BBC Outlook Nov 14, 2011

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Extraordinary personal stories from around the world.

Today, the legendary musician and producer Nile Rodgers.

He's the co-founder of 70s disco band Chic and has collaborated with stars like David Bowie, Madonna and Diana Ross.

He tells Matthew about his rise from being the child of heroin addicts to the top of the music industry and about his own battle with drug addiction.

Now he's written a book about his extraordinary life called Le Freak, after one of his best known songs.

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The Hollywood Reporter: Adam Lambert Enlists Nile Rodgers for New Album [Video]

Video of the "American Idol" alum with the guitar legend and super-producer shows the two grooving in a New York recording studio.

Photo Credit: Jean Morisson

Nile Rodgers is everywhere these days, from your local bookstore, where his just-released memoir, Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny, is a hot item, to the New York Times, to a New York City studio where he and Adam Lambert are finding their groove.

The two have been trading tweets for days and now comes video of the American Idol alum and the guitar great and super-producer working out a riff on a track possibly destined for Lambert’s forthcoming second album -- albeit muted so as to “protect the integrity of the song” (see clip below).

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New York Times: A Hit Maker's Life and Lyrics

Nile Rodgers's new memoir, “Le Freak,” recounts his days as a successful record producer and musician
Photo Credit: Chang W. Lee / The New York Times

The venerable musician and record producer Nile Rodgers, wearing a bandanna tied around his dreadlocks, fade-out sunglasses and a charcoal-gray pinstripe jacket, arrived at Cafe Luxembourg right on schedule one morning last week.

The original idea was to have breakfast and then walk around the Upper West Side, revisiting landmarks represented in his new memoir, “Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny” (Spiegel & Grau). We could have started at the former site of Ungano’s, next door on West 70th Street, where Mr. Rodgers played guitar in 1970 with a jazz-rock band called New World Rising. He was a teenager then, organizing for the Black Panthers and unofficially attending Stuyvesant High School. (He wasn’t enrolled, he explained; he just sat in on classes with teachers he found interesting.)

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New York Times: Mr. Rodgers's Neighborhood

By Nile Rodgers - Photos: Nile Rodgers Productions

Mr. Rodgers's Neighborhood

IN THE EARLY YEARS The author at 15. "In L.A., the day I met Timothy Leary," he says.

It took me a long time to realize that the things my parents did were not exactly normal. I was about 7 years old, and it was the tail end of the 1950s, when it started to dawn on me that they were . . . well, let's just say they were different. For instance: my friends and I got shots when we went to the doctor and we hated them. But my parents stabbed themselves with needles almost every day, and seemed to enjoy it. Weird.

Most of my friends' parents sounded like the adults in school or on TV when they talked. People understood them. My parents, on the other hand, had their own language, laced with a flowery slang that I picked up the same way the Puerto Rican kids could speak English at school and Spanish at home with their abuelas.

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