Nile Rodgers with Debbie Harry at a party for her solo album Koo Koo, New York, 1981. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images
"There are no second acts in American lives," said F Scott Fitzgerald. Clearly, Nile Rodgers did not get the memo. As co-founder of Chic, he soundtracked the glamorous, decadent days of disco with hits including "Good Times", "Everybody Dance" and "Le Freak". After disco burned out, he went on to produce a staggering list of pop's biggest stars, including Michael Jackson, Madonna, David Bowie, Diana Ross, Prince and Mick Jagger. Many Chic stories are music folklore, not least the wonderful story of "Le Freak", Atlantic Records' only triple-platinum-selling single, which they wrote after being refused entry to Studio 54, even though the headliner, Grace Jones, had personally invited them. Over three decades, Rodgers sold more than 100m records, figures unheard of nowadays.
His childhood was spent moving around 50s New York, from Alphabet City to the Bronx, interspersed with two stints in Los Angeles. "I was the oldest eight-year-old on earth," he writes. Suffering from acute asthma, he ended up in a convalescent home and overheard the caretaker abusing other kids at night: "I was terrified. I haven't slept through the night since."Rodgers's mother fell pregnant with him at 13, the first time she had sex, and after she split from his father she took up with Bobby, a white bohemian junkie. Their apartment was an open house of beatniks and drug users, Thelonious Monk once dropping by to buy Rodgers's mum's fur coat for his girlfriend: "Heroin often turns addicts into gifted salespeople."
Obsessed by music from a young age, he played flute and clarinet at school, where his more classical tastes included Gershwin. Then, at 15, he was befriended by hippies and spent two days tripping on acid at a Hollywood house party with Timothy Leary, listening to "The End" by the Doors on repeat, which opened his own musical doors of perception. He took up guitar and landed a job in the touring Sesame Street band alongside Luther Vandross, then the house band at the legendary Apollo Theater, Harlem. He became a Black Panther, was hospitalised at the same time as Andy Warhol, after being spiked with hallucinogens, and jammed with Jimi Hendrix. All of this while he was still a teenager.
When he met Bernard Edwards on the chitlin' circuit, they quickly became inseparable, forming the Big Apple Band, then Chic, inspired by Roxy Music and, more oddly, Kiss. Like most great pop acts, Chic's songs were deceptively simple. "We wrote for the masses," he writes, "but worked tirelessly to make sure there was a deeper kernel that would appeal to the listeners." In less than two years they shifted a staggering 20m records.
Despite promising himself he would learn from his parents' mistakes, Rodgers succumbed to alcohol and drugs. At Studio 54 he held court in the female toilets, where "I'd give my visitors a hit of coke. Sometimes we'd have full-on sex, or maybe one or more girls would give me oral sex… that's just the way it was."
After disco died, Chic were brought in by Motown to reignite Diana Ross's career, and delivered her most successful solo album, Diana,which included "Upside Down". It rescued them from "becoming a minor footnote in rock'n'roll history" and Rodgers became the go-to producer for pop's biggest stars in the 80s. He produced Madonna's Like a Virgin and they became close. "Why don't you want to fuck me?" she asked him one day, almost irked. "I'm your producer," he explained. "That never stopped any of the other ones," retorted Madonna.
This is a rich, warm tale of a fascinating life in the golden age of New York – and pop. The only slight detractions are a touch of post-rehab rationalisation, which means episodes of unrivalled debauchery are occasionally relayed with disappointing sobriety. He is also reluctant to dish dirt on his peers, which leaves several protagonists nameless....
