I spoke with Nile Rodgers on the day it was announced that he and Lady Gaga would perform a tribute to the late David Bowie at the Grammys. Rodgers, the legendary guitarist, composer, and producer, has one of the best reasons to celebrate the life and work of the eccentric limey. There is a very good chance that his own career might have been completely locked up in the disco period of the late-1970s had he not produced Bowie's Let's Dance in 1983. After that spectacular success, the scale of which took even Bowie by surprise, Rodgers ruled the world for five straight years, producing one pop landmark after another: Madonna's Like a Virgin, Duran Duran's Notorious, the B-52s' "Roam," and so on.

"I met David Bowie by accident," he told me. "I always meet people by accident. But I was hanging out with Billy Idol, and we went to the Continental [a storied East Village punk club that closed its doors the same year as CBGB, 2006]. Idol spotted Bowie and pointed him out to me. It was 6 a.m., so I was not shy at that moment. I'm usually shy. But with some help, I'm not. I approached him, and we began talking. That's how it happened. I also knew the people who were living at his building. They were the people on the Young Americans [album], like Luther Vandross, who I had worked with in the past.

"Not long after that, we started working together. We would meet for breakfast or for lunch and share ideas...

"Now, I was at a low point at this time, because my first solo record [Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove] did not do well. And Bowie was kind of in the same situation. His last record [Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)] did okay but not great, and he was not on a label.

"Though I love making music, and love being in the studio, I also have to make hits. That's my job. That's what I do for a living. If the public is not buying my records, then something is wrong. And that's the way it was back then, records sales were like, you know, hits on YouTube or retweets on Twitter. That's how you could tell if you were a success or not—selling records. At that moment, I was not. And I was down. Well, all of that changed with Let's Dance. We sold lots of records, and I was back in business."

Rodgers's last major success before Let's Dance had been Diana Ross's Diana (1980), which had two of the last great disco-funk hits: "Upside Down" and the gay anthem "I'm Coming Out." The year before that, the band Rodgers formed in 1976 with the bassist Bernard Edwards, Chic, had a number-one hit with "Good Times." That tune, which was released on the band's third album, Risqué, proved to be the end of a three-year rise to the top of the charts.

Rodgers also had several hits from the 1979 album he and Edwards produced for Sister Sledge, We Are Family, and an unexpected hit from the then-unknown Sugarhill Gang, a crew of three rappers from, of all places, Englewood, New Jersey. Their track "Rapper's Delight," which introduced America and the rest of the world to a music form born and mostly known in New York City, hiphop, used the beat of "Good Times." (Rodgers told me he was first amazed when he heard the track, and then he got angry when he realized he and Edwards didn't get any credit for it. But as soon as that matter was settled, he loved it again.)

By 1981, the hit machine came to a stop. He worked with Debbie Harry on her debut solo record, KooKoo, but it didn't do well commercially and its funk-rock was artistically inferior to Blondie's "Rapture," a track that, like Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," owed a lot to "Good Times." In 1982, Rodgers went to Toronto and produced a minor new-wave masterpiece called Talkback by Canada's Spoons. That record, however, did most of its business north of the border.

"[When I started working with Bowie], I was still considered, you know, a part of disco," Rodgers recalled. "That hurt my career because of the anti-disco thing of the time. And when it became public that I was producing the album, a lot of people were saying things like I was too commercial or I couldn't be taken seriously. Also I was black. There was that. Blacks did not produce records for white superstars. But Bowie did not listen to any of that. And he gave me a lot of control. I selected all the musicians for the project, except Stevie Ray Vaughan. No one had heard of him. He was picked by Bowie. He discovered him."

Once Rodgers's collaboration with Bowie was a success in the white pop world, there was no more talk about him being a black producer. He was just Nile Rodgers.

The 1990s were not, commercially speaking, as kind to him as the 1980s had been, and the 2000s even less so. But in the first half of this decade, things suddenly turned around for him with Daft Punk's "Get Lucky," a tune he cowrote, played guitar on, and appeared in the video for. (The track also features Pharrell Williams, who can be fairly called the Nile Rodgers of the 21st century.) The tune owes a lot to Chic, which is why the partially reconstituted band often performs it during live shows. (They also play hits Rodgers produced for Madonna, Duran Duran, and Bowie, in addition to their own remarkable catalog.)

"We also play songs that we like," Rodgers said. "Our shows are free-form. We try to figure out where the crowd is and respond to how it's feeling. A show in Los Angeles cannot be the same as a show in Seattle."

Chic will perform at the Showbox on Sunday, February 21.