II. What Might Have Been
It wasn’t just Chubby’s recording career that looked to be over, but his entire career as a performer looked to be dead and done. He spent several years out of the public eye. And these weren’t just any years — these were the ‘60s, America’s most tumultuous decade since the Civil War and undoubtedly the most fecund period for rock ‘n’ roll’s spread and blossoming. But the ‘60s as a category didn’t really begin until around the time that his commercial career ended, that is, 1964 or 1965, and this was no coincidence. The times had changed and Chubby’s canned dithyrambs were antically dated only a few short years after they were massive hits. It wasn’t until nostalgia became an inexhaustible Boomer resource that a way forward became clear, a method by which he could parlay his long-ago fame into a semi-successful career. And this career, playing his old dance hits 00 “The Twist” and its sequels, “The Hucklebuck”, “Pony Time” and the others — continues to this day. But his one-trick-pony legacy act obscures, eclipses, and even omits his single greatest achievement as an artist, which is the strange gem of a record that he released in 1971 called Chequered!, an artistic statement that stands apart from his other work like a Gehry building would on any average city block.
Chequered! is indubitably a good album — it might even be a great album! — and its very existence has compelled me to dramatically revise my conception of Checker. Dead is the idea that he was a one-hit-wonder no-talent. But the album’s singularity in his discography also reinforces the notion that, as an artist, Chubby Checker’s greatest sin was one of omission. Let the Good Times Roll came out only a couple of years after this album was released, but his set there was strictly “oldies”, the word itself only recently having entered the lexicon, and once entered, its function for the performers was one of both opportunity — the dedicated radio stations along with the revue circuit provided a stable source of income — and one of circumscription — the oldies beat was necessarily limiting in regard to artistic growth. Indeed, it would have been jarring had Checker segued from “Let’s Twist Again” into, say, “Stoned in the Bathroom” during his set in Let the Good Times Roll. Jarring and almost certainly disqualifying.
This may partially explain why so many of that first generation of rock ‘n’ rollers never ventured very far artistically from what initially brung ‘em. While it’s impossible to say what direction Buddy Holly might have taken after his initial success, and with the possible exception of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had a successful run as a country artist after his rock ‘n’ roll period, none of these artists grew and expanded and experimented to the extent that Bob Dylan or the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix did over rock ‘n’ roll’s second decade. (I’m excluding the soul artists here to focus more narrowly on the explicit rock ‘n’ rollers for clarity, but James Brown and Marvin Gaye grew and expanded and experimented every bit as much as their rock-and-roll counterparts.)
Elvis’s ‘68 Comeback Special was a “Get Back” moment, really the first and most iconic of its kind, and it even presaged MTV’s Unplugged format. But where had Elvis wandered off to that necessitated his making a comeback? He’d done a stint in the army, that’s true, and made a bunch of bad movies. But artistically where had he gone? He’d taken the opposite route of those ‘60s artists. In less than a decade, he’d gone from “Heartbreak Hotel” to “Do the Clam”. He’d quickly gone from fostering “…almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people”, according to Frank Sinatra, to singing Frank’s song on Frank’s show (“Witchcraft”). In short, he’d gone from rebel to preppy and never made it all the way back again. Little Richard and Bo Diddley and Bill Haley and Chuck Berry covered even less ground than Elvis. They simply waited until their more primitive rock stylings became fashionable again, essentially sitting out the ‘60s as usurped kings.
But not so with Chubby Checker. This album makes clear that he wasn’t content to sit out the ‘60s. No, he wanted to contribute, to grow and expand. The fact that the album remains largely obscure is beside the point. The important consideration — the artistic consideration — is that he wrote — yes, Chubby wrote the songs on Chequered! , a point of pride for him even to this day — and recorded this excellent work, and that he engaged with his time.
A key difference in outlook is undoubtedly due to the fact that that older generation of rockers really is, or was, older. Chubby Checker is considerably younger than Chuck Berry or Bill Haley or Little Richard or Bo Diddley. He’s even younger than both John Lennon and Bob Dylan. So he is really and truly of the generation of musicians who expanded the scope of rock ‘n’ roll despite his being associated with the previous one. And you can start to see the outlines of why Chubby feels he’s been both misunderstood as an artist and disrespected as a hit-maker.
The liner notes to Sunbeam Records’ 2012 rerelease of Chequered! begin with a remarkable statement of purpose: “This is the new Chubby Checker! Those who expect to find an echo of the days of the Twist will not find it — they will find instead much more.” And truer words have seldom been written in ad copy. From the ecstatic opener’s rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat drum-flourish opening through to the closing bars of the bittersweet closer’s twinkling organ and tinkling cymbal fills, hitting upon ferocious bluesy discharges and soulful psychedelia throughout and even a detour to a hokey but affecting ode to Jesus, Chequered! makes for a blast of a listen. It’s a departure so extreme that you’ll probably find yourself checking the cover to assure you’ve put on the right record. Roger Ebert said that Chubby Checker couldn’t sing, but I’d be willing to bet he never heard Chubby’s rapturous thunderings here. On song after song, he sings his ass off, making up for his technical limitations with spirited performances that suggest the same sort of barely-can-stand-it maniacal zeal to which I alluded earlier in reference to his performance in Let the Good Times Roll. That that film was released only a couple of years after this record came out confirms that Chubby was at his artistic peak during this period, and it’s a shame that this album and that film’s three-song set are the only extant records we have of the man in his prime.
The jacket is taken up by a closeup of Chubby’s face as he stares intensely into the distance, the epitome of the denuded candid shot as cover. It reminds one of the Darkness on the Edge of Town cover from a few years later, but this is less posed than that, less an intentional statement of seriousness and purpose and more an articulation that Chubby has been through some things since you last heard from him. He looks weathered here, experienced. And the quality of the photo itself suggests that it wasn’t taken as part of a dedicated shoot for the record. Just an unposed, ingenuous shot of Checker that they found somewhere.
The music within is anything but the dour affair that the cover photo might suggest though. The album’s opener, “How Does It Feel”, is a blissed-out three-chord progression in which Checker reappropriates Dylan’s famous question and bases the entire song around posing it in different formulations. He asks, “How does it feel to be top of the world?” and then proceeds to demonstrate precisely that feeling for us through much of the album’s ten exuberant tracks. Other highlights are the catchy novelty of “Stoned in the Bathroom”, the powerful soul tune “No Need to Get so Heavy”, the intense psychedelia of “Goodbye Victoria”, the song about Jesus, “He Died”, and also the catchy, elegiac closer, “If the Sun Stopped Shining”, which ends with the following line: “If you take all your love, there’ll be no me at all”. This album is more than a mere curiosity owing to its anomalousness in Checker’s otherwise stodgy catalog. It’s superb all on its own.