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 rich 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.”
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.