Free The Hippest Trip in America by Nelson George Page A

choreography,” tailoring movement to augment the doo-wop vocalizing of the day. Until Atkins’s innovations, most groups just stood at the microphone and swayed a bit as they sang.
    But this was the start of the rock ’n’ roll era, when backbeats became louder and electric guitars and bass were introduced, shifting power in popular music to the rhythm sections. So the stagecraft had to match the music. Atkins became so popular in New York that when Berry Gordy started building his Motown Records empire in Detroit, he recruited Atkins to be part of his artist-development team. Atkins was crucial in shaping teenage groups like the Supremes and the Temptations into the most polished entertainers of the 1960s. When Motown closed its artist-development division in the 1970s, Atkins became a free agent and the O’Jays were his new professional mainstay. Eddie Levert, Walter Williams, and Sammy Strain were stellar students, so it was a treat to see Atkins help them work out the steps to the funky “Give the People What They Want.”
    Thompson remembered the episode vividly: “The studio’s all clear and Cholly’s like, Yeah, now you do one, two, three step. My mom was obsessed with Cholly Atkins. She knew who he was from Detroit, and I’m like, ‘Who is that?’ She’s like, ‘That’s Cholly Atkins! He taught the Temptations how to dance. Now he’s teaching the O’Jays.’ Without that I wouldn’t have known any of that stuff.”
    The intimacy between Don and the O’Jays was hard-earned and sometimes took a toll on the vocal group members’ sleep. During the 1970s, when the O’Jays were a premier attraction, they’d travel to LA with no plans to do Soul Train . But Eddie Levert remembers that “Don would literally come to our hotel room. You’d get a call from the lobby. ‘Come out, you’ve got to do our show.’ We’d fluff him off. Finally he’d get me up, and I would say, ‘Well, your boy Walter is not coming out.’ He would bang on Walter’s door for hours and hours. Walter would be yelling, ‘Get away! Go away!’ So when we got in front of the camera, all of that bantering would start. Later we would hang out, go to his house and have drinks.”
    It was easy to tell who Don really respected as artists, and who he had on Soul Train just because it was good business, by the way he introduced them and how happy he seemed to interview them. His love for the O’Jays was obvious. “I love him for how he introduced the O’Jays,” the Roots’ Thompson said. “His introducing the O’Jays and interviewing the O’Jays are probably his brightest moments, because besides the Jackson Five, I believe the O’Jays were the only group that he would introduce that always came with the superlative ‘mighty,’ as in, ‘The mighty, mighty O’Jays.’ ” The group appeared on more than twelve episodes of the show. No act is more closely identified with Soul Train than this vocal trio. So when they were awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by Black Entertainment Television (BET), Cornelius was asked to introduce them. “He told BET, ‘I’m not coming out. I don’t do that anymore,’ ” Levert said. “So they gave me his number and I told him, ‘What do you mean you can’t do it?’ ” Of course he did get there, and once again said, “The mighty, mighty O’Jays” to the delight of the singers, the live audience, and the millions watching at home.

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