The Hippest Trip in America

by Nelson George

  Proctor quickly befriended Little Joe Chism, a charismatic mover who’d become a viewer favorite during those early Soul Train seasons.

  Proctor: Joe would take me to different places because he wanted me to see LA. He was the glue who kept everybody together. He was the one who got me on Soul Train. He knew a lot about things good, bad, and indifferent. He kept everyone informed and together. No one disliked Joe.

  One of the places he took me was a gay club called the Paradise Ballroom. I’ll never forget it. They played the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” It was so funny. The beat was like boom, boom, boom, boom. People were posing to the whole beat. They had a pole in the middle of the floor. They were on top of the pole in the ceiling posing. All on the beat. It was phenomenal. I think Don did that on Soul Train one time because there’s footage of that. When he did it on Soul Train, it was a rather poor version of what you saw in the clubs, but nevertheless, it was done. I’m sure Don was aware there were many gay dancers on Soul Train, but he turned a blind eye.

  There’s a gentleman who danced on the show called Lamont Peterson, who was a formidable, formidable dancer. I mean, there were many dancers on there that are formidable, but Lamont was really good with the posing. And I believe through that evolved what you know now as waacking, because there was Lamont doing it.

  People always come up to me and ask me how did the name waack come. The name waack came because I was showing someone to do it, and I kept telling them, “You gotta whack your arm,” and that’s where the name comes in. The two a’s came in because we didn’t want to get it confused with the word wack, which had a negative connotation. So we said, we’ll put another a in there, and we’ll change the whole thing. That’s how we did that.

  Daniel: There were other people before Tyrone who were the premier waack dancers, who came up with a lot of basics to the steps. But Tyrone—I would have to say I credit him with bringing that dance to Soul Train. It didn’t have a name yet. They called it “punking” at first for the fact that that dance came out of gay clubs. It was just before discos really boomed and started opening. And Tyrone took me to a club so I could see this dance. He said, “Jeffrey, you’ve got to come to this club, the Paradise Ballroom. You’ve got to see this dance.” The reason why the dance has the name waacking was because of the way Tyrone was teaching it to us. He said, “You got to whack your arm. You got to whack your head. You got to whack to the music.” Up to today he’s the premier waack dancer, so if you gotta know waacking, come to the waack doctor, Tyrone Proctor.

  Proctor: At the straight clubs then, the DJ would be on the mic promoting some event or himself and they’d be playing a whole lot of soul music. At the gay club, they were concerned about the sound system, and they’d be playing straight-up disco and the focus would be on dancing. So we began attracting straights. A lot of people don’t know that the bump came out of those gay clubs and then moved into the mainstream. Waacking wasn’t the only dance of that era to move out from the gay clubs. I got a special appreciation for waacking ’cause I learned it from the best.

  Waacking has become part of the international dance catalog. Proctor still teaches the moves at workshops from Russia to Hong Kong, from Shanghai to Argentina, where he can attract up to a thousand anxious students. But he is far from alone. For example, a look on the website of Steps NYC, one of Manhattan’s top locations for amateurs to learn and professionals to rehearse, shows a waacking class being offered. A video of an instructor in Finland, a young white woman, teaching this once-underground gay dance to a class of awkward wannabe dancers is quite entertaining. This journey of an expression—music, dance, language—from underground to the globe was a route that so much African American culture took in the twentieth century. That waacking was an overtly gay expression (as opposed to covert) adds another layer to the tale.

  Waacking, which definitely shares kinship with Don Campbellock’s playful locking and anticipates the voguing of New York gay culture in the early 1990s, would be a major inspiration for many nongay dancers who’d find celebrity on Soul Train, especially the gifted Daniel.

  Though born in LA, Jeffrey Daniel’s family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he was a kid, where he suffered sunshine envy.

  Daniel: I’m watching Soul Train every Saturday thinking and thinking, Why am I in Grand Rapids? I need to go back to LA. I was still in high school. And I met Tyrone at Maverick’s Flat. One day I’m in there dancing, and I look over and I see Tyrone. I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s Tyrone the Bone.” I used to see him in Right On! magazines and watch him on TV every week. So Tyrone was doing the steps. I knew all his steps from watching him on TV, so I’m doing the steps with him. So anyway, we start dancing together, and from that we became friends. I went back to Grand Rapids, and I was going to school, and I finally came back to LA and I went to Tyrone’s place and he took me to Soul Train with him. He said, “Okay, Jeffrey, I’m gonna get you in.” He got me in, but they said, “He can come in, but he can’t dance. You can just sit down.” So I went there, and I sat down.

  Daniel was lucky enough to begin his Soul Train experience with the taping of memorable episodes #141 and #142. “Barry White was up there with his full orchestra,” he remembers. “Elton John came up there with a glass piano. I’m sitting there watching this, and the music came on. I got up and I danced anyway. And the guy came over and said, ‘Yeah, I saw you dance anyway. I saw you out there.’ He embarrassed me in front of everyone. You know what you can do. I credit Tyrone for helping me get onto Soul Train and helping me kick-start my whole career and everything.”

  Thanks to Proctor, waacking went from the gay club culture into the mainstream of the show. The Outrageous Waack Dancers, as Proctor and his crew were known, became one of the show’s core dance groups: “It was the Lockers, Something Special, who were another small dance crew, the Waackers, and the Electric Boogaloos. Now, not everyone who was on Soul Train during that era was a great dancer. A lot folks were poseurs. Someone who couldn’t really dance but just looked good. You could just dress beautifully and be stylish. Or you could dance really well.” Proctor is a little too modest to say that with his round Afro, wide smile, and dancing skills he embodied all three types. It was as a student of movement that he inspired Daniel’s dancing.

  Daniel: Tyrone taught me how to listen inside the music. I’ve always sang. I’ve always been around music, but he taught me. He would be dancing to a song, and there would just be one string line, it would just go zip, and all of a sudden Tyrone would just move with it. And I was like, “Tyrone, how did you know that’s there?” He said, “Jeffrey, you got to listen to the music.” I attribute that to me becoming a choreographer and a producer, because he really taught me how to listen in the music and hear every instrument, every sound. You can dance to anything. Like you can dance to the voice. Tyrone will be dancing to the music, and all of a sudden he’ll just pantomime the vocal of the song.

  The combo of Proctor and Daniel not only became star dancers on the show but, like precocious children, had the run of the place backstage too. “It would be fair to say that Tyrone Proctor and myself—we’re kind of like Don Cornelius’s prodigal sons,” says Daniel. “I mean, we would get away with things that just no other dancer could even dream of.”

  “When you go downstairs, that’s where the hubbub is,” Proctor recalled. “That’s where the producers are, that’s where the hairdressers are, that’s where the greenroom is, and no dancers were ever allowed to go down there. So Jeffrey and I would go down there. At that time I had a lot of hair, and I would go down there and get my hair done, trying to be a star or something. Then Jeffrey could go down there. We were the only two that could go and talk to guests. Don Cornelius, I think, favored us. We could get away with a lot of stuff. One of the things I noticed as the show went on, Don kept adding black crew. At first there were only white faces behind the camera, but each season we got more dark faces. Don got a lot of people in the industry in LA through t
he show.”

  “Don stood by the monitors while he was watching the action on Soul Train,” Daniel said. “Dancers just didn’t go over to Don. But for Tyrone and me, it wasn’t off-limits. We could go over there and speak to Don. We just didn’t abuse our privileges. Don actually gave us money. I really want to say this, because people think Don is just this hard shell of a person, which he is, but Don is a sweet person. Tyrone got arrested for traffic violations. He wasn’t a criminal. Just traffic violations. And we’re at a taping. Where’s Tyrone? Don sent me and [production coordinator] Chuck Johnson down there with the money, and we got Tyrone out of jail, and Don Cornelius paid to get him out so he can come and dance on the show.”

  It isn’t surprising that Proctor ended up with traffic tickets, since he and his fellow waackers were notorious for what they called the Chinese fire drill. “At a red light, we would put the car in park, and we would jump out and just dance all around the car, and then when the light would change, we would jump back in the car and take off again,” said Daniel, adding, “The people would be mad behind us. They would be upset, but we would be in there living our lives. It would be so funny. So, so, so funny.”

  Proctor would be recruited to dance on American Bandstand. When Damita Jo Freeman and Joe Chism won Dick Clark’s national dance championship, they recommended Sharon Hill and Proctor for the next contest.

  Proctor: There was, I think, about seven or eight contestants. We were the only black couple in the contest, and out of the hundred thousand votes tabulated, Sharon and I got sixty thousand of the votes. That’s what was told to us. It was unbelievable. I remember to this day winning the car, and what I did. I just jumped up and just fell on the car. It was a Mazda RX-4 coupe. They called me, and they said, “There’s only one glitch.” I said, “What’s that?” They said, “You need $334.28 in order to pick the car up,” and I’m like, “Well, why do I need that?” And he said, “That’s the taxes you gotta pay.” And I’m going, “Oh, God, where am I gonna get this money at?”

  Frustrated by this turn of events, Proctor reached out to the only person he knew who might have the cash to help him pay the taxes—Don Cornelius. Because of the bad blood between Soul Train and American Bandstand, Don could have easily said no, viewing Proctor’s participation in Dick Clark’s contest as a betrayal. But Don looked beyond that history to help a young friend in need. “So we went up to Don Cornelius very humbly and he just sat there and wrote the check out. We went downstairs, cashed it, and I got my car. Sharon got a car as well.”

  Having danced on both Soul Train and American Bandstand during the height of their 1970s rivalry, Proctor has some interesting observations about the experience.

  Proctor: Very different. Very different but very similar. Everybody was copying what we were doing. Everybody. James Brown always stood his own, and I respect a man for that. I never try to do anything he might have tried to do—a robot maybe one or two times, but other than that, no. But you know that’s how popular [Soul Train] was. It was no different from Bandstand, because they were trying to vie for the same group of fans that we had. You have to also understand that these two shows are taped in the same city. So there’s gonna be similarities. The only difference is the skin color. On Bandstand, you saw a lot more Caucasians and Mexican Americans than you did on Soul Train. On Soul Train there were more African Americans. We had other nationalities on there, but it wasn’t as prevalent as the African Americans that were on there.

  [Going to Bandstand], I felt nervous at first. You feel like a little turncoat because you’re on a whole different show. But Dick Clark and his crew were extremely nice. The kids on the show were very accepting. We got on the show, and again it wasn’t—it didn’t have anything to do with color. We were just so happy to be on there just dancing.

  DANCER PROFILE: The Asian Girl with the Long Hair

  One of the most identifiable Soul Train dancers didn’t introduce any landmark moves. She was simply the most notable nonblack regular in the show’s long history. Her name is Cheryl Song—also known as the Asian girl with the long hair.

  Song lived in the middle of a contradiction. Her mother and father ran a very traditional, strict Asian household in the middle of overwhelmingly black South Central. She attended Dorsey, one of the city’s top black high schools. So when Song’s parents told her, “Don’t hang around with black people,” something had to give. Song said, “I had a pretty tumultuous childhood growing up, and I felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere. The only thing I knew is that I liked to dance. I guess that was my release.

  “So when I was in high school, one of the dancers, I guess his name was Dane, brought me on Soul Train as a dare, because, you know, I wasn’t black. He brought me on, and they liked me. So I was able to stay on the show, and it was the happiest time of my life. It was because it was somewhere where I finally meant something to people, and they would recognize me, and I was like, ‘Wow, somebody knows me!’ So it was kind of like my little clique that I could belong to. And if I didn’t have Soul Train as something to look forward to, I just don’t know how my life would have ended up.”

  Song’s parents were not so enthused. “They said, ‘What are we going to tell our relatives?’ I was just like, ‘Just don’t tell them!’ . . . We were taught to save face, which meant whatever was going on in your life personally, you always had to give the impression that things were well. That’s just the way it was. Because my parents were so rigid, I didn’t know what it was like to be hugged or told ‘I love you,’ and I finally felt like someone liked me when I was on Soul Train, so that’s why it meant so much to me.”

  Cheryl Song’s long hair made her famous among Soul Train viewers.

  Song’s warm recollection shouldn’t disguise the fact that the reception was not that warm when she first arrived on Cornelius’s set. Like a lot of people who look back on Soul Train, there is the tendency to initially see things through rose-colored glasses, but, with a little prodding, a more complex experience emerges.

  Song: Well, the first time I went on, I remember everyone kind of stopped and said, Oh, look! Because there’s this Asian girl, and it’s like, Where did she come from? So I remember that I got to dance a few times, and they ended up liking me, the staff, so they kept me on, and I thought everything was just so beautiful. And, “Wow! I can’t believe I’m actually here.” I remember one time they put me on the riser, and I was standing there in the center of the riser and somebody said, “Who’s that high yellow bitch think she is?” Then I was scared. Oh my God, I’m gonna get jumped! I was really, really scared. I remember as soon as the show was over, I, like, ran to my car so that I wouldn’t get jumped or assaulted or something like that. Then I realized, Wow. Certain people hate me. So it always puzzled me that people could just have feelings like that towards me.

  Song became something of a flash point on the show. There were definitely haters of the long-haired Asian dancer among the other dancers and some of the viewers, but overall Song was accepted, an acceptance that meant she was subject to the same challenges every Soul Train dancer faced—getting close to the camera. “It was pretty competitive. I remember we would all be dancing as soon as the music played, but the minute that camera came towards you, and you saw that red light, someone would jump in front of you. Then you would go back and try to jump in front of them. That was a little frustrating, but, hey, you had to do what you had to do to get on camera.”

  Over time, her Soul Train celebrity somewhat softened her family’s attitude toward her.

  Song: Probably some people must have said to them, “Oh, your daughter’s on Soul Train,” and finally, maybe they got the idea that that’s a good thing instead of something to be ashamed of. So they kind of accepted it. It was just bashed into my head, no matter what you do, you’re going to major in mathematics or chemistry or science. And me being so young, I thought, Well, if I do what they want me to do, I’ll end up just as unhappy as they are. So when they told me that that’s what I
was going to be majoring in in college, it’s gonna be math or science, I said, No, no, it’s not. And I was a dance major in college.

  One of Song’s most unlikely reflections on her Soul Train years is that no dancers on the show ever asked her out, and no one ever asked her to dance when she went out. “Nobody did! Nobody!” she said. As hard as it is to imagine that the most famous Asian woman in black TV history was ignored by men, that’s Song’s story and she’s sticking to it. “Probably because I was Asian, but I remember going to clubs in Los Angeles, and they were mostly black, but that’s who I felt comfortable with. So I would end up sitting there the whole night all by myself. And so I was like, nobody ever asked me to dance. I don’t know if they were afraid, or I don’t know, but most of the times I would just end up sitting there. So I remember one day, Howard Hewitt, he was in Shalamar. He asked me to dance because he felt sorry for me. But that was like one of the few times I got to dance when I went out.”

  Gap Band lead singer (and notorious ladies’ man) Charlie Wilson has put it on record that he tried to “holler at” Song, as have some other entertainers who performed on Soul Train, but apparently she was oblivious.

  Whether Song was asked out or not, it’s clear that entertainers and their management were very aware of her. She helped the Commodores choreograph one of their tours and was cast in numerous 1980s videos, including Rick James’s “Super Freak” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

  Watch closely and you can spot her in the opening diner sequence of that landmark video.

  Tyrone Proctor, bringing gay culture to the masses, and Cheryl Song, a nonblack face in a sea of Afros, were each in their own way iconic figures on Soul Train. Waacking-influenced moves are still employed by choreographers and found in twenty-first-century music videos from Lady Gaga, among others, while gifted Asian street dancers are now staples of our culture, from Gap commercials to competition shows like America’s Best Dance Crew. Though decades removed from their Soul Train appearances, the legacy of Proctor and Song flows on.