Every great label starts somewhere unglamorous. SOLAR Records, the label that would define West Coast funk and soul for a decade, started as a side project of a television dance show. Two years and one lucky medley later, it had become something nobody in the room could have predicted.
A Soul Train Side Hustle
In 1975, Dick Griffey, a talent coordinator for the television program Soul Train, teamed up with the show's host and creator Don Cornelius to launch Soul Train Records, signing a distribution deal with RCA. Their first act was a vocal quartet built specifically to sing the show's own theme, released as "Soul Train '75" under the name Soul Train Gang. The Gang cut two albums before splitting in 1977, but the label had already stumbled onto something bigger.
Griffey pulled together a group of session singers to record "Uptown Festival", a disco-length medley stitched from early Motown hits, and released it under a new name: Shalamar. The record connected. To keep the momentum going, Griffey and Cornelius recruited two dancers from the show, Jody Watley and Jeffrey Daniel, along with singer Gerald Brown, to become an actual working group. Carrie Lucas, another early signing, scored a disco hit of her own with "I Gotta Keep Dancin'" around the same time.
Cornelius, fully occupied running the top rated show on Black television, stepped back from the label business. In late 1977, Griffey took full control, cleared up the legal ownership, and renamed the company. SOLAR, short for Sound Of Los Angeles Records, was born.
A theme song for a dance show turned into a record label, and a medley of other people's Motown hits turned into a group with its own name. Solar's whole origin story is a reminder that most legendary labels start as something much smaller.
Building the Sound
Griffey moved fast once he had control. He signed the funk band Lakeside along with a run of gospel acts, betting on genre range rather than a single formula. But the real architect of what people would come to call the Solar sound was producer Leon Sylvers III, formerly of the family group The Sylvers, who took over production duties across the roster starting in 1978.
Sylvers built layered, rolling basslines and lush, precise vocal arrangements, often pulling his own siblings, Edmund and Angela Sylvers, into sessions for cohesion across projects. His fingerprints are all over Shalamar's late 70s run, The Whispers' "And the Beat Goes On", and Lakeside's "Fantastic Voyage" in 1980. It was a specific, recognizable West Coast take on funk and soul, glossier than the grit coming out of Ohio and Detroit, built for radio and the dance floor at the same time.
Leon Sylvers III
Sylvers produced full albums for Shalamar, The Whispers and Lakeside, building the layered basslines and rich vocal arrangements that became SOLAR's signature. His family-style approach to sessions, often bringing in his own siblings, gave the label's records a consistent identity even across different acts.
The Roster Grows
By the early 1980s, SOLAR had assembled one of the deepest rosters in Black music. Midnight Star joined and would go on to score one of the decade's biggest club records with "No Parking on the Dance Floor" in 1983. Dynasty brought another layer of vocal group harmony to the catalogue. The label signed a distribution deal with Elektra that gave it major label reach while keeping creative control in house, a rare position for a Black owned label at a time when majors were actively signing away independent labels' artists and producers.
The label built a new headquarters on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles, with offices, a recording studio, and rehearsal space all under one roof. It let SOLAR operate almost like a self contained factory: write, record, rehearse, and send an act out on tour, all without leaving the building. Griffey, who had started his career as a concert promoter, believed live performance mattered as much as the records themselves, and he built the infrastructure to support both.
SOLAR was not just a record label. It was a booking agency, a rehearsal space, a publishing house and a recording studio, all built around the idea that an artist's stage show sold as many records as the radio did.
By 1981, the numbers backed up the ambition. SOLAR's annual revenue reached 40.7 million dollars, an extraordinary figure for an independent, Black owned label competing directly against the majors. Gold certified albums piled up: Shalamar's "Big Fun" and "Three for Love", The Whispers' self titled 1980 record, which alone sold 1.5 million copies. Singles like "The Second Time Around" and "And the Beat Goes On" each crossed the million mark. Trade press started calling SOLAR the Motown of the 1980s, and for a few years, the comparison did not feel like a stretch.
Cahuenga Boulevard HQ
Offices, a full recording studio, and rehearsal space under one roof let SOLAR write, cut, and rehearse a record without an act ever leaving the building. Griffey, a former concert promoter, treated the building as proof that touring and recording were two halves of the same business.
What Griffey had built by the start of the decade was not just a hit factory. It was a genuine ecosystem, a home for West Coast Black music that answered to nobody but itself. The next chapter would test exactly how far that independence could carry the label, through new subsidiaries, new stars, and eventually a legal fight that would change everything.
