JOEY DEE AND THE STARLITERS
It was 1962.
Long before Studio 54, The Peppermint Lounge packed ’em in tight. Actors, singers, athletes and politicians rubbed shoulders with the Mob.
The were all doing The Twist.
“Peppermint Twist,” the song, had knocked “The Twist” by Chubby Checker out of the No. 1 slot on the Billboard Hot 100. Checker’s version was a cover of a 1958 B-side by Hank Ballard (the song’s author) & The Midnighters. Joey Dee would honk on his alto, throw his sax down to sing, jump into the crowd and twist away with the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy (who had brought The Twist into the White House).
Never in the history of pop music was there a dance that caught America’s attention and libido like The Twist. The Frug? The Popeye? The Swim? The Fly? The Hully Gully? The Mashed Potato? You’d have to go back to The Charleston in the 1920s or The Tango in the 1890s to find such a seismic dancefloor explosion.
At the center of it all was one Joseph DiNicola from Passaic, New Jersey.
“It took me two hours to write ‘The Peppermint Twist’ with Henry Glover in the back of an empty Peppermint Lounge one Sunday afternoon in September 1961. It took me 11 years to write with J Kevin Morris. I remember the day I said to my wife, ‘I’m going to write a book.’ She said, ‘You sure you want to?’ She knew if I did, I would make it real. Not very flattering to her or me. Hurtful even.
