Summary Losing my guitar "was horrible -- it felt the same as if I had a child kidnapped", Rodgers said.
HONG KONG, Nov 21, 2013 (AFP) - It's the guitar that Nile Rodgers says he cannot live without: a white 1959 Fender Stratocaster through which his music -- to the tune of more than $3 billion, he says -- has flowed for decades. Last month he left it on a train.
Without "The Hitmaker" as Rodgers calls it, some of the most influential music of the past 35 years would not have sounded the same.
From Rodgers' band Chic, which soundtracked the decadent rise of disco with hits such as "Le Freak" and "Good Times", to records that he produced or performed on for Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Madonna, Duran Duran, Diana Ross, Daft Punk and others, the guitar has been a permanent fixture.
Losing it "was horrible -- it felt the same as if I had a child kidnapped", Rodgers, 61, said in an interview with AFP.
"That instrument is so unique and so special, there is nothing in my world that is as consistent as that," he added on the phone from his dressing room before a concert in Tokyo.
Luckily, Rodgers found the guitar in the lost property area of a train yard hours after realising he had left it on the service to Connecticut, where his studio is.
It is just one element of good fortune in a year in which Rodgers has been given the all-clear from cancer, seen his "Get Lucky" collaboration with French electronic music duo Daft Punk become Spotify's most-streamed song over 24 hours, and headline festivals with his band Chic.
"It's great, but I'm very careful not to make a big deal out of it," said Rodgers, who was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer in 2010.
"I know that it can all switch in an instant. The day before I was diagnosed with cancer, my doctor told me I was the healthiest patient he had.
"I felt great. However, I was asymptomatic, and the cancer was growing so fast inside me that it was just a matter of time."
Rodgers underwent surgery and in recovery decided to play as much music around the world as possible. He started a blog, "Walking on Planet C", to document his experiences and reached out to artists he wanted to work with via Facebook and Twitter.
"That was my therapy. I decided that if you have a really good reason to live, you have a reason to wake up the next day," he said.
'Le Freak'
==========
Aside from Chic, Rodgers co-wrote "We Are Family" for Sister Sledge, "Upside Down" for Diana Ross, produced and performed on David Bowie's biggest-selling album "Let's Dance" and on "Like a Virgin" for Madonna. And that's just scratching the surface of his discography.
In his 2011 autobiography, Rodgers describes a mostly happy childhood in New York, despite battling acute asthma and being raised by loving but heroin-addicted parents in a bohemian household "dotted with junkies".
As a teenager he joined the Harlem branch of the Black Panthers, dropped acid with LSD guru Timothy Leary and jammed with Jimi Hendrix.
After jobs in the Sesame Street band and at the Apollo Theatre, he went on to form Chic with his musical partner Bernard Edwards, whose death in 1996 left Rodgers devastated.
The disco lights are shining on Chic once more this year, helped by Rodgers' role in underpinning Daft Punk's "Random Access Memories", a dance album that pays heavy tribute to the 1970s and 1980s.
Its lead single "Get Lucky", featuring Rodgers on his trademark Stratocaster, was for many the song of the summer.
"When 'Get Lucky' first hit, I said to people 'I'm so excited for Daft Punk'," said Rodgers.
"This is their first number one record -- my 20th, I don't even know how many I've had. This is a rare, unique club to be in."
After a year of celebrated live performances, Chic will headline the Shanghai Electric Disco Carnival and perform at Hong Kong's Clockenflap music festival on November 29 and 30, before dates in New Delhi and Kuala Lumpur and then Australia.
"You're just on a trajectory when, every now and then there's some kind of convergence and people go 'we like that' and I'm the beneficiary.
"I know it doesn't last," he said, dwelling on disco's demise in the late 1970s before its rebirth in later years as the undercurrent to newer sounds in hip hop and electronica.
Recent collaborations with British electronic act Disclosure and DJ David Guetta will feature on a new Chic album along with Daft Punk, Rodgers told AFP.
In doing so, he will extend an extraordinary body of work that Rodgers still hears daily, wherever he is in the world.
"Half the time you wonder why it sounds so familiar," said Rodgers.
"And then you remember that you wrote it."
