III. Dancing Apart to the Beat
In late July of 2001, Chubby wrote a deranged letter addressed to “the Nobel Prize nominators and the nominators of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, T.V., Radio, Motion Pictures, Entertainment, Entertainers, and the general public at large worldwide,” in which he assessed his legacy thus: “I am often called the wheel that Rock rolls on as long as people are dancing apart to the beat of the music they enjoy. Before ‘Alexander Graham Bell’…no telephone. Before ‘Thomas Edison’… no light. Before ‘Dr. George Washington Carver’…no oil from seed or cloning of plants. Before ‘Henry Ford’…no V-8 Engine. Before ‘Walt Disney’…no animated cartoons. Before Chubby Checker…no ‘Dancing Apart to the Beat.’ What is ‘Dancing Apart to the Beat’? Dancing Apart to the Beat is the dance that we do when we dance apart to the beat of anybody’s music and before ‘Chubby Checker’ it could not be found!”
In one sentence he demands his Dancing-Apart-to-the-Beat contribution be regarded along with many of the signal inventions of the 20th century, and then, only a few short sentences later, he seeks to clear up any confusion his readers might have regarding his phrasing: “What is ‘Dancing Apart to the Beat’?” he asks. And he answers by restating the question with an exclamation point at the end. Dancing apart to the beat is the dance we do when we dance apart to the beat! Of anybody’s music! Chubby never claimed to be a logician.
It’s true that he didn’t invent the dance or write the song that made it famous — he was scarcely competent at even performing the movement. Still, he was its great proselytizer, and remains so to this day. Journalist James Wolcott, in a characteristic display of acrobatic prosody, helped me to understand that doing the Twist was something of a revolutionary act, a democratizing and gender-equalizing act even: “Unlike dances that came before, such as the Foxtrot and the Mambo, the Twist didn’t require professional instruction or a set of floor diagrams for fancy footwork. Unlike dances that came later, such as the whipcracking Cool Jerk and Frug, it posed no threat to the sacroiliac. The Twist was an infectious bug that anybody could catch, regardless of age (Noël Coward amid all those juvies), innate musicality, or medical condition.” And: “It respected personal space. Because the pelvis is tucked back during the Twist, it didn’t tote the erotic aggression or encroaching intimacy of the rhythmic stalkings and grope-fests that would come later, once Baby was initiated into the full-body latherings of Dirty Dancing and hip-hop became a burlesque palace of humongous backfields in motion.” It’s this separate-but-together component of the Twist to which Chubby is referring with his “dancing apart to the beat” formulation.
But something has happened to Chubby Checker since that way-back-when, since too his early-‘70s artistic high-water mark. Of course we all get old, and let’s face it, many people get weird as they get old. Chubby is perhaps going through the same throes of aging that cause one’s uncle to seethe at the television set at the sight of a few hundred thousand women marching in Washington, only his throes are manifesting differently. But there’s no mistaking the fact that Chubby’s become bitter, and he’s bitter largely due to his diminished stature in the rock ‘n’ roll pantheon. This makes him fascinating. A disgruntled milquetoast. An ornery teddy bear. But I’m of the mind that there’s something deeper going on. Chequered! demonstrates that he’s an artist of merit by the best parameter we have: He made a great album that nobody listened to! And the nostalgia industry revving up just at that moment provided a ready-made avenue for him to exploit his ancient hitmaking, but at the cost perhaps of sacrificing his artistic ambitions. Does it bother him, I wonder, that his actual talent goes unheralded? And at the same time, his popular early-‘60s output which made him a household name also goes underappreciated, or at least, to hear Chubby tell it, underplayed. He declaimed to SFGate: “I have only one regret in my whole life. This is my greatest regret — that my music is not being played and more people aren’t seeing Chubby Checker. That’s very painful for me.” But this is more complaint than regret.
So here he is, still performing “The Twist” at least dozens of nights a year to pay the bills, and yet the song itself is rarely in rotation anymore, what with oldies stations now playing Madonna and Pearl Jam. All of this points to a contradiction at the heart of his evangelizing campaign: He sees as self-evident the rarified status of his legacy, his hit-making contributions rivaled only by the Beatles, and yet he has to explain to anybody who will listen what these contributions are. Meanwhile, Hank Ballard was inducted into the Rock Hall all the way back in 1990. A chafed Chubbs.
Not long after penning that letter, Chubby Checker staged a one-man protest outside of the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan where the induction ceremony was taking place, bemoaning the lack of airplay his “Twist” had been receiving and deriding what he considered a snub on the part of the Hall. He has a point. At least about the Hall. On the one hand, KISS and ABBA made it in; on the other, Joy Division, the Smiths, and the Cure have all been left out. By any reasonable metric, he should definitely be in. Chuck Berry, as it happens, was the very first inductee back in its inaugural year of 1986, though his firstness owed to Berry preceding Brown and Cooke and Domino and Holly and Penniman (Little Richard) and Presley in the alphabet.
As it turned out though, Chubby wasn’t protesting his exclusion from the Hall. Rather, he was protesting its failure to erect a 30-foot statue of his likeness in the courtyard of the Cleveland museum as he had requested. In the letter, he stipulated that they should use the image of his doing the twist that’s emblazoned on the package of his signature beef jerky. He mentioned the beef jerky in the letter. His logic went as follows: “Yes, it’s true that my artistic legacy doesn’t justify my induction into the Hall of Fame; still, I should be acknowledged in some way for my contributions. Billboard magazine named ‘The Twist’ the biggest single of the ‘60s. I’m a beloved figure. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a statue of me in the courtyard, or at least a picture, to welcome the visitors? Something? Anything? Pretty please?” With the Chubbspeak now translated, it’s hard to argue that his position is without merit. Though his bombast, lack of self-awareness, and obsequiousness lend themselves to easy ridicule, I can’t help but sympathize with him here. He should be acknowledged. It’s a tourist attraction, not a private party in Jann Wenner’s anagogic dreamscape.
But Didn’t He Die?
More recently, he’s expressed his disappointment in not being inducted more overtly and it hasn’t gone well. In 2014 he said that his exclusion was attributable to racism. It’s obvious that what Chubby means by racism isn’t what the rest of us understand it to be. His exact phrasing was, “I don’t like to say it, but they’re racist against the Chubb, that’s all it is.” Racist against the Chubb. Just like Cooperstown is racist against Charlie Hustle. It’s unclear to me whether the accusation was an attempt by Chubby to exploit the controversies surrounding race and hip-hop that have swirled around the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in recent years, or whether he was simply charging his words for greater effect.
His one-man Hall protest garnered some media attention, and that might have been all he was really after. Sure, he wanted the giant statue, but more importantly, he wanted some attention. Some attention and some airplay on the oldies stations for his big song. His “Twist” is the only song ever to top the Billboard Hot 100 two separate times, and Checker will not let you forget it. It did so when it was first released in late 1960, and then it did so again in January of 1962, after his appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Billboard named the song the biggest hit of the ’60s, no small feat when you consider all of those Beatles songs it had to contend with, and in 2015, the magazine named it its all-time No. 1 song, just edging out Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas’s “Smooth” collaboration. Chubby told the magazine, “I’m so proud of how ‘The Twist’ has endured and even more thankful for how long my career has endured.”
His website is unsurprisingly a legacy thing, with design features that strike one as ancient in terms of the Internet. The only thing missing is the “The Twist” playing the second you click onto the site. You can peruse his concert schedule – recently he played the Mill Town Music Hall in Bremen, Georgia, a town of 6,000 people close to the Alabama border. You can purchase merchandise — shirts and hats, but also his signature beef jerky, a sugary drink called “Pony Punch”, and Checker Chocolate, a chocolate bar with white and milk chocolate squares that make a checkerboard. My favorite section is dedicated to the Checkerlicious Express. I’ll leave it to the site’s author to explain: “The Checkerlicious Express is but another of Chubby’s idea [sic] brought to life for two purposes: To serve as a motorcoach to transport Chubby and his band to various concert engagements, and for use as a marketing and promotional vehicle for his line of snack foods. It is the marriage of a Volvo tractor to a highly customized coach… and it is Chubby’s pride and joy.”
A Volvo tractor. He goes on and on about its being a Volvo tractor: “‘I am a connoisseur of fine things,’ said Chubby in a recent interview. ‘I worked on the creation of this vehicle for a year and a half before I was satisfied with my design. I then explored and selected the conversion company I wanted to build it for me — Kingsley Coach of Zimmerman, MN. But the one thing I knew right from the beginning is that I wanted a Volvo tractor to power it. ‘I am a big Volvo fan,’ continued Chubby. ‘I’ve looked at all brands of trucks in my travels across North America, and Volvo tractors have always stood out from the rest. The first heavy-duty truck I ever sat in was a Volvo, and I never wanted to sit in anything else.’”
You can see how he’s become an object of ridicule in some corners of the Internet, a pilgarlic. He made some headlines a couple of years ago for settling a lawsuit with Hewlett-Packard in which he was asking for half a billion dollars on account of the company causing him “irreparable damage and harm”. Said damage and harm stemmed from a penis-measuring app on Hewlett-Packard’s Palm OS platform that was aptly called “Chubby Checker”. The app asked you to enter a man’s shoe size and it would promptly spit out his dick dimensions. It would be splendid if they made one for IQs.
The satirical video artist Vic Berger has used Chubby as a subject in several of his surreal creations. Chubby’s unique stature as a household name and simultaneously as an almost entirely forgotten figure makes him an ideal choice for this sort of thing. Berger’s videos focus on Chubby’s sometimes too-intense stare, or his exceedingly high self-regard, and also his habit of violating the personal space of the unsuspecting moms and female news reporters for whom he demonstrates the Twist. “Violating their space” is my polite way of saying that he thrusts his pelvis at and into their fundaments while they do his silly dance. In practice, he doesn’t seem so much to dance apart to the beat, but more on top and through.
And speaking of pelvic thrusts, in addition to the three grown children he has with his wife of 50-plus years, he also fathered former WNBA player Mistie Bass in 1983. To his credit, he seems to have been at least somewhat involved (read: financially) with her upbringing, and they apparently have a real father-daughter relationship now that she’s an adult. In comparison to many of his contemporaries — Chuck Berry comes to mind — he comes off as a puritan in this regard. (Chuck’s autobiography is dotted with vivid tales of conquest and his sexual proclivities are the stuff of urban legend, yet he married Toddy Suggs all the way back in 1948 and they remained married until his death.)
A note about Chubby’s marriage to the Dutch Miss World of 1962, Catharina Evans, née Lodder: It’s endured, and that’s probably all that needs to be said about it. They look happy together in the photos on Chubby’s website. But one point: After their wedding in April of 1963, the pastor who officiated the ceremony had to resign from his parish due to his becoming the target of a racial backlash. Indeed, there were protesters outside of the venue and a police presence in case it turned violent. Interracial marriage was legal in New Jersey in 1963, but it was nonetheless fraught with controversy and personal risk. This was still several months before Kennedy’s assassination, the time to which American culture’s obsessive appeals to nostalgia would have us look back longingly. M mind, this was Chubby Checker we’re talking about, the right kind of Negro, a light-skinned, famous black man, the dance-craze kid with good manners and proper bearing. But marrying a white woman? A beauty queen, even? That was a bridge too far for the revanchists, even in the northern state of New Jersey.
Through the course of working on this article, I’ve asked several people about Chubby Checker and whether they could recall what he’s known for. To a person, they were familiar with his name, and there was a general consensus about his being a singer, but very few of them could identify his signature song. This was surprising. Just a bodiless name from a bygone era. One of my coworkers was sure he was long dead. When I asked a friend’s mother about Chubby, she replied, “Didn’t he just die?” Poor Chubby Checker, she had him confused with Chuck Berry.