It’s not uncommon for mammoth rock songs to have humble beginnings. David Bowie’s monster hit “Let’s Dance” is a perfect example. It came into existence on an acoustic guitar. By the time producer/guitarist Nile Rodgers was finished with it, the tune had turned into a funk-rock powerhouse .
Bowie had his first taste of success as a singer-songwriter in 1969 with "Space Oddity" helping him break into the U.K. charts. But his career was never monochrome, and he soon reinvented himself for the first time via his technicolor glam-rock alter ego, Ziggy Stardust. As the years rolled on, he continued to refine his sound and vision, chameleon-like, to remain relevant in the eyes of his contemporary audiences.
In the mid-’70s, he befriended John Lennon, who told him the “easy” thing about writing hit songs, before turning to King Crimson bandleader Robert Fripp’s guitar talents for the 1977 LP, “Heroes”. By the 1980s he was working with another powerhouse in the form of Rodgers — as well as a then-unknown electric guitar player named Stevie Ray Vaughan — for his 1983 album, Let’s Dance.
Rodgers explained the genesis of the album's title track to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
“I was staying at his house in Switzerland, and frankly, I was asleep,” Rodgers says. “He walked into my bedroom, and he said, ‘Darling, I think this is a hit.’ And I went, ‘Oh, cool man, let me hear it.’ And he starts playing it on a folk guitar — a 12-string guitar with only six strings on it.”
Rodgers was impressed by the song. After discovering its title, Bowie wasn’t reserved in telling him why he'd named it thus.
“He had this really complex concept of dancing — the dance that people do in relationships,” he explains. “I was like, ‘David, I come from dance music. Can I do an arrangement?’”
Rodgers was given free rein to do so. He believed that “if the funk was in the basic groove, we had something.”
The pair then visited Queen’s Mountain Studios, in the Montreux Casino, Switzerland, to put Rodgers’ revisions through their paces.
“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 screamed and went, ‘Woo,’ or something like that,” he remembers. “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.
“He gave me some of the best musical times of my life,” Rodgers, who’s worked with everyone from Madonna to Daft Punk and the Halo video game franchise, adds. “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.”
Yet, the record’s commercial success belied Bowie’s original vision for it. The guitarist admits their relationship was “complicated.”
“All I wanted for him was super success, and David seemed to want me to work against that principle,” Rodgers says. “He wanted me to make a record that was not super accessible. He wanted it to be more avant-garde.
“David was paying for the record with his own money. He had no record deal. [I said] ‘David, please believe me, when these people who are going to come in and bid for this record hear it, we got to knock them off their seat.’”
Bowie retired from touring after suffering a heart attack onstage in 2004, but he continued making albums until his death in 2016. For his final album, Blackstar. he embraced a dark, jazz-laden sound and prophesized his death, which came two days after the record’s release.
“He always did what he wanted to do. And he wanted to do it his way, and he wanted to do it the best way,” his longtime producer Tony Visconti said after his passing. “His death was no different from his life — a work of art.”
