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Dick Clark's scheme to oust Don Cornelius and replace Soul Train with his own all-black dance show

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Dick Clark was determined to bring his own version of Soul Train on the air and call it 'Soul Unlimited'



Dick Clark, who dominated TV for teens with his lily-white American Bandstand, tried to have Don Cornelius’ all-black Soul Train taken off the air--and replaced with his own knockoff, Soul Unlimited.

Soul Train, the brainchild of producer and host Cornelius, debuted in 1971 and ran for 35 years.

‘The impact of Soul Train on the television landscape was not lost on Dick Clark. By 1973, Clark was no longer just cherry-picking talent [from Soul Train] but actively trying to co-opt Cornelius’s franchise by launching his own black-themed dance show, Soul Unlimited,' according to a new book, The Hippest Trip In America, Soul Train by Nelson George.

Clark launched a special episode of his copycat show and despite it being amateurish, with ‘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’, the author writes.

Clark’s power move outraged black political leaders who along with the black community believed that having a black-owned show on television was not only cool, but an extension of the civil rights movement.

Led by Chicago’s Reverend Jesse Jackson, they contacted Clark and ABC executives to protest. ‘The idea that Clark, with whom blacks had always had an uneasy relationship, could kill Soul Train led to threats of an ABC boycott’, George writes.

Black leaders were joined by one of the most powerful men in the history of the black music business—and also a consultant to ABC, Clarence Avant, who went ballistic when he learned about Clark’s power move.

Avant was invited by Clark to a meeting to discuss Soul Unlimited. ‘Clark wanted my okay’, Avant recalled. ‘He wanted me to endorse his idea. I freaked out. If you do this, there’s no Don Cornelius’, I told him. We had just gotten free enough to have something on TV.

‘I told Dick Clark no – I would not endorse his show’.

Avant then set up a meeting with top ABC executives in New York and met with ABC chairman and founder Leonard Goldenson and president Eldon H. Rule.

'I was very upset, very upset. If Dick Clark had been allowed to do it, then there would have been no Don Cornelius’, the author quotes Avant.

Avant received a threatening letter from William Morris Agency that represented Dick Clark Productions telling him to stay out of their business. But Avant was a powerful force behind the scene in the black music business in the early 1970s and would not be intimidated.

Don Cornelius would never speak to Clark again and Soul Unlimited was dead in the water.

Full Article:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...on-Cornelius-Soul-Train-black-dance-show.html
 
Dick Clark's attempted Coup d'état of Don Cornelius' "Soul Train" did not occur in a vacuum.

There was a concerted effort among Cac business men in the 1970's to co-opt and take over the entire Black Music Industry.

They felt that the Black Music Industry had too much dominance on the music charts and was stacking too much $$$$$$$$$$ cash that they felt they weren't getting as big a percentage of as they greedily wanted. So, the Cacs conspired to take over the Black Music Industry and put the money $$$$$$$$$$$$ and shot-calling power into their hands.

Motown type of Black owned & controlled entertainment companies WAS NOT to be replicated by any other Blacks.

Fast forward ten years later to the early 1980's when during MTV's beginnings they refused to broadcast Michael Jackson solo videos (Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', Beat It, etc.) until CBS records told them that they would withhold ALL CBS artist videos unless that put Michael on MTV. The MTV business model was to be a WHITE ARTIST ONLY video channel that would revive flagging white rock & roll artists whose album sales had plummeted because of the dominance of Disco music & Black music acts.

In 1972 Cac music executives commissioned a report from Harvard University on how to dominate and take over Black Music


This story begins in 1972, when a few enterprising master's students at the Harvard Business School prepared a study, commissioned by Clive Davis one of Columbia's execs, detailing how the Columbia Records Group could better integrate the then largely independent black music industry into the mix. The now infamous Harvard Report -- officially known as "A Study of the Soul Music Environment" -- has often been referred to as a sinister blueprint aimed at arming a litany of "culture bandits" with the theoretical tools to return black culture to a neo-colonial state. There's no denying that this is exactly the situation we're staring at now, but it has nothing to do with the Harvard Report. What those MBA students articulated was a no-brainer marketing plan, informed by the commercial success of Motown and the cynical (though not mistaken) view that the Civil Rights "revolution" likely had more to do with the realities that black folk had disposable income and white folk consumed a hell of a lot of black popular culture than anything to do with real structural change in American society. In response to those expecting more sinister designs in the Harvard Report, David Sanjek rhetorically chimes, "why did feel the need to document what they should have already known?" (Rhythm and Business, 62). What Sanjek suggests is that eventually somebody in the music industry would have come up with their own version of the Harvard Report -- say, Clive Davis, who incidentally was a president at Columbia at the time that the report was commissioned. The point is, with or without the Harvard Report, the takeover was well underway.

Black music has always had a complicated relationship with big business. That this relationship has typically had little to do with actual music perhaps explains the often unbalanced quality of this thing we've come to call R&B. This complicated relationship also partly explains what exactly R&B is. The term R&B is essentially a shortened version of "Rhythm & Blues", but as a novice might discern, that which is called R&B bears little resemblance to the musical landscape created by Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan, Laverne Baker, Charles Brown and the Coasters. And perhaps that was the point. Musical innovations aside, R&B was essentially a marketing ploy that finally gained a significant foothold during the late 1970s. R&B was born out of competing logics -- record companies tried to negotiate the realities of black culture and identity within the history of race relations in America while trying at the same time to reach a wider audience of black consumers and white record buyers. As black radio needed mainstream advertisers to court the emerging black middle class (as much an ideology as a measurement of economic and social status) and mainstream record labels became fixated on crossing over black artists to white consumers, terms like Soul and Rhythm and Blues quickly became too black. The same terminology turnover occurred during the late 1970s when urban began to stand for radio stations that essentially programmed black music. As Nelson George explains, "Urban was supposedly a multicolored programming style tuned to the rhythms of America's crossfertilized big cities…. But more often, urban was black radio in disguise." (The Death of Rhythm and Blues, 159).

According to the "Harvard Report" black radio was strategically important to record companies because it provided "access to large and growing record buying public, namely, the Black consumer." The report is oblivious to the fact that the very birth of what was called "race music" in the 1930s was premised on selling goods and services to a uniquely defined audience, namely African-Americans constrained by Jim Crow segregation-an audience that might even buy a record or two, in the process of buying furniture, cleaning supplies and an insurance policy. Nevertheless, the report is cognizant of the growth of an emerging black middle class, one that would prove attractive not just to record companies but also advertisers eager to fuel black desires to consume the fetishes of a post-Civil Rights world. In the aftermath of centuries of struggle, exploitation and violence, some members of the black middle class often viewed their ability to consume widely throughout mainstream society as an emblem of the "freedoms" won during the Civil Rights struggle. .......................

READ MORE:
http://www.popmatters.com/feature/050603-randb/
http://www.theroot.com/articles/cul...ternational_records_remaining_songs_sold.html

​
 
This great book also detailed much of the story...

418gGvUi8ZL._SX326_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
 
Thanks for the post - I never knew about this - they try to co-opt anything A black person starts and is successful at it - Soul Train becomes soul Unlimited, black lives matter becomes blue lives and all lives matter, hidden colors becomes hidden figures. Somebody needs to write a book on cac strategies and have it as a must read for all black people.
 

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