Nile Rodgers

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

0:11Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading artistic figures reveal the most important influences and experiences that inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is one of the most successful and influential figures in popular music of all time. He is singer-songwriter, producer and arranger, Niall Rogers. over a 50-year career with his bands Chic and Sister Sledge and collaborations with Diana Ross, David Bowie, Madonna, right up to Daft Punk and Beyonce in recent years. He's created hit after hit.

1:03I want your love. Upside down. Boy, you turn me inside out.

1:15She's up all night to the sun. I'm up all night to get sun. She's up all night for good fun. I'm up all night to get lucky. Now, Rogers, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much. You are joining us today in the midst of a global tour. Two days ago, you were in South Korea. Two days' time, you're in South Carolina. You must be caught in the midst of time zone limbo. When do you sleep? It is the strangest feeling. My body clock is completely fooled. I have no idea what time it is when I awaken. I look at my watch and I go, is this Wednesday or is this Tuesday? Anyway. Well, it's great to have you here.

2:01whatever time it is in your head. On This Cultural Life, I ask my guests to choose the most important influences and experiences that have informed their own creativity. It's not on the list that you sent us, but surely there is a case to be made for this Fender Stratocaster guitar that you brought with you today, and I guess a guitar which goes everywhere with you. This is the guitar you call the hitmaker. Yes, it is indeed. It's funny, that name, I don't even know how it happened. I think that Bernard or Bob Clear Mountain or somebody else named it that. I was doing so many records, so many sessions early on in my career.

2:42It was just sort of like hit after hit after hit. And then I was picking up a guitar and I believe somebody just said, no, no, why don't you just grab the hit maker? And I got this one. And you talk about Bernard Edwards, who we'll talk about later in the program, your musical partner, with whom you formed Chic. When did you first buy the guitar? How long have you had it? So I got this in 1973. My band was a group called New York City. We had a hit record called I'm doing fine now Without you, baby I'm doing fine now Without you, baby Remember the day you walked away Anyway, what happened was we were playing at a nightclub in Miami, and the opening act would just plug into our gear and do their set, and then we'd come and do our set.

3:43And our set, we not only did original songs from our first album, but a few cover songs. And I noticed when they were playing the cover songs, Their sounded better. And it was to do with the guitar sound then? It sure did. And Bernard looked at me and said, I keep telling you to get a strap. That's why I listen to how that sounds. That sounds like the record. Because at that point you were playing a hollow-bodied guitar that had a thicker sound. Yeah. So why has this guitar served you so well? Why is this guitar so associated with the Nile Rodgers sound? Just give us a, you know, it's the cuts, isn't it?

4:20Probably because typically on old records, there were two or three guitar players. So one person would be holding down the... And the other person would be holding down the...

4:40Something like that. I'm making this all right. But it was that kind of thing. You know, you would have some other guy going...

4:51you put the three parts together, and wow, you have magic. So as a covers band, I'm the only guitar player. So Bernard was saying, you could play all three parts at the same time. And I'm like going, yeah, but it's going to sound wacky. He said, not on a strat. Anyway, when I got a strat and played those cover songs all by myself, he was right. He taught me to chuck. So instead of going, I was going.

5:28So you're playing the 16th note, say. Right, right. But more importantly, I was judiciously muting with my right hand. So you just didn't get a...

5:42You didn't get that. You got...

5:49so I'd comp and I'd start to feel rhythm so if a song was a big song and it had a lick I could play the lick play the chord and also give the vibe and that's what Bernard taught me so next thing you know I just went into the bathroom I practiced for a few weeks and I emerged Niall Rogers. So that's over 50 years ago that you bought this guitar. The world changed in a way because that is instantly identifiable as a Niall Rogers sound, which we have heard on the Chic records, on the Sister Sledge records, we hear it on David Bowie, we've heard it on everything up to Daft Punk. That is an instrument, surely, which more than any other single instrument in the history of popular music is responsible for more hits, I would have thought.

6:41Yeah. I mean, has a single instrument ever been so influential? I don't think so, because even when you think in terms of other guitars that are famous, you know, Hendrix or Bebe's Lucille or Eric Clapton's Blackie or Brownie, whatever the hell they call it. But they had many guitars. Right. There were a lot of guitars. Whereas you've only had, really, this one. Yeah, I got like three or four, but the one I choose to play is this. Do you play it every day? No, I wish I did. I mean, if I could make the living that I make without having to do shows and records and stuff like that, I could just stay at home and play guitar.

7:23I'd stay at home and play guitar. Has it become like a talisman? Do you think, has it become a lucky guitar? I don't think it's a talisman. I think of it as a workhorse. I don't think that it has magical powers or anything like that. What it does, it allows me a certain comfort factor that I know that if I start with this, chances are I'll be in a good place.

7:54It's got a mellow vibe, but it still cuts through and it makes the band feel funkier in a way.

8:12Let's take you right back to the beginning now. You were born in New York City in 1952. Your mother, Beverly, was just 14 years old when she had you. What are your earliest memories growing up in Greenwich Village? Composing music, like swashbuckler-type music. In your head? In my head, yeah. At what age? I was five and change, and I was doing very adventurous type swashbuckler, like, you know,

8:44seven seas, and I'm like a pirate or something. You were scoring your own writing. I was scoring my own writing, and I do that to this very, very day. My road manager will tell you that every morning I wake up and I go, Well, the song that's in my head today is this, and I can't get it out of my head next to you. Why did you do that? Now it's in my head. It's just how I'm programmed as a child. Because I had a very lonely childhood, I imagined scenarios, and typically it was swashbucklets, because the first book I ever read was Treasure Island. Was it about escape as well? Because you say you had a lonely childhood.

9:24Yes. Your mother very young, only 14 years older than you. You had stepfather, Bobby, who was white, a beatnik, very much a jazz man, drug user as well. Yeah, my stepfather came from a family of haberdashers, and he was quite sophisticated. My mom, very fashionable, smart, left school at 14 years old. What was home life like? Home life was wonderful. But the problem was is that I didn't have enough of it because my parents were both heroin addicts and they were quite nomadic. You see, when you're a kid and you don't quite understand heroin addiction, you don't know that it's a sort of triphasic process.

10:12The getting high part is the end of the deal. The first thing they got to do is figure out, OK, where do we get the money? After we get the money, where do we get the drugs? Then we got to get the drugs home and cook them up and then do them. So every day was an adventure in my parents' life. And in my life, I was just getting up and going to school. Were you aware of what they were doing? Were you aware that they were out? I didn't know that it was drug addiction. I saw it. They didn't hide it or anything like that. I saw it, but I didn't know that you had to pay for it. Like, I would watch them cook it sometimes, which looked a little bizarre to me, but you're a child, so it's not...

10:57It's just what you see. Of course, later in life, you started using drugs heavily yourself. But not heroin. Never heroin. Big difference. But from what I understand, you nearly overdosed several times. Many. You put your life in serious danger. What effect do you think that upbringing that you had, being surrounded by drugs as a child, do you think that fed into your understanding of narcotics later in life or had any kind of influence on that life? Somebody could hypothesize that, but I think that it was just the culture. I think that, in fact, growing up in the 60s and being around hippies and, look, the drugs that I did, my parents would never touch, just like the drugs that they did, I would never touch.

11:44I started out as a glue sniffer, and it was all the rage. It was the thing. When I mention that now, people look at me like, what are you talking about, glue sniffing? I mean, when I was a kid, that was the thing. How important was music at home? Music was incredibly important. The arts of all sorts, every manner, dance, theater, music, painting, sculpture. Were you taken to the theater, museums by your parents? All the time. My parents were so culturally literate. Because my dad was a sort of top-of-the-line haberdasher, they made fine clothing. So a lot of the jazz musicians would come over and buy my dad's stuff at a discount.

12:34Now, I'm very young, so I don't know if my dad was stealing the clothes and selling them at a discount so he could pay for his drug habit. I don't know. Now that I'm an adult, that sort of makes sense, but I couldn't swear to it. I remember reading years ago in your memoir that people like Lenny Bruce, the comedian, or the felonious monk jazz people were hanging out in your apartment all the time. All the time. They were there for the clothes or the drugs? I can't. Because in Lenny Bruce's case, he could have been either. You can't tell. How do you know? I'm one of my seven years old. Monk, are you here for blow or heroin or a fur coat?

13:19I don't know. They're just there and they're having a good time and they're laughing and joking. And they're talking about Truffaut films and they're talking about Hitchcock and playing chess with me. And they're playing Go with me. It's an exciting, wonderful cultural life. It was rich.

13:44Your biological father was a musician, I think. Yes. He was a percussionist. A terrific musician. Did he have an influence directly at the time? How much time did you spend with him as a child? Yes, so I didn't spend a huge amount of time with him, But the time that we did spend together was always, once again, about music and art. Always. Greenwich Village had a lot of cultural music shops. So you would go into one store that specialized in Indian ethnic instruments. So we'd stop in there and my father would get on the tabla and start doing something. When did you first start playing music yourself?

14:24And was it your father who was encouraging you? My father, yes, absolutely. My biological father, indeed. We started playing percussion together. However, the standardized curriculum in America demanded that we learn classical instruments. So I started playing the flute as well as playing percussion with my father. Do you remember the first time you picked up a guitar? Yeah, sure. My grandfather, who was from Macon, Georgia, played country kind of music. And he had a guitar hanging up on the wall. And whenever he wasn't around, I would sneak the guitar off the wall and play it. But did it come naturally straight away?

15:04Were you a natural-born guitar player, do you think? No, I was not natural at all. I looked at the guitar the same way. I looked at the violin or the cello. So I had it tuned improperly. And I believed that I could just buy a book of etudes and figure out how to play the guitar. I did, but I didn't learn how to tune the damn thing first. So because of all the classical training, I didn't know anything about the guitar being its own unique instrument instrument that was tuned differently than a violin or a viola or a cello. So you were following the charts and it was sounding terrible? It's totally like the most wacky thing in the world.

15:48So I thought that I just didn't have enough control. So I was playing a Beatles song, The Day in the Life, from the book. And I just kept struggling and struggling and just didn't sound right. And one day, one of my mom's boyfriends came in and said, Whoa, what do you got that thing tuned like? and retuned the guitar, and I was looking at the exact same book, and I played the chord. And I was like, holy cow, that was incredible. And it suddenly made sense. It made more sense than everything.

16:33Your next choice for this cultural life, Niall, An inspirational figure is your jazz guitar teacher, Ted Dunbar. Who was he and why was he so important to you? Ted Dunbar was a teacher at Billy Taylor's Jazzmobile. He taught us the techniques of jazz. He was a taskmaster. Had it not been for Ted, I would not be talking to you because what he taught me was so that the natural, let's call them gifts. I don't know what they were, but the natural parts of my personality, my musical personality, Ted was able to make me understand that you could fuse those talents together and be a composer and an arranger.

17:20and when I was younger those words were huge an arranger you mean like Count Basie you mean like Wayne Shorter you mean like Oliver Nelson like an arranger like I could do that and he said yeah because you naturally love harmony and I was like man you mean I could take this part of the orchestra and mix it with that part of the orchestra and he was like yeah And man, you naturally want to do that. He foresaw that because that's, of course, what you are. You're a great songwriter. You're one of those great guitarists. But you are a producer and bandleader, arranger. You're bringing all these elements together all the time.

18:02And that's what you've done. I write for ensembles. Ensembles. That's what I do. I write for a group of people. And it does many difference how big the group is. The bigger the better, frankly. It was around this time, I think, when you were working with, studying with ted dunbar that there was an open audition for sesame street the live show yes of sesame street and you went along and you got the role you got the parts so you were playing guitar with the sesame street band yeah and that was touring the country then that was touring the world was that the start of becoming a working musician that was really the the beginning where i first got a paycheck with uh taxes deducted and everything it was amazing i'll never forget it my My girlfriend went, I can't believe you.

18:47And I said, what? She said, your first paycheck, you go out and buy a pair of snakeskin shoes. And I went, yeah, this is totally cool. I can't believe it. We got to pay rent. You go out and buy Python platforms. I was like going, yeah, this is cool. I got a check coming next week, too. And I'll pay the rent with that. Apart from a paycheck at the end of the week and allowing you to buy ostentatious clothes, what did being in that Sesame Street band teach you? everything because I was playing the parts of Toots Thielman, one of the greatest guitar players that's ever walked this earth. And that's how I got the job because they couldn't believe that this little skinny kid off the street could just walk in there and look at that chart and go, huh, there's nothing.

19:27This is the easiest pie. Oh, so you're reading off the charts. You were sitting down, no prep. It was just sitting in every night. No prep. That was, it was basically what they would call a jury exam, so to speak. And there was, there was a time actually, I know it was a touring band but there was i know there was a time also that you spent in the apollo in harlem yeah where the where the sesame street band was kind of rooted who were you backing there who were the who were the stars on stage so i i have played in my lifetime this is it's just extraordinary to me one day i'm going to sit down on my right every single name but i have played with everybody from screaming Jay Hawkins and Luther Vandross and Betty Wright to Aretha Franklin.

20:10The roster was so big, and this was instrumental in my development because I had to learn how to interpret all of these different styles of R &B, be it blues, be it Chicago blues, Delta blues, straight-up R &B. You learnt your chops there. That was it. That was the grounding. Yeah.

20:46Your next choice for this cultural life, a hugely significant choice, is your musical partner, Bernard Edwards. Yeah. Who you formed Chic with in 1977. I know you've been playing together for a few years before. before that.

21:06You became musical partners, of course, and producers with Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, and you had so many hits. As songwriters, how did it happen between you and Bernard? What was the secret of the songwriting? And explain something that you've talked about, deep hidden meaning that you need to bury in a lake. So this is before Bernard and I became partners, we were spiritual kind of partners. We weren't business partners because there was no business except for$15. We're going to split 15 bucks. But we were partners. Like the first night we met, I said to him, I never want to do a show without you.

21:48And he said, funny, I was thinking the same thing about you. So we did that for a year or so. So everything was going great, but Bernard was not a composer. He was an arranger, he was a band leader, but he's not a composer. So I wrote all the songs for this group called the Big Apple Band. And we were more or less a fusion rock band.

22:15We couldn't get a deal, but every record label loved our music. We couldn't understand why we couldn't get a deal. Just somehow it didn't work out. Anyway, I come to England on our final New York City tour, and I get stranded because somebody snatches my suitcase, and it was a holiday, like Thanksgiving, and the American embassy was closed for two or three days. And it was funny, in the old days, they used to say, what do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless. I actually happen to have a girlfriend. So I stayed with her over the weekend waiting for the embassy to open. In London? Yeah, in London.

22:56Right. And she got the day off and she says, hey, can we go see my favorite band? I said, of course. You're the boss. Let's go. And we went to see this group called Roxy Music.

23:16And that was the beginning of Chic. I saw Roxy Music. I saw this group wearing couture clothing and having these two girls dancing around looking cool. And I was like, wow, this is like culturally way different than what I've seen in R &B, even though Brian Ferry is very R &B influenced. So in fact, he was just doing a twist on like Ike and Tina Turner or whatever, except with couture clothing because he wanted to be an English gentleman because he was like from Newcastle or something. Yeah, he was. But you're saying that idea of presenting yourself is about the clothing, it's about the brand image.