David Bowie’s Let’s Dance is a masterclass in guitar production. Aside from featuring both Nile Rodgers and the then-little-known Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar, the rhythm guitar parts in the verses are now immediately recognizable due to their trademark delays – a happy accident courtesy of engineer Bob Clearmountain.
Yet the genre-blending, post-disco hit started its life on an acoustic 12-string guitar with only six strings.
“I was staying at his [Bowie’s] house in Switzerland, and frankly, I was asleep,” Rodgers recounts in an interview with the Victoria and Albert Museum.
“He walked into my bedroom, and he says, ‘Darling, I think this is a hit.’ And I went, ‘Oh, cool man, let me hear it.’ And he starts playing something that’s going like [vocalizing a rhythm part]. He’s playing it on a folk guitar, a 12-string guitar with only six strings on it.
“I go, ‘David, what do you call that?’ ‘Let’s Dance.’ ‘Why do you call it, Let’s Dance?’ And he had this really complex concept of dancing – the dance that people do in relationships… lengthy explanation. I was like, ‘David, I come from dance music. Can I do an arrangement?’
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“So I wrote out an arrangement for two guitars, bass, and drums, because I knew that if the vibe was in the rhythm section, that’s all I needed to hear. I easily knew that I could put strings or whatever on top of that if I wanted to, but if the funk was in the basic groove, we had something.”
He continues, “And we get to the recording studio, which was owned by the band Queen. It’s called Mountain Studios, and I count the song off, and we do the little dominant pyramid thing [referring to the song’s intro]. As soon as we played that pyramid and I played it first, I scream and go, ‘Woo,’ or something like that, and I could tell right away that it’s a smash.
“David was really happy, and I remember this like it was yesterday. I said, ‘You think this shit is happening? Wait till you hear my guys play it.’ Because I knew once we got back home, and it was the people that I played with playing my arrangements, it was going to be killer.”
As for his own relationship with Bowie, Rodgers waxes lyrical, “He gave me some of the best musical times of my life. It was just a joy working with him. His unbridled enthusiasm for a project was contagious, to say the least, and his unshakable belief in the potential of the song, Let’s Dance, prophetic.”
However, he does admit that the working relationship was also complicated, due to one specific reason: “All I wanted for him was super success, and David seemed to want me to work against that principle. He wanted me to make a record that was not super accessible.
“He wanted it to be more avant-garde,” he divulges. “David was paying for the record with his own money, which was amazing to me. He had no record deal. I gotta get this right. And, ‘David, please believe me, when these people who are going to come in and bid for this record [to] hear it, we got to knock them off their seat.’”
Rodgers recently added another mega-act to his star-studded list of collaborators – Coldplay, with whom he collaborated on their latest album, Moon Music.
