Chapter 10

Jody and Jeffrey (and O’Bryan)

THERE IS no question that Don Cornelius is the most important figure to emerge from Soul Train. It was his idea, and his on-camera personality and off-camera decisions shaped the show. But the next three most important people in the show’s history are two dancers and a businessman, folks who actually made their biggest mark after they left the show. And all three of them did it together, capitalizing on an opportunity that eluded Don.

Jeffrey Daniel and Jody Watley were the coolest kids to grace Soul Train’s soundstage, while Dick Griffey was a behind-the-scenes force who would become one of the most important music moguls of the 1970s and 1980s. All would make their marks with a label called SOLAR Records, a company Cornelius helped found.

Back in 1971, Daniel and his family lived close to Denker Playground, where Soul Train was holding auditions, but Daniel was an adolescent then and knew nothing about the show. His real introduction to Soul Train happened after his mother relocated with him to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where on Saturdays, while munching on his morning cereal, he watched it religiously.

“I was a dancer, and I always did love dancing and music,” Daniel said. “Just to see these young black kids giving fun and just grooving. It was amazing. I’m watching Soul Train every week, and I was wondering, ‘Wait a minute. If Soul Train is in LA, why am I here?’ ”

Daniel wasn’t doing well in high school, so he borrowed money and hopped a plane back to Cali. As discussed in Tyrone Proctor’s dancer profile, Daniel began hanging out at Maverick’s Flat, where he became part of Tyrone Proctor’s crew and also witnessed Don Campbell’s locking innovations. Initially his dance partner was his older sister Joyce. Then he began dancing with a young woman he knew from church named Jody Watley.

During Soul Train’s early years, Jody and her family were living in Chicago and were dedicated viewers. “The dancers were really the stars of the show,” Watley said. “I had favorite dancers—Pat Davis, Tyrone Proctor, Sharon Hill, Little Joe Chism. I remember writing fan letters to them, asking, ‘How do you get on the show?’ So it was definitely very impactful for me. I had no idea that at some point my parents would end up moving to Los Angeles. It ended up being a twist of fate.”

Reverend John Watley had been a very popular DJ in Chicago, broadcasting gospel music on Sundays on WVON. Apparently he and Cornelius knew each other, but according to Jody, neither man was fond of the other. Through his radio contacts, John Watley made a slew of show-business friends: R&B star Jackie Wilson would be named his daughter’s godfather, Johnnie Taylor was a close friend, and Sam Cooke an occasional employer. At some point, however, John Watley lost his church, which instigated the family’s move west.

The minute adolescent Jody Watley arrived in LA, she was obsessed with getting on Soul Train. But she had no contacts in Los Angeles and was living in the Jungle, a notorious ghetto housing complex off Crenshaw Boulevard, miles from Hollywood geographically and centuries away mentally. (The Jungle was featured prominently in the film Training Day.)

One day, while riding in the car with her mother, Watley spotted Tyrone Proctor walking on Stocker Avenue. Suddenly the fourteen-year-old shouted, “Stop the car!,” bolted out onto the sidewalk, and ran up to the famous dancer. She introduced herself and tried to get him to tell her where Soul Train was, how to get on the show. Proctor was polite and wary, slipping away from the excited girl before he really told her anything useful.

The next weekend in church, a young man named Bobby Washington approached Watley and asked, “Would you be interested in being my partner on Soul Train?” Washington’s regular partner was out of town, and he (rightly) thought Watley had a great look. “So he ended up being my way in,” Watley said.

For her first show, she wore a crocheted hat and high-waisted yellow pants, but she doesn’t remember much about that first time on set other than being told to take off the hat. There was a no-hats-on-the-show rule.

What she does recall is wanting to get back on Soul Train.

 

Watley: This can’t be the Cinderella, and my-carriage-turns-into-a-pumpkin moment. So then my journey on Soul Train got really interesting. It took me many months of taking the bus up to the tapings and trying to weave my way in the line. There would be a security guard. He would check off the names. So I would ride the bus back home, and I would cry and come back the next month and try again.

 

Daniel knew other members of Watley’s family before they’d met, but once they’d been introduced he immediately took a liking to this lean, large-eyed young woman.

 

Daniel: At one point I started coming to Jody’s place after school. She was still in high school. We would practice dance routines either at her place or at the choir director’s house. We had chemistry because we skated well together.

 

Daniel and Watley used to skate at the Hollywood Roller Bowl, developing a rhythm and moves that would be reflected on Soul Train. “It wasn’t contrived. It just happened. It was very natural.”

Watley, along with Daniel, Cleveland Moses Jr., Sharon Hill, and others, would become part of the waacking dancers crew that was centered around Proctor. “I think we all just had a common love for what we were doing,” Daniel said. “We would sometimes dress alike, all four of us. Or just Tyrone would be with Sharon, and I would be with Jody.”

Very quickly, Jody and Jeffrey became their own entity. Whether they were on a riser, in the middle of the dance floor, or grooving down the Soul Train line, the camera loved them both. For one show, they incorporated a fake fight into their dance. Watley said, “That was inspired from an actual real fight that had happened on the show between a couple of dancers who were very popular but didn’t care for each other.” Recalling their days at the roller rink, the duo once skated down the line. Jeffrey even brought two unicycles to the set. At another taping, they used balloons as props. “We were very theatrical with it,” said Watley. Charlie Chaplin, Danny K, and mimes Shields and Yarnell were all influences on Daniel and Watley.

Cynthia Horner made them regular Right On! magazine pinups, with Jody emerging as a late-1970s style icon. She could rock silver lamé pants and red-glitter Converse sneakers, vintage 1940s-inspired dresses with pumps or her prom dress. Her hair was an ongoing adventure, sometimes filled with tons of ribbons, sometimes with a long ponytail or a 1940s hairdo. (When I produced Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair, we used a Jody Watley video to illustrate the range of black hairstyles.)

But soon Jody learned that this kind of celebrity did not come without its costs. Watley became a target—both at Soul Train and at school.

 

Watley: I can think of some outfits that I wore on Soul Train, some of the dancers would say, “What’s she wearing? What does she think she’s doing?” Soul Train was very competitive, and there was a lot of what they’d call hateration now. You had a lot of that. That would go on at school, too. I could wear something to school that I thought was cool, and kids would laugh at me, run me home. You know, it never really dissuaded me from liking the things that I liked. I’m still the same way. So that sort of thing is just a part of you. You just kind of have to be fearless. Not really minding if you might be ridiculed for wearing something. You’re not afraid to be who you really are.

 

By the time Jody Watley had been on the show for three years, she’d blossomed from a skinny fourteen-year-old to a stylish seventeen-year-old—and her dance partner, Jeffrey Daniel, was easily the most identifiable male dancer on Soul Train. They were primed to take their careers to the next level. So was a man named Dick Griffey.

Griffey was a big, bold, sometimes intimidating man with a strong presence, a vision of the future, and a great eye for talent. Born in 1938 and raised in a Nashville housing project, Griffey developed an interest in drumming and built a rep as a musician by playing local clubs before briefly attending the black college Tennessee State University, then enlisting in the navy.

Once out of the military service, Griffey moved to LA in the mid-1960s and resumed his interest in music, becoming part owner of the Guys and Dolls nightclub, where he developed a network of contacts in the music business and built a reputation as a solid citizen in the sometimes shifty business of booking and concert promotion. One of his partners in Guys and Dolls was basketball player Dick Barnett, a college star at Tennessee A&I in Nashville (now Tennessee State), who’d go on to play for the Los Angeles Lakers and, later, on two championship New York Knicks teams in 1970 and 1973. Another member of Griffey’s Guys and Dolls team was Chuck Johnson, who’d be a close business associate for some forty years. He’d later work on Soul Train as a talent scout who both found dancers and worked as a liaison between them and Cornelius.

Dick Griffey’s production company became a force in the LA music business at a time when black music’s audiences were expanding and R&B shows were moving from midsize venues to arenas like Inglewood’s Great Western Forum. Looking for new challenges, Griffey became a talent coordinator for Soul Train and helped Cornelius press big-name acts to give the show a chance. By the mid-seventies, with Soul Train established, Cornelius and Griffey wanted to find ways to capitalize on their new power. In 1975 they founded Soul Train Records, which was distributed by RCA Records. They weren’t a power in R&B, but they were trying to build their presence in a deal brokered by Cornelius’s longtime benefactor Clarence Avant. To emphasize the brand connection, the first act they signed was called the Soul Train Gang.

“They put out an audition for a Soul Train Gang singing group,” Daniel said. “And I did the audition. It must have been horrible, because I was playing the keyboard and trying to sing [Major Harris’s] ‘Love Won’t Let Me Wait’ at the same time, and they said get out of here . . . A lot of the dancers were disappointed because they felt that they had been Soul Train dancers for so long, and here comes an opportunity, and they just picked people who had nothing to do with the show. That was their choice.”

The Soul Train Gang was a quintet consisting of Gerald Brown, Terry Brown, Patricia Williamson, Judy Jones, and Hollis Pippin, and their first album would be Don Cornelius Presents the Soul Train Gang. Produced by Griffey and Cornelius, the collection’s most memorable track was “Soul Train ’75,” which became the show’s new theme. With Williamson replaced by Denise Smith and MFSB guitarist Norman Harris handling production, a second LP was primarily recorded at Philadelphia’s hit-making Sigma Sound. But except for “Soul Train Theme ’76 (Get on Board),” which would replace “Soul Train ’75,” the album made no waves. That had to have been embarrassing for all involved.

Daniel had a brief stint with the Soul Train Gang when Pippin left the group during a promotional tour. With his showmanship and popularity on the show, Daniel shined during the tour. Back in Los Angeles, he was rehearsing with Watley at her house when Cornelius called and asked to speak to him. Don told Daniel that the Soul Train Gang was “ ‘over. It’s finished. I have a new project I want you to do,’ ” Daniel recalled. “He asked me immediately, ‘Do you know a girl who can sing?’ ” Daniel wasn’t sure how good a singer Watley was. Her mother, Rose, sang in the church choir, but he really hadn’t heard his dance partner croon. Initially he called Grand Rapids, reaching out to a cousin of the DeBarge singing clan, but the young lady was pregnant. So together he and Watley practiced vocals, singing along to records by favorites Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross.

While Daniel and Watley were practicing, a producer named Simon Soussan created a track called “Uptown Festival,” a disco-flavored medley of classic Motown hits. Two studio singers, Gary Mumford and Cleo Kennedy, sang on the record. Coincidentally, Kennedy was a singer in the same choir as Watley’s mother. The principals of Soul Train Records purchased the track, feeling it was a commercial record they could use to rebrand the label with another act. It’s not clear who came up with the name Shalamar, but that’s what they called the group. Though not a huge hit, “Uptown Festival” made a mark, reaching No. 22 on the R&B chart and making some noise in the United Kingdom.

They kept Mumford, who was a vocal teacher in the Bay Area, and added Daniel and Watley to fill out the trio. “Jeffrey and I were chosen to be in Shalamar because we were the most popular dancers on the show,” Watley said. “We had been in magazines . . . It was another dream come true for me, because singing was always what I wanted to do. Funny thing was they assumed I couldn’t sing, though. Once we came off this promotional tour promoting ‘Uptown Festival’ and it was time to record the album, there was talk that they were going to get another girl. You know I’m hearing rumors. I’m going, ‘You don’t need another girl. I can sing.’ ”

So she auditioned by singing Streisand’s “Evergreen,” and that sealed the deal. Watley can be heard on most of the seven tracks on 1977’s “Uptown Festival” album, which included a couple of straightforward covers of Motown classics (“Ooo Baby Baby,” “Forever Came Today”) and one song penned by Don Cornelius (“High on Life”).

When it was time to record Shalamar’s second album, Disco Gardens, Mumford was no longer in the group, replaced by Gerald Brown, who’d been the original lead singer of the Soul Train Gang. But there were bigger changes occurring around the group. At some point between 1977 and 1978, the Cornelius-Griffey recording partnership was dissolved and the surviving label was renamed SOLAR (Sound of Los Angeles) Records.

Both men were publicly vague on why they split, but there was no obvious acrimony. Soul Train would, in fact, loyally promote SOLAR acts during the label’s incredibly successful run from its founding in 1978 into the late 1980s. Much like the mistake Cornelius made by not keeping the Soul Train name on the “TSOP” track, he was ending his partnership with Griffey just as he was on the verge of becoming the most successful R&B mogul of the early 1980s. Chuck Johnson, who’d work at Soul Train for more than a decade and would later join SOLAR Records, gives some insight into the differences between Cornelius and Griffey.

“As a marketing man, Don was always ahead of his time,” Johnson said. “He had an eye for talent and great vision. Don was tightly wrapped and controlling, but Dick was very outgoing and open to trying any idea and take a risk.” People say that opposites attract in love, but in business opposites can sometimes irritate the hell out of each other. Perhaps, over time, the two men’s contrasting personalities and desire to be in charge pushed them apart. Cornelius would reign successfully over his Soul Train fiefdom for decades, while Griffey would go on to build a formidable musical empire.

The roots of SOLAR’s ascendance could be found in the production and songwriting credits of Disco Gardens. Three of the seven songs on the album were written or cowritten by Leon Sylvers III; he also produced the entire album. To most folks, the twenty-four-year-old was just one of the older members of the family group the Sylvers, who’d been recording since 1971 on the heels of the Jackson Five’s success. But as early as 1973, when Leon was just twenty, he was already composing songs for his siblings and building a reputation in music-business circles as a promising hit maker. Griffey recruited Sylvers heavily, convincing him to leave his family group and become SOLAR’s in-house producer. A deft bassist as well as a talented songwriter, Sylvers would cowrite the vibrant “Take That to the Bank,” the percolating dance track that established the dynamic, propulsive sound that would become the label’s trademark. Watley’s voice was well showcased by Sylvers, setting an approach that would become a signature of the Shalamar sound.

The song wasn’t a huge hit, but it gave Shalamar and SOLAR a trademark sound and made Watley a genuine recording artist. But her start wasn’t as glamorous as she’d have liked. “It wasn’t a fairy tale,” she said. “It was a lot of hard work. It was before music videos, pretty much, so we toured all the time and not in the best conditions. Terrible bus with no heat in the winter. No bunk beds—just seats. Sometimes I would feel like I was in a fifties movie where you see the artists schlepping their equipment and they’re on the bus. A learning experience.”

Watley didn’t feel she received the warmest reception during Shalamar’s first performance on Soul Train.

 

Watley: Probably a few months before, we had still been on the show and on the Soul Train line. “Why did they pick her and why did they pick him” was the kind of vibe [I] felt. There was kind of a bitter intensity, because a lot of those same dancers were there, and they were giving the evil eye . . . I appreciated it, but I didn’t really savor it, because it was a lot of negative energy at that time. It wasn’t until I went back later on my own that I could really let it sink in. Again, it was being in a survival-of-the-fittest mode the first time I did it.

 

Daniel, who would regularly stop by tapings even after Shalamar had hit records, often felt in the middle of a gentle tug-of-war between Don and Griffey.

 

Daniel: I’m a dancer, and I’ve always been a dancer, and so when Shalamar is not on the road, I would sneak back into Soul Train, and Don would egg me on. “You know Dick Griffey doesn’t want you to dance here. You better not dance.” What? He knew he was using reverse psychology. Then Dick Griffey would watch it. “Jeffrey, I see you dancing down there on Soul Train. You’re a star now. You don’t need to be dancing on no TV show.” So I was caught between Don and Dick, and it was hard because both were like my fathers.

 

Well, if Watley had haters and Daniel was torn, the band’s third popular album surely eased any tension. With Howard Hewett, a smooth crooner with a silky tenor handling lead vocals, Shalamar’s Big Fun would begin a four-year run of danceable hits for the trio.

Other regular Soul Train performers (the Whispers, Lakeside, Carrie Lucas) would populate the SOLAR Records lineup in its early years. It makes you wonder what would have happened if Don had stayed in the record business.

While he never had another label, Don did manage another act, one that got tremendous exposure on Soul Train but never sold many records. O’Bryan McCoy Burnette II, professionally known as O’Bryan, was born in North Carolina, where he began playing piano at six years old and then performing at talent shows. His family moved to Santa Ana, California, in 1974, where he became active in his local Baptist church. He had a sweet voice with a high-pitched falsetto that was noticed by Melanee Kersey, the wife of Ron “Have Mercy” Kersey, once a fixture in the vibrant Philadelphia music scene, who’d moved to the West Coast.

Kersey, who’d been part of the disco band the Trammps, initially recruited O’Bryan to be part of a vocal group. When that deal fell through, Kersey introduced O’Bryan to Don, who was impressed. Together the two music vets formed Friendship Productions and successfully shopped O’Bryan to Capitol Records in the early 1980s. Marketed with a Jheri curl, eyeliner, shirts with the top three buttons open, and occasionally a red leather jacket—all echoes of Michael Jackson—O’Bryan would release four albums between 1982 and 1986 and have nine charting singles including “The Gigolo,” which went to No. 5 on the R&B singles chart. Don certainly supported him, having his artist on Soul Train numerous times during his recording career.

Despite this prime exposure, the singer never earned a gold single or album, and after he was dropped by Capitol, O’Bryan didn’t make another record until 2007. His only truly memorable contribution to Soul Train lore was recording “Soul Train’s A-Comin’,” which became the show’s theme in 1983. So while Soul Train was absolutely a great platform for black talent, regular exposure did not guarantee record sales or genuine celebrity.

One more note on Don’s adventures in recording: Cheryl Song says that Don tried to put together another Shalamar-styled group, using a singer and some of the Soul Train dancers. A vocalist named Terry Stanton would have been the front man, with two of the most charismatic dancers to ever appear on Soul Train—Song and the fiery New Yorker Rosie Perez—adding multiculti showmanship. “I thought this was it!” Song said. “This was my one chance to be a serious artist . . . We met a couple of times with Don, and we met with a record company.” But this multicultural dream group never happened.