How The Doors changed Nile Rodgers’ life
Whilst Nile Rodgers found international acclaim as a disco pioneer alongside Bernard Edwards in Chic, what people don’t realise is that he comes from a distinctly countercultural background. As a child, he was raised in a beatnik environment, which saw him rub shoulders with Richard Pryor, Thelonious Monk, and Lenny Bruce, who regularly visited his mother’s house in Greenwich Village, aptly setting the scene for his rise as a pioneer in his own right.
Demonstrating his long connection to the counterculture, Rodgers has spoken about his love of psychedelic music at length before. He told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2018 that Jimi Hendrix’s debut album Are You Experienced? was “the most important piece of music to me of all time, for about two or three weeks, but it’s still cool. The lyrics, and the way he played, this really made me who I am”.
However, there was another countercultural group that had a life-changing effect on Nile Rodgers: The Doors. Led by Jim Morrison, the Los Angeles quartet are arguably the definitive act of the hippie era, with the frontman’s stream-of-conscious poetry floating on top of their pulsating music, a perfect sonic embodiment of the countercultural spirit.
When speaking to Forbes in 2019, Rodgers recalled an anecdote when, as a 16-year-old living in Los Angeles, he was introduced to LSD via the famous psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary – the most prominent advocate of psychedelic drugs. At the same time, Rodgers heard the music of The Doors, which had a “massive musical influence” on him. This experience gave the future Chic leader “an entirely new vocabulary”.
Rodgers recalled: “I was living in Los Angeles around 14 years old, and I worked at an airport, Van Nuys Airport, and I used to work on Frank Sinatra’s plane. Mr. Sinatra was a really nice guy to me, I was the only black kid there and they were really cool with me, and because I had that really cool job, I had money to do a lot of extracurricular activities.”
Continuing, Rodgers added: “One day, we were going to the skating rink, and they were having an event in Los Angeles called the Teenage Fair. We just happened to notice these really long-haired white guys. When we met these guys and walked across the street, I was a glue sniffer and quite friendly I walked over to these guys who looked really odd to us, and we said, ‘Hey man, what are you guys into?’ They said, ‘Wow, man, we’ve freaks. You guys want to take a trip?’ We said, ‘Absolutely’. We thought they just meant go joyriding, and in fact, they took us up into the Hollywood Hills, and we met a guy named Dr. Timothy Leary. We took acid for the first time in our lives, not knowing what it was. I stayed away from home for two days, and when I came back, the Doors had just released their very first album that day.”
Despite his grandmother being in tears when he finally returned home, Rodgers was ecstatic. He had found his new love, psychedelic music, and it was thanks to a collection of classic tracks by The Doors. In those two short days spent tripping with Leary, he went from playing classical music and jazz to playing the era’s hottest form of rock ‘n’ roll.
He explained: “When I came back home, I had listened to this song by the Doors called ‘The End’ over and over, even though ‘When The Music’s Over’ and ‘Light My Fire’ was the big stuff. But ‘The End’ was where it was at for me. When I got home, my grandmother was crying. The police were there, and I had a whole new language, an entirely new vocabulary. That was a massive musical influence on me because I went from playing classical music, loving modern jazz, of course, playing soul music, because that’s what all my friends listened to in South Central L.A. and in one day I was into psychedelic.”
Rodgers concluded: “What’s really interesting is that stream-of-consciousness rambling sometimes is really incredibly profound when you stand back and look at it. I was a teenager, 14 years old, 15 year old, something like that and I think about the lyric, ‘What have they done to the earth, what have they done to our great sister?’ I never thought about ecological things when I was younger because people really didn’t talk about the ecology that much. I’m not certain if that’s what [Jim Morrison] was talking about but if he were, that was way ahead of its time and amazing. To me when The Doors go into that instrumental section and they just take off it feels like they’re free-form improvising, to me it’s amazing, it’s just like bebop. It felt to me just like the super-hip jazz players that were all around my house and the music that I listened to all the time with my mom.”
Listen to ‘Light My Fire’ by The Doors below.
