The Hippest Trip in America

by Nelson George

  A big issue for any Soul Train reboot is dealing with how social dance is now spread via the Internet. The explosive and, thankfully, brief life of the “Harlem Shake” videos in early 2013 aptly displayed how a novelty dance can travel the globe. Ditto “Gangnam Style,” a dance video by Korean MC Psy that blew past one billion views on YouTube and spawned more tribute videos than there are people in Montana. For innovation in black dance, the place to be is definitely YouTube, where new regional styles are uploaded and then imitated nationally. A great example is jookin’, a balletic Memphis-bred style of movement that incorporates en pointe (in sneakers) alongside elements of old-school popping and locking with hints of hip-hop breaking. Dancers like Lil Buck have gone from battles on Beale Street to performing with classical cello superstar Yo-Yo Ma via his remarkable videos.

  Director Kevin Swain interviews Don Cornelius for the 2010 VH1 documentary The Hippest Trip in America.

  Since late in 2012, Magic Johnson has become more of a spokesman for the Soul Train brand, going on TV and radio to talk about his hopes for its future, speaking both about trying to launch a new weekly show and pursuing a biographical film about Don Cornelius. The basketball great, who two years ago brokered a deal to buy baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers, is an able businessman with impeccable contacts in the entertainment and business worlds. He is well positioned to fulfill the mission that MadVision began in acquiring Soul Train, but time will tell.

  Chapter 20

  The Hippest Trip in America

  WHEN DON Cornelius sold Soul Train in the spring of 2008, he was seventy-one years old. He was a rich man who’d just become a very rich man. What would he do with all this new leisure time? He talked to several writers (including myself) about helping him write an autobiography, but apparently it was never completed. There were conversations about a Soul Train movie, but that didn’t get traction at any studio. He met with John Singleton and pitched a Soul Train–themed television show, using the Soul Train tapings as a setting for tales of Los Angeles during the seventies. It was a promising concept, but it, too, got lost in the Hollywood wilderness, a place where black-themed series in the twenty-first century were now as rare as they were pre–Diahann Carroll’s Julia. In many ways the book Don never wrote was the VH1 documentary The Hippest Trip in America, which was the highest-rated entry in the network’s Rock Doc series. In 2009, Cornelius was the first person interviewed by the episode’s director, J. Kevin Swain. It was a three-hour interview, and while nothing was expressly off-limits, Don didn’t want questions about his personal life, and, as we’ve seen, he didn’t want to get into his long-ago issues with Dick Clark.

  Don Cornelius, 1936–2012. Rest in peace.

  The dynamic dances first showcased on Soul Train live on around the globe.

  It was a very relaxed interview, largely because of Cornelius and Swain’s relationship. Swain had worked in production on fifteen Soul Train Awards shows, from the late 1980s up to 2003; he had also been involved with two Soul Train Lady of Soul broadcasts and one comedy special that Cornelius produced for syndication. “We had a kind of father-and-son relationship,” Swain said. “I was always getting into trouble and being called into the office by Don, being sat down and told, ‘I’m gonna tell you what you did wrong this time.’ ” For years Cornelius had always told Swain, “as long as you are on my set, I’m the boss,” but on the day of the shooting, he was on Swain’s set, where Swain was the boss. “Don told me, ‘I guess you are the boss now,’ and was very good about it.”

  It was quite a challenge to squeeze all those years of television shows into sixty-four minutes. Chaka Khan got one line. Sly Stone got one line. Patti LaBelle, two lines. Two key friends of the show, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder, could never get scheduled during the six-month shoot and edit. The producers could never pin down Oprah Winfrey. Cornelius very much wanted Marvin Gaye represented in the documentary, because Don considered him one of his closest friends in the business. But according to Swain, Cornelius was “appreciative of [the final film]. Believe me, Don was not one to bite his tongue. If he didn’t like it, we’d have known.”

  Having known his subject as a boss for over a decade, it’s interesting to hear Swain’s take on Cornelius post–Soul Train. He said, “At the interview and whenever I saw him, he was upbeat and smiling. Looked like a burden had been lifted.” Along with Cornelius, Swain did a number of promotional events for the documentary, including a 2011 Don Cornelius weekend in Chicago where a Don Cornelius Boulevard was named. “Don just seemed to be having a good time and was very open whenever he spoke in public.”

  “I’d see Don around Los Angeles in the years after the documentary. I’d see him at Neiman Marcus with his wife, shopping and eating. He’d drive around with a young wife and his yellow Rolls-Royce, and they looked like a very happy couple.”

  The Hippest Trip in America has been aired on VH1’s Viacom sister stations, BET and Centric, as well as shown at festivals in Berlin, Barcelona, and two cities in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (though because of the many music-clearance issues with the show, it has yet to appear on DVD or Blu-ray). Despite those limitations, Swain is convinced “the doc cemented the legacy of the show. What a great, great show it was. Now you know what we really miss.”

  Chapter 21

  Last Days

  IF YOU Google images of Don Cornelius and Viktoria Chapman, you’ll see a gallery of red-carpet photos of Don in well-tailored suits and designer glasses, his salt-and-pepper hair cut into a dignified curl (far different from his huge Afro days). Viktoria is a pale, statuesque Russian blonde in a tight-fitting dress with lots of visible cleavage. They were married in 2001 and make a handsome May-September, ebony-ivory couple. In Beverly Hills circles, couples made up of older rich men and younger beautiful women are as common as palm leaves falling onto convertible car hoods.

  There isn’t much known about Chapman’s background. She is a former Miss Ukraine who modeled in Russia and had a daughter, also named Viktoria, from a previous relationship. She apparently appeared in a couple of soft-core porn films before meeting Don. Even folks who knew Cornelius well apparently didn’t get to know her well. “It was Hollywood,” said one old friend. “No one cares, really.”

  That may be true in general, but certainly in the case of Soul Train’s founder, there were many who questioned the marriage. But for several years the relationship seemed to be working, and the two were often seen at his longtime haunts, like the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he had a charge card and a regular table.

  Unfortunately, Don did not spend his retirement years in quiet contentment. Around 2004 Rosie Perez, by then an established actress, was dining at Spago in West Hollywood when he walked over. He was there with his wife, and he was very happy to see Rosie. They exchanged phone numbers, and she called him the next day. “We laughed about our run-ins and stuff that happened on the show,” Perez said. But her overriding memory of the conversation was “that he told me he felt very lonely.”

  In 2007, Chapman filed for divorce and had two restraining orders placed against her husband. In 2008 he was arrested at his Mulholland Drive house after being pepper-sprayed by Chapman multiple times following a heated argument with his estranged wife. In court records, he’s quoted saying, “Although she instigated the confrontation by shouting insults and profanities very close to my face, and even though the incident itself involved mutual acts of aggression against me, her injuries were very apparent. My injuries were to my eyes and face and not apparent because of the darkness of my skin.”

  He was formally charged with spousal abuse and initially pleaded not guilty before changing his plea to no contest. Cornelius was placed on thirty-six-month probation, was ordered to take a fifty-two-week domestic battery course, do three hundred hours of community service, and stay one hundred yards away from the site of the incident. Their divorce became final in May 2009. “I am seventy-two years old,” he wrote in court papers, “I have significant health issues.
I want to finalize this divorce before I die.” In the settlement, he was ordered to pay $10,000 a month in spousal support, buy his ex-wife a home not exceeding $1,095,000, and pay tuition fees for his adopted daughter.

  In the wake of the divorce, Cornelius’s health, physical and mental, was a focus of his friends. He was definitely suffering. He moved more slowly. Spoke more slowly. Couldn’t drive anymore. Yet outwardly his spirit seemed strong. Businessman and longtime friend Danny Bakewell had lunch with him in December 2011 and recalled, “We were talking about family and friends. It wasn’t about how terrible everything is. I didn’t get the impression he had any major health problems or concerns.” Longtime supporter and soul legend Gladys Knight told CNN, “Last time I saw him, he was pretty sick. He had lost a lot of weight, but he still had that thing about him.” Clarence Avant, who dined with him the day before Don died, recalled Don being in the same good mood.

  But Don, an icon of cool who’d learned long ago to mask his inner life when necessary, was clearly not at peace. Some speculate that the very messy divorce shattered his self-confidence and embarrassed him. Others suggest his failing health, including a cancer scare and lingering effects of his brain surgery, made him despondent. Or perhaps he was just uncomfortable with getting old.

  Late on the night of February 1, 2012, Tony Cornelius received a phone call from his father. “It was a call of urgency,” he told CBS’s Gayle King, “and I came to his home immediately.” When Tony arrived, he found his father lying lifeless on the floor. Police were called around 4:00 A.M. and found Don with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His body was taken to Cedars-Sinai hospital where, at 5:00 A.M. on February 2, he was pronounced dead. Don Cornelius was seventy-five.

  Don’s body was cremated on February 9 and the funeral service was held two days later inside the Forest Lawn Memorial Park’s Hall of Liberty, where a three-hour service featured tributes from the celebrity world Don thrived in, including words by Smokey Robinson, Jody Watley, George Duke, Cedric the Entertainer, and Barry White’s widow, Glodean. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, his old friend from Chicago, delivered an affectionate and lengthy eulogy, but he captured Don’s importance quite succinctly with these two lines: “He’s right up there with any civil rights leader. He gave people a chance to feel good about themselves.”

  The Grammy Awards were to be held the next day in Los Angeles, and the show’s producers were preparing a short tribute to Don Cornelius for the telecast. But the tragic death of Whitney Houston at the Beverly Hills Hotel the night of February 11 forced the producers to put together a hurried tribute to the multiplatinum pop superstar that preempted the memorial for Don. He was an innovator in the business, but Houston was a huge star who died a tabloid death. Given the difficult choice, the people behind the show went with the bigger name.

  The next day, across the continent, outside in the dead of winter, a party was held at the base of a set of steps associated with a fictional fighter that proved a heartfelt memorial. In front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the bottom of “the Rocky steps,” over the course of four hours, a couple thousand people danced to the sounds of DJ Touch Tone in a Guinness Book of World Records record-setting Soul Train line. MFSB’s Soul Train theme started things off, but jams like Chuck Brown’s “Bustin’ Loose,” the Jacksons’ “Can You Feel It,” James Brown’s “Funky Good Time,” and Maze featuring Frankie Beverly’s “Before I Let Go” kept the party flowing.

  The mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, a baldheaded, goateed, fifty-four-year-old black man who grew up with Soul Train, started the proceedings with a collective chant of “We love you Don Cornelius!” followed by his version of the show’s trademark “We are on the Soul Train!” opening. The mayor didn’t dance, but he did go down the makeshift dance floor—really just two strings of rope lined up half a block long—and glad-handed in prime campaign form.

  The Soul Train line record of 211 had been held by students at a Berkeley, California, high school. That might not seem like a lot of people until you consider that the Soul Train lines on the show itself probably never had that many people lined up, and perhaps only a quarter of that number actually made it on air.

  The dancing this time was not spectacular. There were no Tyrone the Bones or Don Campbells or Jody Watleys or Rosie Perezes in the bunch. Most were, to some degree, bundled up. But there were some bold folks who wore Afro wigs in place of wool caps and bits of glitter along with gloves. They were mostly black, but whites, Asians, and Latinos were among the folks who shook, shimmed, and slid down the line as they were phoned, videoed, and counted for the persnickety folks at the Guinness Book of World Records, who would officially certify 291 of the thousand or so who danced.

  Not as well publicized but just as powerful was a tribute to Don organized by Marco De Santiago and held at a reopened Maverick’s Flat, where several generations of Soul Train dancers shared stories and danced hard and long to classic tracks. Damita Jo Freeman, Tyrone Proctor, Thelma Davis, Don Campbell, and most of the dancers who made the show famous showed up at their old haunt. A highlight of the evening was Lakeside’s Mark Wood performing “Fantastic Voyage” with his wife, Sharon Hall, and the other dancers joining him onstage as if the classic funk jam captured the spirit of the wonderful experience they’d all shared. The dancers vowed to meet annually at Maverick’s Flat to celebrate Don, Soul Train, and their continuing sense of community. Many of these same dancers have been contacted by the Smithsonian Institution about contributing clothes and memorabilia to the new African American history wing to open in a few years, a prospect that fills them with pride.

  All this activity, organized by fans and folks who lived Soul Train firsthand, reflect a warm looking back and a fun sense of nostalgia, but not a signal that the show’s legacy will endure. Yet that would be a shortsighted view. Daft Punk, two visionary French electronic dance music producer-writers, released Random Access Memories, 2013’s hottest album, which was a rich blend of classic seventies and eighties grooves with twenty-first-century electronic flavor. The past and present mesh beautifully in Daft Punk’s work. Inspired by the album, some clever video archivists reached back to Soul Train’s rich catalog of movement and meticulously matched them to the rhythms of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and “Give Life Back to Music,” putting the genius of Damita Jo, Jeffrey Daniel, and the scores of unknown but equally funky Soul Train dancers at the service of cutting-edge music. Hundreds of thousands have watched these videos at this writing, the majority of them young people from around the globe. The dance, the clothes, and the spirit of Soul Train still captivate, and they will, through live events and clever online video use, live on whenever people feel the need to boogie.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Soul Train documentary director Kevin Swain for his gracious assistance. Richard Gay and Brad Abramson of VH1 were great partners. Naomi Bragin, street dance scholar, gave me wonderful guidance. Ashley Mui helped with tons of details. Special thanks to my editor, Henry Ferris, and my agent, Sarah Lazin, for making this project happen.

  About the Author

  NELSON GEORGE is an author and filmmaker who specializes in documenting and celebrating African American culture. He has written several classic black music histories, including Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, and Hip Hop America. He also coedited The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul. His most recent novel is The Plot Against Hip Hop. He has also contributed major articles on the films The Help, Pariah, and 12 Years a Slave to the New York Times. George directed the HBO film Life Support as well as the VH1 documentary Finding the Funk.

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  Also by Nelson George

  FICTION

  Urban Romance

  Seduced

  One Woman Short

  Show & Tell

  Night Work

 
; The Accidental Hunter

  The Plot Against Hip Hop

  NONFICTION

  Where Did Our Love Go: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound

  The Death of Rhythm & Blues

  Elevating the Game

  Blackface

  Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture

  The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul (edited with Alan Leeds)

  City Kid: A Memoir

  Credits

  Cover design by Adam Johnson

  Cover photographs © by Soul Train Holdings

  Copyright

  VH1’s Rock Docs Soul Train: The Hippest Trip in America used with permission of VH1. © 2013 Viacom International Inc. All Rights Reserved. VH1 and all related titles and logos are trademarks of Viacom International Inc.

  THE HIPPEST TRIP IN AMERICA. Copyright © 2014 by Nelson George. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Chapter opener image © by Ron Dale/Shutterstock, Inc.