The Hippest Trip in America Read online

  It was in this context that WVON, which arrived on air in 1963, made an immediate impact by serving as an outlet for black entrepreneurs to advertise products to a growing consumer market using an on-air delivery and music that Benson pioneered. The station was owned by Leonard and Phil Chess, two Polish brothers who ran Chess and Checker Records, home of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, and countless other legends. While WVON’s location at the far end of the AM dial and tiny 250-watt signal meant it couldn’t be heard all over the city, the station still squarely hit its target—the city’s densely packed black neighborhoods in South and West Side Chicago.

  Though the radio scene had changed considerably since Al Benson’s heyday, his stamp was still felt at WVON. He had sponsored contests for prospective DJs around the city and gave them airtime, inaugurating many of their careers, including those of Sid McCoy (who’d later be the voice of Soul Train) and Herb “the Cool Gent” Kent.

  By the time Cornelius reached WVON in 1966, Benson was no longer a force, although he thrived through the voices of on-air personalities Kent, Pervis “the Blues Man” Spann, Wesley South, and news director Roy Wood, who guided the station’s civil rights coverage. WVON’s playlist was filled with music made in the city itself. Blues stars like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were starting to lose their hold on black listeners, but an exciting generation of local soul singers led by singer-songwriter Curtis Mayfield and including Jerry Butler, the Impressions, Gene Chandler, Fontella Bass, and Tyrone Davis were starting to deliver consistent hits and strong ratings.

  Given the station’s pedigree and power, it’s not surprising that Don never landed a regular on-air slot playing music. Instead he was given the job of news reader and street reporter during one of the most tumultuous periods in Chicago history. In January 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. relocated to a Chicago housing project to dramatize the de facto segregation in real estate practices in the “liberal” North. King would face resistance from political boss Mayor Richard Daley, be confounded by nefarious dealings with black elected officials who were puppets of the local Democratic machine, and endure brutal harassment from Chicago’s white residents during public marches. A photograph from this period shows a young Don with microphone in hand, covering the civil rights movement for WVON, walking down a Chicago street with King.

  Don also covered the riots in the wake of King’s assassination in April 4, 1968, and the violent events of that June’s Democratic Convention that left demonstrators bloody in the city’s streets. The Black Panthers organized successfully in Chicago under the leadership of Fred Hampton, who was then murdered in a one-sided shoot-out with the city’s police, another story Cornelius and WVON reported.

  During this intense period in Chicago’s history, Cornelius made his television debut, hosting a show on local UHF station WCIU called A Black View of the News, just one of scores of public-interest shows that were popping up around the country in response to the civil rights movement. Most had names as on the nose as the one Cornelius hosted, names that unintentionally suggested that “the black view” remained not merely segregated but exotic, even foreign, to the American mainstream.

  Today the UHF broadcast band is used primarily for mobile phones and two-way radio. But in the 1960s UHF stations, which broadcast on a higher frequency than the standard VHF stations of commercial TV, were an alternative viewing experience. The signals had limited coverage and performed as a precursor to public-access TV years before cable’s introduction. And this relationship with WCIU, initially based on Cornelius’s news experience, led to the birth of Soul Train. The idea of doing a dance show was far from original. Aside from Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, which aired nationally on ABC, there were local dance shows all around the country that catered to teenagers and, to varying degrees, included black singers and dancers. Almost none of the shows I’m aware of from the period placed soul, or “black music,” so front and center: most of them used teen appeal to keep local advertisers and TV programmers comfortable. Don’s genius was seeing that the time was right for a more explicitly “soul”—that is, black—show.

  The Soul Train name goes back to Don’s tenure at WVON. Air personnel at radio stations supplemented their income by hosting parties with recording artists at local clubs or schools. Depending on the venue, these were either dance parties or sock hops. Record labels would provide acts free of charge for the DJs’ appearances, which served as an inducement for them to play the acts’ music on air.

  Cornelius did mostly news, so he partnered up with another young WVON personality, DJ Joe Carr, to promote his events. “We’d take relatively small shows to various schools and play shows in the school auditorium and then pack up real quick and take it to another auditorium,” Don said. “It just felt like a train to me moving around the city, and I think I called it ‘Soul Train.’ So when I got the green light at channel twenty-six to do my version of a new dance show, I automatically called it Soul Train.”

  “People look at Soul Train on its surface and assume that it was a tremendous challenge,” Cornelius said of first presenting the idea. “That it was real hard, and it was almost impossible, and you almost had to kill somebody, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t any of that. Television again is a medium where if you come up with a good enough idea, it just goes right on. It just steps right up, it just happens, and you can always find necessary support if the idea is strong enough, and Soul Train was apparently a very strong idea. I will never forget. I had a friend who was an executive at Sears. He knew me as a guy who was always trying to come up with an idea to do this or that, and he humored me a lot. And so when I came up with this Soul Train idea, I made my way into his office. Sears executives on his level had cubicles, and they could even see you coming through the glass, and so George O’Hare was working the phones as usual. I came and sat down next to him, and he gave me one of these looks like, you know, You again, huh? And I just leaned over to his ear and said, ‘George. Soul Train.’ And the guy looked over to his secretary and said, ‘Hold my calls.’ So we knew immediately that that was an idea that had tremendous merit.”

  Cornelius approached WCUI with Sears, Roebuck as a sponsor. Not only did the station agree to broadcast the show, but it didn’t ask for a piece of the pie. He was “fully open to them saying, ‘You do this here, but we’re gonna own it.’ I was fully open to that, but they didn’t say that. By the time someone made mention of the possibility of the station owning the show, I had already licensed it. So it was an accident. I would like to say I’m just a genius. But it just happened. If they had said, ‘Sign here and this belongs to us,’ I would’ve said, ‘No problem,’ but they didn’t say it.”

  WCUI had studios in the beautiful Board of Trade Building, an art deco masterwork at the intersection of West Jackson and LaSalle. The building, which opened in 1930, is known to moviegoers for its prominent roles in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Untouchables, and as the home of Wayne Enterprises in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. The station was using studios in the building to air the daily seven-hour show Stock Market Observer, a testament to the import of grain in the Midwest.

  The station had a tiny studio on the forty-third floor, which actually had already been the site of two previous dance shows—Kiddie a-Go-Go in 1966 and Red Hot and Blues in 1967—prior to Soul Train’s debut on August 17, 1970. The headliners were established Chicago soul star Jerry Butler and the local vocal group the Chi-Lites, who were about to embark on a string of hits in the early 1970s.

  The set was not exactly state of the art. “It had a very local look to it,” Don later recalled ruefully. “It was very small studio. We didn’t have color cameras. We weren’t able to play back very much because the station didn’t have videotape cameras. That’s the reason why we don’t have archival footage.”

  Fawn Quinones, one of the original dancers on the Chicago show (who years later would appear on the LA broadcasts), said, “After hearing it advertised, I got on an
L and went across town to the Board of Trade Building . . . So when I showed up I was wondering where was all the people. Well, I was the people.”

  Fawn remembers Don wearing a giant Afro and a maxi coat and being “so funny.”

  Gladys Knight & the Pips, best known for their soulful hits including “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Midnight Train to Georgia,” were early supporters of Soul Train.

  “They had about fifty kids in there, and they had one camera, and we were in this little room and everyone was sweating to beat the band” is how O’Jays lead singer Eddie Levert recalls the Board of Trade studio. “We did not at the time know that it was going to catch on like it did. But it was an opportunity for black kids in the ghetto to get a chance to do their little dancing and to have their exposure.”

  His longtime partner in the O’Jays, Walter Williams, said, “It looked huge when you saw it on the screen, and everyone was having an absolute ball. This could be big if it goes further than local.”

  Soul Train’s potential was obvious to the O’Jays. “It was just hard to get on a show like American Bandstand because you had this large influx of white artists before you,” said Levert, “people like Jan and Dean, and all of the sudden you felt like a sore thumb in there. You look around and you’re surrounded by all this beach music and we’re coming to do R&B.”

  Williams chimed in: “[To get on] American Bandstand, and Hullabaloo and Shindig, you had to have a hit record. You had to have a Top 40 record, and most R&B was not crossing over to that magnitude, and that’s probably why we were not invited to those kinds of shows. Don’s show, if you had an R&B hit, you were automatically in the mix.”

  “There was an automatic connection because he was struggling to get his foot in the door like American Bandstand,” said Levert. “He was struggling to become a mainstay, and we were still struggling trying to become a hit act. So our purposes are the same. Our relationship became one such as people who were trying to explore and try to get the next level. And automatically [we] became comrades and friends.”

  This connection between Don and the O’Jays—who in 1970 were on the verge of their star-making run of Sound of Philadelphia hits—would be ongoing. Following this first appearance on the original Soul Train, the vocal trio would, between Chicago and Los Angeles, do the show thirteen times over the decades.

  Michelle Garner, a Chicago native and later an advertising executive who would work with Soul Train, remembers seeing the Chicago show. “It was on like five days a week,” Garner said, “so the kids would come home from school. It’s kind of like appointment TV, and they’re all excited about it. It was certainly after we had just come off the riots, after the death of Martin Luther King, so you know it’s kind of like in rebuilding mode. Everything was trying to get back in a nice calm state . . . Before that, all we had were stage shows. That’s the only time you would see the acts when they would go the Regal Theater and see all the acts for two dollars or whatever. So to see them on television just added a whole dynamic.”

  Many of the Soul Train staples that became famous began as accompaniment to the Chicago show. Sid McCoy’s dulcet tone, which was even deeper and smoother than Don’s, had introduced the show from the very start. To Don he “was the greatest disc jockey that the city of Chicago has ever known” and “one of my heroes.”

  The screaming “Soooooooooouuuuulllll Train!” voice that has been imitated for generations is the voice of Don’s WVON colleague Joe Carr. Don was playing around in the studio, trying to create a commercial break for the show, when Carr stuck his head into the booth and, in a playful mood, did his thing. “That’s it,” Don said. “That’s what I’m looking for, and for the whole three decades we never took his voice off the Soul Train show.”

  Just as enduring, both beloved and disparaged, was the scramble board, which had the names of soul singers, politicians, and historical figures hidden amid a wall of jumbled letters. Though never designed to tax the minds of its young contestants, it was always amusing to see how long it took folks to figure out the obvious. “We needed a feature something like [American Bandstand’s] Rate a Record, but not quite as stupid, and we deemed the scramble board as being not quite as stupid, but stupid” was Don’s unsentimental recollection of the feature’s genesis. “Over the years people came to me and said, ‘Well, when are you going to change that scramble board and get rid of the scramble board?’ And I would always say, ‘Bandstand never got rid of Rate a Record, so why do we have to get rid of scramble board?’ Because it is just as stupid. You’re following what I’m saying? So that’s why it’s always been with us. Because it was never intended to be a stroke of genius of any kind. It was just intended to give kids a chance to stand up by the scramble board.”

  In his interview for the VH1 doc, Don said the original Soul Train theme was a song called “Hot Potatoes,” and I think it was by a guy named Eddie Robinson.” Memory failed the TV host on this one. The original version of the song was recorded in 1963 by the soul saxophone giant King Curtis, backed by a band called the Rimshots, which may be where Don’s recollection of “Eddie Robinson” comes from.

  The Soul Train scramble board was one of the show’s most popular staples.

  Tragically, King Curtis was stabbed to death outside his home in Harlem in 1971, the same year Soul Train would go national. Enjoy Records, the New York indie label that had the rights to the record, renamed the track “Soul Train (Parts 1 & 2)” and the band the Rimshots, removing King Curtis’s name from the single.

  Whatever the song was called, it was a funky instrumental with Curtis’s wailing tenor sax, a dark, sexy organ, and a laid-back groove suggesting an after-hours gathering at a smoky South Side bar. It was the kind of funky jazz performance that was typical in the early to mid-1960s when Don was spinning part-time at WVON. Eventually it would be replaced by something more memorable.

  Don’s catalog of on-air DJ slang is legendary, most of it either refinements of catchphrases from other WVON DJs, Chicago street slang, or phrases of his own invention. For example, “You can bet your last money, it’s all gonna be a stone gas, honey” is definitely an R&B radio catchphrase, something usually said to promote a party or a show at the Regal. His signature show closer “As always in parting we wish you—love, peace, and soul!” is not unlike the closing rhymes many of the popular black DJs used, at WVON and elsewhere, to stamp their broadcasts. Drawing upon the rich tradition of black DJs, Don brought the casual cool and rhyming style of those on-air voices to broadcast television.

  But without a doubt the signature symbol of Soul Train was the human alley that dancers moved through every week. Known as the Soul Train line and inspired by showy dances at house parties and clubs nationwide, this was a showcase for creativity, sexuality, and fun. It would be on the Soul Train line that careers were born, stars were showcased, and dynamic new directions in dance emerged. Its roots were quite humble. Don saw it done all the time at parties he attended around Chicago in the fifties and sixties. So it was no great brainstorm but a fun midwestern social ritual that, via television, became a bit of a national obsession.

  “It was overnight hot,” said Don about the show’s impact in Chi-Town. “Overnight because of the fact that nothing was ever targeted at them. Nothing ever targeted us. When it came on it was like, almost in minutes, every black person in town knew about it, and not because it was a wonderful show but because it was theirs . . . They felt that was something on television that was designed to target our audience. Or my audience. The community has always been there for us and has always treated Soul Train like it belonged to them.”

  As a teenager living in Gary, Indiana, Reggie Thornton would come up for Thursday tapings of the show, making the trip on the South Shore train that he says was subsidized by Cornelius. “Then all of a sudden Don Cornelius got an idea to make a pilot for Soul Train and to bring it out here to California, to make it a nationwide show,” says Thornton. “I didn’t know what a pilot was, but Don
Cornelius called my parents and asked could he get permission to use me in a pilot for Soul Train. I knew that I was going to be on national television once this pilot took off.”

  The show was such an immediate local success that black hair-care giant Johnson Products reached out and expressed interest in syndicating it nationally. The Afro was in full bloom, and the company’s Afro Sheen product was one of the most popular ways to keep your ’fro soft and round. Its owner and founder, George Johnson, inspired by the new opportunities for black business, was in an expansive mood. During this same year, he was in the process of founding the Independence Bank and getting his company on the American Stock Exchange, making Johnson Products the first African American–owned company to make the cut. According to some of Don’s business associates, Johnson agreed to put up $600,000 to fund the show if it was national. Johnson was hoping for a slot on one of the three major networks, but CBS, NBC, and ABC all turned the show down.

  So Cornelius and Johnson went the syndication route, looking to the many independent stations around the country that were constantly searching for ways to carve out a niche audience in competition with the networks. In cities like New York and Chicago, there was a lot of after-school programming aimed at schoolkids (cartoon shows hosted by genial, goofy adults and talking puppets) and late-night black-and-white movies. Not unlike the landscape during the early days of radio, many of the shows on local stations had a major advertiser who would underwrite the broadcast.