Good Times: Nile Rodgers Jams With Beck, Pharrell, Duran Duran at FOLD Festival
For Nile Rodgers, these are the good times. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the legendary songwriter-producer celebrated his inaugural FOLD Festival on the picturesque grounds of Martha Clara Vineyards in Riverhead, New York, heading up numerous memorable jam sessions with the likes of Keith Urban, Pharrell Williams, Duran Duran, Chaka Khan, and Janelle Monae. The setlist of nonstop hits included some of the biggest party anthems of the last four decades — Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out,” David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” — almost all of which were written and/or produced by Rodgers himself.
But as Rodgers looked out at the 2,500-strong crowd of hipsters, Hampton socialites, tweens, septuagenarians, and everyone in between dancing on the grassy field on Long Island’s North Fork, he was grateful that anyone came at all.
“I’ve been working with Beck, who did the first Coachella [in 1999], and he told me there was like nobody there,” the Chic mastermind told Yahoo Music backstage on Wednesday, the day after Beck’s first-night headlining set at FOLD (which stands for “Freak Out Let’s Dance”). “Well, now Coachella’s huge and amazing — maybe it’s a really great omen that Beck was at my first festival.”
Things got off to a shaky start after a powerful lightning storm early Tuesday caused ample damage to the stage, resulting in subsequent delays, shortened sets, and, for Rodgers, a lack of, well, chic. "Please forgive me for playing my show in jeans and a T-shirt,” he said, welcoming the audience. As penance for his sartorial sin, he promised, “We’re going to play three times as funky.“
Whenever Rodgers was onstage — which was often — he held up his side of the bargain. Both evenings, the Chic guitarist led an updated lineup of the influential dance act he formed in the ‘70s (the funktastic Jerry Barnes channeling Rodgers’s former partner, the late Bernard Edwards, on bass) through two sets of his enduring disco-era crowd-pleasers, from “Everybody Dance” and “I Want Your Love” to “Le Freak” and show-stopping renditions of “Good Times.”
Chic also served as the house band for Williams, Khan, Urban, and Paloma Faith, a smart decision that kept the show moving as well as production costs (and thus, ticket prices) manageable.
“I’ve seen everyone who played tonight [with Chic] before with their own band, and I feel like, including me, we all sounded better with that band,” Paloma Faith told Yahoo Music. The young British chanteuse with the old-soul vocal style dazzled with her crackling personality and inspired cover of Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High.” Earlier in the week, Faith says she holed up with Rodgers in a local recording studio. “It was the first time I’ve worked with him,“ she said. “We wrote three songs in two days — one of them was in two hours. I’ve never had such an easy writing session in my career.”
As if Rodgers wasn’t busy enough overseeing the festival, he also squeezed in some studio time this week with Beck. Onstage at FOLD, the singer shelved most of the material from his 2015 Best Album Grammy-winner Morning Phase in favor of more upbeat material like “Devil’s Haircut,” “Loser,” and the first in-concert performance of his funky new single, “Dreams.” He also paid homage to the disco era Rodgers helped to architect with a cover of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”
For Rodgers, the highlight of night one was an improvised guitar duel with Keith Urban, yet another artist with whom he’s currently working on new material. “It was such a surprise, because we didn’t have the chance to rehearse with Keith,” says Rodgers of the solos, which even had Urban breaking into White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.“ “It was this wonderful collaboration that turned into an insane jam. It’s like our guitars were having a dialogue — which they were.”
Meanwhile, during Duran Duran’s headlining set on Wednesday, the Brits (whom owe a debt to Rodgers for his work on “The Reflex,” “Wild Boys,” and “Notorious”) performed their new single, “Pressure Off,” live for the first time with collaborators Rodgers and Monae, who respectively co-wrote and coproduced, and contributed featured vocals.
Though Chaka Khan and Rodgers have only joined forces on record once before — when she sang and he played guitar on Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” from 1986 — the iconic singer, who was on FOLD’s Wednesday-night bill, says the two are currently writing together and “planning on doing some stuff together with a bevy of DJs.”
“It’s great when you can together and play music with friends and it feels like family,” added Khan, who’s also working on an album of Joni Mitchell covers and plans to drop a new dance track, “I’m in Love With Myself,” in the coming weeks.
As for Rodgers — who personally bankrolled the fest — he’s already starting to think about next year’s FOLD. “I’ve booked this [venue] for three nights for next year,” he says. "Everybody so far wants to come back: Pharrell, Keith… Maybe we can get Daft Punk!”
photos: Getty Images
