The Hippest Trip in America (14 page)

When it was time to record Shalamar's second album,
Disco Gardens,
Mumford was no longer in the group, replaced by Gerald Brown, who'd been the original lead singer of the Soul Train Gang. But there were bigger changes occurring around the group. At some point between 1977 and 1978, the Cornelius-Griffey recording partnership was dissolved and the surviving label was renamed SOLAR (Sound of Los Angeles) Records.

Both men were publicly vague on why they split, but there was no obvious acrimony.
Soul Train
would, in fact, loyally promote SOLAR acts during the label's incredibly successful run from its founding in 1978 into the late 1980s. Much like the mistake Cornelius made by not keeping the
Soul Train
name on the “TSOP” track, he was ending his partnership with Griffey just as he was on the verge of becoming the most successful R&B mogul of the early 1980s. Chuck Johnson, who'd work at
Soul Train
for more than a decade and would later join SOLAR Records, gives some insight into the differences between Cornelius and Griffey.

“As a marketing man, Don was always ahead of his time,” Johnson said. “He had an eye for talent and great vision. Don was tightly wrapped and controlling, but Dick was very outgoing and open to trying any idea and take a risk.” People say that opposites attract in love, but in business opposites can sometimes irritate the hell out of each other. Perhaps, over time, the two men's contrasting personalities and desire to be in charge pushed them apart. Cornelius would reign successfully over his
Soul Train
fiefdom for decades, while Griffey would go on to build a formidable musical empire.

The roots of SOLAR's ascendance could be found in the production and songwriting credits of
Disco Gardens.
Three of the seven songs on the album were written or cowritten by Leon Sylvers III; he also produced the entire album. To most folks, the twenty-four-year-old was just one of the older members of the family group the Sylvers, who'd been recording since 1971 on the heels of the Jackson Five's success. But as early as 1973, when Leon was just twenty, he was already composing songs for his siblings and building a reputation in music-business circles as a promising hit maker. Griffey recruited Sylvers heavily, convincing him to leave his family group and become SOLAR's in-house producer. A deft bassist as well as a talented songwriter, Sylvers would cowrite the vibrant “Take That to the Bank,” the percolating dance track that established the dynamic, propulsive sound that would become the label's trademark. Watley's voice was well showcased by Sylvers, setting an approach that would become a signature of the Shalamar sound.

The song wasn't a huge hit, but it gave Shalamar and SOLAR a trademark sound and made Watley a genuine recording artist. But her start wasn't as glamorous as she'd have liked. “It wasn't a fairy tale,” she said. “It was a lot of hard work. It was before music videos, pretty much, so we toured all the time and not in the best conditions. Terrible bus with no heat in the winter. No bunk beds—just seats. Sometimes I would feel like I was in a fifties movie where you see the artists schlepping their equipment and they're on the bus. A learning experience.”

Watley didn't feel she received the warmest reception during Shalamar's first performance on
Soul Train
.

 

Watley:
Probably a few months before, we had still been on the show and on the
Soul Train
line. “Why did they pick her and why did they pick him” was the kind of vibe [I] felt. There was kind of a bitter intensity, because a lot of those same dancers were there, and they were giving the evil eye . . . I appreciated it, but I didn't really savor it, because it was a lot of negative energy at that time. It wasn't until I went back later on my own that I could really let it sink in. Again, it was being in a survival-of-the-fittest mode the first time I did it.

 

Daniel, who would regularly stop by tapings even after Shalamar had hit records, often felt in the middle of a gentle tug-of-war between Don and Griffey.

 

Daniel:
I'm a dancer, and I've always been a dancer, and so when Shalamar is not on the road, I would sneak back into
Soul Train,
and Don would egg me on. “You know Dick Griffey doesn't want you to dance here. You better not dance.” What? He knew he was using reverse psychology. Then Dick Griffey would watch it. “Jeffrey, I see you dancing down there on
Soul Train
. You're a star now. You don't need to be dancing on no TV show.” So I was caught between Don and Dick, and it was hard because both were like my fathers.

 

Well, if Watley had haters and Daniel was torn, the band's third popular album surely eased any tension. With Howard Hewett, a smooth crooner with a silky tenor handling lead vocals, Shalamar's
Big Fun
would begin a four-year run of danceable hits for the trio.

Other regular
Soul Train
performers (the Whispers, Lakeside, Carrie Lucas) would populate the SOLAR Records lineup in its early years. It makes you wonder what would have happened if Don had stayed in the record business.

While he never had another label, Don did manage another act, one that got tremendous exposure on
Soul Train
but never sold many records. O'Bryan McCoy Burnette II, professionally known as O'Bryan, was born in North Carolina, where he began playing piano at six years old and then performing at talent shows. His family moved to Santa Ana, California, in 1974, where he became active in his local Baptist church. He had a sweet voice with a high-pitched falsetto that was noticed by Melanee Kersey, the wife of Ron “Have Mercy” Kersey, once a fixture in the vibrant Philadelphia music scene, who'd moved to the West Coast.

Kersey, who'd been part of the disco band the Trammps, initially recruited O'Bryan to be part of a vocal group. When that deal fell through, Kersey introduced O'Bryan to Don, who was impressed. Together the two music vets formed Friendship Productions and successfully shopped O'Bryan to Capitol Records in the early 1980s. Marketed with a Jheri curl, eyeliner, shirts with the top three buttons open, and occasionally a red leather jacket—all echoes of Michael Jackson—O'Bryan would release four albums between 1982 and 1986 and have nine charting singles including “The Gigolo,” which went to No. 5 on the R&B singles chart. Don certainly supported him, having his artist on
Soul Train
numerous times during his recording career.

Despite this prime exposure, the singer never earned a gold single or album, and after he was dropped by Capitol, O'Bryan didn't make another record until 2007. His only truly memorable contribution to
Soul Train
lore was recording “
Soul Train
's A-Comin',” which became the show's theme in 1983. So while
Soul Train
was absolutely a great platform for black talent, regular exposure did not guarantee record sales or genuine celebrity.

One more note on Don's adventures in recording: Cheryl Song says that Don tried to put together another Shalamar-styled group, using a singer and some of the
Soul Train
dancers. A vocalist named Terry Stanton would have been the front man, with two of the most charismatic dancers to ever appear on
Soul Train
—Song and the fiery New Yorker Rosie Perez—adding multiculti showmanship. “I thought this was it!” Song said. “This was my one chance to be a serious artist . . . We met a couple of times with Don, and we met with a record company.” But this multicultural dream group never happened.

Chapter 11
1980s

IN THE
early 1980s, Don Cornelius began having migraine headaches. When he finally went in for tests, the TV producer was diagnosed with a congenital malformation of the blood vessels in his brain. On November 12, 1982, he underwent a twenty-one-hour operation to save his life. Despite the near-death experience, Don quipped after the surgery that “you choose your brain surgeons for their stamina.” The procedure would have long-term repercussions. In the years to come, Don would say he was never “what I used to be as a manager or an entrepreneur” due to the lingering effects of that operation. Nevertheless, a determined Don was back to work on the
Soul Train
set just six months after the operation.

As personally challenging as this recovery had to have been for Don, outwardly he didn't appear slowed down to either the young people who danced on the show or his music-industry peers.
Soul Train,
along with the music industry, would go through profound changes in the new decade, much of it driven by technology that would alter the kinds of acts who'd appear on the show and what they'd look and sound like. Moreover, the competition for the eyeballs of music fans would escalate in ways
Soul Train
could not compete with.

The sound of R&B would evolve from the raw funk and elegant disco associated with
Soul Train
's early years to records driven by drum machines and keyboard-created bass and horn lines. Bands would shrink from nine- and ten-piece aggregations to two- and three-member groups and, in a few special cases, influential one-man bands. In the most unlikely development, soul singing, which had been the pride and joy of black artistic expression since the early sixties, would be challenged as the chief vehicle for black self-expression by a generation of nonsingers from New York. In addition, the turntable, devised as a tool for playing music, would become an instrument in itself.

And just as technology would alter the sound of music, new ways to consume it would present new competition for Don's enterprise.

 

THE MUSIC
video channel MTV premiered in August 1981, but it didn't really have an immediate effect on
Soul Train
. In its early years, MTV failed to include R&B artists in its regular playlist, sticking to the kind of rock-centric programming philosophy that had created musical apartheid on American radio, where it had been very difficult (and sometimes impossible) for black performers to get programmed on many of the nation's biggest radio stations. Network executives said they were utilizing the then-popular album-oriented rock (AOR) format to decide who did and didn't appear on MTV. If they'd been true to that, maybe few would have protested.

But when white artists who played in an R&B or “black” style—such as Culture Club and Hall & Oates—were put in MTV rotation and black R&B artists were not, it was clear MTV's decisions had more to do with skin color than sound. Moreover, MTV was breaking bands with good videos but no durability, while gifted, charismatic musicians like Rick James, whose music did fit the format, found it hard to get on the network's play list and aggressively protested that exclusion.

Even after MTV embraced Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean” video in 1983 and began allowing a few other black crossover performers, such as Prince and Whitney Houston, on its airwaves, there was still a bounty of great black acts and musicians who were denied the exposure to millions of potential young buyers because MTV wouldn't touch them. One legitimate explanation the MTV programmers had was that the few videos that were made for black acts were often of poor quality. But if MTV wouldn't play them, why would record labels finance a $125,000 video? During the early to mid-1980s, the average budget for most black performers' music videos was about $35,000, which kept the production quality poor and the ambition low in comparison to videos for white artists.

To satisfy the appetite for visual representations of black music, a number of ventures were announced after MTV's launch. In 1982 Inner City Broadcasting, a black-owned company that controlled a number of major-market radio stations including New York's WBLS-FM and Los Angeles's KUTE-FM, announced its Apollo Entertainment Network, which had a goal of providing forty-two hours of programming to 250 cable systems. In March of that year, a weekly syndicated video show called
R&B Express
started airing in 420 markets. A ninety-minute music-video-based special called
Sultans of Soul,
hosted by sitcom star Tim Reid (
WKRP in Cincinnati
) aired with an eye toward becoming a half-hour show. Don Kirshner Productions, the folks behind NBC's popular
The Midnight Special
concert series, produced a two-hour special called
Rhythm 'n' Rolls
. A group called Bronze Star Productions was producing a weekly video show named
Jammin' on the Tube
.

Most of these endeavors either never aired or survived only a year or more. The one enterprise from this era that took hold was Black Entertainment Television (BET). Owned by black businessman Robert Johnson along with his deep-pocketed backer, media mogul John Malone, BET started slowly in August 1981 and was available to only two million households by 1984. The programming during its early years primarily comprised old 1970s sitcoms, movies featuring black actors, faith-based broadcasts, and infomercials. There was little original programming, and music wasn't yet a huge part of their mix.

In a long
Billboard
magazine piece titled “As Programming Demands Rise, Black Music Increasingly Visible” that ran on June 5, 1982, BET merited only a single sentence: “The Black Entertainment Television network is extending its programming service this summer with a major portion of time devoted to music.” As more black videos became available, Johnson soon recognized that they could be a huge source of free programming on which he could build his network. Record labels and artists, fed up with getting the cold shoulder from MTV, began to support BET and traveled down to its Washington, DC, studios to do interviews and to tape (mostly lip-synched) performances. It was clear that once BET began airing music videos pretty much exclusively, it would eventually have an impact on
Soul Train
's weekly broadcast, but no one knew to what degree.

This challenge to
Soul Train
's supremacy in broadcasting black music would, however, occur only incrementally, due to BET's many challenges in becoming available on key urban markets' cable systems. In fact, it would be ten years after its launch before BET could truly claim that it was available nationwide.

Black neighborhoods, even in major markets like New York and in crucial southern cities, were often the last to gain cable access. If you lived in midtown Manhattan, you could watch MTV but not be able to see BET in Harlem, much less in black outer-borough hoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. When cable was finally available, many working-class and poor households often had to decide whether it was worth the additional monthly bill (which inspired a lively illegal business in bootleg cable boxes). Local cable operators had to be convinced that BET belonged on their schedules. The 1980s amounted to an arduous climb for the cable start-up.

Unfortunately, Cornelius and Johnson, both pioneers in the business of visual black entertainment, would never have much of a personal relationship. Their business models were so different that neither felt the need to cultivate the other. Plus both men had such healthy egos it's hard to imagine either feeling vulnerable enough to open up to the other. But this doesn't mean
Soul Train
and BET wouldn't do any business together in the 1980s and 1990s. It just meant the founders of these two kindred black institutions didn't necessarily see the value of a close business relationship, and they acted accordingly.

Meanwhile, in the wider world of American media there was much to be excited about vis-à-vis the black image. In September 1980, Eddie Murphy joined the cast of NBC's
Saturday Night Live,
becoming an instant pop star with his chameleonlike impressions, pop-culture references, and youthful exuberance. He'd quickly make the transition to movies (
48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop
) and become Hollywood's biggest black star since Sidney Poitier in the 1960s. Longtime sports announcer Bryant Gumbel debuted as coanchor of the
Today
show in 1982, putting an energetic black presence on the nation's number one morning show. Oprah Winfrey began her incredible run of success when she was named cohost of
AM Chicago
in 1984, which would be the launching pad for an unprecedented media empire. Even before the premiere of
The Cosby Show
in September 1984, comedian Bill Cosby was already the leading commercial spokesperson in America, having successfully hawked everything from banks to Jell-O prior to his hit TV sitcom. He'd go on to rival President Ronald Reagan as 1980s America's favorite surrogate father.

In music, black recording superstars would emerge of a magnitude unimaginable when Don Cornelius started broadcasting from a small Chicago studio in 1969. My first interview as
Record World
's black music editor in January 1981 was with one of these future superstars—a young man known as Prince—prior to the release of his landmark third album,
Dirty Mind,
a record that was a harbinger of the future, full of tracks with new-wave rock flavor and sexually explicit lyrics (referencing orgies and incest) sung in a high-pitched voice in the R&B love-man tradition but with rock 'n' roll abandon. Musically, it would be hugely influential because of its innovative use of keyboards, drum machines, and vocal arrangements; its lyrics expressed a sexual frankness that would embolden and anticipate a new direction in songwriting (which, during our interview, Prince called his “real reality”) that would titillate his generation and alienate many old heads, including Cornelius.

Prince's record pushed the boundaries of black music while maintaining connections to its traditions. It was a balancing act he would maintain throughout his brilliant career. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city with a small black population, Prince was always very conscious of leaping over the barriers that constrained most artists of color. The buzzword for Prince, as well as for Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, Tina Turner, and many others was
crossover,
a strategy for growing your music-buying audience from a black audience to a larger white one. It was the obsession of the major record labels, since their goal was not just to go platinum (one million or so records, most likely at first to black audiences) but multiplatinum, which usually meant reaching regular white record buyers and, eventually, casual fans who only purchased recordings by big, mainstream pop stars.

Which is probably why Prince would never perform on
Soul Train
during his commercial peak in the eighties. It wasn't until the 1993–94 season, after he was fading as a record seller and his Artist Formerly Known as Prince phase, that he appeared on the broadcast.
Soul Train
did run a video by Prince on episode #416 in the 1982–83 season, and acts he produced, such as the Time (episode #375, 1981–82) and Vanity 6 (episode #410, 1982–83), graced Don's stage. But one of the premier blacks stars of the eighties never was on the show, something unthinkable a decade earlier.

It's worth noting that Lionel Richie, who'd appeared on
Soul Train
regularly as a member of the Commodores, never performed on the show during his long run of solo hits, and Whitney Houston, the dominant female vocalist of the era, appeared only once (episode #476, in the 1984–85 season) to promote her record-setting debut album. Once the diva broke pop, Houston never came back. No one was more aware of these omissions and what they meant, both for his show and for the black music business in general, than Don.

In 1982, I moved from
Record World
magazine to the industry's number one trade publication,
Billboard,
where I would cover black music through 1989. On April 6, 1985, I wrote a column that addressed the vexing question of crossover that featured comments from
Soul Train
's founder. The column was titled “Don Cornelius Speaks Out on the Crossover Issue” and was sparked by Los Angeles R&B radio station KACE's boycott of all records released by Warner Bros. artists after the label failed to put as many promotional dollars into black radio as it had pop radio to support a Prince show at the Forum. KACE's management cited this as an example of how crossover by a black star could have a negative economic effect on black businesses.

In response to this, Cornelius sent an open letter to eleven major black radio program directors. He had no problem with any individual act or label, but wrote “to express my concern over the ever developing ‘he's (she's) not black' syndrome in referring to black crossover artists . . . For record companies, this unfortunate approach is a rather insidious form of pragmatism in that it is widely used to deter lesser known black artists and managers from requesting the services being provided to crossover artists. In being denied the full services they see preferred artists receive, the artist and his representative are simply told, ‘But he's not black.' Not what you'd call the fairest way to compare one artist to another.

“In my view, the most damaging effect by far is seen in the attitudes of the artists who are being told they are ‘not black.' Their response, almost without exception, has been a de-emphasis of the importance of black radio, black attendance at concerts, and embarrassingly I admit,
Soul Train
appearances.”

Later in the letter Don wrote, “The original intent of the ‘he's (she's) not black' syndrome may very well have been the removal of distinctions by color which I believe everyone, including myself, would welcome. If indeed this is our goal, I say our goal has been perverted somewhere along the line, for that clearly is what is taking place. Those of us who labor in this industry are all naturally very proud whenever an artist crosses over, since we were usually there in the beginning. The problem we're facing now is something akin to amnesia. It is my hope that eventually black crossover artists come to understand that as important as pop exposure may be, it is not necessary to avoid communication or contact with the black audience or media to hold on to it.”