The only way you could hear your music was if the engineer cut a lacquer and they’d cut it right there in the studio and you’d take that and take it home and listen on your record player. After we wrote that first song, we didn’t have a chance to hear it back, only in the studio, ‘cause we didn’t have cassettes. So our first session cost $10 and we had Luther Vandross, David Lasley, all these great singers who were working with us at Radio City. So we get there – and by the way, we’re playing with Luther Vandross, two shows a day at Radio City, so during the intermission we ran to the recording studio, where my boy was the maintenance engineer, and he paid the elevator boy $10 to keep quiet and not tell the boss that we record after hours. Remember, no one had played this song except for me until we got to the studio. He was like: “OK, that shit is cool, but what am I going to play?” Then he started imitating me and we were both going (noise), then all of a sudden Bernard came up with that genius bassline and we both started chucking and I started out-chucking him and about a minute later, as the writer, I thought, ‘Maybe I should just play simple and let him play the song’. So the first song I wrote I came up to Bernard and was: “Here’s how the song goes.” (plays guitar) Then I got really into it and went (plays guitar). The reason I think of it like that is ‘cause… Well, anyway, that’s what I call it, I’m not going to explain it. Because if I hear that in the root, I want to hear an A chord, I don’t want to call it a D. So I think of that as a A-minor 7 with a raised 5. I’m so traditional, whatever’s in the root, I would think of it as the chord. So we’d do the passing ‘cause I wanted to have Bernard do this chromatic thing (plays guitar).
You can look at this many different ways, but I like to look at it as a D-minor 11 with an A in the bass. And this was the cool thing, this was the real Nile thing. Will you all pretend like I sound good, pretend like I’m in tune? So the first song was C-minor 7, B-flat 11 to C-11, A-flat-major 7. Just one chord, staying in the groove, but because I wanted to hear more harmonically, I wrote (plays guitar). It’s not the typical chord changes for an r&b song ‘cause in those days they’d be like (plays guitar) and you would just groove (plays guitar). So the first was “Everybody Dance”, it was (plays guitar). Bernard hadn’t written a song with me yet. “The first song I wrote for Chic was “Everybody Dance” and I remember at the beginning of Chic I was the only composer. In 1977 during one of Luther’s shows at Radio City Music Hall Nile Rodgers describes what happened.
Nile Rodgers, Bernard Edwards and other members of what was to become CHIC were in Luther’s band touring on the road after the 1976 release of LUTHER.