The Hippest Trip in America (5 page)

Freeman's journey into dance history began on a Thursday night at Maverick's Flat when she and some girlfriends spotted a group of young men doing a dance she'd never seen. Don Campbell, Joe Chism, Jimmy “Scooby Doo” Foster, and some others were just starting to kick the tires on a dance soon to be famous internationally as “locking.” “I thought it was the most magical thing I've ever seen,” she told Stephen McMillian more than twenty years later. But it wasn't until the next night at Climax, another hot club, that Damita Jo got the courage to dance with the boys, make friends, and later bond over a postparty meal at Fat Burger.

What exactly did Freeman see those first two nights? Jeffrey Daniel, in a few years to be a big part of this scene, said with awe:

Don Campbell in the club? My God, why wasn't that filmed? Why wasn't that filmed? Taking off his hat, spinning it, putting it on his head. Throwing his car keys in the air, catching it in his hip pocket all to the beat of the music. Doing double splits, screaming, grabbing the ceiling, coming down a slap, and you could hear his hands slap the floor, these wooden floors, real dance floors. Just hear his hand. Pow! He just fills the whole club. I mean it was just amazing watching this guy.

Campbell, a street-dance innovator, the creator of locking and founder of the Lockers, was born in St. Louis in 1951 but raised in South Central. Drawing was his first artistic expression, and it's why he attended Los Angeles Trade-Technical College to study drafting. While he was in college, Campbell became part of the local club scene and developed his trademark dance moves.

The funky chicken, a southern dance, became a national hit in 1969 when Rufus Thomas recorded “Do the Funky Chicken.” Campbell was having a hard time mastering the dance's rocking movement. As performed by Thomas, who even in his sixties could gyrate with the best, it was a rocking, wobbly move that involved arm movements that mimicked barnyard fowl. For whatever reason, Campbell couldn't do the dance smoothly, finding that his arms would freeze or lock, creating a comical hesitation that cracked up his friends. “No matter what type of mistake I made, they clapped,” Campbell said in
The
Vibe
History of Hip Hop.

Quickly this embarrassment became a trademark that Campbell, along with some other folks he met at LA clubs, began embellishing with leg lifts, splits, dives, and knee drops. Because people often guffawed at the locking movements, the Uncle Sam (in which he pointed at viewers à la the famous army recruiting poster) became a standard move. Another signature move, leg lifts accompanied by hands clenched together in front of the body, looked fantastic when done by two or three dancers at a time (a move echoed in Psy's “Gangnam Style” video in 2012).

After those first two nights of dancing with Campbell and company, Freeman left LA for a month to dance in a musical. Upon her return home, on a Wednesday night she went back to Maverick's Flat, where she was spotted by a
Soul Train
scout who encouraged her to audition at Denker Park that Friday. That's where she met producer Tommy Kuhn and Don Cornelius, who she recalled were dressed in smart, fly coats like the title character's in the blaxploitation flick
Shaft
. Not surprisingly, both Freeman and Campbell were invited to
Soul Train
tapings that Saturday and Sunday morning.

While Freeman and Campbell would soon be celebrated for their dancing on that very first weekend on the
Soul Train
set, the duo didn't impress Don. As soon as they went into their locking moves, several dancers complained to the staff that Freeman and Campbell were “invading” their space, as Freeman recalled. She said Don told them, “I want you two in the back over there in the corner.” So they were moved behind singer Thelma Houston, away from the cameras.

Freeman, one of the few at the taping with show-business experience, wasn't very impressed with the amenities for the dancers. Lunch was a box of chicken, a Coca-Cola, and one drink of water. (I visited the
Soul Train
set in the early 1980s and will never forget seeing a mountain of Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes stacked up for the dancers.) The changing rooms were the studio restrooms. She couldn't do anything about these conditions, but she would have an impact on another backstage aspect of
Soul Train
.

Dancers were not allowed to use the studio pay phone to call parents, friends, or anyone else. Freeman wouldn't accept that and called her mother, who, upset about the restriction, called the police. The next day an LAPD officer stopped by the studio to let Cornelius know that he couldn't prevent the minors on the set from having access to a phone. They had the right to call their parents to let them know they were all right and to set up rides back home. Freeman also argued for herself and others to get
Soul Train
ID cards that would allow them to park in the studio parking lot.

The lanky lady's popularity helped
Soul Train,
but she may have created some tension with its host. “I remember Don Cornelius was looking at me angry because he didn't want the dancers to interact with guest stars,” she said of her legendary dance with Joe Tex. “I just knew this would be my last time on
Soul Train
. But the episode aired, and the show's ratings went up.” Whatever his reservations at the time about Damita Jo, Don would, in 1982, admit that her freestyle with Tex helped
Soul Train
's popularity.

After she danced with Brown on the show, the Godfather invited her to open for him at a concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Damita Jo brought many of the dancers she'd met at Maverick's Flat (Little Joe Chism, Scooby, Gary Keys, Alpha Omega Anderson, Perry Brown) with her, setting two precedents that would define the rest of her career: she'd quickly build a life away from
Soul Train
; and she'd empower other dancers using doors opened by her.

Freeman's first big non–
Soul Train
opportunity came via Dick Clark's
American Bandstand
, which made her a contestant in its national dance contest. Of course Freeman, dancing with
Soul Train
partner Joe Chism, won the contest and a free trip to Hawaii. In 1973 she appeared in the musical
Two Gentlemen from Verona
at the Music Center. In 1974 she danced as part of Diana Ross's show in Las Vegas. After that, her list of credits rolled on as she became a mainstay of LA show business, choreographing for TV specials and tours, including Clark's American Music Awards up through 1992. She even had a brief fling with acting, appearing in the 1980 Goldie Hawn comedy
Private Benjamin
.

Freeman's participation in
American Bandstand
was no accident. Dick Clark was very aware of the talent Don Cornelius's show was unearthing. The next year that same
American Bandstand
dance contest featured two other
Soul Train
regulars, Tyrone Proctor and Sharon Hill, and they won. But more than just poaching dancers, Clark actively tried to co-opt
Soul Train
's black audience. (But it's a little early for that part of the story.)

After Campbell's inauspicious start on
Soul Train
, he became an influential figure via the broadcast. “For me, Don Campbell was the reason I wanted to be on that show,” said Jeffrey Daniel, who was then living (and watching TV) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “One Saturday afternoon, I saw the other dancers dancing, but this guy didn't dance. He walked down the aisle to the beat of the music, stopped, stuck out his hand, gave himself five, hunched his shoulders, and pointed. I was like, Oh my God. That just totally changed everything I knew about dance.”

Daniel, who is really a scholar of popular dance's evolution, says Campbell “broke all the rules . . . when you're looking at dancing from the sixties up until that point.” The twist, the monkey, and other popular dances were full-body movements with isolated movements of specific body parts, while locking “started a whole new level of body isolations from your hips to your head movements,” Daniel said.

 

Don Campbell and the Lockers brought innovative dance moves from LA clubs to
Soul Train.

 

Campbell's impact on the show was magnified by the fact that he arrived on
Soul Train
“posse deep” with his Maverick's Flat dancing buddies, including his then girlfriend Toni Basil, Adolfo “Shaba-Doo” Quinones, and Fred “Rerun” Berry, infiltrating Don's dance floor. Not only were they bringing new moves to the nation, they introduced a flamboyant style of dress that mixed a taste of 1940s zoot-suit flair with vibrant 1970s colors. “They're wearing these knickerbocker pants with the striped socks, marshmallow shoes, applejack hats that would twist on their head while they were dancing, sometimes with suspenders,” Daniel recalls gleefully.

The Lockers were definitely a collection of stars. Toni Basil, born as Antonia Christina Basilotta in Philadelphia, was already a show-business veteran when she hooked up with the Lockers. Back in 1964 she was an assistant choreographer on the legendary concert film
The T.A.M.I. Show,
which featured classic performances by James Brown, the Rolling Stones, and others. Throughout the 1960s, she made a few poorly received records while her dance career, both as a performer and choreographer, continued to prosper before she became part of the Maverick's Flat scene.

Basil would become one of the first white faces on
Soul Train
, which doesn't seem as though it was a big deal for her or the other dancers. In almost all the interviews about whether whites danced on
Soul Train
, folks don't reference her, perhaps because Basil was part of an otherwise all-black crew. Throughout the 1970s, she had a varied post–
Soul Train
career, working with dance-oriented rock groups (codirecting and choreographing two Talking Heads videos), in movies (George Lucas's
American Graffiti
), and in television (mashing up ballet's
Swan Lake
and street dance on
Saturday Night Live
). Her big pop moment came with the 1982 video-driven hit “Mickey,” and she's rolled on ever since, including organizing a TV Land
Soul Train
tribute in 2005.

Fred “Rerun” Berry's light didn't shine as long as Basil's, but it was blindingly bright at its peak. On
Soul Train,
Berry stood out by having the biggest body in a crowd of skinny Californians and by developing his own unique take on locking. His move came to be known as the Slo-Mo, in which he broke down the locking moves to their essence, using his large limbs with remarkable grace. It didn't hurt that Berry had a great smile and a knack for including humor in his dance.

So Berry was well positioned in the mid-1970s when the black-cast sitcom became a TV trend. The ribald chitlin circuit comic Redd Foxx broke through with a smash NBC sitcom called
Sanford and Son
in early 1972. On the same network as
Julia,
Foxx's show, while not as raw as his legendarily raunchy stage show, was built around sexual innuendo and impeccable delivery and brought a colloquial urban attitude to American TV, the same way Al Benson had on R&B radio. Throughout the rest of the decade, black folks and laugh tracks were staples on prime-time TV with
Good Times
,
That's My Mama
(both debuting in 1974),
The Jeffersons
(1975),
What's Happening!!
(1976),
Diff'rent Strokes
(1978), and
Benson
(1979), all having their share of success.

As Fred “Rerun” Stubbs, Berry was the comic heart of
What's Happening!!
, a show that ran for three seasons on ABC. Created by Eric Monte, the black writer behind the beloved film comedy
Cooley High,
this sitcom was set in South Central LA and looked, not very deeply, at the lives of three black male teens. In every episode Berry wore a red beret and suspenders, echoes of his Lockers wardrobe, which became both his trademark and his curse. Though he was reportedly a millionaire by age twenty-nine, his “Rerun” persona and his weight made it hard for him to find acting gigs for the rest of his life.

The résumé for the rest of Berry's life was dotted with appearances built around his locking and those two red garments. An episode of the 2000s NBC series
Scrubs
was typical, with Berry in a dance sequence in his beret and suspenders and other cast members, in full comedy mode, dressed and dancing in his style. He died in 2003 of natural causes at fifty-two years old.

Despite the early prominence of the Lockers,
Soul Train
wasn't always smooth. Basil, who had more showbiz experience than her Locker peers, felt the dancers should be compensated for their contribution to the show's success. According to dance historian Naomi Bragin and
Soul Train
dancer Tyrone Proctor, Basil went to Don asking that Campbell be paid because of his popularity on the show. Not only was Basil turned down, but for a time Campbell and the Lockers were banned from the show. In fact, even locking was forbidden for a while. This conflict was short-lived, but it set a tone for the relationship between star dancers and
Soul Train
—these performers would be granted amazing exposure by the broadcast, but they'd have to make their money elsewhere. For example, aside from dancing with the Lockers, Campbell would make cash as a Chippendales dancer using the charming name King Dingaling.