"Back in the kitchen of my family's Brooklyn housing project, I'd sit alongside my little sister, eat a bowl of Cap'n Crunch cereal, and watch 'Soul Train'." So writes Nelson George early on in The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture and Style. In describing this ritual, George is hardly alone: During its glorious 35-year run, from 1971 to 2006, "Soul Train" snagged untold millions of viewers in its net, and redefined dance, fashion, and music for generations. Sentiments on "Soul Train", and on the deep, dry baritone of its iconic host Don Cornelius, remain about as mixed as sentiments on fresh-baked cookies.
Explaining the "Soul Train"'s ubiquity, George writes, "This wasn't isolated exposure on a black radio station at the end of the AM dial, or a brief appearance by James Brown or Jackie Wilson on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' This was a regularly scheduled get-down, right in your living room, whether you were black or white."
The power of the show's look, sound, and dances, transmitted relatively unrefined into millions of living rooms, had a seismic impact on culture on a global scale. "[Singer and 'Soul Train' dancer] Jody Watley told me a story," George remembers when I catch up with him on the phone. "She went to Japan in the late '80s or early '90s, and some guy came up to her with four tapes that have every 'Soul Train' performance she’s ever been on."
Apart from being a loving history, George says the book is also “almost like a YouTube guide. I tried to describe the year and show number so people could go and find the video. Sometimes you have to dig deep. But most of 'Soul Train' is somewhere.” Below, a few choice clips, illustrating some of the show's most iconic moves, have been embedded to get people started.
Pitchfork: What inspired you to write about "Soul Train"?
Nelson George: Ironically, about two years ago, shortly before Don Cornelius died, I got a call from him about doing a book on "Soul Train". But I was really busy and didn't have the time to do it—we’re talking about 40 years worth of history. Then, after Don's suicide, my agent was contacted about doing a book on him. I was interested, but the challenge was that he’s dead. He’s the voice. He’s the throughline. It turned out that a friend of mine at VH1 had directed a "Soul Train" documentary, and there was an extended transcript with Don, so I used that as my foundation. So, ultimately, it was Don’s passing, tragic as it was, that inspired the book. I just wish he’d been alive to be a part of it.
Pitchfork: What are your personal "Soul Train" memories?
NG: I was a little kid when "Soul Train" came on, and I watched it on Saturdays, just like everybody else I know. But I really remember my first trip when I was in my twenties. I was a full-time writer and worked for Billboard at the time, and I got a chance to go to "Soul Train", which is crazy. One of my favorite memories was the mountain of Kentucky Fried Chicken they had—boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken stacked up for the dancers to eat in between shows. I’d never seen so much in my life.
Pitchfork: Did you find a clip when you were researching this book that you had never seen before and blew your mind?
NG: Somewhere in the "Soul Train" archives is a clip where Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin are at the piano together. A lot of people don’t know about this, but they were childhood friends. That blew me away. I knew they were from Detroit, obviously, but in all those years I’d never seen them perform together. That was special, to see these two kids who were neighbors now as icons sitting around at the piano.
Pitchfork: The lives of the "Soul Train" dancers almost feel like the real subject of your book; it’s a love note, in a way, to them. What drew you to their stories?
NG: Well, Don was obviously the most important person. But to me, the dancers were the next most important—more important, in a way, than the singers. Their job was really remarkable. I mean, it’s definitely a young person’s gig, I’ll put it that way. They recorded up to five, six, seven shows a weekend, so the energy in the dance room had to be looking fresh and excited. They did most of the taping on Saturday and Sunday, and these were long days.
It wasn’t the greatest environment, in a sense, for the dancers. It was weekend work, they didn’t get paid, and it was hard to get in there. But there were perks: Once you were a "Soul Train" regular, you had carte blanche at L.A. clubs. You’d get in anywhere. They were kind of mini celebrities, and in some cases they were able to travel and perform. So while the working conditions weren’t perfect, it was a platform. To this day, many of the dancers still travel the world, teaching the dances they did on "Soul Train" in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Pitchfork: Let’s talk about some of those dancers, since you devote several sections to individual dancers and the moves they perfected, like Tyrone Proctor, Damita Jo Freeman, and Creepin' Sid.
NG: Tyrone Proctor’s one of the guys who helped create waack dancing. One of the interesting things about going in to talk to people like Tyrone and Jody Watley was that there’s a strong gay subtext to the show. I never noticed when I was a kid, but a lot of the male dancers and some of the female dancers were gay. And some of the dances, waacking particularly, later on folded into voguing, which came out of the gay clubs in L.A.
And now he teaches waacking in China, can you believe it? He just came back from Argentina; he was in Russia last year; he got a trip to Hong Kong and mainland China that’s going to happen in the next couple of months. The dance has changed as Tyrone has changed. His hips are really messed up after all those years, so when he teaches it now he does all of the dances and motions waist-up, because he really can’t do the floor motions. It’s led to a really weird morphing of it, and a lot people think it’s only an upper-body dance. But back in the day, it was a full-body dance.
Damita Jo was the first real female star dancer on the show, and she's a classically-trained dancer who had really incredible body control. She could basically do a ballet move on one leg and it’d be funky. There’s this amazing footage where she dances with James Brown—and he spends half of his time on the stage looking at Damita Jo.
And Creepin' Sid, a member of a crew called Sam Solomon and the Electric Boogaloos, was doing backsliding on "Soul Train" years before the moonwalk. Jeffrey Daniel, another popular "Soul Train" dancer, who went by the name the Pop Along Kid, apparently taught it to Michael, and with Michael obviously—boom—it becomes phenomenon. There was interesting relationship between the show, the clubs in L.A., and pop culture.
The thing about "Soul Train" overall is that these mostly West Coast-based dances would get on the show and immediately go national, and then, through the bootlegging of videotapes, they would go global. And once they were global, they remained global. People cut up "Soul Train" footage and made videos for songs from Daft Punk's [Random Access Memories], and they got millions of views. These dances are still living.
Pitchfork: You write about how Rosie Perez had an interesting experience with the show as a dancer as well.
NG: Rosie's story about her relationship with Don is pretty complicated. It seems that Don wasn't comfortable with many of the dancers, he wasn't a fatherly figure in that sense. He was more of a distant authority figure. He wanted to recruit Rosie into a female vocal trio with [fellow "Soul Train" dancer] Cheryl Song and a white dancer-singer, but she wouldn’t sign the contract, so he took her out to dinner to try to convince her.
While there are a lot of stories about sex and people who hooked up on "Soul Train", I never once found any reference to Don with sleeping with any of the female dancers. If it happened, I couldn't find anyone that would cop to it. There's a number of couples who met through the show, but Don, to his credit, seemed to have a hands-off policy.
Pitchfork: Cornelius haunts the book, in an odd way. When people talk about him, there's affection but there's also a certain unease at not knowing the man or what he was thinking. You spent a little bit of time with him: Did you ever feel privy to his inner workings?
NG: Oh no, no. You always felt that Don was measuring you: "Who are you? Ok. What are you about? How smart are you? How savvy are you? Can I trust you, can I not trust you? How honest should I be or not be at this moment?" You’d meet Quincy Jones, for example, for five minutes and you’d think he's your best friend. Don was the total opposite of that. He totally had his own space. He was always respectful, but it was very formal.
In the book, I quote the testimony that he gave at Congress about rap music, and if you really read that testimony, there's a formality in how it's written. I feel that's an extended version of his public persona. It's one of the few instances where you have pages and pages of Don speaking his mind in a public forum. And it reveals a lot; he tries to be respectful to certain aspects of hip-hop but he's got an adult disdain that's really palpable. With the exception of his true Hollywood friends, very few people could say they felt they knew the inner Don.
