Nile Rodgers Reflects on David Bowie
Photo by Peter Gabriel courtesy of Nile Rodgers Productions
After defying nearly every rock’n’roll convention imaginable in the 1970s, David Bowie set out to make an album that would harken back to rock’s past while remaining timeless—an album of hits that anyone could appreciate. To help him create what we now know as 1983’s Let’s Dance, he recruited Chic mastermind Nile Rodgers, a musical genius who was then being hit hard by the disco backlash. The unlikely pair succeeded beyond their most extravagant dreams, and Let’s Dance remains Bowie’s best-selling album to date. The two teamed up once again on the hip-hop and jazz-inspired 1993 album Black Tie White Noise, but they will forever be associated with their world-beating first collaboration.
This morning, we spoke with Rodgers to discuss the making of Let’s Dance, his last interaction with Bowie, and what he learned from the legend about being an artist.
Pitchfork: Were you aware that David was sick?
Nile Rodgers: No. Though I knew something was wrong. A few years ago, the board of directors of my charity foundation, We Are Family, decided to give me an award, so I reached out to Bowie to ask if he would present it to me. He said, “I can’t be there, but I will do something for you.” So he made a video and sent it to me, and it was great. I just felt the love.
But looking at him in that video, I could tell he was ill, or at least certainly not the same David that I was in the studio with doing “Let’s Dance” and “Miracle Goodnight” and “Jump They Say.” Something was very different. But it was so sincere and wonderful. I’m gonna wait a little while and then call [Bowie’s wife] Iman and ask if I could put that video on my website. It makes me feel uncomfortable because it really was him thanking me, and I want to thank him. I just want to show the love and the effort that he put into it.
Pitchfork: Did the news that he had cancer hit you especially hard considering you’ve had your own battles with cancer?
NR: Well, I’ve been very open about cancer in my world: Dozens of musician friends have called me, and we’d share information about cancer and how to get through it, though, in many cases, they didn’t get through it. Sometimes you don’t know who to talk to. But the one thing I don’t do is give advice—when I had cancer, my doctor told me that I shouldn’t take any advice because these are decisions that you have to live and die with, and everybody has to deal with it their own way. So I just share my own story when people call: When I felt like I was at my worst—my doctors were not terribly optimistic—I just started writing songs because I knew the only thing that I could depend on to make me feel good was creating new things. Though that doesn’t mean everybody else should do it.
Pitchfork: Do you wish you could have had a conversation with him about that?
NR: I was a little bit sad that he didn’t call me because I’m so close to everybody [in Bowie’s camp] because “Let’s Dance” and some of the other songs we did together are ongoing things that are licensed to put on a product or in a film, so we all have a good relationship. But I never asked anybody about his health. If they didn’t volunteer it, I didn’t pry.
Pitchfork: Do you remember when you first met?
NR: I had always idolized and respected him, and we first met in the early ’80s at an afterhours club, where we talked for a while. Then we met at his Manhattan apartment, where he showed me a picture of Little Richard in a red Cadillac and said, “I want my album to sound like this.” He just had to show me a picture, and I completely understood. He wanted something that felt like the future but was rooted in rock‘n’roll, something soulful, black, and R&B, but morphed and evergreen. And that’s what Let’s Dance is.
You can explore the alternate universe of Bowie. I’ve always called him the Picasso of rock’n’roll, because I know that if I showed him anything—like a grapefruit—he would see the grapefruit that I see and then he’d see the grapefruit that he sees, and they would be two different things. He would have to explain to me his vision of the grapefruit, and then I would go, “I get it.”
Pitchfork: You wrote in your autobiography about Bowie’s progressive attitude toward race and working with black artists. How do you remember that aspect of your collaboration?
NR: As a black man in America, there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not reminded of being black. It has nothing to do with me. Some people are just uncomfortable with my presence. It’s never gone away. With Bowie, though, I never felt that at all. He made Let’s Dance with me and guys that he never even met, but he had enough faith to allow me to completely take over. He was like, “Nile, take my vision and make it real. You be the empresario.”
The whole album was completed and mixed in 17 days. There’s no four different versions of “Let’s Dance,” no five versions of “Modern Love.” That’s just it. Done. End of story. A huge amount of the time he spent sitting in the lounge watching TV and then he would just come in and check and go “Wow!” and then he would leave. And I’m thinking to myself, “This is the highest form of respect that anyone has ever given to me.”
We made that record the same way we did black records: Cut a song, move on to the next one. That’s seeing culture through someone else’s artistic eyes and also seeing the way they live and not even thinking about it. Because black artists’ budgets were different than rock’n’roll guys’ budgets. I made Bowie’s album the same way I make Chic albums. When I explain how that session went down, people think I’m being braggadocious, but I’m like, “No, it’s exactly the opposite.” It was all about Bowie having such confidence in us.
Pitchfork: Given his more experimental work, were you surprised that David wanted to collaborate with you to make hits?
NR: Yeah, that seemed so weird to me. But then, after getting to know David, I looked at it like an art project: The conflict of David Bowie making a commercial record is in itself an arty, cool thing, like, “Wow, that’s fun.” Hence my riff on “China Girl,” which I thought I was going to get fired over because it’s so corny. But he heard it and went, “That’s amazing!” I was like, “Do you really mean it?” And he’s like “That’s genius.” You have to see that this is a very special man. This is not your average artist. I mean, I’ve worked with everybody from the most eclectic, artistic people—the Laurie Andersons, the Grace Joneses—to ultra commercial—Kylie Minogue or Madonna—so to successfully combine the two and make a pop smash with David Bowie was amazing. It’s just absolutely mind-boggling. People ask me, “What’s the greatest moment of my life?” And I always go back to that, because, while making Let’s Dance, we were all by ourselves, no record deal, no nothing. I was almost hated at the time. I had tried to run away from the word “dance” and then we put out a record called Let’s Dance. I was like, “Jesus, come on Bowie, really? Can’t we use your artistic reputation to do some really cool thing that makes people see that I’m cool and artistic, too? Please, Mr. Bowie?”
I was concerned about us being overly commercial or doing things that were considered outside of David Bowie’s norm, but his concept was, “If you always approach it in an artistic way, you can’t be corny, because it’s just not in you.” So I’ve always tried to do every single thing that I’ve ever done basing it on my artistic reality. If you’re always trying to make artistic statements, it will never be confused. That doesn’t mean that they’ll always be hits, but you’ll always be true to yourself.
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