New jack swing would be the last great innovation in R&B music before hip-hop became the mainstream of black pop music. Moreover, it would be the last big movement in the music he loved that Don would preside over as Soul Train’s host.
Chapter 18
New Hosts
AT THE dawn of the 1990s, the Los Angeles that gave rise to Soul Train was receding into history, and love, peace, and soul was not on the city’s agenda. Tom Bradley, the black mayor elected in the aftermath of the Watts riots and serving the last of five terms in office, was generally viewed as a distant figure by both white and black residents, totally out of touch with Los Angeles’s current challenges. Complaints of police brutality against members of the black community, not dissimilar to those voiced back in the sixties, intensified as the LAPD waged war against the Bloods and Crips, two loosely organized gangs whose reckless gun violence had claimed thousands of lives since the introduction of crack cocaine to the metropolis in the mid-eighties. Some days the Los Angeles Times’s Metro section read like dispatches from a war zone. LA-based rappers like NWA, Ice-T, and Ice Cube had made the region seem like a powder keg in their recordings.
These rhymes proved prophetic when, in the aftermath of Rodney King’s beating by a crew of policemen and their subsequent trial and acquittal, an uprising and riot starting in late April 1992 sent shock waves through the city and the nation. Many of the city’s enduring black institutions found it hard to survive in this contentious new environment. One significant casualty was Maverick’s Flat, once one of Los Angeles’s hottest entertainment destinations but now, like many of the businesses on once-bustling Crenshaw Boulevard, finding business crippled by the fear of gangs and guns. The club, so essential to the birth of Soul Train, would float in and out of operation throughout the nineties.
Quietly but steadily, black folks were beginning to abandon LA, either moving east to the more affordable Inland Empire or back down South, where their families had originally migrated from, an exodus that continues to this day. Just as a slew of movies suggested (Colors, Boyz N the Hood, South Central, Menace II Society), the City of Angels was no longer viewed as a promised land for working-class black families, but rather as a ghetto with sunshine.
In the world of black entertainment on TV, there was great change afoot, the roots of which go back to a Soul Train taping in 1981 when Arsenio Hall, a young comedian from Cleveland, made his first national TV appearances, performing stand-up on two episodes. Throughout the 1980s, Hall, a tall, big-eyed man with a conspiratorial delivery and an easy laugh, built his career in comedy and developed close bonds with other young comedians including Robert Townsend, Keenen Ivory Wayans, and superstar Eddie Murphy, forming a loose collective who’d be labeled the Black Pack by the news media. Hall came to national prominence in 1986 when he hosted the last two seasons of the long-running syndicated dance show Solid Gold. In the late 1980s, when Fox began its efforts to launch a fourth television network, a career-changing opportunity would come Hall’s way. The network started The Late Show to compete with Johnny Carson’s long-running Tonight Show on NBC. When Fox clashed with original host Joan Rivers and she quit, it tried several replacements in her slot before giving Hall a shot. Over the course of thirteen weeks, Hall developed a balance of contemporary irreverence, black slang, and old-school TV host obsequiousness to bring a fresh take on late-night television.
Fox, which had invested heavily in black talent with the shows In Living Color and Roc, should have locked Hall into a long-term contract; instead Hall slipped away, and in 1988 he played a key supporting role in the Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America before signing on with Paramount for his own syndicated late-night show. Debuting in January 1989, The Arsenio Hall Show was, for its time, as important as Soul Train had been nearly twenty years earlier. During the broadcast’s five-year run, Hall captured the glamour of black popular culture at just the moment that hip-hop was going pop, new jack swing was invigorating R&B, and a wave of black film was creating new stars.
Though he didn’t feature dancers, Hall’s show made great use of his Los Angeles home base and his intimacy with the stars of the age, from Murphy to Prince to basketball’s Magic Johnson to starlets like Paula Abdul. He embraced hip-hop’s talents, giving Snoop Dogg, MC Hammer, and many others their first serious national exposure. When Magic Johnson wanted to talk to the nation about acquiring the HIV virus in 1992, he chose to sit down with Hall. When Bill Clinton was running for president, he went on Hall’s show to play sax and burnish his image.
While not direct competition for Soul Train, Hall’s cutting-edge style as the host of a popular black show made Cornelius’s enterprise seem locked into an outmoded black hipness. So at the start of the 1993–94 season, after hosting Soul Train for almost twenty-five years, Don made the fateful announcement that he was exiting his on-camera role. When asked what finally pushed him off the stage, Don cited the example of Jim Brown, the great running back who quit the Cleveland Browns after winning the National Football League championship in 1966.
“Jim Brown, the Hall of Fame football player, is a good friend,” Cornelius said. “I always admired him for having the courage to get out of the game before somebody said retire. People didn’t have to say, ‘Why don’t Jim Brown hang up his cleats?’ I was afraid of someone saying, ‘Why don’t that old brother Don Cornelius put the microphone down and let somebody else do that?’ I ran into people that said, ‘Man, you should still be hosting the show, because you’re good.’ I think to myself, that’s the one who would be saying, ‘Why don’t that old brother put down the mic and get off the stage.’ That’s the one.”
In theory, it was a smart move. Cornelius had little emotional connection to any of the acts then appearing on the show, and quite a few were young enough to be his grandchildren. But replacing himself was easier said than done. Though Soul Train would continue on air for another thirteen years until 2006, you could argue that when Cornelius left the podium, the show was over.
Episode #735 of the 1993–94 season was the first not hosted by its founder and producer. Kim Wayans, a star on Fox’s In Living Color and the female member of the comedic Wayans clan, would be the first to attempt to fill his spot. The rest of that season’s thirty-one shows would be hosted by comedians (Steve White, Lewis Dix, John Witherspoon, George Wallace), actresses (Sheryl Lee Ralph, Paula Jai Parker, Ella Joyce), actors (Mario Van Peebles, John Henton, Morris Chestnut), and one very poised model with a TV future (Tyra Banks).
The 1994–95 season would be heavy on models, with Banks returning and a long list of beauties to follow: Karen Alexander, Roshumba Williams, Lana Ogilvie, Veronica Webb, Beverly Peele, Gail O’Neill, Cynthia Bailey (a future Real Housewife of Atlanta), Michelle Griffin (who would go on to marry the Roots’ Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter), and Waris Dirie. If you were black, tall, and had appeared in Elle magazine or the J.Crew catalog, you could have hosted Soul Train that season.
But just because Don was offstage, it didn’t mean he wasn’t still an on-set presence. Gail O’Neill, a very proper Jamaican American girl from New York who had a long career in modeling and later as a TV host, doesn’t remember many details of the show she hosted (episode #783). Nor does she remember the three acts featured (69 Boyz, Tanya Blount, Y?N-Vee). What she does remember is Cornelius hovering around and not interacting much with her until she voiced a few complaints.
“I saw these cute little girls with low-slung pants,” O’Neill recalled, “and I could see their G-strings. I pointed that out to someone, and Don was immediately, ‘They need to pull up their pants.’ ” The model also objected to the scramble board question about a man “who married and murdered. The answer was O.J. Simpson, and that was very distasteful to me. Don had the question changed.” Despite being on a show that was still on TV around the nation, O’Neill recalls getting more reaction from appearing in the J.Crew clothing catalog than from hosting the show, a reflection both of how few blacks were still appearing in mainstream f
ashion and how much the show’s impact on pop culture had fallen. She was paid around $2,000 for hosting, a check that wasn’t sent to her agent but arrived at her apartment in a handwritten envelope. “I thought it was junk mail ’cause it didn’t have a return address and was handwritten,” she said. “But my doorman opened it and said there was a check inside.” O’Neill, who has gone on to appear on network shows and hosted a program on the H&G network, is glad she did Soul Train, but it isn’t a memory she reflects on very much.
Though the show lacked Cornelius’s on-camera presence for most of the 1990s, it was still a strong attraction for emerging artists. Among those anxious to appear on Soul Train were a female vocal trio from Houston named Destiny’s Child who had a single out in 1997, “No, No, No,” that featured Wyclef Jean. Mathew Knowles, father of lead singer Beyoncé and the group’s manager, was pushing to get his new group on Soul Train, but “Don’s policy was that you had to have an album out before you can be on his show,” and the album wasn’t scheduled for release until February 1998.
Knowles: So what we cleverly did was package “No, No, No” with Wyclef as the second song. The moment I met Don, and he talked to me, he was feeling me out. In his deep voice: “I like you. You are going to do really good in this industry.” I guess he saw something in me and we connected from that moment. He smiled at the fact that we were clever in getting Destiny’s Child on Soul Train. That was Destiny’s Child’s first-ever TV performance.
Mathew Knowles was a huge Soul Train fan, and it was appointment viewing in his Houston home. Not surprisingly, Soul Train pops up in the careers of two performing daughters. Beyoncé, wearing a 1970s Afro, did a Soul Train parody scene when she appeared in 2002’s Austin Powers in Goldmember, while Solange’s second album, Sol-Angel & the Hadley St. Dreams, has a retro 1970s soul sound, and the supporting videos were vibrant Soul Train tributes. That connection between the Knowles family and Cornelius would eventually benefit both as Destiny’s Child and, later, Beyoncé would be honored with multiple Soul Train Awards as well as lifetime achievement awards.
Among the many emerging stars who’d make their first national television appearance on Soul Train in the nineties were up-and-coming stars Erykah Badu and John Legend. But with every year the number of stations carrying the show seemed to shrink, and its longtime distributor, Tribune Entertainment, became less committed. Following the 1996–97 season, Don abandoned the host-by-committee approach and went with a series of hosts who’d handle the duties for a season or two. These Don replacements would include comic Mystro Clark, soap opera heartthrob Shemar Moore, and actor Dorian Gregory, none of whom had the gravity, charisma, or flair to make the show cool again—or to shake Don’s shadow. Meanwhile on BET, first Donnie Simpson and later a series of youthful female and male hosts on the daily broadcast of 106 & Park became the new Don Cornelius as they broadcast hit videos on the national cable channel and became the de facto faces of televised black music.
The 1,117th and final original episode was televised on March 25, 2006. But through 2008, episodes of classic shows from 1974 to 1987 were still in syndication, testimony to the truth that Soul Train’s past was richer than its present.
Chapter 19
Selling Soul
KENARD GIBBS has vivid memories of growing up in Chicago and watching the local version of Soul Train. “My mother was a schoolteacher and she knew many of the kids on the show from her high school English class,” Gibbs fondly recalled. “She’d say, ‘That’s Betty. No wonder she was all dressed up today.’ ” For years Gibbs has treasured these moments he shared with his mother, never suspecting that one day he’d own a piece of Soul Train. He’d tell this story to Don Cornelius some forty years later as they were negotiating the sale of the television show. At Williams College, Gibbs befriended another future black media entrepreneur in Peter Griffin. They stayed in touch as Gibbs attended Northwestern to get his master’s in business, worked for advertising giant Leo Burnett Worldwide, and then served from 1999 to 2006 as the president of Vibe/Spin Ventures, LLC, where he oversaw both the magazine and several television ventures (an award show, a weekly lifestyle show).
So when Gibbs left to start his own business, he hooked up with Griffin and Anthony Maddox, a former business advisor to Sean Combs, to form MadVision Entertainment. The trio got a TV deal at Showtime for a half-hour show titled Whiteboyz in the Hood and a DVD deal with Lionsgate studios, and they were working on a deal to aggregate black content online when they went in search of additional funding to expand. At the recommendation of Vibe CEO Robert Miller, the MadVision partners met with executives at InterMedia Partners, a private equity group founded in 2005 with seven funds aimed at investing media properties in cable, publishing, television, and broadband.
That initial meeting was cordial, but MadVision’s need for $7 million was just too small a deal for InterMedia. If MadVision had a serious acquisition, they were told to come back. Just before the meeting broke up, Gibbs mentioned how valuable the Soul Train library was. “There are very few libraries like it,” Gibbs explained. “It was a unique asset. At the time Don had only allowed fifty-two episodes in syndication. That meant some eleven hundred or so hours of shows had been shown only once. That’s thirty-five years of history.”
The downside of the Soul Train library is that Cornelius had not made rights deals other than for the shows’ initial airing. To exploit these episodes, buyers would have to clear all the music masters and song publishing. Still, the all-white executives of InterMedia, all old enough to have seen Soul Train in its prime or at least aware of its reputation, were excited by the opportunity. So MadVision reached out to Cornelius’s longtime business advisor Clarence Avant.
The timing of their inquiry was perfect. Sometime in 2006, during the period when Soul Train was doing its last broadcast, Cornelius had decided he’d sell the brand outright if the right offer came along. Avant cites an incident involving Mary J. Blige as the tipping point. She was supposed to meet with Cornelius, “but she never called, never showed up,” said Avant. “After thirty-five years of the longest-running syndicated show on TV, Don began to realize, despite all of the people he had helped, the music scene had moved on. He told me, ‘I want you to get me out of this shit.’ ”
Three Japanese businessmen and their interpreter came to Los Angeles to meet with Cornelius and his son Tony, but the gathering was a bust. “After listening to thirty minutes of the pitch in Japanese, Don said, ‘Tell them there is no deal, no kinda way,” Avant said. Time Warner, when Richard Parsons was its chairman, had shown serious interest. “Parsons called up and introduced me to the cable distribution guys. We met four times. Don was very excited by it. Don wanted a Soul Train channel.” However, those talks ended when Parsons stepped down from his position at Time Warner at the end of 2007. There was a feeler from black-owned TV One, but Cornelius wasn’t interested. Similarly, MTV Networks expressed interest, but, again, Cornelius didn’t want to meet with them. Of his friend, Avant said, “If Don didn’t wanna do something, it wasn’t gonna happen.”
So when MadVision appeared on the scene, Soul Train was still available. The roadblock was the plain-spoken Avant. “I didn’t want Don to sell to them,” he told me. “I wasn’t convinced these young guys would be able to put together a strong enough deal.” Even after the MadVision team and InterMedia senior partner Peter Kern flew out to meet with Avant, the veteran dealmaker wasn’t sure. Finally he took them seriously, and they went back and forth on the deal for nine months.
“Don was very reserved during the back-and-forth of the negotiations,” Gibbs remembers. “The best part for us was to have lunch with him and just listen to him tell stories about the show. I don’t think he really believed it would happen until the money hit his account.” Cornelius called the three MadVision principals in May 2008 when the deal was done. “He told us we must carry on the Soul Train name, and that he appreciated the fact that we could get this done,” said Gibbs. “Don was already a ric
h man, but this was a life-changing transaction.”
In the years since InterMedia financed the MadVision purchase of the Soul Train brand, a lot has changed internally. While maintaining equity in Soul Train Holdings, Griffin and Maddox are no longer actively involved in managing the asset. InterMedia sold a substantial share of its Soul Train equity to one of Magic Johnson’s funds, enough so that the basketball great turned businessman is now chairman of Soul Train Holdings.
In terms of sustaining the brand’s relevance, the deal is still a work in progress. The Soul Train Awards have been revived on BET’s adult-oriented Centric Channel. VH1’s documentary The Hippest Trip in America (from which many interviews in this book were culled) not only was a ratings winner for the network but has played in film festivals around the globe. An annual Soul Train cruise has proven popular and, in the District of Columbia, Soul Train–themed lottery tickets went on sale in 2013.
But the big dream of Soul Train Holdings is to bring the weekly show back. Reality TV wizard Mark Burnett was involved at one point, but he couldn’t sell his concept. “Our goal is to have Soul Train on a network,” Gibbs said. The old syndication model that Soul Train used is outmoded in the twenty-first century. “We wanna keep some of the elements that made the show a classic, but make it a contemporary show that can compete with American Idol or anything else on the air today.”
The Hippest Trip in America Page 20
