Chapter 5
TSOP
THE SECOND—AND greatest—Soul Train theme song resulted from a brief collaboration between Don Cornelius and the premier R&B writing-producing team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. This pair began as independent producers in the 1960s, when they created hit singles for Jerry Butler, Wilson Pickett, and Joe Simon, among many. This catapulted the Philadelphia-based duo to the mantle of R&B’s top creative force. In 1971 Gamble and Huff made a deal with CBS Records to found Philadelphia International Records as a vehicle for funneling all their energy into acts on their own label.
Together, and in collaboration with several exceptional staff writers (John Whitehead, Gene McFadden, Bunny Sigler, Cynthia Biggs, Dexter Wansel), PIR was a powerhouse that developed stars (the O’Jays, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass) and enduring songs (“Wake Up Everybody,” “Love Train,” “For the Love of Money,” “Me and Mrs. Jones,” “Love Is the Message,” “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”) using a lush, intricate, rhythmically intense sound built around gospel-inspired singing and the talents of a remarkable team of session musicians.
Labeled MFSB (Mother Father Sister Brother), these players, anchored by guitarist Norman Harris, bassist Ronnie Baker, and drummer Earl Young, worked primarily out of the City of Brotherly Love’s Sigma Sound. Factoring in the more ballad-oriented songs of producer Thom Bell for the Spinners and the Stylistics, the music coming out of Philadelphia became as essential to the 1970s as the Godfather movies and the Watergate break-in.
When Don ran into Gamble in New York in 1973, both men were on the cusp of big things. Don wanted a new theme, one that was unique to the show and more contemporary than the funky jazz song he’d been using. So he traveled to Philadelphia and sat down with Gamble, Huff, and arranger Bobby Martin. A basic rhythm track was developed with a strutting rhythm, later augmented by a cool horn-and-string arrangement that was smooth enough for dancing, yet had a memorable melody.
Don loved the track and asked that his show’s title be included in the primarily instrumental track. The female vocal group the Three Degrees sang “Soul Train, Soul Train” over four notes. The record branded the show and reflected a sound that would soon be labeled disco. He wanted the song held off any recordings until Soul Train’s next season. But as Gamble and Huff played the track for CBS executives and other PIR staffers, it became clear this Soul Train theme could be more than the opening of a TV show. So Gamble called Cornelius and said he wanted to use the song as a single off an MFSB album.
This is where Don made a strategic mistake. Instead of going along with the idea as a tool to further expose the show, he felt that the release of it as a single would infringe on his copyright and wasn’t in the spirit of the agreement he’d made with PIR. So he asked Gamble and Huff to remove his show’s title from the single version. The reworked song had the Three Degrees singing “People all over the world” as a hook and had a second vocal section that was simply “Let’s get it on / It’s time to get down.” Otherwise it was the same track Cornelius would use on Soul Train.
Released in the spring of 1974, the song, now titled “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia),” went to No. 1 on both the pop and R&B charts. Instead of being a commercial for Soul Train that announced the show’s name all over America, it worked to brand Philadelphia’s new musical movement. While there’s no question the original version was great for the show, Don’s decision cost him a marketing opportunity for the ages.
It wasn’t the last time Don wouldn’t fully benefit from one of his great recording ideas.
Chapter 6
Right On
ONE OF the unintended consequences of the civil rights movement would be, starting in the 1970s, the targeting of black teenagers as a consumer market. White teens were already a significant cultural and consumer force through the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, with AM Top 40 radio and American Bandstand as direct beneficiaries. Soft drinks and acne-relief creams like Clearasil filled the coffers of radio stations and the ABC network for decades as each generation moved in and out of that angst-ridden demographic. The white teen idols Clark promoted and, in some cases, controlled also fed an appetite for fanzines like Tiger Beat, which titillated teens with public-relations-created tales of pinup boys and girls.
Black students of the 1960s were identified with sit-ins and protest, with noble struggle and the raised fists. But this visibility also alerted many to the massive buying these ambitious young people represented. Once they could legally sit at lunch counters, black teens became a hot new consumer market. And Soul Train emerged as the perfect venue to exploit this new reality. Soul Train was deeply intertwined with various kinds of marketers, whether advertising agencies or pulp-magazine publishers seizing the new opportunity. UniWorld and Burrell Advertising and Right On! magazine had very different relationships to Soul Train, yet all spoke to ways in which the show expanded the impact of black consumers in general and black youths in particular.
As noted earlier, 1971 was a benchmark year in black entrepreneurship, with Soul Train’s move to LA proving to be one of the most visible events. In that same year, Thomas Burrell and his partner Emmett McBain opened Burrell McBain advertising in Chicago. Burrell, who is now viewed as something of the patron saint of black advertising, was born in Chicago and took a high school aptitude test that suggested he had the right temperament for influencing people.
In 1961, right out of college, he got a job in the mail room of a local ad agency. Within two years, he was writing ad copy. For the rest of the 1960s, Burrell moved in search of opportunity, working for an agency in London for two years, then moving to New York before heading back to Chicago to form his own agency. His guiding philosophy was “Black people are not dark-skinned white people,” meaning that you can’t just use the same techniques to reach black consumers as white. Burrell would sell this difference to clients and build an enduring business.
One of Burrell McBain’s first clients was Johnson Products. George Johnson gave Burrell’s new company a shot, and it would be this agency that created so many of the beloved Afro Sheen commercials that are as much a part of the 1970s Soul Train as Don’s voice. Between 1971 and 1974 Burrell would win accounts from McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, accounts that would then turn into ad buys and commercials on Soul Train. In 1974 McBain left the company, but the renamed Burrell Advertising has continued to roll with mainstream clients to this day. Michelle Garner, a former Burrell executive, said, “These were marketers who had become savvy, and they knew the importance of the African American market, and so they initiated efforts, similar to the music business, where they had black divisions to help market to that particular consumer segment.”
Soul Train was both a catalyst and beneficiary of this new respect for black consumers. It’s certainly an idea Byron Lewis, founder of the UniWorld Group in 1969, agrees with.
“It changed my advertising landscape,” Lewis said of the show. “It’s very difficult for ethnic agencies, particularly African American advertising agencies, because we just don’t have the critical mass; we are basically working on a niche and the idea of credibility, the ability to attract talent, the ability to grow, was really enhanced by Soul Train, because as much as we depended upon black magazines and newspapers . . . the television media reached the most people, and Soul Train gave us an exciting venue to place our commercials and to, frankly, get clients to give us more work to do, which really enhanced our growth.”
With Soul Train as a platform, UniWorld was able to place ads on the show from AT&T, Eastman Kodak, Burger King, Pepsi-Cola, and Colgate. But getting those ad buys approved wasn’t always easy. Lewis recalled that most of these clients initially balked at buying time on Soul Train “because it was difficult for them to conceive of a need to talk to African American consumers on a direct basis. But as the show became more popular, the advertisers were anxious to be on Soul Train . . . Anything you do well in the African American community broadens the reach i
nto the general community, so that the advertisers always felt that doing a very good job in the black community paid double benefits.”
As an architect of commercials that appeared on the show, Lewis strongly believes that they were crucial in reshaping the image of blacks in the American mind.
Lewis: Positive views of black life and experience were almost never seen in the mass media. A great deal of harm had been done to people of color, and the advertising industry had to be forced to bring people into the communication industry . . . The idea of the visual representation of blacks in a positive way was very necessary to move forward in this country. I was bred within the print medium; television was a far more effective medium to present us in a bigger and better way. I think that can also be attributed to Don, to Soul Train, because that’s all there was.
When model Beverly Johnson appeared in an Afro Sheen commercial, she was a beneficiary of this new world of black TV advertising.
Johnson: That’s where as a model you made money in advertising. So being in an Afro Sheen ad was a big payday and made me popular in the community. It was a product that actually addressed the Afro, to make sure our Afros were shining and gleaming and beautiful. It was really important that Madison Avenue finally got that they had to start doing marketing particularly for the African American community. And that’s why that product was the all-time most successful African American beauty product ever.
The Roots’ Ahmir Thompson, a longtime user of Afro Sheen, says his favorite of the product’s ads featured abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. “This young student is imagining he’s having a conversation with Frederick Douglass,” he said. “And the ghost of Frederick Douglass is sort of looking at him with that stern look. Basically he tells the student his ’fro is not tight, and that if he used Afro Sheen, he’d be tighter. So, of course, the guy applies it to his hair, it does a fade-out, and comes back with his quall perfect. And then Frederick Douglass, poof, disappears. Education and entertainment and business savvy in one fell swoop.”
In September 1965, the Laufer brothers, Chuck and Ira, founded a teen-appeal magazine called Tiger Beat. Its first issue featured the white soul singers the Righteous Brothers, British invasion band Herman’s Hermits, and TV music show host Lloyd Thaxton, along with a laundry list of mid-sixties pop stars, some we remember (the Beatles, the Beach Boys) and many we don’t (Freddy and the Dreamers, Derek Taylor, Jan and Dean). There is a strong Anglophile bias to the names on the list, with young British bands then the hottest craze in pop.
Six years later, in 1971—that busy year of black media expansion—the owners of Tiger Beat started a new magazine they titled Right On!, the two words being the official phrase of affirmation for early-1970s black youth. The big reason Right On! was created was the Jackson Five, who had begun their career with four No. 1 singles. There had never been a run like that by a teen-appeal black group. Moreover, here were five handsome, big-Afroed boys, beautifully styled by Motown, to appeal to young women and be admired by young men. In the 1960s, Motown had called itself the Sound of Young America. With the Jackson Five, the label was providing the look of young America as well.
Although a few groups, white and black, tried to imitate the Jackson Five’s youthful appeal (the Osmond Brothers, the Five Stairsteps, the Sylvers), the dancers of Soul Train were the next-biggest beneficiary of Right On!’s existence. “The reason we featured so many of the dancers in the magazine was because fan magazines are always using mail as a barometer as to what they should cover,” said Cynthia Horner, a Californian who joined the magazine working in the mail room and quickly rose to be its editor. “The Soul Train dancers started getting fan letters.”
Lloyd Boston, the twenty-first-century style guru with four best-selling books to his credit and innumerable TV appearances, was a regular purchaser of Right On! while he was growing up in New Jersey. “It wasn’t beautifully produced, but you didn’t know that when you were eleven or twelve,” he recalled. “All you know is you saw big full-page photos of your heartthrobs, and you saw the celebrities that you knew and loved in pull-out posters in the middle . . . You would learn more about the people you watched on mute, basically, because they never really spoke. They just moved and expressed themselves with their moves and their clothes. [Right On!] was almost like our own little portable Soul Train.”
To emphasize this connection between the show and the magazine, dancers would often be hired to write for Right On! For a time in the 1970s, popular dancer Little Joe Chism wrote a column called “And That’s the Tea,” “tea” being LA slang at the time for gossip, which mostly related happenings at Hollywood parties.
Horner developed an up-close and personal relationship with the dancers that would continue for several decades. “We would hang out a lot in Hollywood,” Horner said. “Go to the beach sometimes. The parks. I just wanted to find out more about them because I was so fascinated with all these people that had such good heads on their shoulders and had such a sense of style. Back in those days, we didn’t have fashion stylists or wardrobe coordinators. So these dancers would just figure out on their own what looked good on them, what would attract the most attention on camera.”
Right On! was there from the beginning with Soul Train and would play a crucial role in the elevation of several later Soul Train dancers from TV stars to recording stars. But Horner’s comments lead us to look at the third pillar of Soul Train’s early appeal.
Chapter 7
Stylin’
OVER THE years, whenever Soul Train is used as a pop culture reference—be it in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988 or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in 1994 or the Charlie’s Angels movie in 2000—it always evokes a time of platform shoes, applejack caps, and bell-bottoms, as if the show exists as a style time capsule of 1970s funkiness. The holy trinity of Soul Train’s appeal was music, dance, and fashion: both the Soul Train Gang and the performing guest artist let loose with freaky, fantastic threads that have been much imitated, parodied, but never quite duplicated.
One of the future fashion figures influenced by Soul Train was a white kid from Corpus Christi, Texas, named Todd Oldham, who became a force in American fashion after being named top new fashion talent by the Council of Fashion Designers in 1991. Oldham’s playful vision, both in design and on camera, have made him a staple of American runways and national TV. His work as former creative director for Old Navy, his line for Target, and his role as a host for shows on MTV and Bravo speak to Oldham’s mass appeal.
Labelle’s flamboyant dress was matched by the intensity of their Soul Train performances.
He recalled growing up in Texas in the 1960s and 1970s “when the color lines were not quite as blurry as they are now,” but that “thankfully, for that great moment that Soul Train was on, everything was cool. I can’t tell you how many line dances my sister and I did down the living room with the TV.”
As a child, Oldham was developing his own sense of what constituted good fashion sense, and Soul Train helped define it for him.
Oldham: Loads and loads of high-waisted pants were sort of the moment for Soul Train, a very long moment actually. Whether you were a guy or a girl, it just worked. You could do anything in them. I think the manufacturer was called Angel Flight, and their trick was that they cut pants without side seams. The seams went up the front and kind of arched on the back for extra movement. But you had to wear it with your great little puffy shirt and your short elastic things. All through the seventies, those super-high-waisted pants really worked. I know Soul Train helped magnify it, but I think it was a style that had been resonating for a while. Up until about the mid-1970s is when we lost this mass cooperation with our public psyche. At that point seventy-year-old insurance men were wearing pants the same as a young kid. We don’t get that cooperation anymore. So you had everybody tweaking and interpreting one silhouette.
Bright colors were a huge part of the 1970s Soul Train fashion palette, which was happening in mainstream design but “real
ly kind of reflects what was going on in ethnic fashion,” Oldham believes.
Oldham: It started making acceptable things like tighter clothes on men and some of those colors. I mean the colors are kind of freaky. It’s hard to talk people into wearing lime pantsuits now. It was a lot easier at that time, apparently. There was always a kind of simple classic form with the clothes on Soul Train, but there was always a kind of unusual detail, like some of the embroideries. Always had some sort of ‘I visited Morocco’ thing going on. And then there were the colors. Everything was so seriously turned up. Like weird, off colors. Like a giant pancreas on the stage. I don’t know if it was propriety or what exactly made people’s decisions, but it was a much more free approach. It was daring, but they didn’t seem to be as concerned at trying to be acceptable.
Classic seventies fashion and hair.
A feature that really caught the embryonic designer was that many couples on the show wore the same outfits. Oldham says, “People were there together. That’s what made it work. It kind of magnified the moves when your outfits are the same, and it wasn’t exactly androgynous dressing, even though they’re the same clothes.”
Oldham’s eye for style made him fascinated by Don Cornelius’s choices. His thoughts are not always flattering, but they are amusing.
The Hippest Trip in America Page 8
