let's twist again year

Barely into his 30s, the clean-cut Clark was building an empire, and his cultural impact and commercial power were already enormous. Within seconds the younger set of Mad Men characters, gathered after work in their three-button suits and twinsets to celebrate the acceptance of Peggy Olson's first stab at copywriting by her bosses at Sterling Cooper, are dancing on the floor of PJ Clarke's Third Avenue bar. No one knows how the Twist began. Photograph: Getty Images, he finger presses the plastic button. And so along came the Locomotion, the Fly, the Madison, the Hitch Hike, the Watusi, the Hully Gully, the Frug, the Stroll, the Monkey, the Dog, the Mashed Potato and countless others, including that nameless creation, beloved of mods, in which all movement was reduced to the merest twitch of one knee and a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders: it was, as New Orleans R&B singer Chris Kenner would proclaim in 1962, the Land Of 1,000 Dances indeed.

The singer gave the audience his famous advice on how to master the dance – "Just pretend you're wiping your bottom with a towel as you get out of the shower, while putting out a cigarette with both feet" – and a month later the record was No 1 in the national charts. Arthur Murray, the dance teacher, added it to his curriculum, setting an example followed with some reluctance by Fred Astaire's nationwide chain of academies. Their arms are going from side to side in time with the rhythm while their knees turn in the opposite direction, a contra-rotational movement involving a demure swivel of the pelvis. Before long columnists were recording the presence of Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, Greta Garbo, Tennessee Williams, Elsa Maxwell, Noël Coward, Norman Mailer and the offspring of various European royal families. Their fresh faces are registering surprise and delight. It won particular favour in Baltimore, where the audience at a TV show for local teens made up a dance to go with it. It was only a dance, for heaven's sake, but it opened up a world. The song refers to the Twist dance craze and Checker's 1960 single "The Twist", a two-time U.S. No.1 single (in September 1960 and again in January 1962 on re-release). And since you are not physically attached to your partner, there is nothing to stop you drifting away to dance with someone else who has caught your eye (of course, you can also have that humiliation visited upon you, and find yourself dancing alone). Fifty years ago, this felt like a revolution.

The word was used in connection with dancing in a number of songs during the first half of the 20th century, but the song itself seems to have been written, in its first form, in 1957 by Brother Joseph Wallace of the Sensational Nightingales, a prominent gospel group. Richard Williams, up on his feet when it first hit the dancefloor, celebrates the birth of a revolution.• Gallery: How to do the Twist• Gallery: The craze that swept the world.

He needed another hit, and in May he was back in Cameo-Parkway's studio to record a song called Let's Twist Again, composed by Dave Appell with Kal Mann, Bernie Lowe's business partner and a former comedy writer. It is a narcissistic dance, but it also gives you the chance to watch your partner's moves, and read their intentions.

Checker also recorded the song in German as "Der Twist Beginnt" and in Italian as "Balliamo il Twist". One of the biggest hit singles of 1961, it reached No.8 on the U.S. Both gave prominent mentions to the club, and to the sudden blossoming of the Twist fad, and the warmth of their approval encouraged a flock of celebrities to follow in their footsteps.

But his sharp business instincts had led him to cultivate mutually profitable relationships inside the music business, and he was quick to suggest to his old friend Bernie Lowe, co-owner of Philadelphia's Cameo and Parkway labels, that it would be a good idea to record a cover version of this new song, to feature on his show. For a while, the Twist was ours and ours alone. Checker's The Twist topped the chart for a second time. No more jitterbug or jive.

And when I watch that Mad Men scene now, there's something in it I recognise from the teenage party of half a century ago: the faces, with their look of joy and discovery. One evening in the late summer of 1961, I was invited to a teenage party at which a very pretty girl and I were the only ones who knew how to do the Twist. Twist Around The Clock was launched on 30 December 1961, with the craze at its height.

Jackie Kennedy, the epitome of the new carefree spirit of the post-Eisenhower era, did the Twist in a Capri nightspot. Owned by the Genovese crime family, and operated by one of its underbosses, Matty "The Horse" Ianniello, as part of a string of strip clubs and gay bars, it had acquired as resident band a young New Jersey group called Joey Dee and the Starliters. As things turned out, it was only sleeping, and 1961 was destined to be the year of the Twist. Billboard pop chart (No.3 on Cash Box) in August of that year and subsequently reached No.2 in the U.K. in February 1962. What the Twist had done, however, was create a powerful hunger among modernist youth for new dance crazes based on the template of dancing on the spot, with no contact. "Let's Twist Again" is a song written by Kal Mann and Dave Appell, and released as a single by Chubby Checker. What counted was not the size but the nature of the audience, for in the late summer of 1961 the Peppermint Lounge enlisted the services of Earl Blackwell, publisher of the Celebrity Register, to arrange visits by a couple of New York columnists: Igor Cassini, who contributed gossip items to the daily Journal-American under the byline "Cholly Knickerbocker", and Eugenia Sheppard, a fashion writer for the Herald Tribune.

Each dancer is facing a partner, moving on the spot, without touching. The little black disc drops down and the needle finds the groove. The Twist is a dance for different times.

[17] In Wallonia (French Belgium) his single spent 40 weeks on the chart, also peaking at number 1. Rather than going through a set of predetermined steps, you are free to use dancing as a means of self-expression, of doing your own thing, though that phrase will not come into use until the 60s have become fully swinging. No more rumba or beguine, cha-cha or tango. In France there was Twist à Saint-Tropez, by Dick Rivers et Les Chats Sauvages, while Johnny Hallyday invited his followers to Viens Danser Le Twist. The job of making the record was given to Dave Appell, a former dance-band guitarist who had become Cameo-Parkway's house arranger.

1 on the singles sales chart in France (from 13 November to 13 December 1961 and from 13 January to 9 February 1962). [2], The song was covered in French by Johnny Hallyday.

But not for long. But by the time the Beatles brought their first album to a climax with their raucous, Hamburg-honed version of Twist And Shout at the beginning of 1963, the whole business had become the inevitable victim of overexposure. Checker rerecorded Let's Twist Again in German, for an audience also dancing to Der Liszt Twist. 1962, the Italian actress Sophia Loren (left) demonstrating the Twist at the Saint-Maurice studios with her teacher Regine. Finally, there is no leader: here is the first dance in which the genders are created equal. It's 1961, and a new era is dawning. They were joined on stage by three teenage girls from Spanish Harlem who had turned up at the club one night in high bouffant hairdos, lavish mascara and matching frocks, with Kleenex stuffed in their bras, and were given a job as the world's first go-go dancers. According to Mann, it took all of five minutes to assemble a song clearly designed to do little more than squeeze out the last drop of juice from the original idea.
The song received the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Rock & Roll Recording. The finger presses the plastic button. King Records' boss was Syd Nathan, an archetypal cigar-chomping philistine who liked the Twist so little that it first saw the light of day, in January 1959, as the B-side of a ballad called Teardrops On Your Letter, which edged its way into the Top 100. The voice coming from the jukebox is that of Chubby Checker, and the song is the Twist. Let's Twist again Fifty years ago, a new dance craze swept the world and changed for ever the way people move. On West 45th Street in midtown Manhattan, a small nightclub called the Peppermint Lounge was setting aside its past as a sleazy leather bar. The absence of body contact is significant. His version (titled "Viens danser le twist") was released in 1961 and spent seven weeks in total at no. Later they would become known as the Ronettes, but for now they merely gyrated while the Starliters' high-energy versions of current hits pulled in crowds of young dancers.

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