Fifteen years before Arsenio Hall debuted his hip, black-oriented talk show, Cornelius’s interactions with White, Gaye, Robinson, and others were a window into black glamour and privilege that was particular to Hollywood. In places like Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and Sag Harbor in Long Island, black folks with money had been gathering for decades to network and mate. But this was a new world, built on black music, that was also peopled by black movie and TV stars as well as behind-the-scenes players. It was a 1970s phenomenon that Soul Train made visible.
Marvin Gaye was both a regular presence on Soul Train and a close personal friend of Don Cornelius.
Another of these behind-the-scenes moments was a lovely duet between Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson that was recorded for a 1979 episode. The two soul legends were childhood friends from Detroit. Robinson remembers hearing her sing for the first time when she was four years old. Franklin was the daughter of Reverend C. L. Franklin, who in the 1950s was one of the most powerful religious figures in black America, while Smokey was a gifted singer-songwriter who’d eventually be signed by Berry Gordy along with his group, the Miracles. Though both were good friends from the same city, the silky-voiced songwriter and the Queen of Soul had never performed together on record or TV. Sitting together at a piano with Franklin, an outstanding gospel-trained pianist, on the keys, they sing a slow, sweet version of the Miracles’ classic “Ooo Baby Baby.” Franklin sings the first verse, Robinson the second, and then they sing the chorus together—not exactly harmonizing, more singing softly together in their different styles. It is a brief but magical duet that made the Soul Train set seem more like a living room after church on a Sunday afternoon than an LA TV studio.
As we’ll see, there would be a number of Soul Train theme songs over the years, but one of the best was played only once on the show. Stevie Wonder, who was on during the first season, would make regular appearances over the years. His first song on a 1971 episode was “Superstition,” but Wonder, on grand piano, then played a ditty called “Soul Train,” with Cornelius by his side and the dancers gathered around. The hook was very simple: “Soul Train and Don Cornelius / Where all the brothers and sisters get together,” backed by a soulful, jaunty piano riff that is similar to a melody he would use years later for “Happy Birthday.”
Wonder got the dancers to sing and clap their hands in another of those intimate moments between singer and audience that made Soul Train feel like a window not into a TV show, but into the world of black showbiz.
Patti LaBelle, whether with Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx in Labelle, or later as a solo artist, was a legendary live performer known for kicking off her shoes, sometimes rolling on the stage, and always singing with celestial power. Her fellow Philadelphia native Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, leader of the Roots, doted on her Soul Train appearances.
Thompson: I’ll say another powerful live performer of the show, who sometimes didn’t perform with a band, and that was Patti LaBelle: I believe that all of her performances were sung with her actual voice. Once, Labelle had a band behind them, during the Nightbirds period of “Lady Marmalade” in ’74, but all of her performances were powerful and very, very live. I think she’s probably the only artist to garner ten-second applause at the end of the song before the animation starts. Usually a song is finished and a person does a bow, they’ll clap for—they’ll show the clap for one second, two seconds—and then go straight to the animation. But when she did “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” that was, I believe, December of 1981. She did “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and it was powerful enough, even without a band, powerful enough to get, I think, the only ten-second applause before Don let the animation go.
There were scores of other remarkable live performances during the seventies on Soul Train. But only one pulled the covers back on the precision needed for show-business success as much as the episode in which master choreographer Cholly Atkins showed how he created the O’Jays’ onstage magic. “I actually think that was Don’s idea,” said O’Jay member Walter Williams. “Because we used to rehearse in LA at times, and Don came by and saw how he was beating us up.” The song was “Give the People What They Want,” a classic Philly International message song. Viewers saw the O’Jays in street clothes and then saw them transition into the song in onstage gear. This peek behind the scenes featured show-business legend Atkins.
Atkins and legendary tap dancer Honi Coles had been a part of a team, Coles & Atkins, that was extremely popular in the 1940s and 1950s. As popular culture changed, dance teams lost favor while stand-up vocal groups, mostly composed of golden-voiced teenagers with no stage experience, came into vogue. Working out of a studio in the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway (where David Letterman now tapes his CBS late show), Atkins pioneered what he labeled “vocal choreography,” tailoring movement to augment the doo-wop vocalizing of the day. Until Atkins’s innovations, most groups just stood at the microphone and swayed a bit as they sang.
But this was the start of the rock ’n’ roll era, when backbeats became louder and electric guitars and bass were introduced, shifting power in popular music to the rhythm sections. So the stagecraft had to match the music. Atkins became so popular in New York that when Berry Gordy started building his Motown Records empire in Detroit, he recruited Atkins to be part of his artist-development team. Atkins was crucial in shaping teenage groups like the Supremes and the Temptations into the most polished entertainers of the 1960s. When Motown closed its artist-development division in the 1970s, Atkins became a free agent and the O’Jays were his new professional mainstay. Eddie Levert, Walter Williams, and Sammy Strain were stellar students, so it was a treat to see Atkins help them work out the steps to the funky “Give the People What They Want.”
Thompson remembered the episode vividly: “The studio’s all clear and Cholly’s like, Yeah, now you do one, two, three step. My mom was obsessed with Cholly Atkins. She knew who he was from Detroit, and I’m like, ‘Who is that?’ She’s like, ‘That’s Cholly Atkins! He taught the Temptations how to dance. Now he’s teaching the O’Jays.’ Without that I wouldn’t have known any of that stuff.”
The intimacy between Don and the O’Jays was hard-earned and sometimes took a toll on the vocal group members’ sleep. During the 1970s, when the O’Jays were a premier attraction, they’d travel to LA with no plans to do Soul Train. But Eddie Levert remembers that “Don would literally come to our hotel room. You’d get a call from the lobby. ‘Come out, you’ve got to do our show.’ We’d fluff him off. Finally he’d get me up, and I would say, ‘Well, your boy Walter is not coming out.’ He would bang on Walter’s door for hours and hours. Walter would be yelling, ‘Get away! Go away!’ So when we got in front of the camera, all of that bantering would start. Later we would hang out, go to his house and have drinks.”
It was easy to tell who Don really respected as artists, and who he had on Soul Train just because it was good business, by the way he introduced them and how happy he seemed to interview them. His love for the O’Jays was obvious. “I love him for how he introduced the O’Jays,” the Roots’ Thompson said. “His introducing the O’Jays and interviewing the O’Jays are probably his brightest moments, because besides the Jackson Five, I believe the O’Jays were the only group that he would introduce that always came with the superlative ‘mighty,’ as in, ‘The mighty, mighty O’Jays.’ ” The group appeared on more than twelve episodes of the show. No act is more closely identified with Soul Train than this vocal trio. So when they were awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by Black Entertainment Television (BET), Cornelius was asked to introduce them. “He told BET, ‘I’m not coming out. I don’t do that anymore,’ ” Levert said. “So they gave me his number and I told him, ‘What do you mean you can’t do it?’ ” Of course he did get there, and once again said, “The mighty, mighty O’Jays” to the delight of the singers, the live audience, and the millions watching at home.
Chapter 4
Dick Clark’s Soul Unlimited
“I remember when we first got started, there were news columns that described Soul Train as a black American Bandstand,” he said, “and when I first heard that term used, it kind of offended me until I thought about it. And it didn’t take very long before I thought about it. It was not something to be offended by, because that’s exactly what we were. We were a black American Bandstand. Even though in later years Dick Clark and I didn’t get along real well, I would never deny that the principal inspiration for Soul Train was American Bandstand and Dick Clark. Later Dick would start his own soul dance show, but that’s something we don’t really talk about. It’s a long story, and it might be embarrassing to one of us, and we don’t talk about it.”
The impact of Soul Train on the television landscape was not lost on Dick Clark. As mentioned, after Soul Train’s first season, he invited the dynamic Damita Jo Freeman and Joe Chism to compete on his national dance competition, and they won it. The next competition also featured two dancers from Soul Train (Tyrone Proctor and Sharon Hill), who also won. But by 1973, Clark was no longer just cherry-picking talent but actively trying to co-opt Cornelius’s franchise by launching his own black-themed dance show, Soul Unlimited.
Launched as a special episode of American Bandstand on March 24, 1973, it was hosted by Buster Jones, a smooth-voiced but physically awkward Los Angeles–based announcer. Watching him interview singer Eddie Kendricks or the family vocal group Sylvers, Jones not only has no questions (Cornelius didn’t always have anything to ask, either) but, unlike Cornelius, is in no way cool. He nearly trips over the microphone cord preparing to talk with the Sylvers and draws perplexed looks from Kendricks and another interviewee, Rufus Thomas. Clark should have paid someone to write Jones some questions and given the brother a capable stage manager.
Despite Soul Unlimited’s amateurish flavor, it still could have killed Soul Train. Considering Clark’s power in the record and television industry, including the backing of ABC, this rip-off could have proved fatal to Cornelius’s dream. But Dick Clark’s power move was stopped cold.
The hero of this sad tale is Clarence Avant, one of the most powerful men in the history of the black music business and one of the most press shy. In his nearly sixty years in show business, his biggest media exposure came in the 2013 Academy Award–winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man, in which he’s depicted as something of a villain. The film looks back at the unlikely career twists of Sixto Rodriguez, a Bob Dylan–esque singer-songwriter Avant had signed to his Sussex Records in the early 1970s, then released two critically respected albums that, between them, sold fewer than thirty thousand copies.
In a strange turn of events, Rodriguez’s records found their way to South Africa, where white youth, participating in the anti-apartheid movement, made his songs, composed in Detroit in the 1970s, anthems of their 1980s movement. One part of the documentary asks what happened to Rodriguez’s South African royalties. When asked, Avant replies gruffly that he knows nothing about any contracts from the 1970s.
The film’s editing makes it seem as if Avant was being defensive when, in fact, Avant was just being Avant. After his almost sixty years in show business, he has acquired a blunt, tough, often obscenity-laced vocabulary that belies his skills at internal politics.
His career began back in the 1960s working for music-booking powerhouse Joe Glaser, who famously managed Louis Armstrong but also ran a booking agency that once handled the touring activities of more than a thousand artists. Avant was one of the first blacks to be part of Glaser’s team and built a network of connections within the white, largely Jewish world of touring and management that would be the backbone of his career. His personal management of composer Lalo Schifrin would be crucial during the 1960s and early 1970s because the Argentinean’s jazz-influenced style would make him Hollywood’s hottest composer, knocking out gritty film scores (Dirty Harry, Bullitt) and beloved TV themes (The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Mission: Impossible). The contacts Avant made working for Glaser and the visibility of Schifrin’s work gave Avant unusual access to the halls of power.
After moving from New York to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, he set up Venture Records, a joint venture between MGM Records and former Motown A&R director William “Mickey” Stevenson. The company became the blueprint for collaborations between major labels and black entrepreneurs to come. A few years later, Avant would start his own label, Sussex, which would enjoy massive pop hits by Bill Withers (“Lean on Me,” “Ain’t No Sunshine”), some minor hits (Creative Source’s “Who Is He and What Is He to You”), and the now internationally revered flops of Rodriguez.
“My relationship with Clarence started almost the day I hit Los Angeles to start doing Soul Train,” Don recalled. “He was so enthusiastic for what we were doing that he started calling people at networks, saying, ‘This Soul Train show should be on a network.’ ” Sitting in his Wilshire Boulevard office in 2012, Avant, in typically brusque fashion, says, “There were only three networks then. I knew someone at all three, and they all said no.”
By 1973 Avant was a consultant to ABC, so when Dick Clark was planning Soul Unlimited, he invited the black executive in for a sit-down. “I knew Dick Clark a little bit,” Avant recalled. “One of the ABC execs set up the meeting. Dick Clark wanted my okay. He wanted me to endorse his idea. I freaked out. ‘If you do this, there’s no Don Cornelius,’ I told him. We had just gotten free enough to have something on TV. I told Dick Clark no—I would not endorse his show.”
Outraged by Clark’s power move, black political leaders, led by Chicago’s Reverend Jesse Jackson, contacted Clark and ABC executives to protest. Many in the black community felt that having a black-owned show on television wasn’t just cool TV, but an extension of the civil rights movement. The idea that Clark, with whom blacks had always had an uneasy relationship, could kill Soul Train led to threats of an ABC boycott.
Avant set up a meeting with top ABC executives in New York—even though he’d already received a threatening letter from William Morris, which was representing Dick Clark Productions. “It was a short letter telling me to stay out of their business,” he said. Avant met with ABC chairman (and founder) Leonard Goldenson and president Eldon H. Rule. Avant didn’t hold back: “I was very upset, very upset. If Dick Clark had been allowed to do it, then there would have been no Don Cornelius.”
And when the meeting was over, so was Soul Unlimited.
Don Cornelius never spoke with Dick Clark before his death, and Clarence Avant didn’t speak to Clark again for some twenty years. Not only did this end the threat to Soul Train, but it perhaps influenced ABC’s management to open its doors to more black content. In the 1970s ABC would produce several black sitcoms, make Soul Train announcer Sid McCoy the first black staff announcer on its radio and TV network, and, in 1977, green-light the historic slavery miniseries Roots.
Avant continued to be a busy behind-the-scenes force in the black music business in the early 1970s. In 1971 he was one of those who started KAGB, LA’s first African American–controlled radio station. Two years later, he persuaded the Ford Foundation to finance a music documentary, Save the Children, about a massive concert/political event organized by Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH in Chicago. But his role in the Soul Train saga is far from over. Avant, one of Don’s closest friends and business advisors, will be heard from again.
DANCER PROFILE: Tyrone Proctor
The gay contribution to black popular culture is usually ghettoized to books about gay culture. But it would be impossible to disconnect any discussion of Soul Train dance from gay club culture. A number of the dancers on the show were gay, and it was never a big deal. Don and his staff accepted it as a given. They recruited th
e best dancers they could find, and showcased them to a national audience. Dancer Jody Watley remembers: “Though unspoken, Soul Train had an obvious black male gay culture going on, and for that reason the show was also quite forward. Don allowed everyone to be themselves on camera—that’s clear when you watch old clips.”
So black gay culture, while diluted, was given a platform on Soul Train in ways big and small—but probably the most overt example was a dance called waacking. Like many early-1970s dances, waacking isolated body parts (in this case largely the arms and hands), using them to move through space like summer fans in church ladies’ hands with great speed and an exaggerated femininity, elbows bent and arms twirling. Via Soul Train, an expression of gay subculture went mainstream.
The primary exponent of waacking on the show was Tyrone Proctor, also known as the Bone, who lived with his family in Philadelphia and dreamed of being a dancer on Soul Train. Against the wishes of his father, the teenager saved up his cash and trekked out to the West Coast. The lanky, large-Afroed young man didn’t know anybody in the City of Angels and was desperately seeking a way into the dance scene when he saw a poster on a light pole promoting a party. Proctor walked into the party and his life changed. There were Don Campbell and Patti Davis and Rerun and many of the Soul Train dance stars. Proctor felt the floor shaking under the power of the dancers inside.
The Hippest Trip in America Page 6