Tiggerlion on We Are Family by Sister Sledge released 22/01/1979
Nile Rodgers is fond of saying that those who invested ten dollars in Chic enjoyed million dollar returns. Jerry L. Greenberg, the president of Atlantic Records, wanted to maximise his investment in 1978, when Disco was at its peak and Chic were the best selling act on his label. He suggested that Bernard Edwards and Rodgers wrote and produced albums for others on his roster, including The Rolling Stones and Bette Midler. A few tracks on Some Girls flirted with Disco and Bette Midler’s recent Best Of failed to enter the charts. At the time, Edwards and Rodgers were nervous of working with such iconic performers. They were concerned that any success would not be credited to Chic but they’d be the first in the firing line if things went wrong. Perhaps, an act less well known might be a better place to start, someone who really did need a helping hand. Greenberg had the perfect group in mind.
Sister Sledge are genuine siblings from Philadelphia: Debra, Joni, Kim and Kathy Sledge. Their parents used to tread the boards, Edwin as a tap dancer and Florez as an actress, but it was their maternal grandmother, Viola, a former opera soprano, who trained them to sing. They performed regularly in church and at political events in support of the Black Rights cause. Their first single was as early as 1971. They enjoyed a smash hit in Japan with a Patrick Grant and Gwen Guthrie song, Love Don’t Go Through No Changes For Me. They were on the Zaire ’74 bill with James Brown for The Rumble In The Jungle when all four were still teenagers and still in education. The first two albums were issued on an Atlantic subsidiary. The debut, full of Grant/Guthrie songs, was successful enough in Europe for the follow up to be recorded in Munich with Silver Convention’s Sylvester Levay and Michael Kunze. They were consumate performers, who knew their way around a studio and how to project a song using their tight harmonies and sisterly comradery. Sister Sledge were not exactly a blank canvas. Nevertheless, a true hit eluded them.
Greenberg’s pitch practically wrote the lyrics. “They are a group of sisters that are like family to the label.” “They stick together like birds of a feather.” The first song Edwards and Rodgers composed for someone else effectively wrote itself, even before the two parties met. The complete Chic Organisation kicked into gear, its strings, its horns, its crack band, its home turf of The Power Station studio, New York. Disco was played by real humans and Chic were able to attract the finest musicians but it’s the two lead protagonists that provide the fireworks. Edwards was one of the greatest bassists that has ever lived. He seemed to have an extra hand, able to play the melody, a counter melody and the rhythm at the same time. He defied belief. Rodgers was unspeakably good at finding a deliciously sinuous, propulsive line through Edwards’ complex bass notes. The pair entwined like fingers locked together. Tony Thompson gave them a metronomic platform from which to launch their jazz-like improvisations, with a superhuman stamina, capable of knocking out a 4/4 beat for the most extended tracks and enough guile to push the momentum at precisely the right time.
You’d think the sisters would be daunted just by the quality of the additional backing vocalists, featuring Luther Vandross, Norma Jean Wright and Diva Gray. Kathy Sledge, aged nineteen, stepped up and delivered the breathtaking lead vocal in a single take. At the very least, you have to admire her fortitude. We Are Family lasts for nearly eight and a half minutes and it’s in the last three minutes, after the breakdown and the effervescent bass is brought to the fore, that the greatest demands are made on the vocal. She keeps the energy up, adds some ‘whoop’s and continues to implore her family, and by extrapolation the entire world, to sing it to her. She has the cheek to shout to her producer, “Yeah, come on Bernard, play…play your funky bass, boy!” At this remove, tainted by decades of dad dancing and the horrors of older aunts dragging youngsters to the floor at weddings, it’s easy to forget what a banger We Are Family is. From the opening bark to attention on the snare, through the sumptuous bassline and the ophidian guitar, to the string crescendo at the end, it’s an irresistible hymn to the unifying power of kindred spirit and the joy of dance. Its exuberance makes Good Times seem pedestrian and drab. “I’ve got all my sisters with me” pretty much guaranteed a connection with a key demographic for Disco, the LGBT community. It’s such an inspirational song, it helped The Pittsburg Pirates overturn a deficit to win the world series.
Chic bring a sophisticated opulence and street-smart New York cynicism to Disco. Edwards and Rodgers always looked for the Deep Hidden Meaning in a song, the DHM as they called it. He’s The Greatest Dancer is a perfect example, featuring narcissism, designer labels, single minded dedication to the art of the dance and carnal desire. It was originally written for Chic but offered to Sister Sledge. The girls were horrified. They were God-fearing church attenders. They could not sing to a man like that; “please take me home”. A proposed change to “please don’t go home” was unacceptable to Chic, who knew that the protagonist would spend all night on the dancefloor and be the last to leave. Kathy’s lead is still stellar and the siblings are united behind her but there is a clash of culture. Building on an Escher staircase of a guitar figure and brilliantly rhythmic strings, Sister Sledge focus on the spectacle, the athleticism of the dance, without pondering how that might translate to performance in the bedroom. As they do across the whole album, the sisters soften and feminise the Chic grit. They are not simply a different set of female vocalists to front the band. They bring their own character. Sister Sledge have a natural exuberance Chic could never match. He’s The Greatest Dancer would have sounded very different on Chic’s own 1979 record, Risqué. The first single and the opening track on the album, it may not be the best representation of Sister Sledge but it’s an undeniably hot dance number and an enticing draw to the dancefloor. It was their first big hit.
The tone is more emotional and romantic for the rest of the songs. You’re A Friend To Me, an end of the evening slow ballad, sung by the eldest. A more world weary Debbie states it explicity; “You’re more than a lover, you’re a friend.” There’s huggin’ and squeezin’, lovin’ and pleasin’ and cuddlin’ and teasin’ but a long-term commitment of mutual support is valued more highly than sex. Somebody Who Loves Me is as languid and as beautiful as At Last I Am Free both in terms of pace and melody. A young woman, alone, yearns for a love that seems lost. The reality is that he has probably moved on but it’s the companionship, the emotional intimacy, she misses most.
The heart of the album and the point where the Chic and Sister Sledge blend comes alive is in two songs originally conceived as album tracks but later released as singles. Both are rhapsodies capturing the elation of succumbing to an all-encompassing, higher power. The lead voice on Lost In Music is Joni’s, whose style is more soulful and assertive. The sisters embrace the musical life with a cheerful abandonment, rejecting the responsibility of nine to five. The music floats freely, the majestic rhythm guitar riding on a bed of keyboard chords, Joni’s high-note prolonged ooooh being the moment of blissful liberation. In Thinking Of You, Kathy is totally immersed in the ecstatic, breathless, obsessive state of true love. The guitar flutters with jubilation. The strings politely make room for the palpitating percussion and Edwards’ bass is imponderably liquid. In the second half of the song, Kathy abandons words altogether, cooing and oohing with unbridled joy. Gone are the inhibitions in expressing her sexuality that were present on He’s The Greatest Dancer. There have been plenty of my-life-is-disco songs and even more I’m-in-love ones but Lost In Music and Thinking Of You transcend those tropes and become powerful, passionate, universal encapsulations of the human condition. They transport the listener from the mundanity of life to the sublime. Combined as the A and B side of the third single from the LP, they are arguably the finest Disco record ever made and amongst the best 45s of any kind. Sister Sledge could not have achieved such perfection without Chic but the opposite is also true. These songs were written for and with the sisters in mind. Chic’s lyrics are notoriously basic but Sister Sledge drew out of them words of clarity and connectivity approaching the poetic simplicity of Smokey Robinson. Chic’s own excellent vocalists could not have sung them in the same way. It’s difficult to imagine Chic versions of Lost In Music and Thinking Of You being quite so divine.
Joni also leads on a plea for world peace, Easier To Love. It asks that we turn away from violence and choose the easier option, love, until the DHM kicks in and Joni’s voice increases its intensity and passion. Is this addressed to everyone or is it a one-to-one conversation she is having with an abusive boyfriend? Is Joni safe? The music is beautifully delicate, the bass plucking away at the gentle melody, the guitar quietly gliding along the bottom, the keyboard chords providing a safety net. The finale, One More Time, is a bright, uptempo strut, similar in feel to Happy Man. Piano replaces the rhythm guitar but Rodgers does indulge himself in a brief, nicely serviceable solo. Kim has her moment in the spotlight. She comes across as very needy, low in self-esteem, a clingy girlfriend desperate to be loved but that’s because she delivers the lyric perfectly. It’s a song that can be seen as a prototype for I Want Your Love, the most heartrending Chic song of all, originally written with the Sisters in mind.
The cover photo depicts the girls lounging in the splendour of a dark pink mansion. Even the font is ornate, the album’s title in a pretty ribbon. It follows the template for the C’ést Chic sleeve. Debbie, the only one meeting the viewer’s eye, looks precarious, perched on the table. Kathy is in the middle, treating us to her profile, her chin at a haughty angle. They are dressed in white gowns, closely resembling togas. They could be gods, they could be wives of the ruling class, they could be a harem. At first glance, they seem to be Chic’s playthings, adornment for the wealthy setting, until you look more closely and realise that it’s the setting that adorns them. Later in the year, The Nolan Sisters attempted, without success, to replicate their grace and class on the cover of their album Nolan Sisters
Disco was invented in the early seventies and had a mainly Black and Latino following. It is escapist music. People dressed in their finery to go the dance, leaving hard graft and poverty at home. For a brief time at the weekend, they became the beautiful people, participating in an inclusive, communal celebration of freedom. All were welcome, every colour, creed and sexuality. Most of all, Disco was the sound of gay identity being openly displayed in public. 1977’s Saturday Night Fever popularised Disco into the mainstream but is a misrepresentation. Tony Moreno’s macho showboating is far from its true spirit and the extraordinarily successful soundtrack is mostly white pop music with some decorative dance features. However, Disco warmly accepts all comers and the Bee Gees lit up glitterballs everywhere, setting the scene for Chic’s early singles and stratospheric rise up the charts.
1979 is also the year Disco died, on July 12th to be precise. Steve Dahl, a Rock DJ, became the figure head of a Disco Sucks movement after he was sacked by Chicago WDAI radio station when it abruptly changed format from Rock to Disco. He soon found a new job on WLUP and declared war, scratching Disco records mid song accompanied by sounds of explosions, creating a Kill Disco membership club and organising Death To Disco rallies. His largely young white male audience loved it. Disco Demolition Day took place at Comiskey Park when The White Sox met The Detroit Tigers. Between games, Dahl drove onto the field in a jeep wearing military fatigues. He blew up a pile of Disco records brought by the crowd to the chant “Disco Sucks”. Thousands invaded the field and threw more records onto the fire. The damage was so extensive, The White Sox had to forfeit the second game. The following morning, Dahl woke up a national celebrity and Disco was a bad word. Within weeks, Disco records tumbled from the top of the Billboard charts. There was still time for Good Times to reach the top but its replacement the following week by The Knack’s My Sharona was more than symbolic. Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers found themselves blacklisted.
The racist and homophobic undertones were unavoidable. Angry white youth resorting to physical violence, albeit on inanimate objects, in protest against a largely black and gay cultural activity, was unsavoury and scary. Nevertheless, Disco won. Rapper’s Delight, with its interpolation of Good Times, hit number one in January 1980. In the era before sampling and drum machines, spare a thought for Chip Shearin and Bryan Horton who had to play the rhythm for fifteen minutes straight. Diana Ross enjoyed a series of hit singles and her best selling album, written and produced by Chic in the same year. Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust, featuring the Good Times bassline, and sung by an openly gay man followed Upside Down to number one in the US. Ironically, it became a popular chant at sports events. By 1981, Rock bands like The Clash and Blondie made overtly Disco records with Radio Clash and Rapture and in 1982, Michael Jackson devoured the world with Thriller. As Hip Hop developed into a dominant genre, it used dance music and funk as its bedrock. Disco, itself, morphed into House and Techno, albeit with machines ‘playing’ many of the instruments. If you look at the charts over the last couple of decades, you will hear mostly music resembling Disco and very little Rock.
We Are Family, the album, was released early enough to avoid being killed by Disco Sucks. The third single, Lost In Music, did get caught up in the chaos but both it and Thinking Of You have survived, being re-released and remixed several times over the years, making the charts almost every time. Edwards and Rodgers, however, were traumatised and somewhat burnt out. The follow up Sister Sledge album, Love Somebody Today, and Chic’s own Real People made little impression. Thereafter, the Chic Organisation diversified with both Rodgers and Edwards pursuing projects without their partner. They reunited in 1992 for Chic-ism but Edwards succumbed to a rare strain of pneumonia after a Chic gig at The Budokan in 1996 aged just forty-three. Sister Sledge went on to work with Narada Michael Walden and Al Jarreau. A cover of My Girl had a run in the Billboard chart but they were more popular in Europe. Frankie was a number one in the UK for four weeks. Kathy had parallel solo work as well. Even so, the We Are Family LP remains the crux of their career. A high watermark of its or any genre, it’s an album that would dwarf most act’s catalogue. Nile Rodgers thinks that pound for pound, it’s the best he’s ever made. Decades on, We Are Family still retains its warmth and vibrancy and, most importantly, its ability to fill a floor in a way that makes people not care who might be watching. It taps into a well of joy that is present in all of us, no matter how miserable our day-to-day existence. Its music remains essential for the playlists of the very best cross-generational parties.
Lost In Music
Excellent, as always, Mr T (and this time on a Monday morning – what a way to start the week!)
How delightful to see some AW light shone on this oft-maligned genre.
I had never realised that different sisters took the lead vocal on different songs. Every day is a school day..
Blimey, a hat doffin’ doozy, Tiggs, old fruit, and selling coal to Death Valley, at that. Loathed disco in the requisite day, only getting an appreciation this century, but buying it, jings, that’s a big ask. Yes, of course I have the Chic albums, a couple, but Sister Sledge? Sure, consummate playing but suppose someone checked my shelves…. Anyhoo, ya boogaloo, I just ordered it. Under an assumed name, of course.
Splendid stuff as always.
Disco won in the end, by god it did. Those bedenimned berks at the Disco Sucks event are laughed at by history – and not just because of their obvious racism/sexism/homophobia. The music has triumphed over arguably all other pop genres. Who’s listening to Aerosmith now? Whereas records like this continue to fill up dancefloors with people whose parents weren’t even born in 1979.
A lot of those Chic productions go on a bloody long time, like ten minutes, and yet never seem too long. Nile turned into a bit of a twerp and Sister Sledge never got near this again, but who cares? This music will never stop and never die.
As the end of The Waste Land almost has it:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Yowsah yowsah yowsah
I never imagined T.S. Eliot with snake hips.
No wonder he had the bottoms of his trousers rolled.
There was a remix album planned – The Waistland – (J.A.Proofrocker version) on the Fabber and Fabber label – but it got shelved.
What a great review!
Album now on as I work and it’s taking me back to The Empire Leicester Square on Saturday nights when all my mates, our sisters and their friends trekked up to Central London, hit the dancefloor and had a great time. Happy bygone nights.
A reminder of the Afterword Discocast, for those who are interested.
In my memory, I thought that Moose had also taken part – but clearly not!
Of all the misapprehensions…..
Seems like your kinda baaaag…
I have wear this leopardskin suit for my job, I’ll have you know.
Do you have a diamond pin and a funky hat?
….and it is specifically in my job description to dig the scene with a gangster lean. Plays havoc with my sciatica.
I’d completely forgotten that one. Must relisten.
I’d be interested to know how you feel about it now.
It wasnt just bigotry. A lot of people found disco mind numbingly repetitive. Most drummers and bassists I knew yes , white rock but also jazz players hated the repetitiveness. .
There was a lot of shite disco, but then there was a lot of shite AOR too. Just as repetitive.
There were class acts in both genres as well as the many mediocre ones.
Rock was generally an album form, with some singles released by particularly prominent bands of that ilk. Disco was predominantly a singles form and disco albums tended to be collections of a few singles and enough filler to make up the 30-40 minutes of an album.
You make a good point Junior. Listening to disco, as with all dance music, requires you to submit to the groove. It’s a different way of appreciating a piece of music for someone with a rock n roll upbringing. I can remember having this lightbulb moment and how it opened up my tastes enormously. Suddenly records as different as Neon Lights by Kraftwerk and Shake Your Body Down To The Ground by The Jacksons, whose melodies I had hitherto regarded warmly but found went on a bit, hammering home the point interminably, seemed to be exactly repetitive enough and just the right length. This is what this music is doing – you are free to find the whole idea not to your taste, but you can’t criticise it for not fitting into an entirely differently shaped box..
Bernard Edwards was a Jazz bassist. Just listen to the intro to Everybody Dance. Rodgers was no mean guitarist either. The pair made the rhythm section the source of the melody, the groove and the improvisation.
Rock and Disco share the same 4/4 platform. To me, there is nothing worse than a guitarist noodling over the top of a solid beat. (Where’s Saucey when you need him?)
Here is a Rock band playing a Disco tune. The discipline does them good.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=p4DeaXf1FzE&feature=shared
Hi Tiggs, sorry to be a pain – but who was it and what were they playing?
Ah. The embed thing didn’t work.
It’s the Dee Dee (aka Foo Fighters) playing You Should be Dancing. My favourite cover from a couple of years ago. Play it back to back with the original and compare and contrast.
Nile goes on about this at some length in his autobiography, slightly defensively as I recall, how Chic songs sound simple but contain some complex jazz backing if you listen deeper, referring to Lamonte Young and others as influences. He’s one of the last people who needs to justify his music, in my opinion.
Nice write up, Tiggerlion 👌
You can pick some crap disco and agree with this, or some great disco and think they’re idiots. The programmed rhythms might have been repetitive, but were soon adopted by lots of rock bands. If rock drummers find Earl Young or Hamilton Bohannon boring, I’d love to know who they listened to. The Latin influence and polyrhythms of disco barely gets mentioned, and they were playing without click tracks to keep in time.
Curtis Mayfield deserves more credit for the Disco template: falsetto vocals, rhythm guitar, phat bass, an orchestra and boinging congas.
Fabulous review (as always). I don’t actually own this as an album, but have the main tracks on a Chic Corporation complication – all great tracks,
I recall that Steven Wilson did a Atmos mix of this (and some of the Chic albums) last year. I think it’s only on streaming and there isn’t a physical release. Anyone heard it ? Does it add anything ?