“He couldn’t understand why people didn’t like that more”: Nile Rodgers reveals David Bowie thought this little known track should have been a bigger hit than Let’s Dance
Nile Rodgers has looked back on his time producing David Bowie’s 1983 album Let’s Dance.
Though its title track was loved by many, including the legend himself, Rodgers has revealed that Bowie actually felt the lesser celebrated track Ricochet deserved the same level of appreciation as Let’s Dance, if not a little bit more.
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In an interview with The Recording Academy, Rodgers says, “When David asked me to produce Let’s Dance, he and I had just met. We just bumped into each other at a club and started talking, and I was amazed at his knowledge of jazz artists and composers and arrangers. He was deep into it; we tried to sort of one up each other, going more and more avant-garde, like, ‘Yeah, well, have you heard so-and-so’s record?’ ‘Well, but have you heard 17 West by Eric Dolphy?’ I mean, we were really just going at it man.”
Rodgers adds, “He then called me and realised, okay, you’re the guy I want to produce my next album. I go to his house in Switzerland, and he comes into my bedroom and says, ‘Now darling, I think this is a hit.’ And he starts playing a song that sounds very much like a folk song, and that wasn’t what we agreed we were going to do, but he was really into it. He said, ‘I call it Let’s Dance.’
“I said, ‘Man, I come from dance music. Let me do an arrangement.’ And basically, I restructured the whole thing. I had never heard Let’s Dance until we went to the recording studio the following day and played it. Of course, as an arranger, you can hear it in your head sort of, but I write for an ensemble. When we did the demo, we didn’t have a keyboard player. It was just two guitars, very James Brown style.”
He continues, “When you hear the Let’s Dance demo, you can hear how much fun he’s having; you’re going to hear that he likes it. Obviously, it’s the biggest record of his career, but he thought that my arranging skills on a song called Ricochet were far superior to Let’s Dance, and he couldn’t understand why people didn’t like that more. And I thought, ‘Wow, how weird is that?’”
Last summer, Rodgers reflected on the origins of his iconic Hitmaker Stratocaster guitar. “I wasn’t particularly attracted to it for any reason other than the fact that it was the cheapest guitar in the store,” he told Guitar World. “I’m being perfectly honest. And when I traded in my jazz guitar, the guy gave me back $300. I got the Hitmaker and $300. That was the best deal I probably have ever made in my life.”
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