Free The Hippest Trip in America by Nelson George Page B

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    â€œI 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