A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 91: “The Twist” by Chubby Checker

Episode Date: July 25, 2020

Episode ninety-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, and how the biggest hit single ever had its roots in hard R&B. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Viens Danser le Twist” by Johnny Hallyday, a cover of a Chubby Checker record that became the first number one for France’s biggest rock star. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Also, people have asked me to start selling podcast merchandise, so you can now buy T-shirts from https://500-songs.teemill.com/. That store will be updated semi-regularly. (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hockey Episode 91 The Twist by Chubby Checker Today we're going to look at a record that achieved a feat that's unique in American history It is the only non-Christmas-themed record ever to go to number one on the Billboard Pop Chart drop off and go back to number one again later. It's a record that, a year after it went to number one for the first time,

started a craze that would encompass everyone from teenagers in Philadelphia to the First Lady of the United States. We're going to look at Chubby Checker and at The Twist, and how a B-side by a washed-up R&B group became the most successful record in chart history. One of the groups that have been a perennial back-time, ground player in our story so far has been Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. We talked about them most in the episode on The Wallflower, which was based on their hit

Work with Mianney, and they've cropped up in passing in a number of other places, most recently in the episode on Jackie Wilson. By 1958 though, they were largely a forgotten group. Their style had been rooted in the LA R&B sound that had been pioneered by Johnny Otis, and which we talked so much about in the first year or so of this podcast. That style had been repeatedly swept away by the newer sounds that had come out of Memphis, Chicago and New York, and they were yesterday's news. They hadn't had a hit in three years,

and they were worried they were going to be dropped by their record label. But they were still a popular lie of act, and they were touring regularly, and in Florida, some sources say they were in Tampa, others Miami. They happened to play on the same bill as a gospel group called the Sensational Nightingales, who were one of the best gospel acts on the circuit. The Sensational Nightingales had a song, and they were looking for a group to sing it. They couldn't sing it themselves.

It was a secular song, and they were a gospel group, but they knew that it could be a success if someone did. The song was called The Twist, and it was based around a common expression from R&B songs, that was usually used to mean a generic dance, though it would sometimes be used as a euphemism for sexual activity. There was, though, a specific dance move that was known as the Twist, which was a sort of thrusting, grinding move. It's difficult to get details of exactly what that move involved these days,

as it wasn't a formalised thing at all. Twisting wasn't a whole dance itself, it was a movement that people included in other dancers. Twisting in this sense had been mentioned in several songs. For example, in one of Etta James's sequels to the Wallflower, she had sung. There had been a lot of songs with lines like that over the years, and the sensational nightingales had written a whole song along those lines. They'd first taken it to Joe Cook, of Little Joe and the Thrillers,

who had had a recent pop hit with Peanuts. But the sensational nightingales were remembering an older song, Let's Do the Slop That had been an R&B hit for the group in 1954. That song was very similar to the one by the Nightingales, which suggested that Little Joe might be the right person to do their song. But when Little Joe demoed it, he was dissuaded from releasing it by his record label, OK, because they thought it sounded too dirty.

So instead, the Nightingales decided to offer the song to the Midnighters. Hank Ballard listened to the song and liked it, but he thought the melody needed tightening up. The song, as the sensational Nightingales sang it, was a 15-bar blues, and 15 bars is an awkward, uncommercial number. so he and the Midnighters guitarist Cal Green took the songs that the Nightingale sang and fit the lyrics to a pre-existing 12-bar melody.

The melody they used was one they'd used previously on a song called Is Your Love for Real? But this was one of those songs whose melody had a long ancestry. Is Your Love for Real had been inspired by a track by Clyde McFatter and The Drifters, What you're gonna do?

That song is Chris as having been written by Armet Ertigan, but listening to the gospel song, What You're Gonna Do by the Radio 4, from a year or so earlier, shows a certain amount of influence, shall we say, on the later song. Incidentally, it took more work than it should to track down that song, simply because it's impossible to persuade search engines that a search for the Radio 4,

the almost unknown 50s gospel group, is not a search for Radio 4, the popular BBC radio station. Initially, Ballard and Green took the melody and the twist lyrics and set them to a Jimmy Reed-style blues beat. But by the time they took the song into the studio in November 1958, they'd changed it for a more straightforward beat and added the intro they'd previously used on the song,

Tor Up Over You. They apparently also changed the lyrics significantly. There exists an earlier demo of the song, recorded as a demo for VJ, when Ballard wasn't sure that Sid Nathan would renew his contract, with very different, more sexually suggestive lyrics, which are apparently those that were used in the sensational Nightingales version. Either way, the finished song didn't credit the Nightingales or Green,

who ended up in prison for two years for marijuana possession around this time, and missed out on almost all of this story, or any of the writers of the songs that Ballard lifted from. It was released with Ballard as the sole credited rights, is the B-side of a ballad called Teardrops on Your Letter, but DJs flip the single, and this went to number 16 on the R&B chart. And that should have been the end of the matter,

and seemed like it would be, for a whole year. The twist was recorded in late 1958, came out in very early 1959, and was just one of many minor R&B hits the Midnighters had. But then a confluence of events made that minor R&B hit into a major craze. The first of these events was that Ballard and the Midnighters released another dance-themed song,

finger-popping time, which became a much bigger hit for them thanks in part to an appearance on Dick Clark's TV show, American Bandstand. The success of that saw the twist start to become a minor hit again, and it made the lower reaches of the chart. The second event was also to do with Dick Clark. American Bandstand was, at the time, the biggest music show on TV. At the time, it ran for 90 minutes every weekday afternoon,

and it was shown live, with a studio audience consisting almost entirely of white teenagers. Clark was very aware of what had happened to Alan Freed, when Freed had shown Frankie Lyman dancing with a white girl on his show, and wasn't going to repeat Freed's mistakes. But Clark knew that most of the things that would become cool were coming from black kids, and so there were several regulars in the audience who Clark, New went to black clubs and learned the latest dance moves. Clark would then get those teenagers to demonstrate those moves, while pretending they'd invented them themselves. Several minor dance crazes had started this way, and in 1960, Clark noticed what he thought might become another one.

To understand the dance that became the twist, we have to go back to the late 30s, and to episode four of this podcast, the one on Choo Choo Chibugi. If you can remember that episode, we talked there about a dance that was performed in the Savoy Ballroom in New York in the late 30s called the Lindy Hop. There were two parts of the Lindy Hop. One of those was a relatively formalised dance, with the partners holding each other, swinging each other around, and so on. That part of the dance was later adopted by white people, and renamed the Jitterbug. But there was another part of the dance known as the breakaway, where the two dancers would separate and show off their own individual move, before coming back together.

That would often involve twisting in the old sense, along with a lot of other movements. The breakaway part of the Lindyhop was never really taken up by white culture, but it continued in black clubs. And these teenagers had copied the breakaway, as performed by black dancers, and they showed it to Clark,

but they called the whole dance The Twist, possibly because of Ballard's record. Clark thought it had the potential to become something he could promote, through his TV shows, at least if they toned down the more overtly sexual aspects, but he needed a record to go with it. Now, there are several stories about why Clark didn't ask Hank Ballard and the Midnighters onto the show. Some say that they were simply busy elsewhere on tour, and couldn't make the trip back. Others that Clark wanted someone less threatening,

by which it's generally considered he meant less obviously black, though the artist he settled on is himself black, and that argument gets into a lot of things about colourism, about which it's not my place to speak as a white British man. Others say that he wanted someone younger, others that he was worried about the adult nature of Ballard's Act, and yet others that he just wanted a performer with whom he had a financial link. Clark was one of the more obviously corrupt people in the music industry, and would regularly promote records with which he had some sort of financial interest. possibly all of these were involved. Either way, rather than getting Hank Ballard and the Midnighters

onto his show was to perform the twist, even as it had entered the Hot 100 at the lower reaches, Clark decided to get someone to remake the record. He asked Cameo Parkway, a label based in Philadelphia, the city from which Clark's show was broadcast, and which was often willing to do favors for Clark if they could do a remake of the record.

This was pretty much a guaranteed history, for the label. Clark was the single most powerful person in the music industry at this point, and if he plugged an artist, they were going to be a success. And so of course they said yes, despite the label normally being a novelty label, rather than dealing in rock and roll or R&B. They even had the perfect singer for the job. Ernest Evans was 18 years old, and had repeatedly tried and failed to get Cameo Parkway interested in him as a singer, but things had recently changed for him. Clark had wanted to do an audio Christmas card for his friends, a single with jingle bells sung in the style of various different singers. Evans had told the people at Cameo Parkway he could

do impressions of different singers, and so they'd asked him to record it. That recording was a private one, but Evans later did a re-recording of the song as a duet with Bobby Rydell, including the same impressions of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and the Chipmunks that he'd done on Clark's private copy. so you can hear what it sounded like. Mommy, let the people know Chubby Check are doing Fats Domino. It was that Fats Domino. It was that Fats Domino imitation in particular that gave Evans his stage name.

Dick Clark's wife Barbara was there when he was doing the recording, and she called him Chubby Checker as a play on Fat's Domino. Clark was impressed enough with the record that Cameo Parkway decided to have the newly named Chubby Checker make a record in the same style for the public, and his version of Mary Had a Little Lamb in that style, renamed The Class, made number 38 on the charts thanks to promotion from Clark.

Two more singles in that vein followed. Whole lot of laughing and dancing dinosaur, but neither was a success. But Checker was someone known to Clark, someone unthreatening, someone on a label with financial connections to Clark, and someone who could do decent impressions. So when Clark wanted a record that sounded exactly like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing The Twist, it was easy enough for Checker to do a ballard impression. Clark got Checker to perform that on The Dick Clark Show,

a different show from bandstand but one with a similar audience size, and to demonstrate the toned-down version of the dance that would be just about acceptable to the television audience. This version of the dance basically consisted of miming, toweling your buttocks while stubbing out a cigarette with your foot and were simple enough that anyone could do it. Checker's version of The Twist went to number one, as a result of Clark constantly plugging it on his TV show,

It was so close to Ballard's version that when Ballard first heard it on the radio, he was convinced it was his own record. The only differences were that Checker's drummer plays more on the symbols, and that Checker's saxophone player plays all the way through the song, rather than just playing a solo, and King Records quickly got a saxophone player into the studio to overdub an identical part on Ballard's track and reissue it, to make it sound more like the sounder-like.

Ballard's version of the song ended up going to number 28 on the pop charts on Checker's coattails. And that should, by all right, have been the end of the twist. Checker recorded a series of follow-up hits over the next few months. All of them covers of older R&B songs about dancers. A version of the Hucklebook, a quick cover of Don Covay's Pony Time, released only a few months before, which became Checker's second number one, and Dance the Mess Around. All of these were hits, and it seemed like Chubby Cheka would be associated with dancers in general,

rather than with the Twist in particular. In summer 1961, he did have a second Twist hit with Let's Twist Again, singing Let's Twist Again like we did last summer, a year on from the Twist. That was written by the two owners of Cameo Parkway, who had parallel careers as writers of novelty songs. Their first big hit had been Elvis's Teddy Bear, But over the few months after Let's Twist again, Cheka was back to non-twist dance songs. But then the twist craze proper started, and it started because of Joey D.

and the Starlighters. Joey D'Nicola was a classmate of the Charelles, and when the Chorales had their first hits, they told DiNicola that he should meet up with Florence Greenberg. His group had a rotating line-up, at one point including guitarist Joe Pesci, who would later become famous as an actor, rather than as a re-neutral. musician. But the core membership was a trio of vocalists, Joey D, David Brigatti, and Larry Vernieri, all of whom would take lead vocals. They were one of the few interracial bands of the time, and the music they performed was a stripped-down version of R&B, with an organ as the dominant

instrument, the kind of thing that would later get known as garage rock or frat rock. Greenberg signed the Starlighters to SEPTA records, and they released a couple of singles on SEPTA, produced and written, like much of the material on SEPTA, by Luther Dixon. Neither of their singles on SEPTA was particularly successful, but they became a popular live act around New Jersey, and got occasional gigs at venues in New York. They played a three-day weekend at a CD working-class mafia-owned bar called the Peppermint Lounge in Manhattan.

Their shows there was so successful that they got a residency there and became the house band. Soon the tiny venue, which had a capacity of about 200 people, was packed, largely with the band's fans from New Jersey. The legal drinking age in New Jersey was 21, while in New York it was 18, so a lot of 18 and 19-year-olds from New Jersey would make the journey. As Joey D and the Starlighters were just playing covers of chart hits for dancing, of course they played The Twist, and Let's Twist again,

and of course these audiences would dance the twist to them. but that was happening in a million dingy bars and clubs up and down the country with nobody caring. The idea that anyone would care about a tiny, dingy, bad-smelling bar and the cover band that played it was a nonsense. Until it wasn't. Because the owners of the peppermint lounge decided that they wanted a little publicity for their club, and they hired a publicist, who in turn got in touch with a company called Celebrity Services. What Celebrity Services did was, for a fee, they would get some minor celebrity or other to go to a venue and have a drink or a meal, and they would let the gossip columnists know about it, so the venue would then get a mention in the newspapers.

Normally this would be one or two passing mentions, and nothing further would happen. But this time it did. A couple of mentions in the society columns somehow intrigued enough people that some more celebrities started dropping in. The club was quite close to Broadway, and so a few of the stars of Broadway started popping in to see what the fuss was about. And then more stars started popping in to see what the other stars had been popping in for. Noel Coward started cruising the venue looking for rough trade. Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Tallulah Bankhead were regulars. Norman Mailer danced a twist with the granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook,

and Tennessee Williams and even Greta Garbo turned up, all to either dance to Joey D and the Starlighters, or to watch the younger people dancing to them. There were even rumours, which turned out to be false, that Jackie Kennedy had gone to the peppermint lounge, though she did apparently enjoy dancing the twist herself. The peppermint lounge became a sensation, and the stories all focused on the dance these people were doing.

The twist re-entered the charts, 18 months after it had first come out, and Morris Levy sprang into action. Levy wanted a piece of this new twist thing, and since he didn't have Chubby Checker, he was going to get the next best thing. He signed Joey D. and the Starlighters to Roulette Records, and got Henry Glover in to produce them. Henry Glover is a figure who we really didn't mention as much as we should have in the first 50 or so episodes of the podcast. He'd played trumpet with Lucky Mullinder, and he'd produced most of the artists on King Records in the late 40s and 50s, including Wynoni Harris, Bill Doggett and James Brown.

He'd produced Little Willie John's version of Fever and wrote Drown in My Own Tears, which had become a hit for Ray Charles. Glover had also produced Hank Ballard's original version of The Twist, and now he was assigned to write a twist song for Joey D in the Starlighters. His song, Peppermint Twist, became their first single on Roulette. Peppermint Twist went to number one, and Chubby Checker's version of the twist went back to number one,

becoming the only record ever to do so during the rock and roll era. In fact, Checker's record, on its re-entry, became so popular that as recently as 2018, Billboard listed it as the all-time number one record on the Hot 100. The twist was a massive sensation, but it had moved first from working-class black adults to working-class white teenagers to young middle-class white adults, and now to middle-aged and elderly rich white people who thought it was the latest in, And so, of course, it stopped being the cool in-thing with the teenagers almost straight away. If you're young and rebellious, you don't want to be doing the same thing that your grandmother's

favourite film star from when she was a girl is doing. But it took a while for that disinterest on the part of the teenagers to filter through to the media. And in the meantime, there were thousands of Twist-in' Records. There was a version of Waltz and Matilda remade as Twisting Matilda. The Chipmunks recorded the Alvin Twist. The Devels, a group on Cameo Parkway who'd had a hit with the Bristol Stomp, recorded Bristol Twist in Annie, which managed to be a sequel not only to the twist, but to their own, the Bristol Stomp, and to Hank Ballard's earlier Annie recordings. There were twist records by Bill Haley, Neil Siddarker, Dwayne Eddy. Almost all of these were terrible records, although we will, in a future episode, look at one actually good twist single. The Twist

proper started in November 1961, and by December there were already two films out in the cinemas. Hey Let's Twist starred Joey Dean The Starlighters in a film which portrayed the peppermint lounge as a family-run Italian restaurant rather than a mafia-run bar, and featured Joe Pesci in a cameo that was his first film role. Twist Around the Clock starred Chubby Checker and took a whole week to make. As well as Checker, it featured Dion and the Marcells, trying desperately to have another hit after Blue Moon. Merry Christmas, everybody. A Twisting New Year?

Twist Around the Clock was an easy film to make, because Sam Kurtzman, who produced it, had produced several rock films in the 50s, including Rock Around the Clock. He got the writer of that film to re-type his script over a weekend, so it talked about twisting

instead of rocking, and starred Chubby Checker instead of Bill Haley. As Kurtzman had also made Bill Haley's second film, Don't Knock the Rock, so Checker's second film became Don't Knock the Twist. Checker also appeared in a British film, it's Trad Dad, which we talked about last week. That was a cheap Trad Jazz cash-in, but at the last minute they decided to rework it, so it included twist music as well as Trad.

So the director, Richard Lester, flew to the USA for a couple of days to film Checker and a couple of other artists miring to their records, which was then intercut with footage of British Teenagers Dancing, to make it look like they were dancing to Cheka. Of course, the twist craze couldn't last forever, but Chubby Chekker managed a good few years of making dance craze singles, and he married Catherina Lodders, who had been Miss World 1962 in 1964.

Rather amazingly, for a marriage between a rock star and a beauty queen, they remain married to this day, nearly 60 years later. Checker's last big hit came in 1965, by which point the British invasion had taken over the American charts so comprehensively that Chekker was recording Do the Freddy, a song about the dance that Freddie Garity of Freddy and the Dreamers did on stage. In recent decades, Checker has been very bitter about his status. He's continued a career of sorts,

even scoring a novelty hit in the late 80s with a hip-hop remake of The Twist with the Fat Boys, but for a long time his most successful records were unavailable. Cameo Parkway was bought in the late 60s by Alan Klein, A music industry executive will be hearing more of, more or less as a tax write-off. And between 1975 and 2005, there was no legal way to get any of the recordings on that label, as they went out of print and weren't issued on CD, so Checker didn't get the royalties he could have been getting from 30 years of nostalgia compilation albums.

Recent interviews show that Checker is convinced he is the victim of an attempt to erase him from rock and roll history, and believes he deserves equal prominence with Elvis and the Beatles. He believes his lack of recognition is down to racism, as he married a white woman and has protested outside the rock and roll hall of fame at his lack of induction. Whatever one's view of the artistic merits of his work, it's sad that someone so successful now feels so overlooked. But the twist fad, once it died, left three real legacies. One was a song we'll be looking at in a few months, and the other two came from Jerry D. and the Starlighters. The young rascals, a group who had a series of hits from 1965 to 1970 started out as the instrumentalists in the 1964 line-up of Joey D. and the Starlighters,

before breaking out to become their own band. And a trio called Ronnie and the Relatives made their first appearances at the Peppermint Lounge, singing backing vocals and dancing behind the Starlighters. They later changed their name to the Ronettes, and we'll be hearing more from them later. The twist was the last great fad of the pre-Beatles' 60s. that it left so little of a cultural mark says a lot about the changes that were to come

and which would sweep away all memory of the previous few years. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon Backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on

Beyond Dance Le Twist by Jeannie Halliday. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers,

is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favorite online bookstore, or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and tilt ariser.

Visit 500songs.com That's 500000 the numbers songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show

and feel it's worth reviewing please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts but more importantly tell just one person that you liked this podcast word of mouth more than any other form of promotion is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves thank you very much for listening