Indie Blog Archive 004: Nile Rodgers
Originally published in June 2013
Here’s a special one. In 2013 I was commissioned to do a piece for The Independent on the Daft Punk album Random Access Memories. The idea was to interview all of the collaborators and build a picture of what it was like to work on the project. I spoke to all of them, Pharrell, Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers, Paul Williams, Chilly Gonzales etc…
I have a vivid memory of the Nile interview because it took place at Sony HQ in High Street Kensington. It was quite an amusing press campaign because there was supposedly only one copy of the album being circulated to journalists and it was contained on a hard drive in a special briefcase, with high security around it at all times. I was ushered into a room, any recording devices I had about my person were handed in and the briefcase was brought in. Hilarious. What makes this even more hilarious is the fact that the album did actually get leaked in the end, on the night of the listening party at The Shard.
I managed to get a sneaky photo of the hard drive before my phone was taken off me
I listened to the album a couple of times and then I was given my dictaphone back so I could call Nile. Anyone who’s seen or heard Nile interviewed, or even seen him perform, will know that he’s more than happy to talk candidly about himself and his personal history, so we had a really lovely chat. I only got to use a small quote from him for the Independent piece so I decided to publish the rest of the interview on my Indie blog.
Nile Rodgers on Daft Punk and his renegade approach to music
Here’s the third of my Daft Punk collaborator interviews with a man who has a ridiculous amount of production credits to his name, ridiculous! Nile Rodgers is his name and, despite his vast experience, he’s still a very humble and extremely charismatic, warm, friendly person – I spent a long while on the phone to him for my feature for The Independent’s Radar supplement and here is an edited transcript of our chat, again minus the quotes used by The Independent. Enjoy… I certainly did!
When did you first meet Daft Punk?
Oh my God, we first met when they released their first album years ago, they had a listening party in New York and they told how they’d dedicated so much of their first album to my partner Bernard Edwards, who had just died, so that was around 17 years ago… then, we’ve tried to have subsequent meetings after that and it’s really been a comedy of errors!
How so?
Well, I’ve said, ‘We’re going to meet on this day at two o’clock in Paris’ and they said, ‘Ok great’. Then I get to Paris and they’re in St Tropez. So it’s like, ‘Ok tomorrow we’re going to meet at this place at 12 noon in St Tropez’. They said, ‘Cool’ and then they’re in Paris! We kept getting our signals crossed because when the artists are trying to do the meetings it gets all messed up…
Leave it to management!
Yeah, haha! So, I’m in Paris, they’re in St Tropez and vice versa, I’m like, ‘Wait a minute!’. So finally they just show up at my house, about a year ago, in New York and, maybe they can tell you different, but I don’t think they played any music. We just talked about music. It was conceptual, conceptual, conceptual – talking, talking, talking, ‘We’re gonna film like this, we’re gonna shoot like that’. All of that stuff prepares you, artistically, for what your job has to be because, if you know all those other back stories, you walk in ready to do that. Does that make sense to you?
Yeah, by speaking about everything, planning it out and understanding each other, it helps you to be completely focused on the task in hand.
Exactly, in Chic we called it DHM (Deep Hidden Meaning) – it’s the thing that motivates us and gives us the clarity to do what we’re doing. It teaches that, when we’re not doing what we should be doing, we can tell because we defined it so well. We look at each other and go, ‘Errr, my man, is that what you think we were talking about?!’… [voice of the guy doing it wrong] ‘Oh right, I’m sorry!’, haha. So that never had to happen with us because I was so clear, once I picked up my instrument I said, ‘Ok so this is how we do that’. And they went, ‘Oh shit, is that how you do it?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the only way to do it. Well that’s the only way I know of doing it. If you can teach me a shortcut, do it, but let me do it this way and I’m sure you’ll get the desired result’.
I did my thing the way I used to do it with Chic, mapping out single notes of what the chord progression is, playing on top of that and grooving on top of that – you get these guitar parts that you really can’t play by yourself, but it gives you this compound guitar part… you can’t quite figure out what it is but it sounds like you can play, but you really can’t.
Wicked, so from that first meeting what was it like working with them in the studio, in comparison to working with Chic or the many other artists you’ve worked with?
That’s the thing, it was no different. We were on the same artistic and spiritual wavelength so there was no difference. As a matter of fact, to show how unbelievably ridiculous the coincidence was, we recorded the tracks in the very same studio where we recorded Chic’s first hit record! And, not only was it the same studio, it was some place that, when I was a little kid, I used to hang out in before Jimi Hendrix bought it. It was a nightclub called Generation, which I used to go every single night because it was two blocks from my house.
Unbelievable!
I went there every night of my life. So, walking the guys around the room, I said, ‘Yeah Hendrix did this here, so and so did that here. When we cut Chic, we did this here’. Every inch of that room, I mean that’s where I cut INXS ‘Original Sin’, I did that song in one take, that’s where I cut Hall & Oates ‘Adult Education’, Femi Kuti – we did a dedication to his father, Fela, with D’Angelo and The Roots, we did it right there. ‘You don’t know how many ghosts are in these machines!’.
Were they not aware of that history at all then?
How could they be? No one knows that shit, you gotta be born in that neighbourhood to know that stuff. You may know the Hendrix part of it, but you certainly won’t know that it was a nightclub called Generation, where 16-year-old Nile Rodgers used to hang out and pretend to get drunk by drinking Coca-Cola and rum extract, haha… because I was on LSD, I didn’t have to get drunk! No one would know that, in fact you’re the first one to hear that part, I never told that to anyone! There’s no way you could know that because it wasn’t documented. Remember, when I was 16 I wasn’t known, so that history is not documented – I was just a 16-year-old, enthralled with the building and the location and the people around me.
That’s incredible.
Around that time seeing Hendrix on the street, and even being able to jam with him, was not some unheard of thing, it was actually quite normal. I was around a lot of famous guitar players and famous musicians because, in those days, rock n roll was so much more open than it is now. We didn’t have the internet so no one could say, ‘Oh, so and so was out with this one and they were in the bathroom doing drugs..’, that didn’t happen. You didn’t hear that stuff, unless someone died or something, it was just normal life. It was a wonderful Bohemian, open life where the people who were smarter and older than us had no problem sharing the knowledge with the young kids. So we felt privileged, but we also felt normal. This privilege didn’t feel like some special right, these were just guys in our neighbourhood – I lived there before Hendrix lived there, haha, so he’s coming into my hood!
It is mad how the internet has changed so much about the music industry. It’s now part of everyday life that everyone’s personal lives can be exposed so easily and people can be demonised for something that’s part of the creative process and part of building relationships.
Absolutely and it’s really a shame to me because so much of what we do is very innocent when you think about it. But it’s like three different people looking at the same story, depending on their point of view, it’s three completely different stories. But the people who are involved in it, we’re just trying to make art, we’re just trying to do the best we can and it’s funny, when I was talking to Guy-Man and Thomas, I was like, ‘Yo guys, everything we used to do in the olden days was a work around because we had these big concepts but we didn’t have the gear to make it possible’. So we said, ‘What can we do to push the limits of the gear, to make it sound like that?’ and, once we figured out how do it, you got that unique sound – so, in today’s world, when they try to imitate that, it’s not quite the same because they’re imitating the finished result, as opposed to…
The process.
Right! Exactly! And that’s what gives it that sound because you can tweak any little part during that process, or make a mistake, and that tweak or that mistake will make the record sound fantastic.
Yeah, it’s that organic process…
Absolutely, and I think that’s why this record sounds so wonderful to people and that’s what connects with people – something is happening that’s as close to being in that room with us as you can be. We’ve gone back to that analogue process and, even though you still may be hearing it in a digital medium, you still may be hearing on your earphones or your Dr Dre Beats or what have you, but the fact is, the other stuff that went into it before it got to you, is so organic that you’re one step closer to being in that room with us, as opposed to being five steps removed.
Can you explain what it was like in that room?
It was normal. I’d rather have that than super super high technology, I love just playing in and saying, ‘Ok, we gotta work around all these problems’. In today’s world they say, ‘Well, we don’t have these problems’. I say, ‘No, let’s give ourselves those problems’, because that’s gonna make the record sound unique.
In terms of the conceptual approach, what was their philosophy?
It was almost as if time had stood still – I don’t know if you ever saw X-Men? But there’s a bit where they can freeze all the people around them and they’re stuck in that moment, and the X-Men are walking around. So, it was like we could freeze time and now we’re in this time period, let’s make music for the future – we have a peak into the future because we know what the future looks like, but let’s go back to that time period and record it knowing the limitations of the gear. Let’s push the gear to the limit knowing that we want to make this record for the future, for an audience that exists 30 years from now. Does that make any sense? It may sound really wacky!
I like it! What did you learn from working with the guys?
What I learned was, the things that we learned back then are still relevant today – especially if you’re working with people who have this romantic vision of the past. We may say we’re not, be we are – we’re saying, ‘Wasn’t it great when you could walk into the studio and you could see Cornell Dupree or Jeff Beck or Robert Plant or Jimmy Page, sitting there… and they were just sitting with a guitar and an amplifier and making music?’! Nowadays we’re in the shortcut world, it’s instant gratification. If you want a guitar to sound like a certain way, you just dial it in. No one wants to work to get there, they just want to have it – these guys were willing to put in the work, they were willing to buy this one EQ just for a particular sound.
How long did it take?
Oh my God, I played a year ago! It was at the Ibiza Music Summit when I told everyone, ‘I just played on the new Daft Punk record’, and that was a year ago. What was really exciting about this, this is exactly how we used to think back in the seventies and eighties – we used to make what we called ‘Future Music’, because we never knew when our records were coming out, so we would make records that day that were not likely to come out for a year. That meant we couldn’t make a record that sounded like what was in the charts because, when our record came out, the whole trend could have changed. So you had the challenge of trying to imagine what the arc of pop music was going to be like. So, when we did this record we didn’t have any control, they didn’t have a record label, they didn’t know when it was going to come out – so we had to make Future Music.
That’s what gives it a timeless quality I guess, not being constrained by trends and making music that just sounds good, regardless of when it’s released.
You just hit the nail on the head, that’s exactly how I make my records. When a person tells me to do something else, I say, ‘No, you’re acting like it’s going to come out tonight! We don’t know what’s going to happen, you might even get dropped after this!’ I have fought that all my life and I’ve been lucky, most of the time, that I have won those battles. Every time I’ve turned in a record, the record company hated me because it wasn’t what they were used to – if you read my life story, you’ll see that every record was a struggle. They all sound like pop music to you, like ‘We Are Family’ or ‘Good Times’ or ‘Let’s Dance’ or ‘Like A Virgin’ or all those Duran Duran records, they sound like pop records now. At the time, oh my God, if the CEO of the record company could have killed me and gotten away with it, that could have happened! Every record was a struggle, thank God it was an environment where the record execs actually said, ‘You know what, maybe these guys know something we don’t’.
Good for you for fighting your corner, it’s not always easy to be true to yourself in the music industry.
It’s hard because you feel lonely. Like I said, ‘Don’t you find it interesting that, with a career like mine, I’ve never had a Celine Dion or a Beyonce…’. No one ever calls me when the artist is doing great, I never get those phone calls – no one ever called me to do those people who were riding pop success, I never got that phone call. I only get the phone call when it’s like, ‘Hey guess what, we don’t have a record label’! People don’t realise, David Bowie paid for ‘Let’s Dance’ himself, he didn’t have a record label – we did that on our own.
The renegades!
Give me one, give me a Rihanna record, just one person who’s riding high. I don’t know what I would do with it, I’m almost afraid! I’d be like, ‘Wow, you’re famous! This is great!’. With Duran Duran ‘The Reflex’ their album had already dropped off the charts, it was like, ‘Ok, now what do we do? Let’s call that guy Nile that we liked!’ Hahaha. So I did that and that wound up becoming the biggest single of their careers and the album had already left the charts. It’s only because the artists themselves trusted me enough and I knew what they wanted. Once I understand what a person wants, I really work hard to give them that. ’m so focused, sometimes artists get angry with me because I make it look so easy – because I have it all memorised. So, when we’re laughing and joking, and they want to get serious I’m like, ‘Dudes, I know what we’re doing, we can afford to laugh today, we can afford to go to the movies today, we can afford to get drunk today because I understand, it’s ok, it’s alright’.
With the guys it wasn’t like that, they knew we were all on the same wavelength and it was wonderful and… I don’t like to say we were in control because there are so many organic forces that can derail a process, but we were pretty in control.
Haha, that’s cool. That’s a nice way to finish it all up – you spoke about the creative process and so on, but the bottom line is, ‘We were in control’.
Haha, yes!
Before we finish up, I wanted to ask, I saw a picture of you hanging out with Seth Troxler, he’s been a bit of an inspiration to me, so I wondered what went on with you both?
We went to lunch – I think coming to my apartment is the magical formula – so Seth came to my apartment in New York, we went to lunch and he gave me a flash drive of a bunch of music that he wanted me to hear. I guess he was edifying me in a lot of deep, deep house music that I hadn’t heard, that was super underground. I keep that disk with me all the time and I listen to it when I want to get inspired. Seth has a really interesting philosophy that’s probably a bit counter to mine but that’s what I love. I don’t want a person who thinks just like me, I want to be able to bring some of the stuff that I have into his world… anyway, long story short, Seth and I are gonna work together. We keep in touch via email, but we’re always on opposite sides of the world. But, man, when I look into his eyes, I feel like I can look into his soul and I love the dude, I really love him. He just sent me an email last week, saying, ‘Right, let’s get started…’
Haha, ‘I’m in Nicaragua at the moment, where are you?!’.
Exactly! I swear to God, that’s exactly it. He’s like, ‘Err, I’m in the middle of this blue lake in blah blah blah’. I’m like, ‘Ok, I’m in Frankfurt, what do we do?!’. I have a lot of undiscovered Chic material that I was doing when I was recording my solo album, of course Chic is my band and, no matter how much falling outs we had, I would always call the guys whenever I needed something performed precisely – so I have all these Nile Rodgers solo album demos that are basically Chic records in disguise. We were running away from the disco formula so, when you get down to its essence, it’s this jazzy funk, wacky, weird stuff that a guy like Seth could probably jump into and immerse himself in because it’s so damn underground. But I don’t want a guy to make it more underground, we were underground enough when we were writing this shit. I was so frightened at the time with all this ‘Disco Sucks’ stuff that was going around in America, I was doing everything I could to not be commercial. So I want to send some of that stuff to Seth, but so far the only people that I’ve absolutely promised to send it to, after Daft Punk, believe it or not… Avicii, because, let me tell you something, I don’t give a fuck what people say about Avicii, that is one of the most talented people I’ve ever walked into a studio with and that’s no bullshit. I’ve worked with everyone from Jeff Beck to Herbie Hancock, Robert Plant to Jimmy Page… everybody! This kid, at 23 years old, feels like he is so on my level. We were just on the phone talking about a record we made together that has just become brilliant – we started out in the studio for five or six days, then we had to go our separate ways but we talked every day, just like me and Bernard used to. Every day. It’s amazing to me to find someone like that and I don’t care what other people say, forget all that bullshit, I’m talking about as an artist and a writer, he and I are on a roll. The wavelength is mega and, when people hear it, they’ll be like, ‘Wow! You wrote that with Avicii?!’ and I’ll be like, ‘Yeah! Yeah, motherfucker! Nile Rodgers and Avicii, listen to this shit!’. He is so not intimidated. It’s great to feel that organic excitement because that’s exactly what happened with Daft Punk.
Its those magic moments, that’s what it’s all about…
Exactly, because it may not even come out. The people may not hear it, so all you have is that experience together in the studio and if that doesn’t take you to the highest of highs, what the hell was the point? We’ve all made it in life, I never have to work again, I haven’t had to work since 1980! I do it because I love it and I love meeting new people, like Seth. When I sat down and look in this guy’s eyes, I thought, ‘You know what, this is a guy I can make magic with’.