A Look Back At The Chicago Soul Train
It’s easy to spend time openly mocking bad music writing–there’s certainly enough of it out there–but it’s such a pleasant surprise when someone’s done the legwork to present something informative and interesting in the music press. Thanks, Jake Austen of the Chicago Reader, for making my week with your article about Chicago’s homegrown edition of the legendary Soul Train.
As a somewhat avid Soul Train fan, I knew the show had its beginnings in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles, but I certainly was surprised to find out the Chicago version of the show stayed on the air for over a thousand episodes. Austen’s article about the Chicago series is really amazing in its detail and evocativeness. Unfortunately, it seems that little footage of those episodes remains. This paragraph makes me wish I would have been around to see them when they aired the first time.
The aspirations of the dancers were not the only difference between Chicago’s and LA’s shows. One signature element of the national show, the “Soul Train Line,” could hardly ever be done in WCIU’s tiny studio. Big ensembles like Earth, Wind & Fire couldn’t fit in there either. While in Chicago acts like the O’Jays and Funkadelic pantomined to a single camera, in LA the camera crew was able to capture the occasional live performance by acts like James Brown, Mandrill, and Stevie Wonder. And of course, filling five hours a week instead of just one necessitated booking some sub-superstar talent, including the all-convict band the Escorts, Herb Kent (who rode circles around the dancers on a bicycle), and Alfred Fairley, the one-legged “Dancing Fanatic.”
The Best Of Soul Train compilation shows ended their syndication run late last month, much to my dismay, although the new owners of the brand and archives announced in June are promising a rollout of archival material at some point. Until then, a somewhat horrifying Soul Train-themed film is apparently on the horizon. It’s a buddy comedy about two dancers, which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. As music disappears largely from the non-digital cable portion of the television spectrum, reading about the days when Curtis Mayfield regularly appeared on the small screen aren’t helping to keep me from being wistful for days of televised music past.
Soul Train Local [Chicago Reader]
