The Hippest Trip in America (17 page)

Whenever Rosie was in doubt about her moves, she would “face dance, just face dance. Face dance means you don't know what the hell the rest of your body was doing but your face is
fierce.
That's face dancing.” Perez is much harder on herself than she needs to be. Anyone who saw her on
Soul Train
was impressed with her dancing. Most people who remember her from the show usually recall her dancing in either a red or black dress. That wasn't part of any plan. They were just the only dressy clothes this college student owned.

“Your attire had to feel like you were going to a nightclub,” Perez said. “That's the look that they wanted, and they wanted high fashion, which I did not offer because I could only afford a dress that had that much material. I was very proud of my body back then. That's the other thing I loved. I was hot. It's good, it's on tape forever. Yeah, you look like you were having a night out. That was another great thing about
Soul Train
. I have a picture of all of us going to a club with my friends from
Soul Train
. All the girls just going out to a nightclub, and we're all dressed like we were dressed on
Soul Train
. It was the most surreal experience for me because I walk into the club with them and people started screaming. ‘Oh my God! It's the
Soul Train
dancers!' It was really weird.”

When you see Rosie in
Soul Train
footage on YouTube, she is coming down the
Soul Train
line like an unleashed tiger. Her first time down the line was, for her, the most memorable:

Perez:
I was hysterical. My heart was pounding. I didn't know what I was going to do. A lot of the dancers already had their routine worked out ahead of time, and I'm just freaking out. I don't know what to do, and then you stand at the head of the line, and then, and the stage manager goes, “
Go!
” It was ridiculous, it was so bad. My girlfriends were cracking up at me because I'm hilarious, and I have a great sense of humor. I was laughing at myself. By the time I got to the end of the line, I was just in hysterics. I was laughing so hard, and Don Cornelius goes, “Do it again.” What? “Do it again. Put her up at the head of the line.” And I thought I had messed up, so I did something different and Don goes, “No, no, no, do it again. Do exactly what you did the first time.”

What Perez thought was silly Don loved, which speaks to their difference in perspective about what good dancing was.

Much like Jody Watley and other popular
Soul Train
dancers, her sudden TV celebrity led to a lot of real-world hostility. “I used to get recognized quite often as being a
Soul Train
dancer,” Rosie said. “Quite often. Which was great at times but sometimes was not so great. Especially back at college it was not so great. It was pretty tough.”

A turning point in her relationship with
Soul Train
came when Don tried to recruit Perez into a female vocal trio along with Cheryl Song and a white dancer-singer. “I told Don I could carry a tune, but I couldn't
sing
sing, you know. He told me, ‘It's irrelevant the way you sing. What's relevant is the way you dance and the way you wear your clothes.' ” That didn't exactly charm Perez. Nor did the fact that when he handed her a contract, she was told not to contact an attorney. No negotiation. He wanted her to sign the contract immediately. On the heels of multicultural hit making by the Mary Jane Girls and Vanity 6, Cornelius was clearly seeing Perez and company as a solid bet.

But she still refused to sign the deal, so in an attempt to woo her, Don took her out to dinner. A business meal turned social as, for the first time, he inquired about her background and family. “What broke the ice was that when we sat down, I didn't know which fork to use,” Perez recalled with a laugh. “Don said, ‘Work outside in.' And then he cracked up. I cracked up, too. It was the first time I saw him laugh.” The duo had a lovely meal except for one thing—Perez still wouldn't sign the contract.

That cordial meal was followed by a tense taping in which the host stopped Perez “three or four times” as she grooved down the
Soul Train
line. Unlike her first time, when Don made her go back, his tone was harsh. During a break, the two had a confrontation over the record deal and, according to Perez, she tossed one of the handy fried chicken boxes at him and stormed off the soundstage. That was the last time she'd dance on the show.

But this dustup with Don wouldn't be the end of Perez's relationship with
Soul Train
. About a year before Rosie was banned from dancing on the show, Louil Silas, a vice president for R&B A&R at MCA Records, was visiting the show with an artist when he spotted Rosie dancing in a corner by herself.

“I was on the side and I started dancing hip-hop,” Rosie said. “Louil came over and said, ‘What's that dance? What is that? What are you doing right there?' I said, ‘Oh, that's hip-hop.' He goes, ‘Hip-hop, hip-hop, cool. Yeah, that's what I want.' I said, ‘Huh?' He said, ‘Bobby Brown [of New Edition] is going solo. I want you to teach him that.' I said, ‘I'm not a choreographer.' He goes, ‘I'll pay you sixteen hundred dollars.' I go, ‘I'll be there on Monday.' That was the beginning of my choreography career. That's how it all started. It started from
Soul Train
.”

In the mid- to late eighties, when hip-hop-bred dance moves from the East Coast began to overturn the West Coast styles popularized on
Soul Train
in the seventies, Perez became a bridge between the two worlds. Videos were slowly beginning to replace
Soul Train
as the place where new dances went national. Bobby Brown, probably a more gifted dancer than singer, was the first of many acts Perez began choreographing for videos, TV appearances, and tours.

After working with Brown, she designed steps for kiddie group the Boys, the agile rapper Heavy D of Heavy D and the Boyz, LL Cool J, and new jack swing groups Today and Wreckx-n-Effect. She even worked with the ultimate diva, Diana Ross. But the gig that put her career over the top was selecting and choreographing the Fly Girls for Keenen Ivory Wayans's sketch comedy show
In Living Color
on Fox. On the show, which debuted in April 1990, the four dancers under Rosie's guidance became the new cutting edge of urban dance. It was the peak of her career as a choreographer.

“I was busy,” Perez recalled fondly. “I had a great career, and it all stemmed from being on
Soul Train,
which is crazy. It's really, really crazy.”

That's how her
Soul Train
story comes full circle. As a choreographer, Perez became an occasional visitor to the set, aiding artists she was working with on steps for their TV appearance. At first Cornelius was prickly, and later he just ignored her. A few years later, after her acting in Spike Lee's
Do the Right Thing
and working on
In Living Color,
the two ran into each other in the tunnel underneath an LA concert venue. At first Perez ignored him, but he called out to her.

“I apologized for tossing the chicken at him,” Perez said, “and I thanked him for giving me such a great platform. He told me how talented I was and how proud he was of me. We hugged and smiled. I saw the guy from our dinner at that moment. Then he told me not to tell anyone about it: ‘After all, I have an image to maintain.' ”

Chapter 13
Overseas Soul

EVERYONE WHO
danced on
Soul Train
and did any traveling to Europe or Asia had to be prepared for the excitement of being recognized by people in another country who spoke a different language. But the show's international appeal didn't always sit so well with its founder.

 

Cornelius:
Well, as far as
Soul Train
's popularity outside the United States goes, we've never been able to gauge it so far. What we know so far is that most people outside the US that carry
Soul Train
are not paying anybody. They are not paying for the show, and that takes us back to some of the money that we weren't able to make. There are so many ways to get—from YouTube on down—to get copies of intellectual property and then use it, that it's become impossible to keep track of.

 

Any quick trip around the Internet in 2013 will find some legally licensed
Soul Train
content (the
Soul Train
Japan website is owned by Soul Train Holdings) and plenty of unofficial events (for example, a party in March 2013 in Bristol, England). But during Cornelius's lifetime, episodes of the show, many posted from Japan, proliferated. Jody Watley recalls that in the seventies there was a special
Soul Train
taping for Japanese TV, a suggestion that Cornelius had tried to do business overseas, but apparently it didn't ripen into a deal.

For many years after Watley started her recording career, she'd wanted to use vintage footage of herself as a
Soul Train
dancer in her live show, but Cornelius's company could never accommodate her. However, a trip to Japan changed that. “I did a show in Tokyo in the eighties,” Watley said, “and after the show, these girls gave me a VHS that was filled with highlights of every damn number I did on
Soul Train
. I have no idea how they collected all that footage.”

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 clothes, 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.