came across some stuff that was clearly not Warner Brothers’ property. The way that our band worked was: we were not only the band Chic; Chic also produced other people’s records. The recording studio where we made our records in, was sold. And the new owners didn’t want the responsibility of owning property that they didn’t own. So, they just sent anything that said “Chic” to Warner Brothers, no matter whose record it was for.
So, this guy who worked at Warner Brothers found the box, and took pictures of the tapes that they had and sent them to me, saying “I don’t believe that these belong to us.” And I went, “That’s where those tapes are!” I knew about those tapes, but had no idea where they were.
So these tracks are you, [late bass player] Bernard Fowler and [late drummer] Tony Thompson?
Not the whole album.
You guys were on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot…
I don’t watch the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony for obvious reasons. At the beginning I was part of the organization and I played at the inductions at the Waldorf Astoria with Paul Shaffer and those guys. But early on [in the Hall of Fame’s lifetime], I left. Spiritually, I’m a hippie. My parents were beatniks. I know so much about rock and roll, or what I call rock and roll. When I was young, I played at Electric Ladyland when it was called Generation; it wasn’t even a studio, it was a nightclub. On any given night, you would see Johnny Winter there, Jethro Tull, Danny Kalb and the Blues Project. That’s who I was playing with, we were young kids, smokin’. Smokin’! To me, that’s the bands that should be in the Hall of Fame. To me, rock and roll became this broad category that all music was in, once it hit the top 40. Now it feels gentrified. Like, when I was a kid, we were into Country Joe and the Fish and Quicksilver Messenger Service and Cactus. That’s the [best] stuff, to me! How about Hapshash and the Coloured Coat and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy and Moby Grape?
I remember when I first bought Dr. John the Night Tripper[‘s 1968 debut Gris-Gris]. In fact, Bowie and I have talked about covering “I Walk on Gilded Splinters.” For years! It was passionate.
When they describe Chic as a “sub-genre” of rock and roll, I go, “A sub-genre?” Everything is a sub genre of what rock and roll used to be! None of those bands sound like the early rock and roll artists! I went to the Country Music Hall of Fame and it was unbelievable. I felt like I was at the Museum of Natural History, it was the most moving thing, I was brought to tears. And I learned so much about country music and the history, and they had no problem acknowledging the contributions of black people and addressing the racism. The curator said, “We changed it to ‘country and western’ so white people would buy it!” I didn’t expect that! I thought it was really brave to address that, because people don’t want to talk about that. It was a history lesson. I’ve been to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – believe it or not, they’ve asked us to play – it sort of feels like the Hard Rock Cafe. But in my opinion, at the Rock Hall, you’re not feeling those surf bands, you’re not feeling [the band] Love. If bands didn’t sell [a lot], they’re not there, even though their influence was so strong. Like, Love: every band in L.A. wanted to be Love. The Doors wanted to be like Love!
But some bands that the Rock and Roll Hall have shunned, and seemed to hate, have gotten in in recent years, like KISS and Rush.
How could you hate Rush? That’s ridiculous!
Hey, I love Rush! [And here’s my review of their R40 tour!] So, how did you start working with Keith Urban?
Donna Summer influenced me to start playing this kind of music [disco]; and then Donna Summer, who lived in Westport, Conn., which is where I live, moved to Nashville. I, then, went to Nashville, and I started hanging out with Big and Rich and all these guys. They’re great, amazing and fun. And then I went to the museum and… very few things make you feel like an American. They really acknowledged the history. I felt very, very comfortable there, around people from country music. Also, I really appreciate virtuosity in musicianship, and the musicians there have that. I don’t want to start writing tunes about being in a pickup truck and all that kind of stuff, that’s not where I’m coming from. But the feeling behind certain things, and just the sheer virtuosity, I can get into that.
But Keith Urban is a monster guitar player. Why don’t people think of him as a guitar god? I’ve played with [Mahavishnu] John McLaughlin, Steve Vai, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and he’s in that league. He’s hangin’! When you hear he and I play together, we’re killin it! It’s like we were meant to play together. It’s like, now I’m having withdrawals.
Last question: you once told me that when you produced Bob Dylan’s cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” [from the soundtrack to 1996’s Feeling Minnesota] he was uncomfortable, because you were recording in New York. Why was the problem?
You got it a wee bit twisted; he was uncomfortable being on 48th Street, because of all the music stores. So he said to me – this was so awesome, and this is why I love guys like Bob Dylan – “Nile, do you think they could put a back door on the studio?” And I said, “Why, Bob?” “I feel uncomfortable walking into the studio on 48th Street.” “Well, then we’d be walking into the studio on 47th Street” — there were music stores on 47th also! This was awesome: he says, “Wow! I never thought of it like that!” He was a different kind of cat. I call myself old-school, but he’s really old school!
He walked into the studio and saw a huge mixing desk, he was like, “I don’t want to see that spaceship again.” He wanted to stay out of the control room. I said, “I’m glad to hear that, because I want to record you with just one mic hanging over you, and you singing and playing.” He said, “I’ve been trying to do that for years, no producer would let me do that!”
So have you ever talked about working with him again, given that you recorded him the way he wanted to be recorded?
Not really: he’s a different kind of cat. And I, probably, at the time, was not terribly interested in making records. You know how hard it was for Michael Jackson to get me to come down to the studio to play just one little guitar track [“Money,” on the 1995 album HIStory]? I was very protective of my concept of what it took for me to be sober. I didn’t feel comfortable being in a recording studio, because I was born in New York, I know all the studio people, and in that environment, you can easily start to feel like you’re Elvis, like you’re the King, or something. Everybody’s like “Hey, Nile, what do we do?” Because they’re accustomed to be being the boss. And I didn’t want to be the boss anymore, I just wanted to be a studio musician coming in and playing. But I was the boss. And being the boss of Bob Dylan, that was a little too heavy for me at that point in time.