The Hippest Trip in America Read Online Free PDF Page B

be widely sampled on rap records in the nineties). It was during her tenure at Locke that she became part of the first class of Soul Train dancers.
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    Rushen: The community that surrounded Locke was right in the thick of where the riots had been, and there was a concerted effort to build that community back. It had always been close-knit, and the riots blew it apart. So in bringing it back together, the music department kept the kids busy and involving us in activities that would allow us to see beyond just where we lived. I think it was very important. So being a member of the largest gang going, when you’re in the band, there’s 250 of you. Carrying an instrument case was a big deal. People didn’t mess with us. They really were proud of the fact that we worked hard and we learned a lot, and between Locke’s band and the drill team, we became nationally known.
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    In 1971 Don Cornelius came over to Locke and visited the school’s summer program to talk about “this special show that they were gonna start, and it was a dance show, and it was going to feature R&B artists primarily,” Rushen said. “They wanted kids from the community to participate, to come out. Sounded good to me. I was already into music, very, very heavily, music of all kinds, and an opportunity to be on television was right up my alley, and so I decided to tell a few friends and said, Let’s go down there. They brought a bus. We loaded into a bus and they took us over to KTTV and we went into the studio and we said, ‘Well, what do we do?’ He said, ‘Just enjoy yourselves. Dance to the music and have a great time.’ And that’s what we did.” Rushen and her friends participated in the recording of eight Soul Train s that first year in LA.
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    Cornelius: I was just looking for people who look well. Who look good on camera and who could dance well. That’s all I was looking for, and once we got out here we realized that the LA youth, the Los Angeles population, was much more than that. They were exciting to look at. Just plain exciting to look at . . . They had the bodies, the facial features, the hair, the movement. They had stuff you just didn’t find much. Where I came from, people who looked that good, they didn’t want to be on TV. It was people who probably shouldn’t be on TV wanted to be on TV, but when we hit LA it was all those people that should be on TV, had wanted to be on TV. There was just so much glamour. So much invention, so much creativity.
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    What’s interesting about this effusive praise for California dancers is that this is very much hindsight talking. As we’ll see, Don’s initial feelings about dancing out West were very different.
    Locke High would be one of the three local institutions that would feed dancers to Soul Train in the key first two seasons after the show had relocated to Los Angeles. The other two were Denker Park in South Central and Maverick’s Flat nightclub on Crenshaw Boulevard were also crucial, playing different, though parallel, roles. Locke brought Don into contact with a new important educational institution and blossoming talent like Rushen, who would not only dance on early shows but would come back years later to perform on it. The future hit maker has strong memories of the fifth Soul Train episode, during which she was able to ask questions of singer-songwriters Bill Withers and Al Green. Reflecting on her career, Rushen thinks that early music-business exposure definitely “filtered into my musicianship.”
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    Rushen: Because we were taping the shows, there were stops and starts, and for me that was golden time, because during the stops is when I could really keep my eyes on the artists, and, you know, go up to them. There were no barriers. Nobody would say, Don’t speak to them, don’t do this, don’t do that. We were all there together taping. So you could actually