Nile Rodgers has influenced the pop industry like no other artist, yet he’s battled addictions and brushes with death along the way. He tells Emma Higginbotham about his extraordinary life.
Here’s a challenge. Try and find a description of Nile Rodgers without the words ‘legendary’, ‘genius’ and ‘iconic’ popping up.
It’s not easy. Nor is it surprising, really. Since forming the disco-funk band Chic in the mid-70s, the legendary (sorry) American guitarist, songwriter and producer has had his fingers in so many hits, he’s arguably changed the face of modern music.
If Chic hadn’t released Good Times, famously sampled by the Sugar Hill Gang for their 1979 smash Rapper’s Delight, hip-hop today might sound very different. If Nile hadn’t produced David Bowie’s mega-hit album Let’s Dance, the single of the same name would have been more like a folk song. Without him, we wouldn’t have Upside Down by Diana Ross, We Are Family by Sister Sledge or the fiendishly catchy Get Lucky by Daft Punk. Put it this way, Nile isn’t just in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, he’s the chairman.
Yet for someone who’s a behind-the-scenes genius (sorry again), Nile says nothing beats the buzz of being on stage. After playing for royalty at the superstar-studded Platinum Party at the Palace, he’s now spending the summer zigzagging between mainland Europe and the UK, touring at festivals and racecourse gigs with his iconic (there it is) feelgood sound.
As well as hits from his many, many collaborations, he’ll be playing Chic’s back catalogue – and here’s another challenge: try listening to funky classics like Le Freak, Everybody Dance or I Want Your Love without moving.
“You have no idea how much fun we have when we do those live gigs. It’s just what we live for,” says Niles over Zoom from his home recording studio in Westport, Connecticut. Relaxed and smiley, he’s dressed in his usual uniform of beret and shades, and punctuates each sentence with a throaty “heheh” laugh.
“The thing that makes our show a lot of fun is because I have such great musicians, we can read each other’s minds. We have a sort of artistic camaraderie that allows us, as we say in the dance music business, to just go off. And we just go off! We have a blast.”
Did he ever think he’d still be performing more than half a century after his career kicked off? “Not in a million years. Last night I said to somebody: ‘Can you believe that at 69 I’m putting on a show where I’m expending more energy than I did when I was 19?’ I don’t know how I do it, but it feels natural to me. At the end of the show I’m not like ‘oh man, I’m so tired, I can’t believe I’m going to be 70 in a few weeks’. Heheh.”
Given the life he’s led, it’s incredible that Nile is still alive, let alone still on stage. Born in New York to Beverly Goodman, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, he rarely saw his percussionist father, Nile Rodgers Senior, and his homelife was the definition of dysfunctional.
“My biological father, my stepfather and my mum were all heroin addicts, and so were all their friends, but they were super-intellectuals – they were some of the biggest stars in the music and art world,” he recalls. “I was raised in Greenwich Village, which was the heart of the avant garde beatnik movement, so on any given night you could find Thelonius Monk or Nina Simone at our house, playing chess and talking about the latest Truffaut movie. And I was the beneficiary of these wonderful, intellectual, really cool people who spoke like this: ‘heeey, my man,’” he drawls. “’life is beautiful and everything is copacetic’. That was my world, and I loved it.”
Describing himself as an “exceptionally weird-looking” kid, with bottle-bottom glasses and a skinny frame, Nile always knew his future lay in music. While other children bought toys to show-and-tell, he’d turn up with Billie Holiday records. “Between the ages of five and six I thought that I was going to be a percussionist like my father, but in school I was assigned the flute, not congas, because they aren’t part of the symphony orchestra,” he says. “I started to learn music theory, and by the time I was in the fourth grade we were playing Mozart, and by the seventh grade we were playing Prokofiev and very advanced pieces.” He switched to clarinet, then took up the guitar to impress a girl, “and because I could read music so well, I just figured out how to do it.”
Musically life was going to plan, but at home things took a turn for the worse. At 14 he ran away and started sleeping rough on the subway with his guitar, no longer able to cope with his family’s heroin habit and all the darkness it brought.
“When you’re that addicted, and you spiral out of control, you don’t have great judgement when it comes to your friends,” he explains. “A lot of strange and horrible men would come over, and I thought that being around strangers was safer than being in my own home.”
Eventually he became a session musician and, after meeting and clicking with bass player Bernard Edwards on the circuit, Chic was born. Their first hit was the 1977 floor-filler Dance Dance Dance, but it was Le Freak that changed everything. The song was inspired by a Studio 54 bouncer yelling “Ahhh fuck off!” at them when they tried to get into the nightclub’s back door; they wrote it at Nile’s apartment that very evening – replacing the swearing with “Ahhh freak out!” – convinced they had a major hit on their hands. The record company wasn’t so sure.
“We played Le Freak, and everybody at the meeting walked out of the room to figure out who was going to be brave enough to tell us that it was the worst thing that they’d ever heard in their lives,” he says, beaming. “It wound up being the biggest-selling record in the history of Atlantic Records.”
Chic grew very big, very quickly. From being an anonymous backing musician, Nile found himself thrust in front of crowds of thousands, and to cope with the stage fright he began to drink. Before long he was depending on alcohol and cocaine to get through each day.
The death of the disco movement at the end of the 70s also saw the demise of the band. Nile became the go-to producer, working with Diana Ross (“as fun and unpretentious as she was beautiful and glamorous”) on Diana, then with David Bowie on Let’s Dance. Both would become the biggest-selling album of each megastar’s career.
When Bowie initially played the title track to Nile on his guitar, he recalls it sounding like strummy folk music; Nile rearranged it, and they recorded the song in a couple of takes. “The easiest album I ever made was Let’s Dance. We made that, start to finish, in 17 days,” he says. “I knew David wanted a record that sounded modern, and if we played Let’s Dance today, it would sound like we recorded it this morning.”
His Midas-touch reputation meant that Nile was sought out by the best in the business, from Prince and Madonna (who he calls ‘Madge’) to Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger. But each day was still fuelled by drugs and booze; in his autobiography, he describes himself as a “junkie workaholic”.
His addictions meant several brushes with death: didn’t that change his outlook? “I would love to be philosophical and romantic and say yes. At the time it probably did. I died seven times one night, and the eighth time I lived.” This was after overdosing in 1991: he was brought round by the hospital doctor who’d been recording his time of death when an orderly in the room spotted movement. Later, when the doctor told him what had happened, Nile says he was “humbled and ashamed, but not ashamed enough to learn my lesson.”
Eventually it wasn’t another hospitalisation but music that made him stop for good. In Miami for Madonna’s birthday in 1994, he went on stage in a club and pulled out all his old guitar tricks – playing behind his back, even with his teeth – convinced he’d been a showstopper. When he saw a tape of his performance the next day, he was horrified. After a few days of “coke-fuelled psychosis”, he checked himself into rehab; he’s now been clean and sober for nearly 30 years. Does he wake up feeling good every morning? “Either good or tired, heheh. But that’s easily cured with a cup of coffee.”
Workwise, Nile has barely drawn breath. As well as performing, producing, writing songs and composing film and video game soundtracks, he’s toured extensively with Chic. Yet it hasn’t been an easy ride health-wise. He beat an aggressive form of prostate cancer in 2010, then had cancerous growths removed from his kidney in 2017, a journey he documented in a long-running blog called Walking on Planet C.
“While these things are happening to me, I contemplate life and death, but in a strange way I think that I feel strong when I’m going through them, that I actually marshal all my forces and overcome,” he says, and grins. “Now that’s probably a crock, because I have great doctors and they marshal all their forces, and stick all that stuff inside me, and it happens to work.”
It’s been a busy old seven decades, but Nile insists that he has no plans to hang up his guitar just yet. “No, of course not! No. The day that I stop is the day that I really can’t physically do this anymore,” he says.
“There is nothing like the feedback that I get from people playing live, and the reason for that mainly is because I’m a cancer survivor. When I was going through it, and posting all this stuff on social media, people were getting back to me and they helped me through it. So every time I look out at the crowd, I feel like I’ve got 20,000 friends.”
Nile Rodgers & Chic play Sandown Park Racecourse on 27 July; tickets from thejockeyclub.co.uk/live
GOOD TIMES AND BAD
Nile calls his Fender Stratocaster – which he’s played on tracks ranging from Like a Virgin by Madonna to Notorious by Duran Duran – ‘The Hitmaker’. The NME estimates that the white maple-necked guitar has made more than two billion dollars-worth of music under his fingertips.
Sadly Chic no longer includes bass player Bernard Edwards, who died in 1996 when the newly-reformed band were on tour in Japan. Nile discovered Bernard’s body in his hotel room, and calls it the saddest day of his life.
Nile, who also has homes in New York, Turks & Caicos and Miami, still refers to himself as a bachelor, despite being with former magazine editor Nancy Hunt for more than 20 years. “I love calling her my girlfriend,” he says. “Being married, it’s like you become old in one split second.”
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in June 2022 (c) Waitrose