Questlove was working with neo-soul star D’Angelo on his masterful 2000 Voodoo album and the dynamic tour that supported it. “At the time I had that episode, I was working on D’Angelo’s Voodoo album. When D and I were talking about how to craft the live show, we always noticed that Al Green sort of made a very big moment out of silence and the fact that he would touch the band and sing with the mic at arm’s length away and sort of project clearly. The fact was that silence was just as loud as him screaming—those are tricks. We pretty much used a bunch of Soul Train episodes to sort of craft his Voodoo tour.”
On one Soul Train show, the New York funk ensemble Mandrill marched “in from the audience with the cowbells,” he recalled. “I mean, that’s a trick that the Roots and I still use to this day. We use that Mandrill episode as a template. Also Junior Walker and the All-Stars in ’71. He does a very good cover of Chicago’s ‘These Eyes.’ Just a real funky cover of it. They’re so good that I actually digitized it so that I could DJ with it, because it’s that funky.”
You’d think with his intense love for Soul Train, it would have been a dream come true for Thompson to appear on Soul Train with the Roots. But his feelings about that moment were complicated. “My love for Soul Train is much more than just, ‘Oh, I wanna play,” Thompson said. “Eventually I got my chance to play, and it was anticlimactic, as I thought it would be. We made it to Soul Train in 2000, and Don was all types of confused about it. We brought both Jaguar Wright, unknown, and Jill Scott, unknown, to the show to perform two separate songs. So there was confusion there, because it was like one artist was gonna get an interview and one artist wasn’t gonna get an interview. They decided that Jill’s performance was more engaging, so they decided to conduct the interview behind that. But then they thought she was a member of the Roots. They didn’t know that was the future Jill Scott onstage.”
In preparing for that performance, Thompson “took a cue from the Beastie Boys.”
Thompson: The Beastie Boys were the only act I knew clever enough to actually go in the studio and make a track for them specifically to lip-synch on Soul Train so that it would appear to be live. So we wanted to do—at least I wanted to do—the same thing. My band isn’t as on fire with Soul Train as I am. I didn’t want my only appearance on the show to be lip-synching. Especially when we’re called the best live act in hip-hop. So I spent four days crafting the sessions that would be for Soul Train. I wanted to meticulously remember everything. I said, “Don’t over-ad-lib, because then you’re gonna come off like Marvin Gaye, forgetting your cues and all that.” Marvin was world famous for just letting the track go and not singing to it. We got there and I was trying not to get excited. But naturally, of course, you get there and you get excited. And it was just over in a huff.
After years of viewing the show, the drummer’s interaction with the legendary host, while pretty typical of Don, proved disappointing.
Thompson: My only interaction with Don Cornelius was, “Son, you can’t stand there.” “I’m sorry.” Like, I wanted to be the fly on the wall that just stood in the back of the show and watched. I think I was watching Sisqo doing “The Thong Song.” I saw Don and I told myself, I’m gonna do the very thing that irks me whenever fans come up to me and wanna talk. They’re very passive sometimes. They’ll be so scared to speak that they stand behind me, not say anything, and act like they wanna say something but not say it. I was like, You’re not gonna be that guy, you’re not gonna go behind Don Cornelius and start geeking out and tell him stories. He actually walked up to me and was like, “You can’t stand here,” and walked away [laughs]. Everyone felt bad for me more than me. I shrugged it off. I get it. I wasn’t allowed to stand there.
Considering that Questlove has watched as many Soul Train episodes as anyone, who delivered his favorite performance? Was it Al Green? Patti LaBelle? Or maybe Marvin Gaye? As a man who walks the line between soul and hip-hop, trying to bring them together in his work as a producer and DJ, it’s not so surprising his choice is New Edition, a Boston-bred quintet that also walked that line.
Thompson: I mean, there’s probably nothing better in the world of soul music than to watch choreographed moves done to the tee and absolutely clean and 100 percent precise. I’ll say that New Edition, in performing on that show, had an advantage above the Jackson Five, even though the Jackson Five is the standard and the mold that New Edition followed: I’m under the impression that New Edition not only had to master the Jackson Five appeal and their mold but, in creating their own mold, had to sort of base it on hip-hop choreography, which is probably the most complex choreography of black music. The fact that you have to utilize your head, using different levels of B-boying and break-dancing. You just never, ever saw a group cleaner than New Edition. Of course, in the subsequent reunion tours of New Edition, you’ll always see that Bobby Brown was always his own drummer. He would sort of, in a defiant move, not do the choreography that they’re all supposed to do, but there was one point in time, Bobby Brown absolutely was in sync with Ronnie DeVoe, Ricky Bell, Ralph Tresvant, and Michael Bivins, and it just, really—it got no better.
DANCER PROFILE: Nick Cannon
The hosts of the Soul Train Awards over its twenty-year run tended to be mainstream figures—Luther Vandross, Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, and star-turned-movie-star Will Smith. But only one Soul Train Awards host both danced and performed on the show. It’s not to say that Nick Cannon’s other credentials aren’t impressive (star of the film Drum Line, host of shows on MTV and Nickelodeon, married to Mariah Carey), but he has a unique position in the Soul Train history. His relationship to Soul Train echoes that of dancers from the 1970s and 1980s while also illustrating the changes time made on the brand.
Growing up in San Diego, Cannon remembered that “Soul Train is embedded in the black household, so you come out the womb watching Soul Train. That’s when you knew the cartoons were over, because Soul Train was coming on. So you done . . . you been sitting in the spot for four hours and you know you get to exercise your bones when Soul Train comes on. When Soul Train went off, it was time to go outside and show everyone the moves that you just learned from Soul Train. You created your own Soul Train after the show went off with your friends in the neighborhood. You out there popping and locking and trying to battle and do what you just saw. So if it was Jody Watley, getting it popping. If it was New Edition, hearing the songs for the first time—it was like a visual radio station for us.”
Like many viewers who watched the show in the late eighties and early nineties, Cannon’s favorite person on Soul Train “was hands down Louie ‘Ski’ Carr, because he was just so cool the whole time, just whole eighties. My man had the glasses on. He would walk around with the cane and he was in everybody’s video in the eighties. He hung out with everybody. He was just mad cool. He had this swagger the whole time.”
Cannon may have grown up in the eighties—a decade after the show first started airing—but he still saw Soul Train “as the tastemaker for all black people at the time. That’s where you saw the newest acts. I mean, you might have heard the song a couple times on the radio, but Soul Train was the first time you got to see them live in living color. You’d see how they perform, see how they interact, see how they handled Don’s tough questions, and that made you a fan. I was happy to say that [almost] all of my music I purchased as a youngin’ was because of Soul Train.”
What’s also fascinating is despite his youth, Cannon was steeped in Soul Train lore. Growing up in the era of the VCR, he was able to see tapes of some of the classic 1970s episodes that are essential to the Soul Train legacy—and he saw them as part of his legacy. “Everyone from Marvin Gaye to Al Green knows those classic performances that we’ve seen on Soul Train,” Cannon said. “For someone like me who really is a performer, all my recollection goes back to seeing those performances. So really it has inspired generations of performers, people who may not have had the opportunity to see those performances originally, but that are all
in the archives of Soul Train. We gotta know about when Marvin Gaye performed on Soul Train or when Al Green sang live with the audience around him or when Stevie would come on. That’s the blueprint on how to do it today.”
By age fifteen Cannon, ambitious and multitalented, was already hanging around LA “trying to be an entertainer. I was doing everything, from stand-up to rapping and dancing. And being a fan of Soul Train and watching it every day, being like, ‘Wow, that’s Hollywood, people are always up there. Once I get to LA, I gotta go audition to be on Soul Train.’ ”
The process of getting on Soul Train in 1995 for Cannon wasn’t very different from the process on getting on Soul Train in 1975 or 1985.
Cannon: You gotta stand in line all Saturday morning. You gotta be the best dressed you could possibly be, fresh all the way on. Literally, someone comes out and starts pointing at people to start to come in, and you like sittin’ there like it’s the gate to heaven to get to be chosen to be on. Eric was the guy who came out. He was an older brother who’d come out and, obviously, he’d pick all the fly chicks first. We’d be like, “Tell him to pick me once you get in there.” Then, you know, if you had that right persuasive lady or however it was, you could get Eric’s attention—that’s how you got in. I would see him and start dancing and start practicing and making sure my outfit was all the way fly.
This was early nineties, so I was wearing shiny shirts with the matching Hush Puppies. I had on a shiny lime-green shirt and matching shiny lime-green Hush Puppies, trying to get chosen. One day he pointed at me. Once you get the recognition, once you get christened by Eric, you could come back as long as your outfit was fly. So once I got in, it was on. You couldn’t get rid of me. I was showing up every week that they was taping. First it’s getting through the door—once you get through the door and you’re in the building, you become part of that sea of dancers that you only get to see the top of their head when you watch Soul Train. You don’t necessarily get to see what they got on or what they doin’, but they are in the crowd.
Then once you get through there, you might make it to the edge of the stage. Then, ’cause you ain’t center stage just yet, but you get to dance in the rafters, and the camera might hit you, and then . . . you get to actually dance on the stage if you get to that level. Then once you get from dancing on the stage, you get to be part of the Soul Train line. That’s, like, that’s the star moment is when you actually get to go down the Soul Train line. I remember it would be weeks, it would be months, and I’d be like the next dude getting ready to go down, and I’d be ready to kill it, and they’d be like, “Cut!” And I’d be like, “Dang. I didn’t make the Soul Train line this time.” I actually only made it one time. I only made it down the Soul Train line one time, and that was just the highlight of my fifteen-year-old life.
Cannon danced on the show during the post–Don Cornelius period, so he doesn’t have any of those funny and fraught tales of interacting with Don while trying to get a better spot on the dance floor. Tommy Davidson, then a hot comic, hosted a show Cannon attended. Actress Rhona Bennett, who was on the notoriously bad sitcom Homeboys from Outer Space and later The Jamie Foxx Show, made a more lasting impression. They got to talk when Cannon did the scramble board, and “as the years went on we became friends, and I knew her for a long time and stuff. She had a record deal, and we would do music together.” Bennett would be part of the vocal group En Vogue from 2003 to 2008.
Cannon: The scramble board, for a young teenager, is probably like the SATs, just because of the type of pressure that it’s set up for. I mean, number one, it’s national television, so I know my mama gonna be watching, my auntie gonna be watching, so I better spell this word right, ’cause you know my family’s legacy is on the line. “That boy gonna get on there, and he can’t spell and gonna let the world know he’s dyslexic,” so you got that whole pressure. Then you gotta make sure you look fly, ’cause then, you know, they ask you your name and stuff. So at the time I was a rapper, so I had to give him a fly name. I told him I was Nick Knack, or something crazy like that. I didn’t really use my real name. They pair you up with some lady that you don’t know, so I had to hope that her intelligence level was on high, too, so y’all don’t mix the word up. I remember my question was one of the greatest golf prodigies of all time, something like that. As you all know, it’s Tiger Woods. I was sitting there like, All right, how many g’s are in Tiger?
Though he wasn’t in the studio the day Mariah Carey made her debut on the show, he vividly remembers his future wife’s appearance on Soul Train. “You know what, being a youngster and seeing her perform ‘Vision of Love’ on Soul Train, I was like, ‘One day, I’m-a be her vision of love. Watch. I promise,” he recalled. “She was definitely one of the people that when she graced the Soul Train stage, everybody was talking about it, you know, right after. ‘Yo, you see that girl?’ That was like the first time for me and many other people that actually saw her perform live, and she was so natural and comfortable and fine. You know it was one of those things—light-skin girl with the curly hair. Ooh, I want her. And I spoke it into existence.”
The personable and ambitious young man started a rap duo called Da G4 Dope Bomb Squad in his teens that was getting opening-act slots with bigger groups around Southern California. After that broke up, he was signed to Jive Records, where the label hoped that he’d be the next Fresh Prince. He believes the Soul Train experience was crucial in getting him into the music game.
Cannon: For one, I thought I was on national television, so that was on top of my résumé. I’m like, “I’m a Soul Train dancer, you can catch me at Paramount Studios every week.” You get a chance, you know, if you’re a cool cat, you get a chance to meet every artist that kinda comes through. Most of the artists just hang out. I mean, I was always intrigued by the way a production works. So I was, you know, getting close with all the cameramen and the producers, just trying to figure out what goes into the process of creating a show. And you’re right there, you’re right at the pulse of the music industry, so everybody is coming through there. I created a lot of friendships when I was a young cat. People I still see and talk to today.
I was always a young kid with ADD, and, to me, the production was fascinating. I mean, when you see Soul Train on television, it’s like this huge 360 world, and then you get there and it’s a regular soundstage. And you’re like, “Wow, so this is how it looks,” and then I started wanting to know more about camera angles, and why do they shoot up? What’s the crane do? How does that lens make it look so massive and stuff? So I would just ask questions and the entire crew was always nice enough—I think they saw this kid that was wide-eyed and just ready to obtain as much knowledge as possible. They would just talk to me about it. You know, I thank all those people that kinda took the time out to explain stuff like that to me. Now being the one that’s the producer who creates a lot of content, it’s one of the things where I just naturally think of what I was taught on the set of Soul Train.
In 2003, his debut self-titled album was released with a single produced and written by R&B’s reigning king, Jive Records label mate R. Kelly, called “Gigolo” that was a minor hit. So, like Patrice Rushen, Jody Watley, and Jeffrey Daniel, Cannon joined a small group of folks who danced on Soul Train as a teen and returned as a performer.
Cannon: It was like coming full circle. I mean, because being a kid I was standing outside in the cold trying to get in there just to see the set, just to dance, just to do whatever. And then to actually—you always hear about what the dressing rooms look like up there, and to actually be in one of the dressing rooms chilling and walk the artist walk, all of that stuff, it was amazing. I literally was like, Wow. That was one of those moments in my career where I thought, “Okay, I’m actually doing it. I’m actually living the dream that I always dreamed of.” So it was special for me. I couldn’t contain myself. It was one of those things where I was just excited and hyped. I don’t know how that affected my performance at the time,
but I was definitely overhyped.
“Gigolo” is no classic, but with R. Kelly producing and Nick at that point appearing on the Nickelodeon show, “it was one of those smashes that just kinda came out of nowhere . . . I was just joking around when we created the record, because I was obviously on kids’ television at the time.” The idea of Cannon as a gigolo was obviously tongue in cheek.
Cannon: But the beat was crazy. I remember R. Kelly putting the beat on, and I was like, “Yo, I’m-a take that in the other room and record something to it.” I wasn’t thinking I was recording a single or even something for my album. I was just like, “I’m-a do my grown-man thing on this. I’m-a talk about chicks. I’m-a talk about my life, all of that.” There was no hook on it or anything. It was just me rapping. And, like, you know, sixteen bars with three verses. And I left the studio, came back a couple weeks later—actually I hadn’t come back, I got a phone call from the record label, like, “Yo, that record ‘Gigolo’ that you and R. Kelly made is insane.” I was like, “I ain’t record no record called ‘Gigolo.’ ”
Kelly got inspired by the lyrics and wrote this “Gigolo” hook. And it just became a hit. So by the time we got to Soul Train, that was the first time that I actually understood that it was a hit record. Before then I thought it was just a record that we did that was fun. They talked about picking it as a single. Then I got to the stage and saw people singing along with it. That was my first time actually performing that record. It was crazy. I knew I was good.
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