The Hippest Trip in America

by Nelson George

  Soul Train maniac Ahmir Thompson had a similar experience when he traveled to Japan with the Roots in 1996. “I met a fan, and he had two hundred to three hundred episodes from the seventies,” said Thompson.

  This Japanese interest in black music, while not widespread across the country, was deep for those who loved it. For a time there was a Soul Train Club in Japan, as well as nightclubs named after Motown Records and the Apollo Theater—all venues dedicated to the hard-core soul music fan.

  Because of the complexity of licensing deals, Cornelius was limited in exploiting the shows internationally, but via VHS, DVD, and, eventually, the Internet, Soul Train was an international presence from its earliest days. Soul Train was incredibly popular in Japan, where the Japanese—great consumers of all aspects of black musical culture—would bring over dancers from the show starting in the late seventies (and still do into the twenty-first century).

  The female dancers of Soul Train brought beauty, style, and creativity to the weekly broadcasts.

  It’s not surprising that the show’s one Asian dance star, Cheryl Song, was invited over along with three black dancers. More amusing is her experience there.

  Song: Nobody recognized me. I remember we rehearsed and we rehearsed and rehearsed. I helped make a lot of the costumes. When we got to Japan, it was four of us—three black dancers and me. Everybody would come and talk to me. Not because they thought I was the dancer with the long hair—they thought I was the tour guide! They thought I was the translator! So, you know, we were in Japan, and I’m not even Japanese! They would always come to me and speak Japanese, and I was like, “What?” And that happened to me a lot. So believe me, that knocked me down to the ground. I didn’t believe I was popular, I didn’t think I was all that. That kind of brought me back to reality.

  In 1985 Derek Fleming—also known as Dfox—took another trip over to Japan with Song, along with Ricky Carson and Nieci Payne.

  “Recognition in another country is just unbelievable,” Fleming said. “It was everything you can imagine.”

  On that tour the four dancers were over in Japan for two months performing every night, but Mondays at a club called the Latin Quarters. While in Japan the quartet hung out at a spot called Club Temps. Fleming said, “I’ll never forget being there. We walk in, and we had no idea Soul Train would be playing on the monitors. But then almost every club we went into in Japan was showing Soul Train on the monitors.”

  Nieci Payne, who was on that tour with Fleming and Song, actually learned to speak Japanese. As a result she’d go back and forth between the United States and Japan for almost ten years. She felt “Soul Train in Osaka and Tokyo was bigger than the show here. I remember going down the street, and some kids going, ‘Soul Train dancer.’ So you literally found yourself signing autographs daily.” Payne got modeling gigs in Japan and danced with American bands on tour there. “A lot of people went to Japan from the show and still live there from America because of dancing on Soul Train.”

  In 2004 Jody Watley had an unexpected Soul Train moment in Malaysia. She had traveled over with other international artists to do a benefit concert in the wake of the tsunami’s devastation of the country. “After the speeches and the food, when the music started, just two songs in, they wanted to do a Soul Train line. I just had to laugh. [The show] was something that had such a positive impact on so many people, and you may not realize what that impact is.”

  So while Don Cornelius may have felt ripped off by the show’s online ubiquity, Soul Train’s global impact can’t be quantified in dollars and cents.

  DANCER PROFILE: Marco De Santiago

  Marco De Santiago was one of the most colorful and enduring Soul Train dancers. He was a lean, handsome, big-haired man with a distinctive fashion sense who appeared on the show from 1976 to 1993, going from the days of disco to the height of new jack swing. When he was in the eleventh grade, De Santiago was attending a Saturday-morning high school track meet when a comely cheerleader asked if he’d like to attend Soul Train with her. De Santiago’s reaction? “I thought, ‘Oh my God. I don’t like cameras. I don’t like TV. I don’t want any part of it.’ ”

  So De Santiago tried to avoid her, but the cheerleader was persistent and insisted that he come and pick her up. Reluctantly he swung by in his car, and they drove over to KTTV Studios in Hollywood. “So we go there,” he recalled, “and I’m thinking I don’t even know what to do. Nor did she. We don’t see a sign that says Soul Train or anything. So a guy comes over and says, ‘Okay, you two follow me.’ I thought we’re in trouble. They’re gonna call my mother. I don’t know what’s gonna happen when we go inside. There was Soul Train. Here I was just a guy in school, and to see these glamorous people and these girls. It was just so exciting. But I could see the camera, and I would be like, ‘Don’t face the camera.’ So I would turn my back.”

  But De Santiago’s hair, cut into a massive Afro, overshadowed his modesty. A member of the production staff came over and suggested that he use Afro Sheen on his hair. “We would just buy the cheap products,” he admitted, “but the Johnson Products people were like, ‘We want this guy.’ ” De Santiago and his cheerleader date ended up doing the scramble board. At that time folks who did the scramble board got two gifts: a Panasonic eight-track player and a box of Fashion Fair cosmetics. When the box of makeup arrived at the De Santiago household, his mother had a moment of concern. “So she says, ‘I noticed a box came for you, and there is makeup inside. Is there anything you want to tell me?’ ”

  While his mother’s fears about her son’s post–Soul Train sexuality were unfounded, De Santiago definitely found his status at high school forever altered by his appearances on the broadcast. “You sort of obtain all these friends that you didn’t know were your friends, like the football players, the jocks,” he said. “I won’t say the teachers were kinder, but the security guards weren’t exactly as bossy, and you suddenly had a few more dates than you would have had . . . What was even more interesting was the nonblacks recognized me from Soul Train. Soul Train came on local TV after The Twilight Zone and before I Love Lucy, so the Twilight Zone fans recognized me and the I Love Lucy fans recognized me.”

  De Santiago was becoming a celebrity via Soul Train but his family didn’t have a TV, which is probably hard for folks born in the media-saturated twenty-first century to believe. But into the 1970s there were many families, either because of financial or religious reasons, who didn’t own a set. One Saturday De Santiago and a friend drove out to the Northridge Mall, went into the Sears, and turned all the store’s TVs to Soul Train so they could finally see the show. Word got around the mall that a Soul Train dancer was in Sears, and a spooked De Santiago had to make a hasty retreat while being followed by twenty-five excited high school girls.

  Why was De Santiago so recognizable? When he first danced on Soul Train, the teen had a huge Afro, not atypical of the time. But in the late 1970s, he altered his hairstyle and picked up the nickname “the Black Barry Gibb.” “I used to wear my hair blow-dried and feathered,” he said. “Some people call it my Revlon days—meaning my Revlon perm.” The best reference point for De Santiago’s hair were the flowing locks of Bee Gees singer Barry Gibb on the cover of their Spirits Having Flown album. “All the attention made me more polite with people and more patient,” he says. “I was gonna have to talk to people, so it made me more comfortable talking more.”

  Along with his elaborate hair, De Santiago dressed in a style hard to miss. “In the earlier days it was really common for couples to match up,” he said. So he’d talk with longtime dance partner Dina Rivera either during the week or on the Friday night before a Saturday taping about coordinating clothes. Usually she set the tone, telling him what colors she was wearing. Sometimes De Santiago scrambled to a mall at its ten A.M. opening time before an eleven A.M. taping to grab a shirt—or to quickly spray-paint one to alter its color.

  De Santiago, like many Soul Train regulars, learned how to “Hollywood” his clo
thes, using safety pins and tape to make oversize garments fit or to cover tears created by rigorous dancing. Unlike today, when designers and brands would have been aggressive in trying to get Soul Train dancers to wear their gear, in the seventies no major brands sought to dress them. So they had to become crafty shoppers at stores like Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Neiman Marcus, always looking for sale items around the time of Soul Train tapings.

  But De Santiago didn’t hit his stride as a dresser until he matured, along with Soul Train, in the mid-eighties. “After we became more comfortable being there, we felt that we had an obligation,” he said. “We don’t have to wear what’s local. So how do we stay ahead?” He and his friends turned to Italian and French Vogue, as well as Gentleman’s Quarterly, to upgrade their gear and be fashion forward. “If we filmed in September, by the time the taping came on in December maybe those fashions had come out,” he recalled. Tuxedos, cummerbunds, sashes around his waist, and scarves were all aspects of his dress game.

  In 1986 De Santiago was in a car accident. A leg was shattered into forty-five pieces. In an earlier era, the leg would have been amputated. Instead he was given a choice: either a body cast for a year or a metal rod in the leg for a year and a half. He chose the rod. “That was the longest year and a half of my life because I love to dance so much. Once I learned how to walk again, I went to Soul Train,” he recalled. It was some time in 1987 when he showed up on the set. Don and the production team hadn’t known what happened to him.

  After being told the story, Don, Chuck Johnson, and his team invited De Santiago to dance on a riser. “Someone helps me up there and I’m dancing. One of the funniest things about it is someone said, ‘Wow, you’re really dancing really well.’ I said, ‘You have no idea how much pain I’m in.’ My leg did not bend. The screws were large. You can’t imagine trying to dance with screws in your body.” But that wasn’t the end of the day.

  De Santiago was then invited to dance down the Soul Train line. He’d never really enjoyed the line when healthy, but everyone wanted to try it. “I don’t even have a word for it. But that many people liked or respected me, who were glad I was back. So I go down the line and I hear people say, ‘Go Marco! Go Marco!’ It was so encouraging.” Looking at video of that moment on line, he “could see the facial expression. I had to look to see if I was bleeding at all. I thought, I’m gonna always remember that everyone was just so happy I was back.”

  For De Santiago, who had one of the longest runs of any dancer on the show, the golden age of Soul Train was not the seventies but late eighties and early nineties. “There were groups like Tony! Toni! Toné! or Guy that were this perfect marriage of hip-hop and R&B. It was really exciting at that time. But I felt like, Okay, I thought it was time for me to leave. Leave this to the young ones. Leave it to the sixteen-year-olds, just as I was sixteen years old.”

  Today he works as an analyst at a cancer laboratory, working as a middleman between doctors and scientists when someone is diagnosed with the disease. That’s his day job. But Soul Train remains a huge part of his life. De Santiago has become a key organizer of gatherings of the early Soul Train dancers. He put together a memorial for Don Cornelius at Maverick’s Flat after Don’s passing, and for Labor Day weekend in 2013 he organized three days of events in Los Angeles featuring Soul Train dancers.

  Chapter 14

  Sex and Soul Train

  ROMANCE AND dancing. They go together better than chicken and waffles—whether it’s in an inner-city basement or a country-and-western hoedown. Combine that basic law of nature with the legendarily hypersexual atmosphere of Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s, and, as you’d expect, there were many sexscapades inspired by the Soul Train experience.

  Derek Fleming, also known as Dfox, loved the dating scene around the show. “A lot of us were dating at the time the shooting went on,” he said. “You would see split-ups, and that’s why you wouldn’t see a certain person dancing with another person. I ran into Otis Williams of the Temptations in the hall, and I told him I went out with his daughter. Her name was Lana. A beautiful girl. A Playboy Bunny. I dated some stars. I won’t say those names.”

  Over the course of his long tenure on Soul Train, Marco De Santiago would be engaged (though never married) to three different women he met on Don’s dance floor. “I had three close calls,” he says, “all with Soul Train girls. The dating scene was very competitive. But it wasn’t just dancer versus dancer. Your competition for a girl on that show would also be Magic Johnson or Keith Sweat. I was trying to talk to a girl on the show but then I saw Smokey Robinson give her his phone number. Tough to compete against Smokey.”

  Don Cornelius, in his wisdom, did his best to discourage his dancers, particularly his young, barely legal female dancers, from hooking up with the singers and musicians who performed on the show. He didn’t want Soul Train viewed as a pickup spot or a home base for groupies. It was a very practical but extremely difficult—damn near impossible—rule to enforce. The women of Soul Train would, in fact, prove to be muses for some of the greatest songwriters of the era. Reportedly Robinson wrote his sensual “The Agony and the Ecstasy” from his classic A Quiet Storm album about a Soul Train dancer. Marvin Gaye would go further, writing much of his landmark I Want You album about a seventeen-year-old woman named Jan he met at the show and would subsequently marry.

  One of the chief violators of Don’s rules to keep male singers away from his young female dancers would be Charlie Wilson, the charismatic, ultrasoulful lead singer of the Gap Band. His father had been a preacher and, like a lot of children of ministers, Wilson was drawn to the wild side of life.

  “Growing up in Oklahoma, my mother said we weren’t allowed to listen to blues music in the house,” Wilson remembered. “But we’d go around to the next-door neighbor’s on Saturday for Soul Train. Man, it was incredible. I just said, I want to one day do that. I remember saying, I wanna do that. Seeing Stevie Wonder on Soul Train. I wanted to do that. It was incredible. Soul Train showed me this is what I’m gonna do.”

  The sex appeal of the Soul Train dancers was crucial to the show’s success.

  Wilson grew up relatively sheltered in Tulsa in a tight-knit, church-based community. He sang gospel in church as a teenager, but he also started slipping out to nightclubs, first on the mostly black north side of Tulsa and then the south side, which was where white bands performed. So in 1967 Wilson, along with his two brothers, Ronnie and Robert, formed a group, the Gap Band (named after the Tulsa streets Greenwood, Archer, and Pine), that quickly became one of the most popular bands in the city. They got their first record deal while living in Tulsa but didn’t hit their stride until they moved to Los Angeles and became part of the Crenshaw Boulevard scene that incubated so many Soul Train dancers. Lonnie Simmons, who’d later sign them to his Total Experience Records, also owned a cool nightclub with the same name.

  Wilson: I remember pulling up in front of the Total Experience nightclub. There were Rolls-Royces lined in front. I remember seeing a black one with maroon piping. I remember seeing a tan one and I remember seeing another kind of foreign car. The crowd was lined up around the corner. It was definitely a place I really wanted to go into and see what all the hoopla was about. The moment I stepped in the place, it was jam-packed, and the Dramatics was performing. It was crazy. I remember there were three clubs on that particular street: at the front was Maverick’s Flat, in the middle was the Pied Piper, and then there was the Total Experience. It seemed like in order to get where you needed to go, or if you needed to get to the big one, you had to get into Maverick’s Flat. If you could get into Maverick’s Flat and be seen and be accepted, then you were on your way. It was like a gateway into the music business. It took a long time for us to get in there. We wanted to play our own music. Stuff that we had written, and it was like, “Well, where’s your Top Forty stuff at?” So we had to go back. First they said you have to have Top Forty, play Top Forty—what is your original stuff? So we went back and wrot
e the original stuff. It was like they were tricking us. They didn’t want us in the club. It was a weird deal, but we went in there one day and performed for those guys and just lit the place on fire. It was amazing during that time. The club scene was hot.

  Backed by Total Experience, who’d recently signed a distribution deal with PolyGram Records, the Gap Band would establish themselves as a viable band with the P-Funk-derivative cut “I Don’t Believe You Want to Get Up and Dance (Oops!)” in 1979. They made their Soul Train debut on episode #320 as the secondary act to Shalamar.

  Wilson: Man, I was nervous. First time on Soul Train! We was all nervous. I know I was shaking. Don Cornelius had to come backstage and said, “Listen, just calm down. It’s all good. It’s just like how you perform. I watch you perform all the time.” I was talking to him just shaking, and he grabbed me, and I was still shaking. Don was like, “You’re really nervous! Just calm down, it’s gonna be all right.” We got up there and did our song “Shake.” I thought I was gonna forget my steps. The place came unglued when we went onstage, and it just made me feel a little bit calmer. Had a good time that day. Don Cornelius, he really calmed me down a lot. I was mostly scared of being on the stage with him walking up to me to talk to me. He was the one to calm me down in the beginning. He came, had a conversation with me. I was like, “Okay, he’s just a man.” I can’t remember what our conversation was about. But we had a conversation and he just calmed my spirit down. Don Cornelius was like the cornerstone of black music. He was the launching pad for anybody that was successful. He was part of the reason—definitely was part of the reason why you were successful. It was his show, and his creation that made things work for you, and it was sort of hard getting on Don Cornelius, but if he liked the record, then it was on. If the record was responding, it was on. He would put you in if the record was responding. If it wasn’t responding, then you just, you didn’t get the good look. It was like it is like now, but he was definitely the gatekeeper. But he gave everybody a shot that deserved a shot.