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.”