The Hippest Trip in America

by Nelson George

  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.’ ”

  Jenkins: I noticed her watching the show, of course. The eye went right to her because not only were the cameras on her a lot, but she’s beautiful. She’s not only that, but very bubbly, as she is now. Nothing has changed. She was smiley, happy, and just open. Plus she’s Chicago, so I knew she didn’t play around basically. So when I would travel I would always call or send a note or bring something back from my traveling.

  Years later Nieci still has jewelry, T-shirts, and other items Tomi sent her while traveling with Cameo. The two never married and they had other relationships over that time, but they have remained close. “I’ve always loved Tomi,” she said, “but sometimes you have to let people go, and you come back together when you’re more mature and you’re more settled, because I’m a no-nonsense person, and he’s a good boy now.”

  On episode #221 of the 1977–78 season, Smokey Robinson was the headline attraction. The secondary act was a baby band from Dayton, Ohio, named Lakeside, who had a ballad out called “If I Didn’t Have You” and were on the verge of signing with Dick Griffey’s SOLAR Records. But at the time they were just a bunch of young musicians from Dayton, Ohio, trying to make an impression.

  Lakeside lead singer Mark Wood had two important missions that day: to perform well and to make contact with Sharon Hill, one of the most prominent Soul Train dancers. She’d partnered earlier with the innovative Tyrone Proctor when they’d won a contest at American Bandstand in 1975. During her years on the show, Hill toured the country with other dancers as the Soul Train Gang and was regularly featured in Right On! magazine.

  Wood’s band was the product of a fantastic, underappreciated music scene in Dayton that would produce the Ohio Players, Slave, Roger and Zapp, and many other dynamic funk bands. So when they hit LA, Wood knew the band had chops. It was just a matter of paying dues. Getting on Soul Train, of course, was a career goal, but Wood was after more. “I had seen my wife in the show,” Wood recalled. “You see someone, and you say, ‘That’s the girl for me.’ I knew one day I’d meet her. I didn’t meet her until years later and we were on the show together. But I did choose her off the television.” Though Wood was determined to meet her, the young performer was apparently also shy. Instead of going over to her, Wood asked Chuck Johnson to pass along his number and ask her to call. Hill wasn’t interested.

  “I was too busy,” she said. “Chuck said, ‘Please call him. Just call him.’ I said, ‘I was raised in Texas, and the way I was raised, with ten sisters, my morals are different than California. So I finally called him. He said everything I wanted to hear. So I said, ‘Okay, we can go out.’ When we did it, we were like two peas in a pod. It was like we were meant.”

  Five years after that first date, they wer
e married and have had four children, two boys and two girls. Lakeside would enjoy its biggest sales success with the 1980 album Fantastic Voyage, the title track of which would be an R&B hit and then, redone by rapper Coolio in 1994, a top-three pop hit. The band still tours, and the singer and the dancer have lived happily ever after.

  Chapter 15

  Ahmir Thompson: Soul Train Fanatic

  IT IS a twenty-first-century Thursday night in hipster heaven: Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At a converted factory turned bowling alley/restaurant/nightclub named Brooklyn Bowl, a thousand revelers fill the dance floor. The crowd is mostly white but with a healthy percentage of blacks, Asians, and Latinos, dancing, drinking, and engaged in various forms of seduction.

  Looking down from an elevated DJ booth is Ahmir Thompson, known as Questlove, the drummer and leader of the hip-hop band the Roots, as well as musical director for Jimmy Fallon’s popular late-night NBC comedy show, a gig that has made him one of the most visible figures in popular music. He’s emerged as an in-demand DJ who gigs all over the world (schedule permitting), but he rarely misses this Thursday-night party, which he titled Bowl Train.

  This homage to Soul Train, along with Thompson’s trademark Afro, are not the only things that link him to the groovy 1970s. Unlike so many contemporary music makers who are, at best, ignorant of the past and sometimes too arrogant to look back, Thompson was profoundly shaped by his viewing of Don Cornelius’s brainchild. “The biggest love in my life, more than any career or woman—my mom probably places on top of that—but Soul Train is probably the biggest love of my life,” Thompson said passionately. “This show was my MTV, my BET. Things that people younger than me now take for granted, having access to music shows when they want it.”

  Thompson grew up in a house of music. His father, Lee Andrews, was the lead singer of Lee Andrews & the Hearts, a classic Philadelphia doo-wop group that had several hits, their biggest being “Tear Drops” in 1957, which reached No. 20 on the pop chart. Along with his wife, Jacqui, Andrews would also be part of a soul-era group called Congress Alley. Not fond of babysitters, the couple brought their son along with them to nighttime gigs and on tour. By age seven Thompson was drumming as part of their show, and by thirteen he was arranger and musical director for his parents.

  Despite this background, his parents enforced a very firm 8:30 bedtime for him, a rule that conflicted with the late-night airtimes of all the music shows, especially Soul Train, which came on at 1:00 A.M. on Philadelphia’s CNBC, a UHF channel. Because they were a musical family and their son loved music, they’d allow Thompson to get up at 12:50 A.M. to watch the show downstairs in the dark.

  The show-opening animation “actually scared the living daylights out of me,” he remembers. “It was hands down some of the most evil, engaging animation. I was so frightened and excited about the show all at the same time, and so it just became an obsession. There was no rewind button. The Betamax didn’t come out until 1979, so you pretty much had to use your memory to memorize everything.” Thompson wasn’t allowed to watch cartoons or sitcoms until he was thirteen, so Soul Train, and other music shows, were his childhood TV world. “Obviously, it affected me, because, you know, I go absolutely nowhere in this world without three computers and a bunch of hard drives with every Soul Train episode that I’ve ever collected in the last twelve years—because I show people,” said Thompson. “I force them [to watch] at gunpoint.”

  Eventually, Soul Train’s popularity in Philadelphia got the broadcast shifted to noon. As a result, Thompson was joined in his Soul Train viewing by various family members. “I guess I was the alarm,” he recalled. “There’s always that one person who had to let everyone know the segment before the Soul Train line came on. That was my job. Soul Train came on at twelve o’clock, so I guess the line was at twelve forty-five after the support act does their second song. You pretty much have to yell, ‘Aunt Sherrie! The Soul Train line is about to come on!’ They would gather around and watch it like it was old-time radio. I was the designated alarm, like the ice cream man was coming.”

  As he became a teenager, Thompson’s Soul Train obsession grew stronger. He had to see every show—even in the face of punishment.

  Thompson: Sometimes I had to weigh out the consequences if I got caught—am I willing to take an extra two weeks on top of what I got already? And you know, the answer is always yes. Usually on punishment weeks, I would have to just ease my Soul Train jones. We’re talking the early eighties. I would have to really devise a MacGyveresque-like system to watch the show. By Tuesday I would have to find a designated person in my school to record the show for me, so once off punishment, I could have access to what I missed—but that wasn’t good enough. You figure I would just leave well enough alone and say, “Okay, in three weeks, once my grades get better or whatever, I’ll watch the four episodes I missed.” There was no feeling in the world like eleven fifty A.M. on a Saturday when you know that your all-time favorite show is about to come on.

  You prep for it. You make sure everything is done. I make sure that my lessons were done, my drum lessons. I would take seven A.M. class on Saturday and get all that out the way and be home at eleven fifty just to be home and catch Soul Train. On weeks that I was on punishment, I would have to tell my next-door neighbor, who was also an avid watcher, to raise his volume up just a little bit so I could hear it through the wall. So I would press my ear against the wall and, if that wasn’t enough, next week I’ll tell him, Leave your bathroom window open, because I can see directly into their guest room. Turn on the guest television. They had a big television, and for some reason it worked.

  So Thompson could either watch it and not hear it or hear it and not watch it. “It’s one thing for your best friend to agree to it, but it’s another thing for your best friend’s parents to wonder why they’re blasting a Soul Train episode on two televisions at the loudest levels ever,” he said. “You know they’d always turn it off. I’d yell, ‘Turn it back on!’ He’d say, ‘My mom made me turn it off.’ ”

  Whenever that happened, Thompson turned his friend into his designated recorder.

  Thompson: I’d basically ask for a play-by-play of what happened as if it were a basketball game. Which, you know, by this point my obsession got to the point where it was past the dancing. What could you really ask about Soul Train details? What did Rosie Perez look like? Or what song did New Edition perform? The things that I was obsessed with most of Soul Train are the details. There were two episodes I was on punishment for that, coincidentally, Don had to choose the episode that I was on punishment for. He tried two new ideas. One was he did sort of a clear animation of the show. So instead of the normal intro where it’s clearly an animated sun and black background that eventually morphs into the studio, they did, I guess, two episodes in which they use some sort of digital effect so you can see both the studio and the animation going on at the same time. This is torture, because I’m not allowed to watch this for three weeks.

  That was the kind of stuff I was obsessed with. I wanted him to tell me how the digital box came down when announcing that Al Green was performing. How long did it stay there? Morris Day and Al Green have the longest record of seconds, the digital box. The digital box is what they show you when the guest is on. “Soul Train, the hippest trip in America. Guest stars Evelyn “Champagne” King, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and the Soul Train dancers!” One episode, and I don’t know why, but Morris Day stood there for like eight seconds. “With guest star Morris Day.” I was like, “Are you sure it’s eight seconds?” I made him get on the telephone. He said, “Listen to it.” That’s how crazy my obsession got.

  Because Thompson held on to his Afro well past the hairstyle’s 1980s expiration date, everyone in his neighborhood associated him with the Jackson Five.

  Thompson: I do remember the day that Michael Jackson premiered the robot on Soul Train. Only because it was similar to the effect he had ten years later when he did the moonwalk on Motown 25. All my
cousins, all next door, they saw it, and just instantly you had to do the robot. They would ask you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Because I held on to my Afro the longest of any adolescent, they’d be, “Yeah, you wanna be the Jackson Five.” I thought being the Jackson Five is more of an occupation than a birthright. No, I’m not gonna go through the loins of Joe and Katherine. I’m just gonna apply for the job.

  Thompson’s reaction to seeing James Brown on a 1974 show had humorous consequences. “That was the first time I saw James Brown control a microphone,” he says. “You know, watching him toss it back and forth. The only object that resembled a microphone, at least something with a pole and a platform to it, was our toilet plunger. So I would practice with a toilet plunger. Then my dad would be, ‘Boy, do you know where that has been?’ I would just drag it around the house, pretending that that toilet plunger was a microphone. Finally my dad was like, ‘No, you can’t play with this no more. It’s a hazard.’ ”

  While legions of fans around the world are obsessed with Soul Train, few have been able to so directly translate what they learned from the show into their work. For Thompson, “the shows that the artists were able to display their skill live were probably the most important performances on Soul Train. As far as live performance is concerned, hands down I believe that Al Green takes the cake. Actually, he has three live episodes. Many people don’t mention his 1972 performance where he did ‘Love and Happiness’ and did Kris Kristofferson’s ‘For the Good Times.’ Very powerful performance.”