Everybody knows the record that came out of this story: the bass line that walks in first, low and confident, before the voice arrives on top of it; the bright, strutting song about a romance turned upside down; and the fanfare announcing a second song about coming out, stepping forward, being seen. Those two songs have been played at weddings, parties, and celebrations of every kind for more than forty years, and they sound like the most natural Diana Ross records in the world: glamorous, assured, impossible to imagine sung by anyone else.
What almost nobody tells first is that the versions everybody knows are not the versions their writers and producers delivered. The album that carried those songs to the top of the charts in 1980 was recorded by one team, and then, in secret, remade by another. The singer at its centre heard the finished work of the hottest production duo in America, decided it sounded too much like them and not enough like her, and had the whole album remixed without telling them. When the producers heard what had been done to their work, they were furious, and they considered taking their names off the record altogether. The record company backed the singer. The remixed album became the best-selling studio album of her solo career.
This article stays inside that dispute, from the first conversations in late 1979 to the release of the original mixes twenty years later. It is not a general biography of Diana Ross, and it is not a survey of her years with the Supremes or of her later career at RCA. The Supremes matter here only as background, because they explain what Ross was trying to leave behind, and what she was afraid of losing. The question at the centre is narrower, and more interesting than a chart history: who owns a record, the people who write and produce it, or the singer whose name and voice are on the cover? In the spring of 1980, Diana Ross answered that question with a mixing desk, and the answer changed her career.
A caution belongs at the start: this is a story told in competing versions. Ross, the producers, the label, and the disc jockey who warned her remember key moments slightly differently, and colourful details — a warning in a private preview, a singer in tears, a threat to remove two famous names — rest on interviews given years later, not on documents a writer can check. Where accounts differ, this article says so, and where a figure such as a worldwide sales total is reported differently, it is given as reported, not settled. The shape is consistent; the fine detail, in places, is not.
A star who needed a new sound
To understand why Ross went looking for Chic, it helps to remember where she stood at the end of the 1970s. After nearly twenty years as the most visible woman in American popular music — first with the Supremes, then as a solo singer — she had enjoyed a comeback of sorts with The Boss (1979), made with Ashford and Simpson. It restored her to the charts and clubs, but it did not solve a larger problem. Approaching forty, a mother, living in New York rather than in Los Angeles, where Motown had moved, she was restless. She wanted a sound that belonged to the new decade, and a record that said where she was in her life, not where she had been.
The sound she wanted belonged, in 1979, to two men from New York. Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were the founders of Chic, a band whose records had defined the sophisticated end of disco: clean, precise guitar figures, bass lines that danced rather than merely thumped, string arrangements that glittered without getting in the way, and a rhythmic discipline that made even a long instrumental passage feel like a pop song. Their hits for their own band, and for Sister Sledge, had made them the most sought-after producers in America, and they had a particular gift that mattered for Ross. They did not simply write songs and hand them to a singer. They built a world around a singer, a sound in which the voice was one instrument among several, held inside a groove that went on, elegantly, for minutes at a time. For a singer who wanted to sound modern, there was no better address in New York.
How Ross came to Chic is told in more than one way: she had heard their work at Studio 54; her children were talking about Chic incessantly and asked her to take them to see the band, in one version in Santa Monica; she had taken her daughters to a Chic concert. These versions do not contradict each other in any important way. The point is that she went to them, rather than waiting for Motown to assign a producer, with a personal rather than commercial brief: a record that stated where she felt she was in her life and career.
Rodgers and Edwards took that brief seriously. Before any tape rolled, they spent, by the most detailed accounts, two days interviewing Ross at her apartment, about fame, family, loneliness, and laughter, and the answers became the material for the songs. When she told them she wanted to turn her career upside down and have fun again, they wrote songs around those very phrases. The result was not a collection chosen from a catalogue. It was a set built out of a singer’s own account of herself — which is why the later dispute hurt so much on both sides. Rodgers and Edwards had written, as they saw it, Diana Ross’s life, set to their music. Ross, hearing the result, felt her life had been set to somebody else’s music.
Power Station, December 1979 to March 1980
Recording took place at the Power Station in New York City, the studio Chic favoured for its bright, live sound, between December 1979 and March 1980. The band was, in essence, Chic itself — Edwards on bass, Rodgers on guitar, Tony Thompson on drums, Chic’s regular background singers including Alfa Anderson and Luci Martin, and the Chic Strings led by Gene Orloff — plus Ross on lead vocals. It was a Chic session with a guest star, a description that would later become a complaint, and at the time was the attraction.
All eight songs were written by Edwards and Rodgers, and with one exception — the piano song, which came from their normal songwriting process — they were built from the conversations with Ross. They were not songs Chic had lying around; they were made for this singer, from her words, and recorded with her standing in the middle of Chic’s band.
The sound of those sessions, as it can now be heard on the original mixes released decades later, was expansive: longer grooves, instrumental passages allowed to breathe, prominent strings, and Ross’s voice sitting inside the music rather than on top of it. Rodgers later summed up the clash as an avant-garde concept against a more accessible one — two ideas of what a Diana Ross record should be. There was also no short, obvious lead single: the songs were album tracks, and in their original mixes the coming-out song ran for more than six minutes and the fun-again song for more than seven. A record company facing a radio landscape turning against disco would see a problem in those lengths; a producer proud of a new sound would see an achievement. Only one view could be pressed onto vinyl.
Disco, backlash, and a warning
The problem was not only musical. By the spring of 1980, disco, which had dominated American pop for years, faced a backlash as cultural as musical. In July 1979, Disco Demolition Night at a Chicago baseball stadium had seen thousands of disco records destroyed in a bonfire between games, an event since become the standard symbol of the backlash. By 1980, radio stations were dropping disco, labels were quietly removing the word from marketing, and a sound that had seemed like the future a year earlier now sounded, to some listeners, like the past. A singer releasing a disco album in spring 1980 was taking a position in a culture war, whether she wanted to or not.
Ross knew that, and the people around her knew it too. The most famous warning in the story came from Frankie Crocker, the influential New York disc jockey, a friend and confidant of Ross’s, who heard a preview of the album and told her, in the version most often repeated, that releasing it in its original state could lead to the end of her career. That warning has been told in different forms, and the differences matter enough to state them. In some accounts, Crocker warned about the album as a whole, with its heavy disco-funk orientation, in the new anti-disco climate. In others, the warning centred on one song in particular, the song about coming out, because Crocker pointed out to Ross what the phrase meant in gay slang, and warned her that listeners might think she was announcing something about her own life, and that it would ruin her career. In a third version, the warning is attributed more broadly to Motown itself, which told Ross that releasing the album as it stood would kill her career, in the same way, one account adds, that the company had once warned Marvin Gaye about another record that became a classic.
These versions are not mutually exclusive, and the most honest way to tell the story is to say that Crocker warned her, that the warning was about the record’s sound and about one song’s title, and that the exact wording, and whether it was delivered about the whole album or about one track, varies with the teller. What is consistent is the effect. Ross, who had gone to Chic looking for a modern sound, now heard, from a man whose job was to know what radio would play, that the modern sound she had bought might be the sound that ended her career. She had already taken a risk by going outside Motown’s usual producers. Now she was told that the risk might be fatal. A singer in that position has, in practice, two choices: trust the producers and release the record as they made it, or take control of the record herself and remake it in a form she believes radio will accept. Ross chose the second.
The coming-out song has its own history. Rodgers, by his own later account, got the idea after seeing Diana Ross impersonators — drag queens dressed as Ross — in a New York club: in the fullest version, at the Gilded Grape, he noticed six or seven of them, stepped outside to telephone Edwards, and said Ross was revered by the gay community, and that a song with that title would have a power comparable to a famous anthem of Black pride. Other accounts name a different club, the GG Barnum Room. The club does not change the story: Rodgers deliberately wrote a song that would speak at once to Ross’s gay audience and to Ross herself, as a declaration of independence. Ross reportedly loved the record until Crocker pointed out the gay meaning of its title, at which point she was, in one version, in tears in the studio, demanding to know why the writers would damage her career. Rodgers, by his own later admission, reassured her — in a phrase he himself called a lie — by telling her the song was simply about her own coming out from under Motown’s control. That second meaning was real, and it is the one Ross later emphasised. But the first meaning was real too, and it has given the song its long life as an anthem. From the start, the song meant two things at once.
The remix, in secret
What happened next is the heart of this article, and it is told here in the form in which the strongest sources agree, with the variations noted where they matter. Ross turned to Russ Terrana, Motown’s house engineer, a man who had worked on her Supremes and solo hits and who was trusted, inside Motown, to know how to make a Diana Ross record sound like a Diana Ross record. Terrana, working with Ross, remixed the entire album. The work was done, by the album’s own credits, at Artisan Sound Recorders in Hollywood, California, far from the Power Station in New York where the album had been recorded and first mixed. The changes were systematic, not cosmetic. Extended instrumental passages were trimmed or removed. Tempos were sped up, slightly but audibly. String sections were lowered in the mix. And Ross re-recorded her lead vocals, in whole or in part, so that they sat front and centre, brighter and more prominent, rather than inside the band’s sound. The result was, in the standard description, a smoother, more commercial mix: punchier, tighter, more direct, and more obviously a singer’s record than a band’s record.
The crucial fact is that the remix was done without the knowledge or approval of Rodgers and Edwards — the phrase on which the whole dispute turns. A mix is a decision about how a set of tapes should sound together; taking those tapes to another studio, in another city, and making a new mix is not merely polishing a record, but making a second record out of the same performances, without the people who conceived the first in the room. Labels routinely remix for different markets, but it is unusual when the people left out are the writers and producers whose names are on the record, and when the new mix changes the work’s character as fundamentally as Terrana’s did.
One variation complicates a simple story of a secret remix. In one version, Ross first gave Rodgers and Edwards specific remixing instructions, they made slight changes, and they suggested that if she still did not like it, she could remix it herself — which she then did, with Terrana. In another, the Terrana remix was commissioned without that intermediate step, and the producers first heard the new version when Motown presented it as finished. No single source checked for this article settles that point. Both versions agree on the outcome: the Terrana mix became the released album, and Rodgers and Edwards did not approve it.
When Rodgers and Edwards heard the Terrana version, they were, by every account, furious. Rodgers later described his reaction, in an interview with Billboard in June 1980, as shock and fury, and he later summed up the clash in the phrase quoted earlier, about an avant-garde concept against an accessible concept. The producers, in the standard account, publicly objected and, at one point, considered having their names removed from the album’s credits, and in one version, wished to take their names off the record altogether. That threat, if it had been carried out, would have been a serious blow to the album’s marketing, because Rodgers and Edwards were, in 1980, the names that signified a modern sound. A Diana Ross album without their names on it would have looked like a record whose makers had disowned it, which, in a sense, they had. In the end, cooler heads prevailed, or, more prosaically, Motown held firm, and the names stayed on the record. Motown and Ross persisted, in the album history’s phrase, and the version released was Terrana’s more commercial mix.
Why did Motown back Ross rather than its producers? By 1980, Gordy’s system — in which the company, not the artist, controlled sound, image, and marketing — was under strain, and Ross, its most important artist for nearly two decades, was living in New York, working outside its usual producers, and, by several accounts, preparing to leave. A company in that position does not pick a fight with its biggest star over a mix. It backs the star, because the star is the asset. Rodgers and Edwards could object, threaten to remove their names, and later tell their side in interviews and a memoir — but they could not stop Motown pressing the Terrana mix.
The dispute was personal as well as professional. Rodgers and Edwards had written songs out of two days listening to Ross talk about her life; to have them remixed in secret, in another city, must have felt like a betrayal. Ross, who had spent nearly two decades inside a system that told her what to sing and how to look, had gone to Chic to break out of it, and now heard that the record meant to break her out might end her career. Both sides felt the other had not understood what was at stake — which is why the dispute has lasted, in interviews and reissues, for more than forty years. It was not a misunderstanding about tempos. It was a disagreement about who Diana Ross was, and who had the right to decide.
Release, and a number one that vindicated the remix
The remixed album, titled in lower case on its cover as diana, was released on 22 May 1980 by Motown. Its cover, photographed by Francesco Scavullo, showed Ross in jeans, looking directly at the camera — a familiar star presented, like the mix itself, in a new, more direct form.
The album’s commercial life began unusually: according to its chart history, Motown released it without a lead single, a decision the history attributes in part to the controversy. It climbed anyway, reaching the top ten within weeks, and radio programmers and the label together settled on the upside-down song as the single. It jumped in its fifth week from number forty-nine to number ten, reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on 6 September 1980, stayed there for four weeks — the longest chart-topping run of her solo career — and also topped the disco and soul charts. The album reached number two on the Billboard 200, number one on the soul albums chart for eight consecutive weeks, and spent a year on the American chart.
The other singles followed the same pattern of success, on a smaller scale. The song about coming out, released on 22 August 1980 as the second single, reached number five on the Hot 100 and number one on the disco chart, and it has since become, in the standard phrase, an anthem for the LGBT community, a status it has held for more than forty years. The piano song, released in September 1980, reached the top five in Britain, where the album went gold and produced three successful singles, with the upside-down song at number two, the piano song at number five, and the coming-out song at number thirteen. In the United States the album sold more than a million copies and was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. It is described, in the album’s standard history, as the best-selling studio album of Ross’s solo career, a claim that rests on its American certification and its long chart life, and that is repeated in most histories of her career.
Worldwide sales are a different matter, and this article states no single worldwide figure as settled fact, because sources do not agree: one later account, from a music critic, puts worldwide sales at more than ten million copies, another at more than nine million. Neither rests on a single audited source, so this article gives the certified American figure and notes only that later estimates run into the millions. The point does not depend on the exact total: the remixed album, which Rodgers and Edwards had objected to and Crocker had warned might end Ross’s career, became by any measure a major success, and the biggest-selling studio album of her solo career.
The success vindicated the remix commercially, but it did not prove the Terrana mix better than the Chic mix — only more successful on radio in 1980, in an anti-disco climate, with the singer’s voice front and centre. Charts measure what people buy and what radio plays, not what a record means to the people who made it. Ross was entitled to feel vindicated, and Rodgers and Edwards were entitled to feel that work altered without their consent had been rewarded. Both feelings can be true at once.
Aftermath: leaving Motown, and a lawsuit in the background
The album’s success did not keep Ross at Motown. After two more hit singles that followed the album, the duet with Lionel Richie and a song from a film, Ross left Motown and signed, in 1981, a then record-breaking twenty-million-dollar recording deal with RCA Records, a figure that is consistently reported and that Motown, by the accounts of the time, could not afford to match. The first album for RCA, released in 1981 and self-produced, went platinum and produced two American top-ten hits. Ross had, in other words, done what the song about coming out had promised, in its second meaning: she had come out from under Motown’s control, after nearly two decades, and she had done so on the strength of a record that Motown itself had released, in a form Motown had backed against its producers. The irony is not lost on any history of the period. The remix that had been made to save her career at Motown became, in effect, the record that allowed her to leave Motown.
The producers’ side of the aftermath is less tidy, and it is here that this article must be most careful, because the plan for this article flagged a lawsuit claim that is reported in some sources and not in others. The album’s history on Wikipedia states that Rodgers and Edwards sued Motown, unsuccessfully, claiming that they were owed money for creating and recording the original version of the album. That is a specific claim, and it is stated in that source as a fact. Other histories of the album, including the Motown-affiliated history published for the original-mix reissue, do not mention a lawsuit at all, and instead describe the producers as objecting publicly and considering removing their names, and then cooling off when the album became a hit. This article therefore does not present a lawsuit as a settled, fully documented fact. It reports that at least one standard history says Rodgers and Edwards later sued Motown unsuccessfully over money claimed for the original version, and that other accounts describe the dispute as ending with a public objection and a cooling-off, without mentioning a court case. A reader who wants to follow the lawsuit claim further should look for a court record or a contemporary legal report, which the material checked for this article does not supply. The dispute itself, whether or not it reached a courtroom, is not in doubt. The form it took after the album’s release is, in the sources, less clear than the form it took before release, and this article leaves that uncertainty visible rather than smoothing it away.
The professional relationship did survive, in a form: in 1989, after Ross had returned to Motown, she and Rodgers collaborated again, on an album that reached number three on the American rhythm-and-blues chart, and Edwards had produced a single for her in 1984. Those later collaborations do not erase the 1980 dispute. Rodgers, in his memoir decades later, tells the story with pride in the songs and frustration at the remix — in effect, that the Terrana version was a different record, made for a commercial rather than an artistic purpose.
Two versions, twenty-three years apart
For more than twenty years, most listeners knew only one version. The Chic mixes circulated as bootlegs, prized by collectors who wanted the longer grooves, deeper low end, and more prominent instrumental passages Terrana had trimmed. Their official release mattered not only to collectors but to the story, because it allowed listeners, for the first time, to compare the two versions from legitimate sources and judge what had been changed, and whether the change had been for the better.
The original mixes were released as part of a double compact disc deluxe edition in 2003, in the United States, with a United Kingdom edition in 2001, containing the original Chic mixes and the Motown final mixes, together with unremixed versions and a selection of other Motown dance tracks from the same period. The track listing of that edition makes the comparison easy. The eight released tracks appear first, in their Terrana forms, and then again, as original Chic mixes, with longer running times: the upside-down song at four minutes and seventeen seconds against four minutes and five seconds in the released version, the tenderness song at five minutes and ten seconds against three minutes and fifty-two seconds, the coming-out song at six minutes and one second against five minutes and twenty-four seconds, and the fun-again song at seven minutes and nine seconds against five minutes and fifty-seven seconds. Those differences, a few seconds here and more than a minute there, are the audible trace of Terrana’s work: the trimming of instrumental passages, the tightening of structures, and the speeding up of tempos, all visible in the numbers before a listener hears a note.
In 2017, the original Chic mix received its first vinyl release, as a double album on pink vinyl at 45 revolutions per minute, presented as a record in its own right rather than as bonus tracks. It did not replace the released album in the public mind, and was not intended to. The Terrana mix remains the version that topped the charts and that most listeners know; the original mix remains a what-if. That is the final irony: the version made in secret, without the producers’ approval, became canonical, and the version the producers made, with the singer’s cooperation, became the alternative, released decades later.
Critical opinion has tended to favour the released album: in 2020, Rolling Stone placed it at number 394 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and contemporary and retrospective reviews praised its energy and Ross’s forcefulness. Those judgements do not answer the question the original mixes raise — whether a more forceful, more commercial record is also more true to the songs as written — which is perhaps why the two versions continue to be discussed together, rather than one replacing the other.
Why the remix still matters
It is easy to treat the remix as a footnote resolved by the charts. That misses what it did, in three ways that are still audible, and still relevant to how the record business is understood.
First, it changed Ross’s relationship to her own voice. Re-recording her leads so they sit front and centre, brighter and more prominent, is a claim about what a record should be: a singer’s record, not a band’s, a voice that leads rather than blends. After nearly two decades as a voice inside a system — first in a group, then inside Motown’s production system — the remix was a declaration of independence made with a mixing desk, before the legal independence of leaving Motown. It said, in sound, what the coming-out song said in words: she was stepping forward. Whether that declaration was artistically justified is a matter of taste. That it was a declaration is not in doubt.
Second, it changed her relationship to her producers, and to authorship in popular music. A record is rarely one person’s work; it is writers, producers, musicians, engineers, and a singer, each contributing something not easily separated from the rest. When a singer remixes without her producers’ approval, she asserts that her contribution — voice, name, career — outweighs theirs, at least for the released version. That assertion has consequences: two of America’s most talented producers felt their work had been taken from them, and said so publicly for years. Contracts since 1980 have become more formal about who controls a mix, but the underlying question — who owns a record? — has only become more pressing, as remixes, re-recordings, and reissues have grown.
Third, it changed how listeners hear Ross herself. A listener who knows only the released album hears a confident, commercial record, and a star in full control. A listener who knows both versions hears something more complicated: a star who was not at first in full control, who doubted her own record, listened to a disc jockey’s warning, and took control by remaking it in secret — afraid as well as ambitious, vindicated by the charts without necessarily being proved right artistically. That richer story is told not by the released album alone, but by the existence of two versions, and the dispute that produced them.
If there is a single image to carry away, it is not a stage, a chart, or a cover photograph. It is a mixing desk in Hollywood in the spring of 1980, with a singer and an engineer working through tapes recorded in New York, by other people, for a different purpose, and making a record that would become the biggest-selling studio album of her career. The people who recorded those tapes were not in the room, and when they found out what had been done, they objected, considered removing their names, and were overruled. The record that came out of that room was not the record they had made. It was the record Diana Ross wanted the world to hear, and the world, in 1980, agreed with her. That agreement, and the disagreement that preceded it, are why diana is still discussed, reissued, and argued over, more than forty years after a singer took a finished album, remixed it herself, and made her biggest solo hit anyway.
Sources
Wikipedia — “Diana (album)” (released 22 May 1980 by Motown; recorded December 1979 to March 1980 at Power Station, New York; Ross approached Rodgers after hearing Chic’s work at Studio 54; songs crafted after direct conversations, including the wish to turn her career upside down and have fun again; Frankie Crocker warning; remix by Ross with Russ Terrana, removing extended instrumental passages and speeding up tempos, re-recording lead vocals front and centre; remix without Rodgers and Edwards’ knowledge or approval; producers publicly objected and considered removing their names; Motown and Ross persisted with Terrana’s commercial mix; chart performance, including Billboard 200 number two, soul albums number one for eight weeks, platinum certification in the United States, and United Kingdom gold with three singles; later history, including the RCA deal, the 2003 deluxe edition with original Chic mixes, and the claim, reported there, that Rodgers and Edwards later sued Motown unsuccessfully over money claimed for the original version).
uDiscover Music — “Upside Down: When Diana Ross Got A Chic Makeover” (Ross’s children talking about Chic and the Santa Monica concert account; Ross disliked the sessions’ results and gave specific remixing instructions, with Rodgers and Edwards making slight changes and suggesting she remix it herself; Ross reworked the whole album with Terrana to downplay the funk element and make her voice more prominent; producers initially furious and considering removing their production credit; album a platinum-selling number two that spent a year on the American chart; “Upside Down” topping the Hot 100 on 6 September 1980 for four weeks).
uDiscover Music — “Diana Ross’s Landmark ‘diana’ Chic Mix Finally On Vinyl” (Ross sought a new sound after The Boss and hired Rodgers and Edwards; Terrana remix using alternate vocals and speeding up tracks for a more commercial mix; revised album released 22 May 1980; original Chic mix vinyl release 21 April 2017, with the deluxe edition first issued 29 July 2003 in the United States).
Motown/UMe, via BroadwayWorld and MusicPlayers — “1980 Diana Ross Album, ‘diana — The Original CHIC Mix’ Gets First-Ever Vinyl Release” (original Chic mixes as envisioned by Rodgers and Edwards; Terrana remix with vocals more upfront for a smoother commercial mix; revised album released 22 May 1980; vinyl double album at 45 revolutions per minute, 21 April 2017).
Wikipedia — “I’m Coming Out” (released 22 August 1980 as the second single from Diana; written and produced by Edwards and Rodgers; peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the disco chart; regarded since release as an anthem for the LGBT community; Rodgers’s 2021 account of seeing drag queens dressed as Ross at a New York club and telephoning Edwards; Crocker pointing out the gay meaning of the title and Ross’s reported distress and later decision to release the song).
Nile Rodgers, “Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny” (2011), as reported in secondary accounts (Rodgers’s summary of the clash as an avant-garde concept against a more accessible concept; his account of the coming-out song’s inspiration and of reassuring Ross about its meaning).
Rolling Stone — “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” (2020) (Diana placed at number 394).
YouTube — “Upside Down” (video title confirmed from the YouTube page text fetch; the fetch gave only “Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group” and no channel line, so no official-channel claim is made in this draft).
Image credits: Urban street scene — photo by Lesli Whitecotton, Pexels free licence (thematic image only, not a photograph of New York in 1980 or of Diana Ross). Microphone on a dark stage — photo by Michael DO, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). Close-up of microphones in a studio — photo by Clement Lepetit, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). Illuminated control panel — photo by Daniel Ponomarev, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). River at dusk — photo by Ehsan Haque, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). All images are thematic illustrations; none is a photograph of Diana Ross, Nile Rodgers, or Bernard Edwards.