Le Freak

Rodgers told Sound On Sound that he and Edwards were invited to meet Grace Jones at Studio 54 on New Year's Eve 1977 to talk about her next album, but she had not left their names and the doorman would not let them in. His apartment was a block away, so they bought champagne, plugged in and jammed. He wanted a riff song in the spirit of Cream's Sunshine of Your Love, and the refrain started as an expletive aimed at the club. It became freak off, which they found lame, and then freak out. The lyric reads like instructions for a dance craze, though Rodgers said they had no idea how the dance went, and it names the club in the line about coming down to 54.

It was recorded at the Power Station with Bob Clearmountain engineering. Rodgers played guitar, Edwards bass and Tony Thompson drums, with Rob Sabino on acoustic piano, either Raymond Jones or Andy Schwartz on Fender Rhodes, the Chic Strings, and Alfa Anderson and Diva Gray singing. The vocals went down after the backing track, with no guide vocals. Rodgers said the rhythm track took hours and one take was used. The main studio effect was the large echo on the bass drum after the freak out shout, made by overloading the Power Station's live echo chamber, which was the bathroom.

Chart and legacy

Issued as a single by Atlantic in September 1978, it was the first single from C'est Chic. It reached number one on the Hot 100 and the R&B chart, and was the first song to reach number one on the Hot 100 three separate times, with six non-consecutive weeks at the top. In Britain it reached number 7. Billboard ranked it the third song of 1979. A 1987 acid house remix called Jack Le Freak, by Phil Harding, reached number 18 in Britain.

The Grammy Hall of Fame inducted the 1978 recording in 2015, and the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry in 2018. Stereogum's Tom Breihan wrote that it is barely a song and that what you remember is the groove, and he noted that Edwards basically plays lead on it. The night before Edwards died in 1996, Chic played it at the Budokan with Slash guesting on guitar.