How Nile Rodgers saved Sister Sledge from law school: “It really is tough”
In terms of out-and-out disco anthems, you can’t get much bigger than ‘We Are Family’ by Sister Sledge. But it would have never existed if it weren’t for the commanding power of Nile Rodgers.
The four Philadelphians had gathered a smattering of modest hits over the few years after they formed in 1971. But it was fair to say that, without a storming song to their name, they were stuck in quite a bit of a rut, and didn’t know where to turn. Indeed, they didn’t even know if they wanted to carry on in the music business at all.
However, coming into the orbit of Rodgers and his Chic bandmate Bernard Edwards was the key to prosperity that they never knew they needed, as the tracks they produced over a series of sessions with the pair would be the ones that served to change the course of their lives forever. ‘We Are Family’ was both the ultimate testament to their dynamic and the song that saved their souls.
As Joni Sledge later recalled in 2016: “We’d had a couple of hits in 1974, 1975, we’d been to Germany and made an album with the disco act Silver Convention, but by the time we met Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, the four of us had been in the music business for eight years and we were frustrated. We were saying: ‘Well, maybe we should go to college and just become lawyers or something other than music, because it really is tough’. My sister Kim actually started law school.”
Ironically, at that time, Rodgers and Edwards weren’t exactly a pair with a huge precedent behind them that anyone could have confidently taken advice from. In those days of the mid-1970s, he and Edwards were known as the Big Apple Band, and the heyday of their future rebrand would not arrive for another number of years yet.
But it was clear that the disco messiah still possessed a charm and steady reassurance that, when they came into contact, provided Sister Sledge with enough determination to keep pursuing the dreams they had long been fighting for. Yet it wasn’t all exactly plain sailing. By her own admission, Joni Sledge confessed that her sister Debbie and Edwards were a clash of musical visions and personalities, which didn’t always make for the most sonically conducive conditions.
Nevertheless, ‘We Are Family’ did seem like the romp that bounced through the speakers. Recording the song “was like a one-take party – we were just dancing and playing around and hanging out in the studio when we did it,” Joni recalled, clearly symbolising the mantra of what Sister Sledge was always meant to be.
Indeed, the sentiment was so pivotal that it went on to form the name of the band’s breakthrough third studio album. Unlike their previous records, you could barely sort the weak from the chaff – it was just wall to wall hits, in the form of the eponymous track as well as the likes of ‘Lost in Music’, ‘He’s The Greatest Dancer’, and ‘Thinking of You’.
Of course, Rodgers can take credit for launching many seismic hits into the stratosphere, not least his own. But through a legion of everyone from Sister Sledge to David Bowie, there is one brain behind all their most disco-oriented tunes. He may be a musical mogul, but most importantly, he stopped Sister Sledge from having to go to law school.
