NEW YORK — Reggie Lucas, a guitarist, songwriter, and producer who was a member of Miles Davis’s electric band of the early and middle 1970s and who produced the majority of Madonna’s debut album, died Saturday at a New York hospital. He was 65.
The cause was advanced heart failure, his daughter, Lisa, said.
The versatile Mr. Lucas was present for some of the most divisive music of the 1970s and some of the most unifying music of the 1980s. He played on “On the Corner,’’ one of Davis’s most difficult and, in its day, critically derided albums. And he produced six of the eight songs on Madonna’s 1983 debut album, including the breakthrough hits “Lucky Star,’’ “Borderline’’ (which he also wrote), and “Burning Up.’’
Reginald Grant Lucas was born on Feb. 25, 1953, in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, to Ronald and Annie (Parham) Lucas. His father was a physician, his mother a teacher and administrator in the New York City school system.
As a child he took piano lessons and, later, taught himself guitar. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he embraced the radical politics of the day, taking part in protests and writing articles in left-leaning student publications. He was featured in Robert Rossner’s book “The Year Without an Autumn: Portrait of a School in Crisis’’ (1969), which chronicled the 1968 New York City teacher strike and its fallout.
Mr. Lucas met Nile Rodgers, the future disco and pop producer who went on to co-found the band Chic, at a Vietnam War protest in Union Square when the two were both New York City high school students. They became lifelong friends.
After dropping out of Bronx Science, Mr. Lucas moved to Philadelphia, where he joined the band of soul singer Billy Paul. By the time he was 18, he was invited to join Davis’s band.
He stayed for around three years. In addition to “On the Corner’’ — the signature release of Davis’s fully freaky period, reflecting influences as diverse as Sly Stone and Karlheinz Stockhausen — Mr. Lucas played on the live albums “Agharta,’’ “Pangaea,’’ and “Dark Magus.’’
“We were all writing and composing onstage — continuous collaborative compositions and improvisations,’’ Mr. Lucas said of his tenure with Davis in an interview for The Fader in 2016.
Among his colleagues in the band was percussionist James Mtume. The two joined Roberta Flack’s band in 1976 — the same year Mr. Lucas released “Survival Themes,’’ his only solo album — and went on to become an in-demand R&B songwriting and production team in the late 1970s.
Mr. Lucas and Mtume specialized in a kind of regal disco-R&B, including hits for Phyllis Hyman (“You Know How to Love Me’’) and Flack (“The Closer I Get to You’’). In 1981, they won a Grammy Award for best R&B song for writing the Stephanie Mills hit “Never Knew Love Like This Before.’’
In 1982, Mr. Lucas began production work on the debut album of a then little-known singer, Madonna. Released in 1983, it would go on to be certified five times platinum and set the table for one of the most singular careers in modern pop. But he and Madonna had creative differences.
“She had her way of wanting to do things,’’ he told J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of “Madonna: An Intimate Biography’’ (2001). “And I understood that. So we had to have a meeting of the minds, from time to time.’’ (Some of the songs Mr. Lucas produced were remixed to Madonna’s tastes by Jellybean Benitez.)
The album, Mr. Lucas told The Atlantic in 2013, was “a hybrid of her interests and mine’’; Madonna was a nightclub denizen steeped in dance music and new wave, and Mr. Lucas was hired to bring R&B authority and texture. (Madonna’s early singles were marketed to black radio.) He even used an introduction for “Borderline’’ similar to the one he had used on “Never Knew Love Like This Before.’’
Mr. Lucas did not work with Madonna again; it was Nile Rodgers, his childhood friend, who took over production duties on her follow-up album.
