Hi, welcome to Rhythm and Rap. I'm J.J. Johnson, ranked Connecticut near New York City. With the first-year-old writers, producers, leaders, and members of a very well-known recording group. Join me and together we'll get to know now Rogers, Bernard Edwards, and Sheik. Hello, hello, hello. Hello, hello, hello. And hello. Hi, baby. Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards, writers, producers, performers, and founders of Sheik. For years, Nile and Bernard searched for stardom. In 1977, their first record dance dance dance quickly became the first of many monster hits for this talent to do all. Soon afterwards, stars like Diana Ross, Sister Sledge, and Deborah Harry were knocking at the door for their services. The Sheik organization is the result of years of hard work and planning by Nile and Bernard, who've managed to cope with her new life's talent success with Down the Earth Eats. Yeah, do it my time. Okay. When you do a Diana Ross or a Deborah Harry or a Johnny Madness, do you write and produce differently for each one or do you apply the same Sheik ingredients standard for lack of a better term ingredients for each one? Well, see, everybody has certain guidelines that they work by. You know, I mean, in other words, we have a certain formula for doing what we do. However, we absolutely write and produce differently for each one of those artists, something we spoke about earlier that when we were younger, we didn't understand that these people had images and concepts before we even got there. So we have to understand these people's artistry and try and develop that with our interpretation of where they're coming from. It sounds a little complex, but that's really what we do. In other words, we have to understand what Debbie's about in order to write songs that represent Debbie's image. Saying what Diana was, I mean, she was instrumental in teaching us that. Instrumental in letting us know that, wait a minute. You know, you're writing songs for me now and they have to represent my lifestyle or what I want to be about. And then we started getting all this pressure from outside that our songs weren't legitimate. They were lightweight, you know, they were disco and you know, and your artist, you know, something that's a bit more sensitive than that. Yeah, I don't want a person to walk up on me and say, oh, you want to do it right ahead. Of course I do, but I mean, on an album of eight tunes, I feel pretty strongly about at least seven of them. You know, so it's not like something I just do in my spare time. That's my work. I'm very serious about it. And we found that the press and a lot of the people around us weren't taking it serious. And a lot of the musicians loved us, you know, and that's the thing that kind of balanced everything off and we started to talk to them more. And to see that they appreciated and understood that we were musicians. We were writing songs. We were trying to change the sound and we weren't just trying to make some quick money. I met my wife in a club, you know, we worked in the same club. She was singing in a talent show. So we both decided that it's best that the family be kept away from, you know, most of the craziness because there's some nice people in the music business, but there's a lot of bad things that I personally don't feel that I want my family exposed to. And for a person like me, I'm a very quiet person. So I want to come home to what I call normal people, you know, I don't want to come home to a, you know, a child star and a wife who has 30 interviews for the weekend and can't cook dinner, you know, and I see enough of it out there. And I know where it does to people. So I'm real happy with my family. I think it's the best thing I have. It's very normal. It's very stable. So when I come off the road, I can come home and sit down and watch TV. And, you know, I'm just dead and the husband and I'm not, you know, Bernardo was from chic. I like the wife being home, you know, and taking care of the children, especially when they're young. And I like the children to know their mother and father and I think it's important for kids to have a mother and a father to grow up. And, you know, to more or less have a working father and those type of things, more conservative things from the old days. When Bernardo stopped working at the post office and started into the music field, there was a difference in our lives because we knew that the post office was an assured check during the week. But when he went into the music field, there were times when he didn't have work and there were times when the paycheck was nice. But with the two children, he walked in worried more than anything about the children and where their next pair of shoes would come from and all, but they always had. The post office was again a sure thing, whereas the music field was not. You and Bernardo have been together for a long time, haven't you? Yeah. If my math is right, it's about 13 years. And yeah. Have you been making music together for this? Absolutely. In other words, our relationship developed from music. I saw him walking down the street in a neighborhood with his base, but we didn't hook up right then. We lived one block away from each other. But when we eventually met, it was through music and our friendship was a revolver on music. How about the other friends? When you were other friends in life, were you still hanging around the same folks? Absolutely. It's funny, too, because I've met a lot of people now that I dig a lot. A lot of new friends that are hip. The old friends, we seem to have a different kind of relationship. It's a lot of, I guess it's a lot of humor, a lot of joking around, a lot of, you know, just a lot of good times. That's really what it is. We just do, we hang, that's what it is. You know, it's hip. It's really, really good. I know the real thing that keeps Bernard and I really close together is that our friendships are so limited, like the people who are our friends now are exactly the same people who are our friends then. When you first started having them, what was the first thing you went out and bought? Well, let me see, Bernard bought a color TV, he had like no furniture, and he had a little Sony Trinitron sitting in his house with nothing in there at all.