REWIND | Nile Rodgers Transforms a David Bowie Guitar Sketch Into a Megahit

No Guitar Is Safe

Jude Gold

Music

4.8 • 857 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2024

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From hearing David Bowie strum a simple acoustic chord pattern while singing the words "let's dance" to transforming the sketch into the superstar singer's biggest hit, NILE RODGERS (in this flashback to Episode 125) relives step by step how he pulled off the feat. He also details meeting a new musician on the session — a future guitar hero that Bowie's "Let's Dance" album would soon introduce to the world: a young Texan named Stevie Ray Vaughan. (ABOUT THE "REWIND" SERIES: There is simply too much treasure in No Guitar Is Safe's ever-growing archive of back episodes not to revisit some great moments once in awhile! That is why now, between new episodes, you can expect to be hit with short, curated, "fun size," easily digestible REWIND posts in which we "roll back the tape" and listen back to a magical moment in this show's history.) This episode is presented by GUITAR PLAYER magazine and hosted by JUDE GOLD.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Neil, guitar is safe.
0:07.0	So Nile Rogers hears David Bowie playing him this.
0:11.0	Let's dance.
0:13.0	And he turns it into this. That's why Bowie hired him for the Let's Dance record.
0:28.7	We're going to get into that.
0:29.6	He wanted a hit.
0:31.0	He hired the hit maker.
0:32.8	Nile Rogers has so many hits.
0:34.1	It's just silly all the way up to get lucky with daft punk fairly recently
0:40.0	decades of hits this was really interesting to hear him reconstruct it this is our second
0:45.8	episode of rewind full episode coming next week with a brand new interview you're going to love
0:51.8	that always new stuff coming And this rewind series is fun
0:56.0	because now that there's 170-something episodes, it's cool to go back and relisten to some or in
1:01.9	case you missed it. Like, you do not want to miss this moment where Nile discusses meeting David Bowie
1:07.8	and becoming his producer for what is probably his biggest album and kind of a
1:13.1	big comeback record for Nile Rogers as well and then meeting a guy from Texas named Stevie Ray Vaughan
1:18.1	before the world knew who he was. Bowie brought him in as you know of course after seeing him play
1:22.9	Montreau so there's good stuff in there about all of that and then there's also also the demo, of course, which you're going to hear in there where
1:29.0	Nile has a bunch of A-list musicians playing a demo of Let's Dance and it's kind of more of a funk version.
1:35.4	Good stuff.
1:36.7	Hope you all are doing great.
1:37.8	I've been touring a lot with Jefferson Starship all over the place.
	...

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