There are many bands that have influenced commercial music, but finding an influential band with equally influential players, composers and producers at the forefront of their artistry, that's a rarity.
Chic was formed in the mid-to-late 1970s, by legendary musicians and producers, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. The two were kindred spirits; both obsessed with music and playing. Both men were steeped in the jazz tradition and had an enormous understanding of the richness of jazz harmony.
They met and played together in 1970 as session musicians in The Big Apple Band.
Drawing inspiration from England’s blooming glam rock scene and bands such as Roxy Music, the nucleus of Chic was formed in 1977, with the recruitment of drummer Tony Thompson, and - in the background - there was keyboardist Raymond Jones.
During the late 70s, Chic were getting plenty of attention - notably some of it negative. They had released Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah) and had a US No.1 hit with Le Freak, but an American-wide backlash against the disco genre, culminating in the Disco Sucks campaign in 1979, stood firmly in their way. Nevertheless, Chic released the glorious Good Times during that same year.
Rodgers has always been very honest about his starting points for the song. When growing up, he was heavily influenced by Kool and the Gang, not least of all because his cousin was one of the founding members.
He recalls hearing the track Hollywood Swinging and citing this track as direct inspiration for Good Times.
The classic funk guitar part played on Good Times, was played by Nile on his now legendary white 1960s Stratocaster, with a hardtail bridge.
Nicknamed ‘The Hitmaker’, NME estimated that the guitar has been played on a whopping $2 billion worth of music, albeit with a little help from Nile!
Good Times only really uses four chords, but their description depends how you approach the harmony, as these chords are influenced by the position of the bass against the chords.
If we start with the chorus, which unusually happens to be the first section we hear, we start with a chord of Em7, for one bar. This then subtly shifts to E7sus4 for the second bar. Demonstrating similarity, the third bar drops to A7sus4, before shifting to A13.
These chord descriptions refer predominantly to the guitar part, but taking the position of the bass into account, and the inversions played in the keyboard part, we could consider the last two chords as alternatives; the third chord becomes Em7/A and the fourth F#m7/A.
In many respects, this subtle alteration in chord voicing between the instrumentation is a crucial part of the Chic sound, informed heavily by the use of inverted chords from jazz. This is the process of shifting the pattern of the notes used in a chord to a different voicing.
Among their many production tools and tricks, Chic would double parts, particularly in the keyboards (Rhodes and piano), but with each element maintaining its own identity.
In Good Times, the Rhodes adopts a fairly static persona, reinforcing the harmony with its classic mellow tone, while the piano punctuates and accents, with the odd heavily syncopated note jumping out and creating interest for the listener.
Good Times was recorded in NYC at the iconic Power Station, in a session which was engineered by a young Bob Clearmountain, now a mixing and mastering legend in his own right.
There is no doubt that one of the most influential aspects of the song lies in the bass part. This is entirely down to the genius and exceptional playing of Bernard Edwards.
“I wrote Good Times the morning we recorded it,” Rodgers told Uncut magazine. “Bernard was a little late to the studio, but I'd already written out the charts for everybody in the band. We were playing when Bernard walked in. He asked the engineers, 'what the hell is that?' The engineer said, 'I don't know, something Nile wrote this morning.' Whenever Bernard was late, he was like a puppy dog with his tail between his legs. Typically, what he and I do is we'd copy each other and then develop our parts after that."
"We'd been trying for years to come up with this walking bass line, putting it over and over again on all sorts of songs but we could never get it right. But that day, I started screaming 'Walk!' over Tony's drums. Bernard said, 'What?' I was shouting 'Walk!' On that particular day, he walked."
Bernard’s spontaneous bass part was impressive and highly imaginative. Bob Clearmountain was bowled over.
“Before they came into the room for a playback, I thought, ‘This has to be a hit. How could this not be a hit?’ Clearmountain told Tape Op. “They came into the control room for playback. Bernard Edwards, the bass player [and producer], was standing next to me. I turned to him and said, ‘Where did you come up with that amazing bass line?’ He turned to me and said, ‘Oh, you like that?’ Like he didn't know.”
At this point, we could say ‘… and the rest is history’, but Bernard’s irresistible bass line has gone down as one of the all-time classics, influencing many other artists, notably Blondie, and Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. Undeniable bedfellows, even to the ears of non-musicians.
Another unique element of the song, is the first thing that we hear. The piano glissando was apparently played on a Rhodes, sweeping from the lowest note on the instrument to the very top. It does sound bizarrely like an acoustic piano, rather than a Rhodes, possibly because of its unusual production treatment.
The Power Station studio provided an amazing reverb space, the only problem was, it emanated from the ladies bathroom!
So, the Rhodes glissando was piped into the tiled space, and re-recorded with the natural reverb applied. Apparently Nile and Bernard liked the shimmering effect that this unique space could provide.
The drums, that are provided courtesy of Tony Thompson, are relatively simplistic, at least on the face of it.
The kick part sits firmly in sync with the bass part, while the snare sits on 2 and 4, but with no ghost notes or drop-sticks - just the backbeat!
Meanwhile, the hi-hat locks completely with Nile’s guitar, with just the odd accent as part of the groove. It really is beautifully played.
Another part of the unique Chic sound employed the use of violins. These are particularly prominent in the chorus structure, as they punctuate the vocal part, with stabbing single note falls, juxtaposed with a sustained rising countermelody which we hear in the verse structure.
Of course, the track would also be nothing without the classic vocal sound, provided by Alfa Anderson and Michelle Cobbs, with a high male vocal from Fonzi Thornton. The song was always designed to be an uplifting track, reflecting and moving on from the tough experiences of the recession of the 70s.
This uplifting notion is exploited heavily in the lyrical content, borrowing phrases such as ‘Happy days are here again’ and referencing roller skates, which drew on the phenomena of the roller disco, which was then hitting peak popularity in 1979.
The next part of the story came later in the year, with the release of Rapper’s Delight by The Sugarhill Gang.
Now recognised as one of the first ever high profile rap singles. The track's undeniable and exceptionally extensive use of Good Times’ bass line, as the musical bedrock for the rap vocal, resulted in Bernard Edwards and Nile Rogers rightly being equally credited as writers of the work.
Not bad for a couple of wannabe jazz musicians who ended up leaving a substantial stamp on the language of funk, disco and the earliest days of hip-hop.
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