June 1979, New York: Chic release the single “Good Times” - the peak of the disco era and the starting point of something entirely different. #1 Billboard Hot 100 for 1 week, #5 UK, 5 million copies by the end of 1979. But chart position isn't the point. Three months later the Sugarhill Gang lifted the bass line wholesale for “Rapper's Delight” - the first commercial hip-hop hit. In 1980 Queen paraphrased the same bass part on “Another One Bites the Dust” (#1 Billboard). By 1981 the bass figure had seeded genres on three continents. “Good Times” is simultaneously the last top disco record before the genre's collapse and the first brick in the foundation of modern popular music.
Chic as a production machine
Nile Rodgers (born 1952, New York City) and Bernard Edwards (born 1952, Greenville, North Carolina) met in 1970 in the New York jazz-fusion group The Big Apple Band. Both worked as session musicians: Rodgers as guitarist on Sesame Street, Edwards as bassist for TV production. In 1976 they formed the duo Chic Organization - not just a band, a production company.
The Chic business model was radical: Rodgers and Edwards wrote, played, produced and recorded every track themselves. They hired session vocalists (Alfa Anderson, Norma Jean Wright, later Luci Martin) and called them “Chic vocalists”, but the contracts were straightforward work-for-hire. All royalties went to Chic Organization.
Over three years they turned out four key singles:
- “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)” (1977) - #6 Billboard
- “Everybody Dance” (1978) - #38 Billboard
- “Le Freak” (1978) - #1 Billboard for 6 weeks, 7 million copies
- “I Want Your Love” (1978) - #7 Billboard
“Le Freak” became the best-selling single in Atlantic Records history - a record that stood until 1997, when Elton John's “Candle in the Wind '97” broke it. In parallel, Rodgers and Edwards produced Sister Sledge (“We Are Family” - 6 million copies in 1979) and were preparing material for Diana Ross.
Recording “Good Times” - April 1979
Tracking ran four days at The Power Station (NYC). Budget: US$45,000. Personnel:
- Nile Rodgers - rhythm guitar on a Fender Stratocaster (white, 1960), his signature “chucking” style
- Bernard Edwards - Music Man StingRay bass, 1978 build
- Tony Thompson - drums, Ludwig kit (Thompson had been hired in 1977 as the third central member)
- Raymond Jones - Steinway piano
- Andy Schwartz - Minimoog for stabs
- String section - 14 New York sessioneers, arrangement by Gene Orloff
- Vocalists - Alfa Anderson, Luci Martin, Michelle Cobbs
Tempo: 112 BPM. Key: E minor. Structure: 8-bar intro, 16-bar verse, 16-bar chorus, repeat. The original album version ran 8:11; the single edit was cut to 3:45, the 12-inch extended to 8:10.
The bass line that rewrote popular music
The “Good Times” bass part is a simple eight-bar figure in Em: E-D-E-D-E-D-E-D with small variations at the start and middle. Edwards plays it fingerstyle (not with a pick), on a Music Man StingRay through an Ampeg SVT. The tone is fat, clean, with a sharp attack on each note. Edwards leaned into the part, adding a “mechanical” pulse that sync-locked with Thompson's clap hit.
“Nile and I put that part together in 20 minutes. It was a deliberately simple riff - we wanted the floor to dance to it without effort. It was so simple it sounded almost dumb. But the floors loved it”, - Bernard Edwards in Bass Player, 1994.
“Rapper's Delight” - September 1979
Three months after “Good Times” came out, producer Sylvia Robinson (owner of Sugar Hill Records in Englewood, New Jersey) gathered three unknown rappers in a studio - Master Gee, Wonder Mike, Big Bank Hank - and asked them to rap over... an exact copy of the Chic bass line. Instead of sampling, Robinson hired a session band to play the Edwards bass note-for-note, along with Rodgers's guitar figure.
“Rapper's Delight” (October 1979) went to #36 Billboard Hot 100 and sold 8 million copies worldwide. It's the first commercially successful hip-hop track in history - and it was built on someone else's bass line without permission.
Rodgers and Edwards filed suit against Sugar Hill Records in January 1980. The case ran 18 months. In October 1981 the parties settled at US$1.1 million in royalties plus a credit “written by Rodgers/Edwards/Robinson” on all future reissues of “Rapper's Delight”. Since then Chic have collected royalties on every use - more than US$25 million over 45 years.
Queen “Another One Bites the Dust” - summer 1980
The next big instance was Queen. Bassist John Deacon heard “Good Times” at Studio 54 in October 1979 and, by his own admission, “couldn't get that bass line out of my head for two weeks”. Walking into Musicland in Munich in January 1980 (the same Moroder studio), he wrote the part with minor changes - slightly different rhythm, different key (E minor), but the intervallic structure was identical.
“Another One Bites the Dust” hit #1 Billboard Hot 100 in October 1980. Rodgers, hearing it on the radio, called Deacon and said: “Thanks for paying me with our own bass line.” Queen didn't pay royalties - Chic's lawyers couldn't prove direct theft; the differences were enough for legal cover.
Other chains of borrowing
- Blondie “Rapture” (1981) - Nigel Harrison's verse bass is a direct retool of “Good Times”
- Grandmaster Flash “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel” (1981) - scratching over the Chic bass line
- Duran Duran “Girls on Film” (1981) - John Taylor's bass explicitly inspired by Edwards
- The Clash “Magnificent Seven” (1981) - Paul Simonon playing a close cousin
- Daft Punk “Around the World” (1997) - a nod to the minimalist 4/4 bass
In 2024 WhoSampled.com lists over 1,900 tracks using a sample or re-performance of “Good Times”. That puts it second in the history of popular music for citations (first place: “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons, 1969).
The end of disco and the Chic split
On 12 July 1979 Chicago hosted Disco Demolition Night - an event at Comiskey Park where tens of thousands of white teenagers burned disco records. It was the symbolic end of the era. By autumn 1979 US radio stations were cutting back disco rotations, and by the end of 1980 most disco labels were bankrupt.
Chic survived in altered form. Rodgers and Edwards pivoted into producing other artists: Nile Rodgers produced Bowie, Madonna, Duran Duran. Chic as a group dissolved in 1983, after the failed album Believer. Edwards died in 1996 of pneumonia in Tokyo after a tour show. Rodgers has kept working - in 2013 his role in Daft Punk's “Get Lucky” made Chic culturally current again.
Related: “Heart of Glass” Blondie (1979), “I Feel Love” Donna Summer, “Born to Be Alive” Patrick Hernandez. “Good Times” is the last top-tier disco single before the genre's collapse and simultaneously the first brick of hip-hop. Two eras in one record - that rarely happens in popular music.