Chapter 4

Dick Clark’s Soul Unlimited

IN HIS interview for VH1’s Soul Train documentary, director Kevin Swain asked Don Cornelius about his relationship with Dick Clark and American Bandstand. Cornelius’s reply is one of the most complex he gives during the interview, and the most interesting parts didn’t end up in the final cut.

“I remember when we first got started, there were news columns that described Soul Train as a black American Bandstand,” he said, “and when I first heard that term used, it kind of offended me until I thought about it. And it didn’t take very long before I thought about it. It was not something to be offended by, because that’s exactly what we were. We were a black American Bandstand. Even though in later years Dick Clark and I didn’t get along real well, I would never deny that the principal inspiration for Soul Train was American Bandstand and Dick Clark. Later Dick would start his own soul dance show, but that’s something we don’t really talk about. It’s a long story, and it might be embarrassing to one of us, and we don’t talk about it.”

The impact of Soul Train on the television landscape was not lost on Dick Clark. As mentioned, after Soul Train’s first season, he invited the dynamic Damita Jo Freeman and Joe Chism to compete on his national dance competition, and they won it. The next competition also featured two dancers from Soul Train (Tyrone Proctor and Sharon Hill), who also won. But by 1973, Clark was no longer just cherry-picking talent but actively trying to co-opt Cornelius’s franchise by launching his own black-themed dance show, Soul Unlimited.

Launched as a special episode of American Bandstand on March 24, 1973, it was hosted by Buster Jones, a smooth-voiced but physically awkward Los Angeles–based announcer. Watching him interview singer Eddie Kendricks or the family vocal group Sylvers, Jones not only has no questions (Cornelius didn’t always have anything to ask, either) but, unlike Cornelius, is in no way cool. He nearly trips over the microphone cord preparing to talk with the Sylvers and draws perplexed looks from Kendricks and another interviewee, Rufus Thomas. Clark should have paid someone to write Jones some questions and given the brother a capable stage manager.

Despite Soul Unlimited’s amateurish flavor, it still could have killed Soul Train. Considering Clark’s power in the record and television industry, including the backing of ABC, this rip-off could have proved fatal to Cornelius’s dream. But Dick Clark’s power move was stopped cold.

The hero of this sad tale is Clarence Avant, one of the most powerful men in the history of the black music business and one of the most press shy. In his nearly sixty years in show business, his biggest media exposure came in the 2013 Academy Award–winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man, in which he’s depicted as something of a villain. The film looks back at the unlikely career twists of Sixto Rodriguez, a Bob Dylan–esque singer-songwriter Avant had signed to his Sussex Records in the early 1970s, then released two critically respected albums that, between them, sold fewer than thirty thousand copies.

In a strange turn of events, Rodriguez’s records found their way to South Africa, where white youth, participating in the anti-apartheid movement, made his songs, composed in Detroit in the 1970s, anthems of their 1980s movement. One part of the documentary asks what happened to Rodriguez’s South African royalties. When asked, Avant replies gruffly that he knows nothing about any contracts from the 1970s.

The film’s editing makes it seem as if Avant was being defensive when, in fact, Avant was just being Avant. After his almost sixty years in show business, he has acquired a blunt, tough, often obscenity-laced vocabulary that belies his skills at internal politics.

His career began back in the 1960s working for music-booking powerhouse Joe Glaser, who famously managed Louis Armstrong but also ran a booking agency that once handled the touring activities of more than a thousand artists. Avant was one of the first blacks to be part of Glaser’s team and built a network of connections within the white, largely Jewish world of touring and management that would be the backbone of his career. His personal management of composer Lalo Schifrin would be crucial during the 1960s and early 1970s because the Argentinean’s jazz-influenced style would make him Hollywood’s hottest composer, knocking out gritty film scores (Dirty Harry, Bullitt) and beloved TV themes (The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Mission: Impossible). The contacts Avant made working for Glaser and the visibility of Schifrin’s work gave Avant unusual access to the halls of power.

After moving from New York to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, he set up Venture Records, a joint venture between MGM Records and former Motown A&R director William “Mickey” Stevenson. The company became the blueprint for collaborations between major labels and black entrepreneurs to come. A few years later, Avant would start his own label, Sussex, which would enjoy massive pop hits by Bill Withers (“Lean on Me,” “Ain’t No Sunshine”), some minor hits (Creative Source’s “Who Is He and What Is He to You”), and the now internationally revered flops of Rodriguez.

“My relationship with Clarence started almost the day I hit Los Angeles to start doing Soul Train,” Don recalled. “He was so enthusiastic for what we were doing that he started calling people at networks, saying, ‘This Soul Train show should be on a network.’ ” Sitting in his Wilshire Boulevard office in 2012, Avant, in typically brusque fashion, says, “There were only three networks then. I knew someone at all three, and they all said no.”

By 1973 Avant was a consultant to ABC, so when Dick Clark was planning Soul Unlimited, he invited the black executive in for a sit-down. “I knew Dick Clark a little bit,” Avant recalled. “One of the ABC execs set up the meeting. Dick Clark wanted my okay. He wanted me to endorse his idea. I freaked out. ‘If you do this, there’s no Don Cornelius,’ I told him. We had just gotten free enough to have something on TV. I told Dick Clark no—I would not endorse his show.”

Outraged by Clark’s power move, black political leaders, led by Chicago’s Reverend Jesse Jackson, contacted Clark and ABC executives to protest. Many in the black community felt that having a black-owned show on television wasn’t just cool TV, but an extension of the civil rights movement. The idea that Clark, with whom blacks had always had an uneasy relationship, could kill Soul Train led to threats of an ABC boycott.

Avant set up a meeting with top ABC executives in New York—even though he’d already received a threatening letter from William Morris, which was representing Dick Clark Productions. “It was a short letter telling me to stay out of their business,” he said. Avant met with ABC chairman (and founder) Leonard Goldenson and president Eldon H. Rule. Avant didn’t hold back: “I was very upset, very upset. If Dick Clark had been allowed to do it, then there would have been no Don Cornelius.”

And when the meeting was over, so was Soul Unlimited.

Don Cornelius never spoke with Dick Clark before his death, and Clarence Avant didn’t speak to Clark again for some twenty years. Not only did this end the threat to Soul Train, but it perhaps influenced ABC’s management to open its doors to more black content. In the 1970s ABC would produce several black sitcoms, make Soul Train announcer Sid McCoy the first black staff announcer on its radio and TV network, and, in 1977, green-light the historic slavery miniseries Roots.

Avant continued to be a busy behind-the-scenes force in the black music business in the early 1970s. In 1971 he was one of those who started KAGB, LA’s first African American–controlled radio station. Two years later, he persuaded the Ford Foundation to finance a music documentary, Save the Children, about a massive concert/political event organized by Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH in Chicago. But his role in the Soul Train saga is far from over. Avant, one of Don’s closest friends and business advisors, will be heard from again.

 

DANCER PROFILE: Tyrone Proctor

 

The gay contribution to black popular culture is usually ghettoized to books about gay culture. But it would be impossible to disconnect any discussion of Soul Train dance from gay club culture. A number of the dancers on the show were gay, and it was never a big deal. Don and his staff accepted it as a given. They recruited the best dancers they could find, and showcased them to a national audience. Dancer Jody Watley remembers: “Though unspoken, Soul Train had an obvious black male gay culture going on, and for that reason the show was also quite forward. Don allowed everyone to be themselves on camera—that’s clear when you watch old clips.”

So black gay culture, while diluted, was given a platform on Soul Train in ways big and small—but probably the most overt example was a dance called waacking. Like many early-1970s dances, waacking isolated body parts (in this case largely the arms and hands), using them to move through space like summer fans in church ladies’ hands with great speed and an exaggerated femininity, elbows bent and arms twirling. Via Soul Train, an expression of gay subculture went mainstream.

The primary exponent of waacking on the show was Tyrone Proctor, also known as the Bone, who lived with his family in Philadelphia and dreamed of being a dancer on Soul Train. Against the wishes of his father, the teenager saved up his cash and trekked out to the West Coast. The lanky, large-Afroed young man didn’t know anybody in the City of Angels and was desperately seeking a way into the dance scene when he saw a poster on a light pole promoting a party. Proctor walked into the party and his life changed. There were Don Campbell and Patti Davis and Rerun and many of the Soul Train dance stars. Proctor felt the floor shaking under the power of the dancers inside.

Proctor quickly befriended Little Joe Chism, a charismatic mover who’d become a viewer favorite during those early Soul Train seasons.

Proctor: Joe would take me to different places because he wanted me to see LA. He was the glue who kept everybody together. He was the one who got me on Soul Train. He knew a lot about things good, bad, and indifferent. He kept everyone informed and together. No one disliked Joe.

One of the places he took me was a gay club called the Paradise Ballroom. I’ll never forget it. They played the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” It was so funny. The beat was like boom, boom, boom, boom. People were posing to the whole beat. They had a pole in the middle of the floor. They were on top of the pole in the ceiling posing. All on the beat. It was phenomenal. I think Don did that on Soul Train one time because there’s footage of that. When he did it on Soul Train, it was a rather poor version of what you saw in the clubs, but nevertheless, it was done. I’m sure Don was aware there were many gay dancers on Soul Train, but he turned a blind eye.

There’s a gentleman who danced on the show called Lamont Peterson, who was a formidable, formidable dancer. I mean, there were many dancers on there that are formidable, but Lamont was really good with the posing. And I believe through that evolved what you know now as waacking, because there was Lamont doing it.

People always come up to me and ask me how did the name waack come. The name waack came because I was showing someone to do it, and I kept telling them, “You gotta whack your arm,” and that’s where the name comes in. The two a’s came in because we didn’t want to get it confused with the word wack, which had a negative connotation. So we said, we’ll put another a in there, and we’ll change the whole thing. That’s how we did that.

Daniel: There were other people before Tyrone who were the premier waack dancers, who came up with a lot of basics to the steps. But Tyrone—I would have to say I credit him with bringing that dance to Soul Train. It didn’t have a name yet. They called it “punking” at first for the fact that that dance came out of gay clubs. It was just before discos really boomed and started opening. And Tyrone took me to a club so I could see this dance. He said, “Jeffrey, you’ve got to come to this club, the Paradise Ballroom. You’ve got to see this dance.” The reason why the dance has the name waacking was because of the way Tyrone was teaching it to us. He said, “You got to whack your arm. You got to whack your head. You got to whack to the music.” Up to today he’s the premier waack dancer, so if you gotta know waacking, come to the waack doctor, Tyrone Proctor.

Proctor: At the straight clubs then, the DJ would be on the mic promoting some event or himself and they’d be playing a whole lot of soul music. At the gay club, they were concerned about the sound system, and they’d be playing straight-up disco and the focus would be on dancing. So we began attracting straights. A lot of people don’t know that the bump came out of those gay clubs and then moved into the mainstream. Waacking wasn’t the only dance of that era to move out from the gay clubs. I got a special appreciation for waacking ’cause I learned it from the best.

Waacking has become part of the international dance catalog. Proctor still teaches the moves at workshops from Russia to Hong Kong, from Shanghai to Argentina, where he can attract up to a thousand anxious students. But he is far from alone. For example, a look on the website of Steps NYC, one of Manhattan’s top locations for amateurs to learn and professionals to rehearse, shows a waacking class being offered. A video of an instructor in Finland, a young white woman, teaching this once-underground gay dance to a class of awkward wannabe dancers is quite entertaining. This journey of an expression—music, dance, language—from underground to the globe was a route that so much African American culture took in the twentieth century. That waacking was an overtly gay expression (as opposed to covert) adds another layer to the tale.

Waacking, which definitely shares kinship with Don Campbellock’s playful locking and anticipates the voguing of New York gay culture in the early 1990s, would be a major inspiration for many nongay dancers who’d find celebrity on Soul Train, especially the gifted Daniel.

Though born in LA, Jeffrey Daniel’s family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he was a kid, where he suffered sunshine envy.

Daniel: I’m watching Soul Train every Saturday thinking and thinking, Why am I in Grand Rapids? I need to go back to LA. I was still in high school. And I met Tyrone at Maverick’s Flat. One day I’m in there dancing, and I look over and I see Tyrone. I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s Tyrone the Bone.” I used to see him in Right On! magazines and watch him on TV every week. So Tyrone was doing the steps. I knew all his steps from watching him on TV, so I’m doing the steps with him. So anyway, we start dancing together, and from that we became friends. I went back to Grand Rapids, and I was going to school, and I finally came back to LA and I went to Tyrone’s place and he took me to Soul Train with him. He said, “Okay, Jeffrey, I’m gonna get you in.” He got me in, but they said, “He can come in, but he can’t dance. You can just sit down.” So I went there, and I sat down.

Daniel was lucky enough to begin his Soul Train experience with the taping of memorable episodes #141 and #142. “Barry White was up there with his full orchestra,” he remembers. “Elton John came up there with a glass piano. I’m sitting there watching this, and the music came on. I got up and I danced anyway. And the guy came over and said, ‘Yeah, I saw you dance anyway. I saw you out there.’ He embarrassed me in front of everyone. You know what you can do. I credit Tyrone for helping me get onto Soul Train and helping me kick-start my whole career and everything.”

Thanks to Proctor, waacking went from the gay club culture into the mainstream of the show. The Outrageous Waack Dancers, as Proctor and his crew were known, became one of the show’s core dance groups: “It was the Lockers, Something Special, who were another small dance crew, the Waackers, and the Electric Boogaloos. Now, not everyone who was on Soul Train during that era was a great dancer. A lot folks were poseurs. Someone who couldn’t really dance but just looked good. You could just dress beautifully and be stylish. Or you could dance really well.” Proctor is a little too modest to say that with his round Afro, wide smile, and dancing skills he embodied all three types. It was as a student of movement that he inspired Daniel’s dancing.

Daniel: Tyrone taught me how to listen inside the music. I’ve always sang. I’ve always been around music, but he taught me. He would be dancing to a song, and there would just be one string line, it would just go zip, and all of a sudden Tyrone would just move with it. And I was like, “Tyrone, how did you know that’s there?” He said, “Jeffrey, you got to listen to the music.” I attribute that to me becoming a choreographer and a producer, because he really taught me how to listen in the music and hear every instrument, every sound. You can dance to anything. Like you can dance to the voice. Tyrone will be dancing to the music, and all of a sudden he’ll just pantomime the vocal of the song.

The combo of Proctor and Daniel not only became star dancers on the show but, like precocious children, had the run of the place backstage too. “It would be fair to say that Tyrone Proctor and myself—we’re kind of like Don Cornelius’s prodigal sons,” says Daniel. “I mean, we would get away with things that just no other dancer could even dream of.”

“When you go downstairs, that’s where the hubbub is,” Proctor recalled. “That’s where the producers are, that’s where the hairdressers are, that’s where the greenroom is, and no dancers were ever allowed to go down there. So Jeffrey and I would go down there. At that time I had a lot of hair, and I would go down there and get my hair done, trying to be a star or something. Then Jeffrey could go down there. We were the only two that could go and talk to guests. Don Cornelius, I think, favored us. We could get away with a lot of stuff. One of the things I noticed as the show went on, Don kept adding black crew. At first there were only white faces behind the camera, but each season we got more dark faces. Don got a lot of people in the industry in LA through the show.”

“Don stood by the monitors while he was watching the action on Soul Train,” Daniel said. “Dancers just didn’t go over to Don. But for Tyrone and me, it wasn’t off-limits. We could go over there and speak to Don. We just didn’t abuse our privileges. Don actually gave us money. I really want to say this, because people think Don is just this hard shell of a person, which he is, but Don is a sweet person. Tyrone got arrested for traffic violations. He wasn’t a criminal. Just traffic violations. And we’re at a taping. Where’s Tyrone? Don sent me and [production coordinator] Chuck Johnson down there with the money, and we got Tyrone out of jail, and Don Cornelius paid to get him out so he can come and dance on the show.”

It isn’t surprising that Proctor ended up with traffic tickets, since he and his fellow waackers were notorious for what they called the Chinese fire drill. “At a red light, we would put the car in park, and we would jump out and just dance all around the car, and then when the light would change, we would jump back in the car and take off again,” said Daniel, adding, “The people would be mad behind us. They would be upset, but we would be in there living our lives. It would be so funny. So, so, so funny.”

Proctor would be recruited to dance on American Bandstand. When Damita Jo Freeman and Joe Chism won Dick Clark’s national dance championship, they recommended Sharon Hill and Proctor for the next contest.

Proctor: There was, I think, about seven or eight contestants. We were the only black couple in the contest, and out of the hundred thousand votes tabulated, Sharon and I got sixty thousand of the votes. That’s what was told to us. It was unbelievable. I remember to this day winning the car, and what I did. I just jumped up and just fell on the car. It was a Mazda RX-4 coupe. They called me, and they said, “There’s only one glitch.” I said, “What’s that?” They said, “You need $334.28 in order to pick the car up,” and I’m like, “Well, why do I need that?” And he said, “That’s the taxes you gotta pay.” And I’m going, “Oh, God, where am I gonna get this money at?”

Frustrated by this turn of events, Proctor reached out to the only person he knew who might have the cash to help him pay the taxes—Don Cornelius. Because of the bad blood between Soul Train and American Bandstand, Don could have easily said no, viewing Proctor’s participation in Dick Clark’s contest as a betrayal. But Don looked beyond that history to help a young friend in need. “So we went up to Don Cornelius very humbly and he just sat there and wrote the check out. We went downstairs, cashed it, and I got my car. Sharon got a car as well.”

Having danced on both Soul Train and American Bandstand during the height of their 1970s rivalry, Proctor has some interesting observations about the experience.

Proctor: Very different. Very different but very similar. Everybody was copying what we were doing. Everybody. James Brown always stood his own, and I respect a man for that. I never try to do anything he might have tried to do—a robot maybe one or two times, but other than that, no. But you know that’s how popular [Soul Train] was. It was no different from Bandstand, because they were trying to vie for the same group of fans that we had. You have to also understand that these two shows are taped in the same city. So there’s gonna be similarities. The only difference is the skin color. On Bandstand, you saw a lot more Caucasians and Mexican Americans than you did on Soul Train. On Soul Train there were more African Americans. We had other nationalities on there, but it wasn’t as prevalent as the African Americans that were on there.

[Going to Bandstand], I felt nervous at first. You feel like a little turncoat because you’re on a whole different show. But Dick Clark and his crew were extremely nice. The kids on the show were very accepting. We got on the show, and again it wasn’t—it didn’t have anything to do with color. We were just so happy to be on there just dancing.

 

DANCER PROFILE: The Asian Girl with the Long Hair

 

One of the most identifiable Soul Train dancers didn’t introduce any landmark moves. She was simply the most notable nonblack regular in the show’s long history. Her name is Cheryl Song—also known as the Asian girl with the long hair.

Song lived in the middle of a contradiction. Her mother and father ran a very traditional, strict Asian household in the middle of overwhelmingly black South Central. She attended Dorsey, one of the city’s top black high schools. So when Song’s parents told her, “Don’t hang around with black people,” something had to give. Song said, “I had a pretty tumultuous childhood growing up, and I felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere. The only thing I knew is that I liked to dance. I guess that was my release.

“So when I was in high school, one of the dancers, I guess his name was Dane, brought me on Soul Train as a dare, because, you know, I wasn’t black. He brought me on, and they liked me. So I was able to stay on the show, and it was the happiest time of my life. It was because it was somewhere where I finally meant something to people, and they would recognize me, and I was like, ‘Wow, somebody knows me!’ So it was kind of like my little clique that I could belong to. And if I didn’t have Soul Train as something to look forward to, I just don’t know how my life would have ended up.”

Song’s parents were not so enthused. “They said, ‘What are we going to tell our relatives?’ I was just like, ‘Just don’t tell them!’ . . . We were taught to save face, which meant whatever was going on in your life personally, you always had to give the impression that things were well. That’s just the way it was. Because my parents were so rigid, I didn’t know what it was like to be hugged or told ‘I love you,’ and I finally felt like someone liked me when I was on Soul Train, so that’s why it meant so much to me.”

 

Cheryl Song’s long hair made her famous among Soul Train viewers.

 

Song’s warm recollection shouldn’t disguise the fact that the reception was not that warm when she first arrived on Cornelius’s set. Like a lot of people who look back on Soul Train, there is the tendency to initially see things through rose-colored glasses, but, with a little prodding, a more complex experience emerges.

Song: Well, the first time I went on, I remember everyone kind of stopped and said, Oh, look! Because there’s this Asian girl, and it’s like, Where did she come from? So I remember that I got to dance a few times, and they ended up liking me, the staff, so they kept me on, and I thought everything was just so beautiful. And, “Wow! I can’t believe I’m actually here.” I remember one time they put me on the riser, and I was standing there in the center of the riser and somebody said, “Who’s that high yellow bitch think she is?” Then I was scared. Oh my God, I’m gonna get jumped! I was really, really scared. I remember as soon as the show was over, I, like, ran to my car so that I wouldn’t get jumped or assaulted or something like that. Then I realized, Wow. Certain people hate me. So it always puzzled me that people could just have feelings like that towards me.

Song became something of a flash point on the show. There were definitely haters of the long-haired Asian dancer among the other dancers and some of the viewers, but overall Song was accepted, an acceptance that meant she was subject to the same challenges every Soul Train dancer faced—getting close to the camera. “It was pretty competitive. I remember we would all be dancing as soon as the music played, but the minute that camera came towards you, and you saw that red light, someone would jump in front of you. Then you would go back and try to jump in front of them. That was a little frustrating, but, hey, you had to do what you had to do to get on camera.”

Over time, her Soul Train celebrity somewhat softened her family’s attitude toward her.

Song: Probably some people must have said to them, “Oh, your daughter’s on Soul Train,” and finally, maybe they got the idea that that’s a good thing instead of something to be ashamed of. So they kind of accepted it. It was just bashed into my head, no matter what you do, you’re going to major in mathematics or chemistry or science. And me being so young, I thought, Well, if I do what they want me to do, I’ll end up just as unhappy as they are. So when they told me that that’s what I was going to be majoring in in college, it’s gonna be math or science, I said, No, no, it’s not. And I was a dance major in college.

One of Song’s most unlikely reflections on her Soul Train years is that no dancers on the show ever asked her out, and no one ever asked her to dance when she went out. “Nobody did! Nobody!” she said. As hard as it is to imagine that the most famous Asian woman in black TV history was ignored by men, that’s Song’s story and she’s sticking to it. “Probably because I was Asian, but I remember going to clubs in Los Angeles, and they were mostly black, but that’s who I felt comfortable with. So I would end up sitting there the whole night all by myself. And so I was like, nobody ever asked me to dance. I don’t know if they were afraid, or I don’t know, but most of the times I would just end up sitting there. So I remember one day, Howard Hewitt, he was in Shalamar. He asked me to dance because he felt sorry for me. But that was like one of the few times I got to dance when I went out.”

Gap Band lead singer (and notorious ladies’ man) Charlie Wilson has put it on record that he tried to “holler at” Song, as have some other entertainers who performed on Soul Train, but apparently she was oblivious.

Whether Song was asked out or not, it’s clear that entertainers and their management were very aware of her. She helped the Commodores choreograph one of their tours and was cast in numerous 1980s videos, including Rick James’s “Super Freak” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

Watch closely and you can spot her in the opening diner sequence of that landmark video.

Tyrone Proctor, bringing gay culture to the masses, and Cheryl Song, a nonblack face in a sea of Afros, were each in their own way iconic figures on Soul Train. Waacking-influenced moves are still employed by choreographers and found in twenty-first-century music videos from Lady Gaga, among others, while gifted Asian street dancers are now staples of our culture, from Gap commercials to competition shows like America’s Best Dance Crew. Though decades removed from their Soul Train appearances, the legacy of Proctor and Song flows on.