Chic Playing Good Times – Live at Budokan

photo credit: Nick Atkins Photography via photopin cc

I’m a huge Nile Rodgers fan – he’s one of my all time favourite guitarists. I’d always been aware of his music, but one day in the early 90’s my guitar teacher played me a song of the Chicism CD and I was hooked. I started searching out all the old Chic tunes and learnt more about this amazing band.

Here’s a clip from the concert in Budokan, Japan. This one is special because it was the last gig that Nile played with Bernard Edwards. Bernard sadly died only hours after this show.

Together they were a great combination. I’m so impressed with Nile that he’s kept the Chic spirit intact and he’s continued to play and tour under the Chic name.

Check out Niles’ blog Walking on Planet C – this is an awesome blog document his journey through cancer. He usually updates it daily and it’s a fascinating insight into the life of an amazing musician.

So, sit back, hit play and enjoy the show. This is one of my all-time favourite Chic songs. And don’t forget to check out the guitar playing – such a simple riff through the whole song.

I’ve put a link to Nile’s book below the video – it’s a fascinating read. I recommend it!

Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny

Nile Rodgers Le Freak – click on the image below for more information.

Nile Rodgers Le Freak

You will hear a Nile Rodgers song today. It will make you happy.

Today’s pop music—genre-crossing, gender-bending, racially mixed, visually stylish, and dominated by dance music with global appeal—is the world that Nile Rodgers created. In the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote and produced the songs that defined that era and everything that came after: “Le Freak,” “Good Times,” “We Are Family,” “Like a Virgin,” “Modern Love,” “I’m Coming Out,” “The Reflex,” “Rapper’s Delight.” Aside from his own band, Chic, he worked with everyone from Diana Ross and Madonna to David Bowie and Duran Duran (not to mention Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson, Prince, Rod Stewart, Robert Plant, Depeche Mode, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, Bryan Ferry, INXS, and the B-52’s), transforming their music, selling millions of records, and redefining what a pop song could be.

But before he reinvented pop music, Nile Rodgers invented himself. He was born into a mixed-race, bicoastal family of dope-fiend bohemians who taught him everything he needed to know about love, loss, fashion, art, music, and the subversive power of underground culture. The stars of the scene were his glamorous teenage mom and heroin-addicted Jewish stepfather, but there were also monkeys, voodoo orishas, jazz cats, and serial killers in the mix. By the time he was sixteen, Nile was on his own, busking through the sixties, half-hippie and half–Black Panther. He jammed with Jimi Hendrix, rocked out at Max’s Kansas City, toured with Big Bird on Sesame Street’s road show, and played in the legendary Apollo Theater house band behind history’s greatest soul singers. And then one night, he discovered disco.

During pop’s most glamorous and decadent age, Nile Rodgers wrote the biggest records and lived behind the velvet rope—whether he was holding court in the bathroom stalls at Studio 54, club hopping with Madonna, or scarfing down White Castle burgers with Diana Ross. Le Freak is the fascinating inside story of pop and its tangled roots, narrated by the man who absorbed everything in his topsy-turvy life—the pain and euphoria and fear and love—and turned it into some of the most sparklingly ebullient pop music ever recorded. Nile Rodgers is a brilliant storyteller who gives readers the surprising behind-the-scenes tales of the songs we all know, and lovingly re-creates the lost outsider subcultures—from the backstreets of 1950s Greenwich Village to the hills of 1960s Southern California to the demimonde of New York’s 1970s and 1980s discos and clubs—that live on in his music and in the throbbing, thriving world of pop he helped to set in motion.

A Letter from Author Nile Rodgers: The Reason I Wrote Le Freak

I started writing Le Freak to answer some questions I had about my life. Not the big existential ones, just the facts. I’d asked my mother a question about our early years and her answer would ignite another spark of curiosity rather than provide closure. In no time at all we were off and running like a couple of dog-track greyhounds. The more I wanted to know the more she wanted to tell– like it was some sort of absolution ritual.

Mom didn’t need to apologize for anything–nor did I–we’d already done that countless times throughout the years. When I started interviewing doctors, institutional historians, family members, and friends I noticed there was a real pattern to this process of rediscovery. Everybody wanted to contribute. My inquiries reminded them that we were all a part of an amazing period in American history.

My early childhood was fascinating in the fifties; my teens were quasi-suicidal in the sixties; young adulthood was sexy in the seventies, and the edginess of the eighties lasted into the mid-nineties. Then that edgy life caught up with me. I only turned away from it when it finally threatened to take away my world’s most precious gift–music.

This isn’t literally a book about music–maybe writing about music really is like dancing about architecture, as the old saying goes. But if music takes the jumble of life–the love and loss, the excitement and pain–and neatly arranges it into notes and chords and verses and choruses that somehow capture it all, then what I’ve done is a little reverse engineering by recovering all the stuff that got packed into those records, a story that trails around the world and back to a newborn leaving his teenaged mother’s arms on Welfare Island in 1952. So in a way this is a book about music because music is about, well, everything, isn’t it?