The Hippest Trip in America (13 page)

McCarey:
I would say that
Soul Train
impacted young people in poverty. For that hour, they weren't getting into trouble. They weren't stealing. They weren't robbing people. After that one hour, they still felt positive and felt good about themselves. They kind of held that from week to week. When I was watching
Soul Train
in Chicago, I had no idea at all that I would ever come to California, that I would ever be on the show. But I think it had a strong impact on young urban women in terms of grooming and the way they took care of themselves.

Barbara—who became known to their neighbors in the projects as “Miss Bobby”—was determined that her oldest daughter not be trapped in poverty, so she began calling old friends in Los Angeles. “Even at that point, in her sorrow and feeling the pain she felt for her own self, she saved my life and got me out of the projects,” McCarey said.

A family friend sent the young woman a ticket to California and helped her find a place to stay. After growing up in the Chicago cold, Crystal immediately took to the Los Angeles sun. She landed a job as a receptionist at a law firm and was walking down an LA street on lunch break when her life changed again. A car pulled up next to her and began driving alongside her. A black man leaned out of his window checking her out. Unfortunately for a woman like McCarey, this was an unwanted but not unusual experience.

“I'm just looking at him, and I'm like, Okay, I know he doesn't think I'm getting in that car,” she recalled. “Finally he pulled over and said, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me! Look, I'm not trying to pick you up. I don't mean you any harm. Can you dance?' ” The man handed her his card. It turned out to be
Soul Train
's Chuck Johnson. To make this even more Hollywood, McCarey says this all happened across the street from
Soul Train
's offices. So after work she went over to meet with Don Cornelius himself.

“He was sitting behind this huge, imposing desk. He didn't have a lot to say, 'cause Don was just so cool. He looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, she's cute.' Then Chuck said, ‘Okay, so this is it. This is your shot now. Whatcha got.' He put on some music, and I just started dancing, and that was it. He said, ‘Okay, you did all right, kid.' They gave me the information for the taping, and I probably didn't sleep a night between that audition and the two weeks I had to wait for the taping. I did the first taping, and they told me they wanted me back. What that did for my mother, in that wheelchair, living in the projects, to be able to see me dancing every week, I have no words.”

Chapter 9
Disco Fever

THE RISE
of dance music called disco—named for its popularity at the growing number of discotheques around the nation—became the hottest musical fad starting in 1974 and peaking three years later. Musically, disco took liberally from the sophisticated soul sounds of Philly International Records and Barry White, styles that took the rough edges off R&B, maintaining funk underneath a rich, orchestral tapestry of strings and horns. From 1973 to 1975, the
Soul Train
theme song, “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia),” was definitely one of the songs that inspired the disco movement. Over time the sound of disco would evolve, with lesser hands turning the innovations of the Philly Sound and White into bland formula, while keyboard-driven European dance music, or Euro disco, rhythmically flattened out the sound.

But disco was about more than music. It gave license for white people to couples-dance to pop music for the first time since the rock revolution of the late 1960s. Out went tie-dyed shirts, unruly hair, and shaking awkwardly to guitar solos. In were platform shoes, upscale fashions, and cocaine. The hustle, a touch dance with elements of Latin salsa and traditional ballroom, became the first dance associated with disco.

This combination of music and dance, which awakened a generation of white Americans to the pleasures of the dance floor, generated scores of dance shows—both on local television and in syndication—but
Soul Train
survived in large part because it was already way ahead of the dance-music curve. Though crafty white groups like the Bee Gees prospered by exploiting discomania, many of the musical acts featured on
Soul Train
were already making tracks being played at discos. While disco definitely sucked a lot of soul out of popular black music, it didn't diminish
Soul Train
. In some ways, it helped the show.

 

Cornelius:
Well, the key ingredient for the success of
Soul Train
was that it's very solidly based on black music. These were the best dance records made for our beginning period, our second decade, our third decade, and any future decades. The best dance records made during those periods were black records. Made by black artists, black singers, black musicians. The best dance music was our folks, okay? And it took us to a point of decision when disco evolved. We didn't know whether to join the bandwagon and say this is a
Soul Train
disco show. We didn't know what to do, because disco came in strong. It was intimidating. And we came to realize that the best disco records, the very best, invariably—almost invariably—were black records. And so we made a commitment to just play the best black records we could find, during the disco era or not, and we remained okay. We just played the best dance records possible. You want to call it disco, fine. I'm playing the best dance records I can find, and most of the best disco records, if not all of them, were actually black records.

 

Disco would have a variety of impacts on black music. While rawer-sounding records never went away (with bands like Parliament-Funkadelic, Slave, the Bar-Kays, and Cameo staying true to the funk), the sophisticated sounds of disco were viewed by many record-industry executives as an easier way to reach white audiences. Some R&B stars found success adapting to disco flavor (Johnnie Taylor's “Disco Lady” in 1976 was the biggest hit of his long career), while many great talents made their worst records chasing the trend. (Aretha Franklin's 1979 album
La Diva
was her poorest-selling record ever.)

Disco also introduced a number of new acts to
Soul Train
. A few, like the New York–based band Chic, would have staying power. But most were one- or two-hit wonders (the Trammps, South Shore Commission, First Choice) who never sold many records outside the East Coast. More enduring was the impact disco would have on dancing on the show, as the hustle began sharing the dance floor with popping and locking. The long-legged individuality that dancers like Damita Jo Freeman had introduced to the show wouldn't go away, but less funky, more self-conscious sophistication in movement and dress became part of the weekly mix.
Soul Train
was never overrun by the faux glitz of
Saturday Night Fever
, but dance culture was changing, and the show reflected that evolution.

But Don Cornelius would do more than accommodate disco acts on his show. He'd use disco as a springboard into his own label by plucking a couple of stars off his dance floor.

Chapter 10
Jody and Jeffrey (and O'Bryan)

THERE IS
no question that Don Cornelius is the most important figure to emerge from
Soul Train
. It was his idea, and his on-camera personality and off-camera decisions shaped the show. But the next three most important people in the show's history are two dancers and a businessman, folks who actually made their biggest mark after they left the show. And all three of them did it together, capitalizing on an opportunity that eluded Don.

Jeffrey Daniel and Jody Watley were the coolest kids to grace
Soul Train
's soundstage, while Dick Griffey was a behind-the-scenes force who would become one of the most important music moguls of the 1970s and 1980s. All would make their marks with a label called SOLAR Records, a company Cornelius helped found.

Back in 1971, Daniel and his family lived close to Denker Playground, where
Soul Train
was holding auditions, but Daniel was an adolescent then and knew nothing about the show. His real introduction to
Soul Train
happened after his mother relocated with him to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where on Saturdays, while munching on his morning cereal, he watched it religiously.

“I was a dancer, and I always did love dancing and music,” Daniel said. “Just to see these young black kids giving fun and just grooving. It was amazing. I'm watching
Soul Train
every week, and I was wondering, ‘Wait a minute. If
Soul Train
is in LA, why am I here?' ”

Daniel wasn't doing well in high school, so he borrowed money and hopped a plane back to Cali. As discussed in Tyrone Proctor's dancer profile, Daniel began hanging out at Maverick's Flat, where he became part of Tyrone Proctor's crew and also witnessed Don Campbell's locking innovations. Initially his dance partner was his older sister Joyce. Then he began dancing with a young woman he knew from church named Jody Watley.

During
Soul Train
's early years, Jody and her family were living in Chicago and were dedicated viewers. “The dancers were really the stars of the show,” Watley said. “I had favorite dancers—Pat Davis, Tyrone Proctor, Sharon Hill, Little Joe Chism. I remember writing fan letters to them, asking, ‘How do you get on the show?' So it was definitely very impactful for me. I had no idea that at some point my parents would end up moving to Los Angeles. It ended up being a twist of fate.”

Reverend John Watley had been a very popular DJ in Chicago, broadcasting gospel music on Sundays on WVON. Apparently he and Cornelius knew each other, but according to Jody, neither man was fond of the other. Through his radio contacts, John Watley made a slew of show-business friends: R&B star Jackie Wilson would be named his daughter's godfather, Johnnie Taylor was a close friend, and Sam Cooke an occasional employer. At some point, however, John Watley lost his church, which instigated the family's move west.

The minute adolescent Jody Watley arrived in LA, she was obsessed with getting on
Soul Train
. But she had no contacts in Los Angeles and was living in the Jungle, a notorious ghetto housing complex off Crenshaw Boulevard, miles from Hollywood geographically and centuries away mentally. (The Jungle was featured prominently in the film
Training Day
.)

One day, while riding in the car with her mother, Watley spotted Tyrone Proctor walking on Stocker Avenue. Suddenly the fourteen-year-old shouted, “Stop the car!,” bolted out onto the sidewalk, and ran up to the famous dancer. She introduced herself and tried to get him to tell her where
Soul Train
was, how to get on the show. Proctor was polite and wary, slipping away from the excited girl before he really told her anything useful.

The next weekend in church, a young man named Bobby Washington approached Watley and asked, “Would you be interested in being my partner on
Soul Train
?” Washington's regular partner was out of town, and he (rightly) thought Watley had a great look. “So he ended up being my way in,” Watley said.

For her first show, she wore a crocheted hat and high-waisted yellow pants, but she doesn't remember much about that first time on set other than being told to take off the hat. There was a no-hats-on-the-show rule.

What she does recall is wanting to get back on
Soul Train
.

 

Watley:
This can't be the Cinderella, and my-carriage-turns-into-a-pumpkin moment. So then my journey on
Soul Train
got really interesting. It took me many months of taking the bus up to the tapings and trying to weave my way in the line. There would be a security guard. He would check off the names. So I would ride the bus back home, and I would cry and come back the next month and try again.

 

Daniel knew other members of Watley's family before they'd met, but once they'd been introduced he immediately took a liking to this lean, large-eyed young woman.

 

Daniel:
At one point I started coming to Jody's place after school. She was still in high school. We would practice dance routines either at her place or at the choir director's house. We had chemistry because we skated well together.

 

Daniel and Watley used to skate at the Hollywood Roller Bowl, developing a rhythm and moves that would be reflected on
Soul Train
. “It wasn't contrived. It just happened. It was very natural.”

Watley, along with Daniel, Cleveland Moses Jr., Sharon Hill, and others, would become part of the waacking dancers crew that was centered around Proctor. “I think we all just had a common love for what we were doing,” Daniel said. “We would sometimes dress alike, all four of us. Or just Tyrone would be with Sharon, and I would be with Jody.”

Very quickly, Jody and Jeffrey became their own entity. Whether they were on a riser, in the middle of the dance floor, or grooving down the
Soul Train
line, the camera loved them both. For one show, they incorporated a fake fight into their dance. Watley said, “That was inspired from an actual real fight that had happened on the show between a couple of dancers who were very popular but didn't care for each other.” Recalling their days at the roller rink, the duo once skated down the line. Jeffrey even brought two unicycles to the set. At another taping, they used balloons as props. “We were very theatrical with it,” said Watley. Charlie Chaplin, Danny K, and mimes Shields and Yarnell were all influences on Daniel and Watley.

Cynthia Horner made them regular
Right On!
magazine pinups, with Jody emerging as a late-1970s style icon. She could rock silver lamé pants and red-glitter Converse sneakers, vintage 1940s-inspired dresses with pumps or her prom dress. Her hair was an ongoing adventure, sometimes filled with tons of ribbons, sometimes with a long ponytail or a 1940s hairdo. (When I produced Chris Rock's documentary
Good Hair,
we used a Jody Watley video to illustrate the range of black hairstyles.)

But soon Jody learned that this kind of celebrity did not come without its costs. Watley became a target—both at
Soul Train
and at school.

 

Watley:
I can think of some outfits that I wore on
Soul Train,
some of the dancers would say, “What's she wearing? What does she think she's doing?”
Soul Train
was very competitive, and there was a lot of what they'd call hateration now. You had a lot of that. That would go on at school, too. I could wear something to school that I thought was cool, and kids would laugh at me, run me home. You know, it never really dissuaded me from liking the things that I liked. I'm still the same way. So that sort of thing is just a part of you. You just kind of have to be fearless. Not really minding if you might be ridiculed for wearing something. You're not afraid to be who you really are.

 

By the time Jody Watley had been on the show for three years, she'd blossomed from a skinny fourteen-year-old to a stylish seventeen-year-old—and her dance partner, Jeffrey Daniel, was easily the most identifiable male dancer on
Soul Train
. They were primed to take their careers to the next level. So was a man named Dick Griffey.

Griffey was a big, bold, sometimes intimidating man with a strong presence, a vision of the future, and a great eye for talent. Born in 1938 and raised in a Nashville housing project, Griffey developed an interest in drumming and built a rep as a musician by playing local clubs before briefly attending the black college Tennessee State University, then enlisting in the navy.

Once out of the military service, Griffey moved to LA in the mid-1960s and resumed his interest in music, becoming part owner of the Guys and Dolls nightclub, where he developed a network of contacts in the music business and built a reputation as a solid citizen in the sometimes shifty business of booking and concert promotion. One of his partners in Guys and Dolls was basketball player Dick Barnett, a college star at Tennessee A&I in Nashville (now Tennessee State), who'd go on to play for the Los Angeles Lakers and, later, on two championship New York Knicks teams in 1970 and 1973. Another member of Griffey's Guys and Dolls team was Chuck Johnson, who'd be a close business associate for some forty years. He'd later work on
Soul Train
as a talent scout who both found dancers and worked as a liaison between them and Cornelius.

Dick Griffey's production company became a force in the LA music business at a time when black music's audiences were expanding and R&B shows were moving from midsize venues to arenas like Inglewood's Great Western Forum. Looking for new challenges, Griffey became a talent coordinator for
Soul Train
and helped Cornelius press big-name acts to give the show a chance. By the mid-seventies, with
Soul Train
established, Cornelius and Griffey wanted to find ways to capitalize on their new power. In 1975 they founded Soul Train Records, which was distributed by RCA Records. They weren't a power in R&B, but they were trying to build their presence in a deal brokered by Cornelius's longtime benefactor Clarence Avant. To emphasize the brand connection, the first act they signed was called the Soul Train Gang.

“They put out an audition for a Soul Train Gang singing group,” Daniel said. “And I did the audition. It must have been horrible, because I was playing the keyboard and trying to sing [Major Harris's] ‘Love Won't Let Me Wait' at the same time, and they said get out of here . . . A lot of the dancers were disappointed because they felt that they had been
Soul Train
dancers for so long, and here comes an opportunity, and they just picked people who had nothing to do with the show. That was their choice.”

The Soul Train Gang was a quintet consisting of Gerald Brown, Terry Brown, Patricia Williamson, Judy Jones, and Hollis Pippin, and their first album would be
Don Cornelius Presents the Soul Train Gang.
Produced by Griffey and Cornelius, the collection's most memorable track was “Soul Train '75,” which became the show's new theme. With Williamson replaced by Denise Smith and MFSB guitarist Norman Harris handling production, a second LP was primarily recorded at Philadelphia's hit-making Sigma Sound. But except for “Soul Train Theme '76 (Get on Board),” which would replace “Soul Train '75,” the album made no waves. That had to have been embarrassing for all involved.

Daniel had a brief stint with the Soul Train Gang when Pippin left the group during a promotional tour. With his showmanship and popularity on the show, Daniel shined during the tour. Back in Los Angeles, he was rehearsing with Watley at her house when Cornelius called and asked to speak to him. Don told Daniel that the Soul Train Gang was “ ‘over. It's finished. I have a new project I want you to do,' ” Daniel recalled. “He asked me immediately, ‘Do you know a girl who can sing?' ” Daniel wasn't sure how good a singer Watley was. Her mother, Rose, sang in the church choir, but he really hadn't heard his dance partner croon. Initially he called Grand Rapids, reaching out to a cousin of the DeBarge singing clan, but the young lady was pregnant. So together he and Watley practiced vocals, singing along to records by favorites Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross.

While Daniel and Watley were practicing, a producer named Simon Soussan created a track called “Uptown Festival,” a disco-flavored medley of classic Motown hits. Two studio singers, Gary Mumford and Cleo Kennedy, sang on the record. Coincidentally, Kennedy was a singer in the same choir as Watley's mother. The principals of Soul Train Records purchased the track, feeling it was a commercial record they could use to rebrand the label with another act. It's not clear who came up with the name Shalamar, but that's what they called the group. Though not a huge hit, “Uptown Festival” made a mark, reaching No. 22 on the R&B chart and making some noise in the United Kingdom.

They kept Mumford, who was a vocal teacher in the Bay Area, and added Daniel and Watley to fill out the trio. “Jeffrey and I were chosen to be in Shalamar because we were the most popular dancers on the show,” Watley said. “We had been in magazines . . . It was another dream come true for me, because singing was always what I wanted to do. Funny thing was they assumed I couldn't sing, though. Once we came off this promotional tour promoting ‘Uptown Festival' and it was time to record the album, there was talk that they were going to get another girl. You know I'm hearing rumors. I'm going, ‘You don't need another girl. I can sing.' ”

So she auditioned by singing Streisand's “Evergreen,” and that sealed the deal. Watley can be heard on most of the seven tracks on 1977's “Uptown Festival” album, which included a couple of straightforward covers of Motown classics (“Ooo Baby Baby,” “Forever Came Today”) and one song penned by Don Cornelius (“High on Life”).