MatR: Bruce Springsteen, Joe Grushecky, and Gary U.S. Bonds: The Twist

You’ve done The Twist.

You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t.

If you’re a fan of rock and roll from any era, sooner or later you’ve done The Twist. Everybody has.

Chubby Checker’s version (it was a cover) was a monster hit–the biggest hit single ever, in fact, and the only non-Christmas song to ever reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100 a second time after its first run up the charts.

“The Twist” was a dance before it was a song. No one knows exactly where it originated, but early rock and roll pioneer Hank Ballard was in Tampa with his band The Midnighters when he first saw kids doing it in 1958.

He was playing a show with The Sensational Nightingales, a gospel group, who had worked up a song about the dance. It wasn’t the sanitized version we know today from television, movies, and school dances, however; it was coarser, more sexual, and completely inappropriate for a gospel group to sing about.

Since they couldn’t release it themselves, they shopped their song around. First they approached Little Joe and The Thrillers, who had released a very (almost suspiciously) similar sounding song called “Let’s Do The Slop” a few years earlier.

Little Joe was interested, but his label balked at the sexual connotations of the title and lyrics. Ballard, however, had no such reservations. In fact, he thought the song could stand to be livened up a bit, and he knew just how to do it: he’d recorded a song called “Is Your Love for Real” in 1957, and the melody for that song was a close enough fit to graft onto the lyrics of “The Twist.”

We can hear the similarity to “Is Your Love for Real” in Ballard’s original recording of “The Twist,” but what’s just as noticeable are the lyrics, which differ significantly from the song we know and love today.

Presumably those were the lyrics he’d heard The Sensational Nightingales sing, but when Ballard released his own version in late 1958, he’d changed the lyrics to the more familiar ones.

Ballard released “The Twist” in the early days of 1959. It generated some airplay initially, peaking at #16 on the Billboard Hot R&B chart, but it wasn’t until Ballard had a subsequent hit that interest piqued in his earlier work. A year after its first run up the charts, “The Twist” peaked at #6 on the R&B chart and #28 on the Hot 100.

That was high enough to earn the attention of Dick Clark, who wanted to book Ballard to perform “The Twist” on American Bandstand. Explanations vary about why Ballard either never got or never accepted the offer, and we may never know the true story. The outcome is the same, though: Clark recruited a young singer named Ernest Evans to record a cover.

Evans was only eighteen years old when he recorded “The Twist,” and the only reason Clark knew him was that Evans recorded a humorous Christmas song for him, featuring dead-on impressions of popular singers like Fats Domino. His Domino impression was so good, in fact, that Clark’s wife dubbed him “Chubby Checker” as a wink.

Clark asked Checker to record a cover of “The Twist” doing his best Hank Ballard impression, and the result was… well, immortal. Clark had Checker perform the song on television, and it became an immediate hit, rocketing all the way to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Checker’s version of “The Twist” sounded so much like Ballard’s that even Ballard was confused when he first heard it–it sounded like a new version with himself singing on it.

“The Twist” was now a smash hit, and so was the dance. Twist-mania swept the country throughout the early 1960s, becoming ubiquitous in American popular culture. So stubborn was its hold on the dance floor that Checker’s label, sensing an opportunity, took out a full-page ad for Checker’s two-year-old song in Billboard and sparked another run to the top of the Hot 100 in January 1962.

Although he’d have plenty of other hit singles, Checker became indelibly identified with “The Twist,” and over the years he recorded remake after remake (including a country version and a rap version with The Fat Boys that cracked the Top 20 in 1988) and sequels like “Let’s Twist Again.”

But nothing ever since–by anyone–bottled the lightning of “The Twist.”

It’s impossible to catalog all the artists who have covered “The Twist” over the decades–it’s a rock and roll staple guaranteed to get everyone out on the dance floor. So it’s not surprising to learn that Bruce Springsteen covered it in concert–the surprise is that he only did it once.

It was over twenty years ago, at one of the earliest Light of Day benefits–so early that the event was still held at Tradewinds in Sea Bright. Bruce made his already customary surprise appearance with Joe Grushecky for an eight-song set that included originals by Springsteen, Grushecky, and Garland Jeffreys (also on stage that night).

At the end of their set, Joe, Bruce, Garland, and Gary U.S. Bonds all took the stage for a raucous, loose encore jam of “The Twist,” featuring Bruce on lead vocals.

Toward the end of the song, Bonds took over. He segued the band into “Peppermint Twist,” a 1961 song by Joey Dee and The Starliters (another New Jersey band) that not only rode Checker’s coattails to the top of the Hot 100, it stomped on them, dethroning Checker from his second reign in the process.

“Peppermint Twist” was only one of many Twist-themed songs spawned by Checker’s record-setting single. While Joey Dee and The Starliters were scoring a hit with “Peppermint Twist,” another local group called The Top Notes recorded their own Twist tribute.

Their 1961 original recording attracted little notice, but when it was re-worked by The Isley Brothers and The Beatles shortly after, it became a monster hit of its own, one that Springsteen would go on to cover more than 400 times (and counting) in concert–more than his own staples like “No Surrender” and “Racing in the Street.”

But that’s an entry for another day.

The Twist
First performed: November 2,  2002 (Sea Bright, NJ)
Last performed: November 2, 2002 (Sea Bright, NJ)

(For more information on “The Twist,” see this excellent episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, an invaluable resource for me in general and for this entry specifically.)