Four decades later, the track has cemented itself into the pop music canon with its punchy rhythms, reverb-laden vocals, and all-around 1980s production style. However, “Let’s Dance” didn’t start as a hit.
In order to transform the tune from a milquetoast folk ditty to bonafide dancefloor bop, Bowie sought the help of a handful of musical legends, including Little Richard, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Chic’s Nile Rodgers.
After meeting Chic’s Niles Rodgers at a New York City nightclub in 1982, Bowie asked Rodgers if he would be a producer on the Brit rocker’s next album.
Despite being an accomplished instrumentalist, David Bowie adopted a different approach for his 1980s pop record ‘Let’s Dance.’ Rather than adding his own accompaniment to the record, Bowie stayed on vocals. For the track’s powerful electric guitar feature, Bowie hired a yet-to-be-famous blues guitarist whom he met at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival: Stevie Ray Vaughan.
“Bowie had this wonderful saying,” Nile Rodgers recalls. “He’d say, ‘Nile, darling, it’s all the same, but different.’”
“Let’s Dance,” which he co-produced with Bowie, was the album that vaulted him into the mainstream — and within a year he’d be helming Madonna’s smash breakthrough album, “Like a Virgin,” and overhauling Duran Duran’s original muddled mix of “The Reflex” into a global smash single. (Excerpt from Variety, to read the full article click HERE)
“David opened a door for me that never closed, and for that I’m grateful,” Rodgers says.
Yet the album was hardly an obvious move: A combination of vintage rock and roll, big band jazz and chunky R&B that he and Bowie chose for “Let’s Dance.”
David showed Rodgers a photo of Little Richard getting into a red Cadillac: “That’s what I want my album to sound like,” Rodgers recalls Bowie saying.
Bowie also waited until all of the instrumentals were finished before recording his near-peerless vocals. Contrary to common belief, however, it wasn’t Rodgers who recorded Bowie, but Clearmountain.
“Bowie recorded his vocals after all of the tracks were done, but it was me (Bob Clearmountain, engineer) who recorded him,” said Clearmountain. “When it was time to do his vocals, Bowie really and truly wanted to do it on his own, so it was just him and me. First off, without insulting anyone, he is the most amazing, most incredible singer that I ever worked with. On ‘Modern Love,’ he came in, started singing, but began an octave lower than what it wound up being, in that deep Anthony Newley-type voice of his. So, he sings a verse and chorus, stops, asks to hear it back, listens in the studio with his headphones without coming into the control room – gets to the end of the first chorus, rubs his forehead, and says, ‘Let’s do it again.’
Bowie released “Let’s Dance” as a standalone single on March 14, 1983, exactly one month before he released the full album of the same name. By April of that year, the track had shot up to the No. 1 spot in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Dance/Disco charts, as well as international charts, including in the U.K., Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Portugal, and New Zealand.
