Sunday Morning Vault: Chubby Checker--The Twist (1961)

     Ernest Evans at times lamented the fact that many overlooked his talent, but one thing is for sure, he was smart enough to ride "The Twist" to a solid career for the entirety of his career.
     Evans was working at a chicken processing plant and a produce market in the late 50's, and was known as a good singer who had the gift of making impressions of popular singers of the day, Fats Domino, Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis were just a few of the artists that he would imitate. He would entertain workers at both places with his talents. It was the owner of the produce market and his friend who was a songwriter for Cameo-Parkway records who arraigned for him to make a private recording for Dick Clark (who was still based in Philadelphia at the time) using the voices.
     It was Clark's wife who gave him the name "Checker". She asked him his name and Ernest said that his friends called him, "Chubby". She was making a play on Fats Domino's name when she saying, "Like Checker?". The name got a laugh from all there, but it also stuck. The record that Checker made was sent to Clark's friends as a Christmas gift. However, the folks at Cameo-Parkway was so impressed that they signed him to a contract and released, "The Class" as a single in the spring of 1959. It reached the top 40 later that year.
     "The Twist" had been recorded by Hank Ballard & The Midnighters in 1959, and reached the top 20 that year. They had also introduced the dance, but it was Checker's version, released in the summer of 1960 that stormed up the charts, all the way to #1. It not only hit the top of the charts that year, but it went on to reach number 1 again in late 1961.
     This launched Checker into international stardom, but it also trapped him by producers who saw him as a, "dance" singer, and had him not only attempt songs with a "Twist" theme (Let's Twist Again, Twistin' USA, Slow Twistin'), but a whole bunch of other songs about dancing, (The Hucklebuck, Pony Time, The Fly). He wasn't always happy about this, but on the other hand, was a smart enough businessman to strike while the iron was hot.
     As it turned out, Checker finished with three #1's and had 24 songs on the top 40, with the last time being a re-recording of "The Twist" for a new generation with The Fat Boys in 1988. 

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The Capitols--Cool Jerk (1966)

     As with all popular music for centuries, dancing to music seems to be a natural thing to do. By the early 1900's, there always seemed to be a dance for musicians to capitalize on and make popular. The decade of the 60's however was about the last decade that artists wrote for particular dances. One of them was performed by a group out of Detroit.
     The Capitols had their beginnings as "The Caps" in 1962. They were signed to a local label and released an album and single, which although showing musical promise, never caught on and after several years disbanded. Two of it's members, Ralph Julies Jones, and Don Storball was seeking to capitalize on a new dance in the clubs of Detroit. It was a version of "the jerk", but a bit more sexual in nature. It was called, "the pimp jerk", but given the potential problems with the name, changed it to the "cool jerk". Jones and Storball wrote the song and hastily reformed The Caps and renamed them.
     "Cool Jerk" was released in the spring of 1966 and shot up to #7 on the charts. The group released eight more singles, which two of them reached the lower rungs of the top 100. They disbanded in late 1969....

  

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The Paula Abdul Essentials

Wrote this blog on Yahoo....it's not exactly within the purview of this blog, but if your curious about Paula Abdul's musical career....check it out here...

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/9001929/the_paula_abdul_essentials.html?cat=37

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Chubby Checker--The Twist (1960)

    Ernest Evans has lamented that his career has been focused on just one song, but probably no one artist in the rock and roll era has been linked to a song like he has...

     As a teenager, The Twist was the only song that I associated with Chubby Checker. In fact, it's the only song linked to him in 2010. There have been times that he has complained about that, which is a valued argument. From 1960 to 1965 Checker had 21 hits on the top 40 (if you count The Twist's second #1 showing in January 1962). So why isn't he known for more than just this one song.

     Well, first of all, it's a great song. It was originally recorded by Hank Ballard & The Midnighters in 1959 as a B-side to "Teardrops on your Letter". In 1960, Dick Clark attempted to get Ballard on American Bandstand to perform the song, but was unavailable. With that Clark decided to look for a local kid to do the song. He found Checker who's vocal style is similar to Ballard's. The song went to #1 and began a string of hits that linked itself to dance (including 5 about the Twist).

      The Twist was also on the cusp of a couple of cultural changes that are still with us today. The first was the style of music. People had been dancing for centuries, but the Twist was the first major hit in the rock era where couples didn't have to touch to dance. I'm not sure why, but it sparked a revolution in dance where the participants wouldn't be touching. Another huge change (and a reason why it went #1 for a second time) was that adults began dancing the Twist. Before this song, rock and roll songs were danced by teenagers and the parents stayed away. However, the upper and middle class adults began to take the dance moves to the floor, and this spurred on an entirely new audience for the song.

      Another factor why this was important in the career of Checker was that of all of those dance crazes, the Twist is one of the few that has survived the hype. The Pony, The Limbo and others have pretty much gone away except for those who were actually dancing in that era. For whatever reason, the dance and therefore the song stayed in the public eye for years. Then in 1988, he re-recorded the song with The Fat Boys, in a totally different style and reached the top 20 again and made the song hip again for a new generation.

       Checker hit the oldies circuit since the 70's, and is still touring today. And on dance floors all over the world, there will still be couples dancing the twist.....

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Joey Dee & The Starlighters--Peppermint Twist (1961)

     On today's date in 1940, Joseph DiNicola better known as Joey Dee was born in Passaic, New Jersey. Along with David Brigati, Larry Vernieri, Carlton Lattimore and Willie Davis, Dee and The Starlighters got a standing gig at the Peppermint Lounge in New York in 1960. This song was based on that venue, and also gave them their only number one song in late 1961.

     The hits kept coming over the next two years (including three top 40's) then dried up. However, the band never stopped touring and still continues to this day (www.joeydee.com). Another interesting note, during the early 60's they had some interesting members of the backing band including three future members of The Young Rascals, Jimmy Jones, who would later drop the moniker and go by his real name of Jimi Hendrix, and a young Joe Pesci.

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