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  2. I watched Soul Train obsessively as a kid.  My older sister introduced me to the show since she watched it to learn dance moves.  I also perfected my dancefloor style from the show, but it was the music that just knocked me out.  When I later became a musician myself, I also drew upon the many Soul Train performances to develop a stage persona, which was basically a punk rock version of The Manhattans crossed with the overwhelming sexiness of Teddy Pendergrass.

     

  6. i did not…on account of me growing up with 3 channels on the telly view box…..all of them being dutch

    moving to england and getting the sky box was mindblowing the first time

    so many channels…still nothing to watch…..i mean…fucking how?

  8. Due to some quirk in programming, my lily-white suburb did not get American Bandstand but we did Soul Train and watching it was the highlight of my week. Here’s the line dance to Amii Stewart’s cover of “Knock on Wood,” all 9 minutes and 15 seconds of it.

    A little bit off-topic, but I was reading recently about some oral history of American Bandstand and how many of the featured male dancers were gay. That’s fine, great even. Except that ageless Dick Clark was a little bit obsessive about enforcing a “no faggots” rule (my words, not his) so the gay dancers had to act as straight as they could or else they were out, in more ways than one. Behind the scenes the dancers were getting all the sexy times, and then showing up for tapings with their female “partners” to do the latest novelty dance to “Surfin’ Safari” or whatever. “Surfin’ Safari” indeed.

      • The whole premise of “Hairspray” is the truthful story of how there were local copycat versions of American Bandstand and some of them, like the one in Baltimore, integrated when American Bandstand refused to. Dick Clark gave majority America exactly what it wanted, that was his genius. He wasn’t looking for any awards from GLAAD or the NAACP; he was looking for coast-to-coast syndication deals.

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