He took two acetates and played them back and forth. And the DJ would play the record for an hour at a time. Even though we took A&R people down and showed them the reaction, this was not staged, this was real. We thought, ‘Damn, if they like that, what if we develop more stuff?’ And after ‘Everybody Dance’ it took a long time to get record companies to believe in us. It had something to do with being in that environment and hitting you with something that moved your soul, moved your heart, moved your feet, and all of a sudden we really believed in ourselves. I’d never seen anything like that and I realised the power of the groove, the power of the DJ to talk to the audience, and it had nothing to do with the radio. The people in the audience were playing air bass and stuff. I don’t remember what dance they were doing in those days, probably the rock or something. As soon as the opening drum hits everyone went (screams) and ran out to the dancefloor. Those are the only vocals on the record and everyone is losing their minds. We walk into this club, and my boy is playing this. This is going on for eight and a half minutes. Then we’d break it down, do that thing, break it down again, then get to my part where I go (plays guitar) with the clavinet playing. So we never heard the song again until three weeks later we were going to a disco and my man says: “Hey, come down and check this out.” “Check what out?” “You just got to see this.” And it was basically an instrumental that went (plays guitar, sings): “Everybody dance, clap your hands, clap your hands.” Then for an hour we’d play (plays guitar). Or you could make a reel-to-reel tape but then had to have a reel-to-reel tape player. The only way you could hear your music was if the engineer cut a lacquer and they’d cut it right there in the studio and you’d take that and take it home and listen on your record player. After we wrote that first song, we didn’t have a chance to hear it back, only in the studio, ‘cause we didn’t have cassettes. So our first session cost $10 and we had Luther Vandross, David Lasley, all these great singers who were working with us at Radio City. So we get there – and by the way, we’re playing with Luther Vandross, two shows a day at Radio City, so during the intermission we ran to the recording studio, where my boy was the maintenance engineer, and he paid the elevator boy $10 to keep quiet and not tell the boss that we record after hours. Remember, no one had played this song except for me until we got to the studio. He was like: “OK, that shit is cool, but what am I going to play?” Then he started imitating me and we were both going (noise), then all of a sudden Bernard came up with that genius bassline and we both started chucking and I started out-chucking him and about a minute later, as the writer, I thought, ‘Maybe I should just play simple and let him play the song’. So the first song I wrote I came up to Bernard and was: “Here’s how the song goes.” (plays guitar) Then I got really into it and went (plays guitar). The reason I think of it like that is ‘cause… Well, anyway, that’s what I call it, I’m not going to explain it. Because if I hear that in the root, I want to hear an A chord, I don’t want to call it a D. So I think of that as a A-minor 7 with a raised 5. I’m so traditional, whatever’s in the root, I would think of it as the chord.
So we’d do the passing ‘cause I wanted to have Bernard do this chromatic thing (plays guitar). You can look at this many different ways, but I like to look at it as a D-minor 11 with an A in the bass. And this was the cool thing, this was the real Nile thing. Will you all pretend like I sound good, pretend like I’m in tune? So the first song was C-minor 7, B-flat 11 to C-11, A-flat-major 7. Just one chord, staying in the groove, but because I wanted to hear more harmonically, I wrote (plays guitar). It’s not the typical chord changes for an r&b song ‘cause in those days they’d be like (plays guitar) and you would just groove (plays guitar). So the first was “Everybody Dance”, it was (plays guitar). Bernard hadn’t written a song with me yet. “The first song I wrote for Chic was “Everybody Dance” and I remember at the beginning of Chic I was the only composer. In 1977 during one of Luther’s shows at Radio City Music Hall Nile Rodgers describes what happened. Nile Rodgers, Bernard Edwards and other members of what was to become CHIC were in Luther’s band touring on the road after the 1976 release of LUTHER.