It takes one music icon to know one.
Nile Rodgers, the legendary producer and Chic bandleader, worshiped Sly Stone long before he became friends with the funk pioneer, who passed away at 82 on Monday, June 9.
And he has the receipts to prove it.
“I still to this day have my ticket [from when] I saw Sly & the Family Stone at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park,” Rodgers, 72, exclusively told The Post on the red carpet of the Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Thursday at NYC’s Marriott Marquis.
“Check this out — the price of the ticket? One dollar. General admission was one dollar. I still have it. It was that great of a day to me,” he said.
And that’s not the only way that Stone took a young Rodgers higher.
“I remember when he released, I don’t know if it was the second album or the first album, I remember going to my friend’s house — he was the only one who could afford the album — and we all sat around smoking hash and listening to the record all day,” he recalled.
As fate would have it, the Songwriters Hall of Fame chairman would end up meeting and bonding with the genius behind Sly & the Family hits such as “Dance to the Music,” Everyday People,” and “Family Affair.”
“Later on in life, I became friends with Sly in California. It was really sad for me because he was living in a car,” he said. “So every night we would meet at the China Club when it moved to Los Angeles, and we would talk, and for some reason, we became really close.”
In fact, Stone asked Rodgers to be the music director for the Sly & the Family Stone tribute at the 2006 Grammys that included Maroon 5, John Legend, Steven Tyler and Joss Stone — as well as a brief appearance by the funk god himself.
Another legendary producer, Jimmy Jam, recalled sampling Sly & the Family Stone’s 1970 chart-topper “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” on Janet Jackson’s 1989 hit “Rhythm Nation.”
“I don’t think people really put that together,” he told The Post. “For me, it was so obvious that it’s Sly. But he was a tremendous influence, [and] still continues to be. His music is singular.
“And his influence [was] not only me but certainly on Prince in the way that he made his band up — like, it was multiracial, multi-gender,” said the former Prince protégé. “All of that came from Sly.”
Stone’s impact on Rodgers was formative, too.
“Honestly, to me, Sly is on the same level as [John] Coltrane, Miles [Davis], Charlie Parker, Nina Simone, all the people I grew up with. Sly was my R&B example of that,” he said.
Indeed, with Sly & the Family Stone, Rodgers said that Stone “changed music.”
“They changed the way that America saw black musicians,” he said. “They changed everything.”
