11. A Hit Maker’s Life and Lyrics (Rodgers)英文版本.pdf

A Hit Maker’s Life and Lyrics Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Nile Rodgerss new memoir, “Le Freak,” recounts his days as a successful record producer and musician. By BEN RATLIFF The New York Times Published: October 19, 2011 The venerable musician and record producer Nile Rodgers, wearing a bandanna tied around his dreadlocks, fade-out sunglasses and a charcoal-gray pinstripe jacket, arrived at Cafe Luxembourg right on schedule one morning last week. The original idea was to have breakfast and then walk around the Upper West Side, revisiting landmarks represented in his new memoir, “Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny” (Spiegel Grau). We could have started at the former site of Ungano’s, next door on West 70th Street, where Mr. Rodgers played guitar in 1970 with a jazz-rock band called New World Rising. He was a teenager then, organizing for the Black Panthers and unofficially attending Stuyvesant High School. (He wasn’t enrolled, he explained; he just sat in on classes with teachers he found interesting.) Then we might have gone down to the site of Studio 54, which inspired his first No. 1 hit, “Le Freak,” in 1978, as the songwriter, guitarist and producer of the funk band Chic, a group that transcended the clichés of the disco era and became influential across styles. You can hear its imprint on hits by Queen, the Clash and Notorious B.I.G., as well as in piles of postpunk bands that sloppily emulated Mr. Rodgers’s rhythm guitar style, cleanly chopping in perfect time. We’d continue past the Power Station recording studio, now Avatar Studios, at West 53rd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues, where he spent many days producing hit records for Sister Sledge (“We Are Family”), David Bowie (“Let’s Dance”), Madonna (“Like a Virgin”), Diana Ross (“I’m Coming Out”) and Duran Duran (“The Wild Boys”). But we stayed put. Mr. Rodgers, 59, is a serious