Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco

PREFACE

Happy Man with a Style of His Own

The Budokan, Tokyo, Japan is a venue that has more than its fair share of popular music mythology. In late June and early July 1966, a frazzled and fading Beatles played a concert in this fabled Sumo wrestling arena, opening up the venue to the West just as Admiral Matthew Perry had done over 100 years previously to its parent country.

As a concert hall, it became enshrined in the world’s consciousness with two albums from the late 1970s – Bob Dylan and Cheap Trick both released records within months of each other in 1979 with the title At Budokan – and these LPs, with their washed-out images of men in baseball caps and mascara, meant an awful lot at the time and are still known to spark particularly fond memories of that period of Western cultural imperialism.

Given the unquestioning love Japanese audiences would bestow on their Western heroes, if you were a popular group or artist of any standing, the Budokan simply had to be on your touring itinerary.

That Chic should have received the accolade of playing in this legendary hall to celebrate Nile Rodgers’ career as a producer in April 1996 demonstrates that, 15 years after their creative peak, Chic were at last being welcomed onto the same stages as the storied rock acts that had preceded them, and whose fans, at the time, had reacted so sniffily to them.

The event in question was for a season called the Japan Tobacco Super Producers, and Chic, although by now only containing two of the original players from the classic 1977–83 line-up, were the star guests. Those two players were guitarist and vocalist Nile Rodgers and bass player extraordinaire Bernard Edwards. Between them they had been responsible for over 50 hit records as artists and producers as well as countless gold and platinum discs. One of their songs, ‘Le Freak’, became the biggest-selling single in the history of Atlantic Records.

Chic performed three concerts in Japan, one in Osaka and two at the Budokan, with the final show taped for a television special and what was to become Chic’s Live At The Budokan CD. To commemorate Rodgers’ production record, they had brought along a coterie of famous friends and guest players for the evening, including Guns N’ Roses’ guitarist Saul Hudson, better known as Slash, Simon Le Bon and Steve Winwood. Three-quarters of their old production charges Sister Sledge – Joni, Debbie and Kim Sledge – were also on hand to provide a dose of sororal magic with their rendition of Rodgers and Edwards’ greatest anthem, ‘We Are Family’.

There was, however, one serious cloud on the horizon: Bernard Edwards was not well. Clearly not well. Edwards had always been a notorious limelight-shunner, preferring to be behind the scenes or at home with his family rather than indulging in the obvious high-life activities of his musical partner. Not that he hadn’t in the past, but those days were long over. He had been getting fit and had lost a considerable amount of weight. So, his subdued and distant behaviour in Tokyo that April wasn’t any immediate cause for alarm.

One night, Rodgers and Edwards were out in a nightclub doing a meet-and-greet for the great and the good from Japan Tobacco, the people who’d spent all this money bringing Chic all the way across the Pacific. At the function, Edwards was passing out and falling asleep – but, to Rodgers, this was simply the behaviour of the ‘regular old ’Nard’, bored to tears with all the trappings and commitments that his position brought with it. Edwards had been known to fall asleep at social occasions before, to the point where Rodgers had always believed that his dearest friend suffered from mild narcolepsy.

By the time of the final concert engagement, Edwards was really ill. It was increasingly apparent that he was suffering from pneumonia, but, true to his professional roots, he refused to cancel the performance. At the side of the Budokan stage, on the final night of the three Japanese concerts, Edwards reached for Rodgers and held his lifelong friend close and, fighting back tears, said, ‘Man, we did it. This music is bigger than us.’ Rodgers replied, ‘What are you doing, coming up with this philosophical stuff, Sophocles?’ Edwards whispered back, ‘The music has a life beyond us – it almost has nothing to do with you and me at all now.’

The gig itself absolutely smouldered. Playing as Chic in concert for the first time in six years, the hits-and-career-highlights performance rocked. With extended intros, Slash added guitar throughout ‘Le Freak’; Steve Winwood did his best Jimi Hendrix on ‘Stone Free’ as a tribute to Rodgers’ all-time hero; and the Sledge trio once again injected some gospel glamour into the angular veneers of Chic’s groove. Rodgers’ and Edwards’ by turns interlocking, supporting and duelling styles were present throughout, with Edwards still in his ever-present suit, while Rodgers now favoured his true bohemian rock-star dreads ’n’ threads approach.

Although the evening was a celebration of Rodgers as a producer, it was more about the friendship of the pair of them, at that point approaching its twenty-fifth year. In the extended workout of ‘Chic Cheer’, conceived so many years previously as their rallying call, Rodgers introduced Edwards by saying, ‘Now, this is my partner; not only my partner in music, but my partner in life. If it wasn’t for him I would not be here in Tokyo tonight; on funky bass, Bernard Edwards.’ Edwards returned the compliment: ‘Now, that young man over there…’ After a brief pause, he continued, ‘I’m a little sick tonight; I’ve got the Tokyo flu… But we’re still here. This is my dearest friend in the world; we’ve been together since we were about 17 years old and we’re well into our forties now. And we’ve been here a long time and I love him dearly… On guitar, Mr Nile Rodgers.’

After an emotionally charged show, the group returned to the Hotel New Otani. The rest of the touring party departed for America the following day. Edwards was too ill to travel and spent the day recuperating. Rodgers stayed behind as well.

Rodgers checked on his partner that night as he went out to eat. He asked him if he needed anything. Edwards assured his friend that everything would be fine. ‘It’s alright. I just need to sleep,’ Edwards whispered.

They were to be his final words. At 1.30 a.m. on the morning of 18 April 1996, bassist, composer, producer, husband, friend and father Bernard Edwards was officially pronounced dead.

The golden age of Chic died along with Edwards, but it was also to be the start of the most remarkable rebirth for Rodgers.

INTRODUCTION

Dancing Helps Relieve the Pain

chic / ƒi¡k / > adj said of clothes, people, etc.: appealingly elegant or fashionable. noun > stylishness; elegance > chicly adverb. 19c: French.

disco / ‘dÍskou / > noun (discos) 1 a discotheque. 2 a party with dancing to recorded music. 3 the mobile hi-fi and lighting equipment used for such a party. > suitable for, or designed for, discotheques. 1960s.

Chambers Dictionary

If you think about it, the whole movement was run by women, gays and ethnics: Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Grace Jones… I mean, the Village People were revolutionary! People who would never even stand in a room with a gay person were dancing to ‘San Francisco’, and that’s what was so subversive about disco. It rewrote the book.

Nile Rodgers, 1999

Chic are arguably one of the most important groups of the late twentieth century. Formed in 1977 and splitting initially in 1983, the New York-based dance act were of their moment yet strangely timeless. They combined two of black America’s classic musical traditions – close vocal harmonies and a watertight rhythm section – together with a huge sweep of the musical past.

They then melded this fusion with white rock sensibilities. When you listen to other records of the same era, with their reliance on special effects and overproduction, Chic’s music stands out. It’s a very blank, repetitive sound, fastidiously but not fussily made. It is spare; it is elegant. And, for little short of three years, they were one of Atlantic Records’ biggest-selling acts of all time.

Think Chic; think chic – an inextricable link to the stylish New York disco scene in the late 1970s; Studio 54; hedonism; good times. Musically and culturally, Chic were clearly blocks ahead of everything else that was on offer. Even their choice of name was apposite: an African-American band modelled on two white bands (Roxy Music and Kiss) and calling themselves ‘Chic’ located blackness as glamorous and sophisticated. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s it was the black and white of the civil rights movement and in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was the threat of the Black Panthers, by 1977 blackness had become ‘Chic’ – colour as a statement that African-Americans are beautiful people. In their tuxedos and evening wear, Chic sent a clear declaration that they as African-Americans were not prepared to either dress or dumb down. Everybody wanted to be, as Ashford & Simpson wrote, ‘Bourgie Bourgie’.

Chic presented a snapshot of American – and, indeed, global – culture at the close of the 1970s, a period when economic and social hedonism was giving way to recessionary gloom. But critic Peter Shapiro hits several nails on the head when he suggests that ‘art rockers at heart’ Chic were never simply about escape. While they undoubtedly enjoyed shaking their groove thing as much as any Peaches & Herb, they also recognised hedonism’s limitations and foresaw its dangers, and, more saliently, ‘the second best band of the 1970s (after Parliament/Funkadelic)’ knew how to present them to the widest audience cloaked fully in masking and irony.

Chic can now be viewed as The Beatles or Kraftwerk of the disco movement. Central to it, yet simultaneously removed from it, they led and they innovated and their influence pervades musical culture to the present day. Unlike other disco acts, they bore similarities to rock groups of the day. The casual observer would see a recognisable line-up; albums were released on a major label, and, in the era of the rising prominence of the synthesiser, the group produced a fantastically organic, functional sound. And there was more to this than met the ear: not only did their music sound magnificent on the dance floor, in the car or on the radio, but their lyrics coursed with deeper, often political meanings. Nile Rodgers gave this the acronym DHM (deep hidden meaning).

Chic were a prime influence on later British art rock and new romanticism. New romanticism held up the excesses of Studio 54 and sought to reproduce them and their fashions. The rough-hewn, scratchy guitar styling of Nile Rodgers and the economic, metronomic bass style of Bernard Edwards were slavishly copied by bands such as Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. Hip-hop may never have caught on so spectacularly had it not been for The Sugarhill Gang’s re-recording of ‘Good Times’ as ‘Rapper’s Delight’. Sure, the street-corner phenomenon would have gone overground at some point, but the fact that it was on the back of one of the best known breaks in the world propelled it further, faster.

It’s not that this innovation hasn’t been noted: it simply hasn’t been noted enough. Plaudits were not thick on the ground at the time, although critics have subsequently rushed to praise Chic. Alex Ogg argued in 1999 that Chic songs ‘expanded rather than conformed to disco’s musical agenda’; Dave Marsh states that ‘rewriting Chic became almost as great a pastime of the late 1970s as rewriting The Beatles was in the late 1960s’; Nick Coleman stated in 1992, ‘With their singular geometry of sound and sensibility, Chic redefined what was to be expected of dance music.’ But Rolling Stone encapsulated onomatopoetically the very essence of their groove: ‘Back in the disco era, when most records went thump-thump-thump, the music produced by Edwards and Rodgers went bumpity-bip-bop, bing-bang-boom,’ lifting it out of the ordinary to be something more enduring. But in mainstream opinion, there is still little difference between the sophistication of Chic and the mass-produced commercialism of, say, Boney M.

At the core of Chic were Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. The relationship between them, although musically short-lived, produced some of the greatest tunes in popular dance music. It was one of pop’s great partnerships – Rodgers’ hippie radicalism often jarring with Edwards’ old-fashioned, strait-laced R&B style – but, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney before them, that creative friction produced an incredibly exciting body of work. Robert Drake, the New York-based engineer and DJ who gave them, as The Big Apple Band, an enormous early break, has little doubt: ‘Chic truly are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the 1970s. Their music is classic and has staying power.’

Although it was not obvious, there were different agendas at work within the group at the time. Bernard Edwards, as someone schooled in the groove, was content not to mention social or political issues, while ex-Black Panther Nile Rodgers wanted to talk about a revolution. ‘And these were two guys working on the exact same song!’ recalls Rodgers. ‘Our philosophies defined our personalities. I had my bohemian lifestyle and Bernard was the family man. Everything that was systematic about Bernard was exactly what my anarchy needed.’ This systematic anarchy was reflected in a punishing schedule for the duo and an incredible work rate that saw the band release seven albums and produce a further eight for other artists in the years 1977–83.

Everybody Dance: Chic And The Politics Of Disco puts the rise and fall and rise of Rodgers and Edwards, the emblematic disco duo and leaders of Chic, at the heart of a changing landscape, taking in socio-political and cultural events such as the end of the civil rights struggle, the Black Panthers and the US oil crisis. The swing to the right in America at the turn of the 1980s and in the middle of the 2010s is explored. There is dancing, up-tight artists, drugs and Muppets, but, most importantly, an in-depth appraisal of a group whose legacy remains hugely underrated.

Dr Mary Ellison, Professor of American Studies at Keele University, recognises the power of the group: ‘Chic have always produced music that gives evidence of communal joy in the face of adversity. The link with the Panthers references freedom and equality that are found in disco and that are quite specific to its polyrhythms, offsetting the sheer speed of the disco beat and reflecting the complex layering of life.’ The speed and complexity will be two recurring themes throughout the tale – the speed with which they worked and the complexity of the characters involved.

The story is set in a period of great musical and social change… and unbelievable possibilities. At the starting point, we find ourselves back in the creative hotbed of Greenwich Village at the tail end of the 1960s. Where we finish, we find a music business changed beyond all recognition. The capitalism alluded to as Chic adopted a business uniform for their stage and promotional outfits in 1977 has become dominant. Sales are in permanent decline and the business is marketing-rather than product-led.

While Rodgers and Edwards were constructing and living out their disco dream, the central period covered by the book (1969–96) signifies a full stop to the innocence and optimism of post-Cold War America. It was a period of almost daily change: in the way lives were lived, how people consumed, even how wars were fought. Bastions of the establishment and the status quo were questioned, and the hopes and aspirations of millions of people who had never previously had a voice were now heard – though a great many of these voices were ignored. The post-war idyll of a safe and prosperous America, espoused by Dwight Eisenhower, was, by the end of this period, a distant memory. The 1950s and 1960s had been very clearly defined: in the 1950s, everyone knew their place, but they were beginning to question it; in the 1960s, freedoms were being celebrated, liberation was being enjoyed and people’s positions were being challenged. The 1970s were not as easy a decade to define, as industrial strife, political upheaval and a general discontent blurred all the boundaries.

As the 1970s progressed, a sense of loss of direction crept in. Discontent towards Richard Nixon’s presidency simmered in 1970 with student protests turning violent. Rioting was no longer something Middle America could portray solely as a race issue. Spiro Agnew responded by calling students ‘parasites of passion’, and intellectuals ‘an effete corps of impudent snobs’. The American government was doing its utmost to control the voices that had begun to speak out in the 1960s. The Black Panther movement, so momentarily terrifying to the white mainstream in the late 1960s, had been contained with the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The inner-city rioting of the late 1960s had also abated, but the scars of this period ran deep.

The war in Vietnam entered its final stages and then fizzled out in 1973. No substantial victory had been won and America’s war debts were amassing. Suddenly America began to doubt itself. It was clear that, no matter how much firepower and money the US possessed, they could not conquer a people with such dedicated resistance and hatred of imperialism. Even mass escapist, diversionary tactics such as the space race, and especially the series of moon landings, were over by the end of 1972. When Apollo 17 landed in December, the shutters finally came down on a three-year window of dreams.

Few things could be taken for granted. The OPEC oil embargo in 1973 flexed the Arab nations’ muscles against American imperialism. Images of lines of cars forming to fill up with rationed petrol abounded. The hike in the price of oil would have huge ramifications on trade. Big questions started to be asked. In a world where the status quo had been maintained for so long (in the US’s favour, of course), how could America be brought to its knees like this?

But all of this was merely a trailer for the main feature: Watergate. The scandal that followed the cover-up of the burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington in June 1972 was exposed in full televised glory. It demonstrated the lies that the incumbent of the country’s highest office was prepared to tell. Leadership at the highest level was exposed as corrupt, which in a famously patriarchal society set a shameful example to the people. It has been argued that it was simply a case of a president only doing what presidents had always done, but the sense of disbelief shared by the nation was palpable. And there was now a hungry, baying media ready to exploit, instead of shield, their fallibility. Yet, displaying the acute double standards of American political society, it was also a time when corrupt presidents could receive ‘full, free and absolute’ pardons from their successors. On 8 September 1974, less than a month after his resignation, Richard Nixon was pardoned by his former vice president, Gerald Ford. Ford was the first and only US president not to have been elected by the people. It was, to many observers, an America in disarray. With faith in the system failing, personal politics became more important. Self-betterment, material acquisition and their ultimate by-product, greed, were slowly but surely to permeate first American and then the whole of Western society.

On a social level, the 1960s and 1970s were a period of unparalleled, often insidious change. The American 1970s – like the British 1980s – were, on many levels, the end of innocence: a series of small, unconnected events meant that daily lives, moving forward, would forever be different. It is often the routine and mundane that slip through any larger net, but then, suddenly, huge, wholesale change has arrived. For example, quietly in 1972, the Universal Product Code (UPC), better known as the barcode, the first step towards product homogenisation on the path to corporate globalisation, was introduced. If people could now accurately track what was being sold, how long would it be before people could accurately track who was buying what and where, and, increasingly, why? What had seemed so spontaneous, so ad hoc and almost accidental before, was beginning to be defined, categorised, regulated, industrialised, commodified and exploited.

As popular culture is universally accepted as distraction, these grim and challenging times needed some form of counterweight. As a result, the theme of escape was prevalent in everyday entertainment. White mores took pop back two decades to the rock ’n’ roll days when there were certainties in life to cling to. Inspired initially by George Lucas’s 1973 movie American Graffiti, the award-winning Happy Days TV series and the 1978 blockbuster Grease, the strong visual imagery of the era of the first mass teenage rebellion could now be replayed to the widest popular audience. It was all reproduced in bright colours with any residual edges of danger smoothed out. But there was also another overlooked significance: rock ’n’ roll was actually old enough to have a revival. This was one of the first times that this had happened in popular culture. Nostalgia was being mined by 40-year-olds reliving their teens.

African-American pop went back even further in the 1970s. The string concerto washes, so typical of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s Philadelphia International Records or Gene Page and Barry White’s love symphonies, sated the African-American appetite. Rather than plundering the 1950s, these records evoked the era of the big orchestras favoured by Duke Ellington or Count Basie from several decades previously, which demonstrated an elegance and sophistication not synonymous with rock ’n’ roll. So, a man had supposedly landed on the moon and significant advances had been made in the fields of feminism, sexual equality and, most importantly, civil rights. For every dead leader or redundant figurehead, power had supposedly been passed to the people. However, just as Gamble and Huff asked ‘Now That We Found Love (What Are We Gonna Do With It?)’, so it would seem that people were confused and at a loss to know what to do with their newfound freedoms.

Momentarily, disco seemed to be the answer.

Dancing has long been seen as the ultimate expression of freedom. When you think of the many references to dancing, and show, within Chic’s music – ‘Everybody Dance’, ‘Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)’, ‘My Feet Keep Dancing’, ‘He’s The Greatest Dancer’, ‘Strike Up The Band’ – they are geared to a popular view of dancing, as an expression of liberation. And dancing is still one of the most subversive and uncontrolled urges. When the first black-focused movies came out, such as 20th Century Fox’s first black talkie, Hearts In Dixie, in 1929, people dismissed them, saying that they were just full of singing and dancing – to which one of the country’s most celebrated African-American novelists, Ralph Ellison, responded, ‘Yes, but did you see them sing, did you see them dance.’ African-American dance rituals had long been seen as an area where supremacy over whites was assured.

Although pop stars had been copying black movements for years, it was only during the explosion of disco that everybody started doing it. Disco was the music that paraded the personal. It was about what you wore, how you wore it, how you danced it. It was all about you. For two, maybe three, years, it was a phenomenon. It rose from the gay bars on the seaboards of America, the factory towns of northern America, the French capital, and, eventually, a London still trying to recover from the hedonistic spotlight-dappled days of the 1960s. Disco was for many the musical equivalent of the smiley face and rainbow patches – a place where street-level escapism and optimism were being preached. It was initially emblematic of the freedoms granted, and, in its earliest forms, a truly egalitarian, intoxicating, gender-balanced force that united blacks, Hispanics, Jews and homosexuals. Because the main themes were about love and dancing, its potency and meanings were often lost. The late, venerated music writer Lester Bangs stated in his essay on Barry White that disco’s audience looked like ‘Africa in a sportin’ hat with a sprinkle seasoning of gays and white folk who were just plain weird – nut and bolt joiners off the factory line, lonely pubescent girls’. It was this very audience that was claiming a music as their own, to dance and to enjoy.

Dancing helps relieve the pain,

Soothes your mind,

Makes you happy again.

What disco was to become was another matter entirely. By the time it had gone overground in the late 1970s, everybody had a take on it – it was unlike other musical trends that had come and gone. There was something about disco that penetrated deep into the public psyche. And this was almost entirely down to one film: Saturday Night Fever. The misappropriation of the image of John Travolta strutting along as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever – itself a bleak, downbeat motion picture – served to reduce five years of musical growth into a mass-marketing cliché overnight. And so, in 1977, the year Elvis Presley died, the world got another smouldering, snake-hipped dancer in the shape of Travolta. Where Elvis had stultified under his declining health and full complement of chins, here he was on the Louisiana Hayride again, doing dances that could be seen in full, closeup glory. The king is dead, long live the king.

The Anglo-Australian former beat group the Bee Gees, now sporting medallions, falsettos and chest hair, were featured heavily on the film’s soundtrack and became the palatable vanilla figureheads for the music’s passage into the mainstream. Disco became the butt of many jokes. In films like Love At First Bite and Airplane!, the disco floor, that ultimate space for joyful expressions of proletarian freedom, became simply an arena for parody. In rock music journalism, especially, it became common practice to reduce five whole years of a vibrant, enlightening dance movement into one beige suit.

There was money to be made by ‘going disco’. The economic climate meant that acts like Kool & The Gang, once a greasy, sassy New Jersey street-funk ensemble, were rendered neutral by the smooth grooves and production veneer of Eumir Deodato. Earth, Wind & Fire, practically a Black Panther house band at the start of the decade – and soundtrackers of Melvin Van Peebles’ ground-breaking proto-blaxploitation flick Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song – left the decade singing about a ‘Boogie Wonderland’.

Disco music became reductive shorthand for all that encapsulated the other within music: black, gay, Hispanic, Jewish. And so it became an easy target for Middle American prejudice. It would be easy to think of the anti-disco record-burning activities led by DJ Steve Dahl at Chicago’s Comiskey Park on July 1979 as the lightning finale to disco, but in reality it was only the start of a long, protracted passing. Like most cultural events, its ramifications are hard to calculate statistically. Disco carried on for at least a year, but times were changing. Chic’s worldwide popularity peaked soon after disco officially sucked. They were seen as completely disco. They blazed onto the scene with ‘Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)’ and appeared to espouse the life completely. In the public perception, there was no reference point for them outside disco. Thus, when disco passed, Chic were apparently over.

Like many trends and fads that have wide appeal, where disco ended was a long way away from where it began. By the start of the 1980s the music was derided, discredited and broken. It was put to one side by the white rock establishment, as were Rodgers and Edwards as the band’s main protagonists. However, the duo were determined to display their credentials and ran headlong into the arms of rock, producing every artist who wanted a splash of dance sensibility. In return, Rodgers and Edwards began to receive a degree of rock credibility.

Disco was the vehicle that Chic crashed in, and no matter what it was meant to be, many understood it only as the caricature it became in the mainstream. Rodgers and Edwards’ rise could be viewed – and let’s not be too grand about this – as a Faustian pact with the mirror ball. All those riches came to them, for sure, realising what Rodgers stated to Melody Maker in 1979: ‘When disco came in, it was like a gift from heaven. Discos gave us the perfect opportunity to realise our concept, because it wasn’t about being black, white, male or female. Further, it would give us a chance to get into the mainstream. We wanted millions of dollars, Ferraris and planes – and this seemed the way to get them.’ But what did not come alongside it for the players in Chic was the recognition and widescale respect that Rodgers, however nonchalant, has always craved.

It was only much later that the smart inferences in the group’s material were recognised and that the true significance of Rodgers’ Black Panther past surfaced. The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music stated grandly, yet accurately, in 1989 that ‘Chic’s influence on both black and white music may be as great as that of Chuck Berry on The Rolling Stones’.

Chic really were that important. It couldn’t be seen at the time because, although everybody knew their records, no one actually listened to them.

Everyone still knows their records. Now it is time to hear them.

1

Can’t Kick This Feeling When It Hits

From these beginnings, it is natural that Nile would be the one to bridge the gap between rock/funk and wistful ballroom romanticism.

Chic biography, 1979

The America the future members of Chic were born into in the 1950s had both an outer and an inner face. It was a cauldron of uncertainty and change, yet outwardly it was almost impossible to notice this. The world image of the country was one of a happy, smiling white suburbia.

In 1945, America had stood victorious. It had just successfully fought a war on two fronts and, by ending its period of isolationism, it took its place as a superpower in world hegemony. Less than five years later, the United States had seen the advance of Communism in Eastern Europe and China, seen the Soviets develop their own atomic weaponry, and faced very real concerns regarding internal security. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy had emerged to exploit the prevailing mood of fear and uncertainty with his activities with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Yet in black inner cities, concerns were still more primal – concerns about basic rights, and often about where the next meal was coming from, were paramount. For African-Americans, there had been little change; despite their central role in America’s campaign in the Second World War, they were still marginalised and segregated, living in once prosperous areas that had become, simply put, ghettos. The Bronx was one such area.

In 1950, social workers reported enduring poverty in a section of the South Bronx. Systematic rent control had been introduced during the Second World War to prevent rents from skyrocketing as empty apartments became scarce due to the influx of residents; it soon prevented conscientious landlords from paying for repairs to their ageing buildings.

The South Bronx was where Beverly Goodman, Nile Rodgers’ mother, was to grow up. And on 19 September 1952, her son, ‘Baby Boy Goodman’, was born in Queens General Hospital in the neighbouring borough.

In 1979, the official Chic biography opened with the following statement: ‘It has long been relegated to his subconscious, but the first music Nile Rodgers ever heard was in the rhythm of rubber thumping against the iron grating of the Triborough Bridge. The car was careening across the East River en route to Queens General Hospital, where Nile Rodgers’ mother had an appointment to give birth. As usual, Nile was in a hurry, and before the car had touched dry land, the world had one more guitar player.’

This story was the creation of Rodgers’ fertile imagination. ‘In the early days of Chic, Bernard and I didn’t have any money, we didn’t have any team, it was just he and I thinking of stuff,’ Rodgers stated. ‘We knew we needed to have stories to tell.’ Rodgers was the product of Goodman and a nomadic father, Nile Rodgers Senior. ‘My mother was only 14 years old when she had me,’ Rodgers recalls. ‘She had a whole plan of handing me over for adoption.’ Although rarely discussed, it was commonplace in the black communities in the 1950s for pregnant women simply to disappear immediately before their pregnancy began to show. ‘She’d come back and she’d be not pregnant – and no baby. It was a programme where I was going to be handed over right away. You cannot find a birth certificate for Nile Rodgers in New York City. There’s just Baby Boy Goodman.’

The Triborough Bridge story grew because Rodgers recalled tales told by his mother. Beverly Goodman fell pregnant at 13, after she had sex with Rodgers’ father as a Christmas present. ‘She was a virgin and got pregnant the first time,’ Rodgers explains. ‘She didn’t tell her parents until March, when she was 14. The police arrested her and she became a Ward of Court. They put my mom in a home for wayward girls in midtown Manhattan. Her most horrible memory of the whole experience was that she remembers one day winding up being the only passenger on a bus, going across the 59th Street Bridge, being treated like a criminal. It took her to Hollis, Queens, to another home for young women and that’s where they kept her until she had me. When I was a young kid, I remember her telling me this story that she was going across this bridge and next thing, I was born. That’s how it morphed into the born on the bridge story – it was something I heard when I was young. My mom then told me that I wasn’t actually born on the bridge. I said, Fuck it, let’s stick with it – it looks good in print.’

‘My mom didn’t want me from day one. When New York City later toured Europe, I had to get a passport. I knew I was born in New York City, but there was no evidence of a Nile Rodgers. My mom didn’t even put my dad’s name on the birth certificate as father, because she didn’t want my new family to trace me back to him.’ The baby Nile’s mother duly handed him over for adoption.

‘There was just supposed to be this thing that happened,’ he says philosophically. ‘And I would just become their kid, and that’s it.’ However, this situation was not to last long. Given the contradictory phase adolescents pass through in their early teens, there was little wonder Rodgers’ mother was confused, having the very real and significant issue of a dependant to consider. However, it became too much to bear. After a few weeks, her maternal instincts got the better of her.

‘She went and collected me from this poor woman – she was an albino who couldn’t have any children,’ Rodgers remembers. It was a story that was to be oft repeated in the Goodman household. ‘I can picture the scene, because my mother has told me a thousand times, that this woman got on her hands and knees and held my mother’s legs to keep her from taking her baby back. In those days, biological parents had ultimate rights. In that brief window of time, I had bonded with this woman as well. As a result, for my whole life, I’ve always felt disconnected from my family.’ This dislocation has been present throughout his career: in 1986, Rodgers and his then-girlfriend and business partner, Nancy Huang, gave an interview to New York Magazine.

‘Everybody adores Nile,’ Huang stated. ‘Apart from those relations of his. People are always springing up saying they were the first person to buy Nile a guitar.’ Rodgers continued, ‘People think your relationships change dramatically after you become popular. Mine haven’t changed at all. I tell my family, I don’t hear you guys complaining that my brother never calls. I didn’t get that many calls from them before.’

Although Rodgers barely saw his father, the few times he did meet Nile Rodgers Senior, he realised that he was a deeply charismatic man who looked exactly like his son. ‘My father was a professional musician. Which is what my mom says really attracted her to him; he was this cool young guy who was working with all these famous musicians. It sounded sexy to me as a young kid. Whatever he told me it was certainly an easy pill to swallow. He would say he used to play with the big Latin bands, just like on I Love Lucy. And so I grew up listening to artists such as Cal Tjader and Mongo Santamaría. It was part of the culture in New York City. I grew up fancying those guys.’

Meetings with his father, who was an alcoholic, were intermittent: ‘I physically saw my father the amount of times you could count on your fingers, but they were all very important. I loved him and wanted to reach out to him and be something special.’ One of the final times Rodgers saw his father, later in the 1960s, would continue to haunt him: ‘I was out with my really cute girlfriend, Alannah, and we’d just come from the movies. We made a great couple. I was in the Black Panthers and my girlfriend’s father is the head of the Jewish Zionist organisation B’nai B’rith, which in those days was its exact polar opposite. We were totally in love – it was the absolute Romeo and Juliet situation. I could see this crowd gathering round a man in the gutter on Broadway and 94th Street. As I was this young activist who believed that he had to go and save the people, I went over. I realised it was my father, suffering from the DTs. It was the penultimate time I saw him alive. It was not a great time, but I didn’t internalise it.’

Nile Rodgers Senior was to die of sclerosis of the liver brought on by his alcoholism in his thirties, while Rodgers was still a teenager. With his itinerant, alcoholic father and his young, inexperienced mother, Nile Rodgers was to have a traumatic and nomadic childhood, living from time to time with his mother and with various other family members. And it is fairly unusual for a son to remember most things about his mother’s twenty-first birthday party.

Beverly Goodman was to later find stability by marrying Robert ‘Bobby’ Glanzrock, a Jewish New Yorker who worked in a clothing store. There was another factor that linked his birth parents and his stepfather: heroin. ‘I believed that only children slept lying down and adults only slept standing up,’ Rodgers recalls. ‘When I would come home from school, all my mom’s and stepfather’s friends were all nodding around the living room. They were all standing up asleep, with cigarettes dangling. I didn’t realise they were all on heroin.’ But Glanzrock and Goodman were very much in love. ‘My mother found spiritual stability with my stepfather,’ Rodgers continues. ‘I didn’t have a steady life but she did; tumult was the norm for them – they lived a beatnik Bonnie and Clyde-like existence. They lived to support their habit – everything else was secondary, including kids and jobs – anything you could do to get drugs. She just adored him. It took a very long time for them to get divorced.’

Although Rodgers spent some time in California from the age of six with his maternal grandmother, the majority of his childhood was spent in and around New York in various neighbourhoods in the 14th Street and below and in the Bronx. From the notorious south – where the young John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez was also to grow up – all the way up to the semi-affluent Italian section, Pelham Parkway. ‘All of this was the Nile Rodgers’ neighbourhood,’ he laughs. Moving to Greenwich Village, his family fell in with a beatnik crowd. ‘I never went to the same school for more than a couple of months until I could control my own destiny. When my grandmother passed away – she was one of my primary caretakers – I was 15 or 16, which was pretty much the first time I could say I’m going to stay at this school, regardless of where we move. It was tough. I was always the new kid in class, usually the only black kid in an all-white school, so music became my salvation.’

Music was indeed to become Rodgers’ main interest. ‘I was raised Roman Catholic, so I had that influence from my grandmother’s side, but the real interesting thing about black culture was that, although my grandmother was a devout Roman Catholic, the music she listened to was all Southern Baptist – James Brown, the original Five Blind Boys, all that hardcore southern groove. She didn’t live in that world, but her family came from the West Indies and moved to New York; there was always that spiritual, voodoo-esque thing going on.’ The rich variety of music Rodgers was exposed to was to shape his entire life. ‘Occasionally you’d see Elvis – the first record I got was Blue Suede Shoes and my grandma gave me the shoes to go along with it. I was really little. I remember what I looked like and how small I was, so I have to assume it was pre-school.’

The phenomenon Elvis Presley caused was to mould popular music as we know it. When he broke through in 1956, it was soon apparent that his was to be so much more than previous popular successes, as radio, film and the nascent television service were all being brought together to market an artist. And, of course, he made real the marketing man’s dream: taking black music and making it white. But it was to be the Godfather of Soul, the incomparable James Brown, who was to leave the most indelible mark on the young Rodgers’ psyche. ‘James Brown changed my life. I was a kid who went to church and our services were in Latin; very peaceful and restrained and reserved at best. The first concert I ever saw was James Brown, with the cape and the spirit and all that – it was powerful stuff. I should have known even then that my path was chosen. I saw that TV programme 28 Up, which looked at these people every seven years of their life. If a person interviewing me now had seen me at seven, it would have been so clear that I would be the guy I am now. I just didn’t know you could make a career out of music. I had heard music all my life, but I had never seen it, there was no visual image for it – so seeing James Brown, it really was like Holy Cow.’

Bernard Edwards entered the world a month and a half after Rodgers on 31 October 1952, in North Carolina, out in the sleepy suburb of Beaver Dam, part of Greenville, Pitt County. Greenville was named after General Nathanael Greene, the Revolutionary War hero. The town had begun to make its mark around the 1860s when there were several established riverboat lines on the Tar River, transporting passengers and goods. Cotton was the leading agricultural crop, and Greenville became a major cotton-exporting centre. Before the turn of the century, however, tobacco surpassed cotton and became the leading money crop. Greenville became one of North Carolina’s leading tobacco-marketing and warehouse centres.

Bernard’s father, Wilson, like many African-Americans of the era, gained employment as a handyman. He was exceptionally good with his hands, an all-round Mr Fixit, while Bernard’s mother, Mamie, was a homemaker. The family relocated to New York for work when Bernard was 10 years old. Turning their backs on small-town life, the Edwards stayed in a building owned by the family in Manhattan.

There is not a great deal of information regarding Bernard Edwards’ childhood, as he simply would not talk about it. His eldest son, Bernard Jr, recalls, ‘It seemed to be something he tried to avoid. I wish I knew why. My dad was just like everybody saw him in the world, a very private person, and if it was anything that was going to make him emotional, he would rather be quiet about it than deal with it.’ However, his seemed to be a far more peaceful, settled childhood than Rodgers’. Edwards had an enormous interest in music from the very beginning. He played reeds at his school, PS 164, on 77th Avenue in Flushing. He took up tenor sax in junior high and electric bass at the High School of Performing Arts. Edwards Jr has a theory about why his father took up the bass. ‘My dad’s first instrument was saxophone. He then taught himself how to play the bass on a broomstick. That was amazing – he was like a Prince, ahead of his time. The bass is part of the foundation, the driver in the band – and my dad was definitely a natural-born leader. Any chance to be a part of the foundation, my dad would be all for that.’ There was a more straightforward equation, though, as Edwards himself explained to Blues & Soul in 1992: ‘I actually started off as a sax player and the only reason I started playing the bass was because at the time I was playing the sax the Vietnam War was on and the bass player who was in the band got drafted.’

In 1954, the year the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (Brown v Board of Education of Topeka), the third component of the last great rhythm section was born. Tony Thompson was born on 15 November in Queens, New York, to a Trinidadian mother and an Antiguan father. He had a sister named Cookie and an adopted brother and sister, Alan and Lisa. ‘My dad was a chef at Kennedy airport. That’s what he wanted me to do,’ Thompson recalled. ‘He didn’t understand why I would want to become a musician, because there were no other musicians in my family.’ However, it was his maternal grandfather who slyly encouraged the rhythm in Thompson. He would bring out his guitar, bongos and congas in the school holidays. ‘All the kids could participate. I used to be fascinated by that, which is how I began to get into the drums.’

However, Thompson could easily have become a priest. ‘I went to Catholic school all my life and enjoyed it immensely, even though the nuns would hit me. I’d go home to my parents and complain. They would side with them!’ Although he was an altar boy, his holy ambitions were to be short-lived.

‘When I was in eighth grade, a priest, Father Gallo, befriended me. He took me to a monastery in Staten Island – I really enjoyed the whole thing. The only problem was that when we were supposed to be taking meditation walks on the beautiful grassy knolls behind the monastery, I brought my Daisy BB gun and I was killing birds. And I started to sneak into girls’ rooms. It was really whack. I’m glad I went through that phase.’

Thompson, Rodgers and Edwards were of the generation that saw Malcolm X and Martin Luther King’s activities writ large, but, being so young, they were then more influenced by pop music. The real turning point for Thompson, as it was for an entire generation of Americans, came on 9 February 1964 when The Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show. Twenty-one years later, Newsweek was to ponder the cultural significance of this momentous event. Assessing the manner in which the group had affected the lives