The Hippest Trip in America (18 page)

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 wrote 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.

 

Once Wilson got comfortable on the
Soul Train
stage, coming back often in the 1980s with an impressive string of hits with the Gap Band, he became very confident in approaching the dancers.

 

Wilson:
We weren't allowed to dance with the people on the shows—we were not allowed to do that. Don would not have allowed them to have any association with the artist and the camaraderie. None of that. They were not allowed to do that. So we were definitely parted on the stage, and the crowd was just partying anyway. It's just as though we were right next to them. I can reach down and touch them. They would definitely go for it. They weren't supposed to, but we always would break all the rules as entertainers. After those
Soul Train
shows, there were definitely some beautiful women up there, man. I was not married then. Well, after the show the place was packed full of young men and beautiful women. We definitely went through the audience to get back to the stage, and on your way to the dressing room you would eye and find the one you was gonna talk to. We'd been through taping in about thirty minutes. We used to go from
Soul Train
to the clubs. We would take a carload of maybe fifteen. We had a good time. A good time. Guys would pile a limousine up with everybody, and there were definitely some beautiful women in the car.

I definitely got a few dates out of
Soul Train
. I had some fun. Met three girls in there and I had a long relationship with each one of them. Maybe three years one, three years another one. I was talking to Don and saying thank you. Then me trying to get through the crowd was tedious. I was mobbed. Maybe the first girl who grabbed me was one who I ended up seeing for a while. It was something to behold.

 

Other male entertainers interviewed about
Soul Train
weren't as frank as Charlie Wilson about their sexual conquests. Time and, perhaps, current marriages put a damper on that line of storytelling. But a couple performers enjoyed real love stories because of the show. Tomi Jenkins of Cameo and
Soul Train
dancer Nieci Payne did their VH1 documentary interview together, a testament to their ongoing relationship of some twenty-plus years. Jenkins has been a working musician since joining a thirteen-member band called the New York City Players in 1974. Subsequently they changed their name to Cameo and in 1976 signed to Casablanca Records, where they had a successful run as a large funk band.

In the early 1980s, when live horns and traditional rhythm sections gave way to synthesizers and drum machines, Cameo shrank down to three key members and overhauled its sound, entering an innovative period of music and videos that peaked with the 1985 single “Word Up!” that Jenkins cowrote. Jenkins, along with the group's leader Larry Blackmon, still record and tour to this day. As strong a career as Jenkins has had in music, he's not nearly as legendary as Nieci Payne. Quite simply, Payne is the Brick House. In old-school black slang, a “brick house” was a woman with incredible curves and an imposing stature. As a young woman in LA, Payne was seen by the Commodores, who wrote the classic funk jam “Brick House” (with the famous line “36-24-36, what a winning hand!”) about her statuesque frame.

The sexy dancer's connection to
Soul Train
goes back to the post–Don Cornelius daily shows in Chicago, on which she danced as a high schooler in the late 1970s. In fact, in a dance contest run by Chicago host Clinton Ghent, Payne won a pair of shoes from a shoe store owned by Chaka Khan. After graduating from high school, she headed west to try and get on the national broadcast. Many have talked about the challenges of getting on the show, but it wasn't a problem for Payne. At an LA club she met veteran
Soul Train
dancer Thelma Davis, who, after checking out Payne's moves, invited the young woman to a
Soul Train
taping.

“I wore tie-dye pants—they were elephant pants—a T-shirt, and these two Afro puffs,” she said. “I went on there, and Don Cornelius saw me dancing on the floor. When he introduced himself to me, I said, ‘Don, I'm from Chicago,' and he said, ‘Cool. Cool. Let's see what you can do,' and I rocked it for eleven years, from 1980 to 1991.” Jenkins, already a music-business veteran, first saw Payne on the show. “She was always on the platform,” he remembered. He wasn't the only music-business figure to notice her. During her tenure on
Soul Train,
she'd be recruited by the Commodores, the Emotions, Con Funk Shun, L.T.D., and Rose Royce to perform on tours and other TV shows.

Within the world of
Soul Train
, as we've noted, Don tried to keep his young dancers away from each other. And, as Charlie Wilson made clear, that didn't always work out. “We would go in the back and take pictures, and a lot of times celebrities would take pictures,” Payne said. “It was kind of a no-no to do.” Yet away from the set, Don would have dinners where he, the dancers, and the artists could mingle.

 

Payne:
Don went to dinner, and he would call me from time to time and say, “Nieci, I'm going to dinner. Do you and a couple of girls wanna go out and eat dinner with me and some friends?” It would usually be like a group. But it was just straight. Let's have dinner. Everybody leave. Bye. It wasn't like you get there and hooked up with somebody. It wasn't that kind of story. Tomi was there when we had dinner at Tramps of London. It was a club out here in the Beverly Center at the time. We all had dinner, and it was right before it was time to go, and he said, ‘Hey, you wanna go out?' No, actually, what Tomi said was, ‘You don't want to go out with me, do you?' I said, ‘Sure.' ”