Twisting the Years Away

John F. Kennedy occupied the White House when a little-known band from New Jersey hit it big with a number-one single that celebrated a new dance craze. Four decades later, Joey Dee and the Starliters can still shake it up for the home crowd.

By Peter Golden

The grim Southern practice of official segregation wasn’t limited to housing, restaurants, and public transportation in 1936, when Billboard magazine’s new hit parade listed the works of black artists as “race” records. The tout sheet of popular music gave the category a hipper name in 1949, calling it rhythm and blues. But Billboard’s intent remained the same. The aim was to keep the races separate. Pop records were white, R&B was black.

Elvis Presley would soon be credited with bridging this racial divide. John Lennon once commented that, musically speaking, before Elvis there was nothing. Lennon’s statement was a lavish tribute. But as history it’s incomplete, because it takes us straight to rock ’n’ roll, bypassing doo-wop—the hand-clapping, finger-snapping a cappella style heard on street corners in the urban centers of the Midwest and Northeast. Blacks sang it, whites sang it, and, most significant, blacks and whites sang it together. “Elvis was late,” says Carl Fouchee, a member of the Monotones, who recorded the doo-wop classic “Book of Love.” “Kids were singing all over Newark. And it wasn’t only black kids. White kids were down with it too.”

One of those white kids was a young saxophonist from Passaic named Joseph DiNicola, who was dreaming about starting his own band. “I used to listen to WNJR out of Newark,” he says. “They played race music.” Another like-minded teenager under the spell of this new sound was David Brigati. He lived in Garfield, but he, too, heard the music coming out of Newark, first on the radio and later at Ben’s Cotton Club on Frelinghuysen Avenue. One day while Brigati was in high school, a teacher asked for volunteers to sing group harmonies at a student assembly. Brigati raised his hand. “I went just to get out of class,” he recalls. “I started singing, and I was good at it. I had never gotten so much positive attention from my teachers.”

Brigati went on to sing and record with a local group, while DiNicola, at age fourteen, formed the Thunder Trio, an instrumental band in which he played harmonica. They performed at charity events at the Salvation Army and local churches, and they finished second on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour. DiNicola planned to become a teacher, but before enrolling at William Paterson University (then Paterson State College) he decided to give music a try. “I was the youngest boy of ten children,” he says. “My father died when I was almost nine, and my mother thought I was out of my mind when I told her.”

One evening between sets at a CYO dance at St. Anthony’s Church in Passaic, DiNicola stepped outside for a break. He admired the R&B group the Moonglows, and as he looked up at the sky that night, he thought not of the glow from the moon but of the light from the stars. “I gave it a different spelling,” he says, “and my band had a name: Joey Dee and the Starliters.”

It was a racially mixed group, and during its first few years, members came and went. Brigati signed on shortly before DiNicola’s high school friends, the Shirelles, suggested he call Florence Greenberg, their onetime manager who was now the owner of Scepter Records. Greenberg agreed to record the group, which now included drummer Willie Davis, keyboardist Carlton Lattimore, singer Larry Vernieri, and DiNicola on saxophone.

And so began a long and bumpy ride in the music business that has spanned nearly a half-century. Along the way, Joey Dee and the Starliters would nurture some of the most impressive talent in pop history and win a unique spot in American culture, helping to push a teenage dance craze into the older, more staid mainstream. Today the band still travels the country in an RV, playing to sell-out crowds at school auditoriums, church social halls, county fairs, theaters, hotel ballrooms, casinos, and on cruise ships. 

By 1959, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had hit the R&B charts with a string of recordings that had a sexual edge so sharp that some radio stations refu sed to play them. One night Ballard noticed something while watching his backup group practicing dance routines. “I don’t know where they got it from. I really don’t,” Ballard recalled for filmmaker Ron Mann’s documentary Twist. “They were twisting their bodies, and the lyric came to me.” Ballard wrote a song to accompany the Midnighters’ new moves. He called it “The Twist.” 

Dave Brigati has a theory about the Twist. One night at Ben’s Cotton Club, he saw a few young black women on the dance floor twisting their hips unlike anything he’d ever seen. They were from Alabama, Brigati recalls, and when they came to Newark, they brought with them a dance that they and their friends were doing back home. “My guess is the dance was being done all over the country and just made its way elsewhere when people moved,” he says. 

Brigati was so enamored of the dance that it was incorporated into the moves that Joey Dee and the Starliters were working on to accompany their live performances of “Shimmy Baby,” which in 1960 became the B side of “The Face of an Angel,” their first 45 for Scepter Records. The move involved twisting your hips, feet, and arms as you shimmied downward, then popping up with a one-two-three kick, one-two-three jump.

In 1959 Ballard’s “Twist” made the R&B charts, but neither the song nor the dance broke out to a wide audience until Ballard appeared at the Royal Theater in Baltimore. Afterward, he says, the white kids “took it to The Buddy Deane Show.” For six years starting in 1957, Deane hosted an afternoon dance party on a Baltimore TV station. (Decades after it premiered, the show would serve as an inspiration for the 1988 movie and 2002 Broadway musical Hairspray.) “When Buddy Deane saw the kids, he was really in shock, and he called Dick Clark,” Ballard told Mann. “‘You should see these kids over here doing a dance called the Twist. You know, it’s the song by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.’ So Dick said, ‘I don’t even wanna hear it, ’cause I know it’s another of those dirty records.’”

Yet in 1960, American Bandstand featured a clean-cut black nineteen-year-old nicknamed Chubby Checker, covering Ballard’s song. Teenagers were hooked. Checker’s rendition of “The Twist” finished sixth in Billboard’s Top 100 that year. But a year later he recorded “Pony Time,” introducing another dance craze, the Pony, and it appeared that the Twist had run out of steam.

By late summer 1961, Joey Dee and the Starliters had released a pair of 45s that didn’t chart. Their live shows were popular with teenagers around New Jersey and New York City’s outer boroughs, but that didn’t always endear them to nightclub owners. At one spot in Brooklyn, the owner refused to pay them because their fans were spending too much time dancing and not enough time drinking at the bar. The band’s luck would soon change.
In September 1961, the band was playing at Oliveri’s, a nightclub on Route 46 in Lodi, when an agent offered them a weekend at the Peppermint Lounge in Manhattan. They would split $400—an “excellent” fee at the time, DiNicola says—and the New York City exposure couldn’t hurt. Besides, with his wife pregnant, he was grateful for any gig.

The Peppermint Lounge, at 128 West 45th Street, could pack in maybe 500 people—never mind that the fire department code limited occupancy to 150. The joint had a reputation as a pit stop for sailors passing through the bluer reaches of Times Square. “That first night, it wasn’t crowded,” DiNicola says. “The kids in turtleneck sweaters and motorcycle jackets were twisting. It was raining out, and I saw some older, well-dressed people come in for a drink. After a while, two of them got up and started to twist.” He describes what happened next as “mind-boggling.” 
The couple on the dance floor turned out to be the actress Merle Oberon, then 50 years old, and Prince Serge Obolensky, 71, a member of Russian royalty. One of the men at their table was influential society columnist Cholly Knickerbocker, who proceeded to write about the Twist and the Peppermint Lounge in the New York Journal-American. “The twist is the new teen dance craze,” Knickerbocker wrote. “But you don’t have to be teenage to dance it. Colonel Serge Obolensky has become one of the finest exponents of the Twist.” Suddenly the Peppermint Lounge was the hottest spot in town. What was supposed to be a weekend gig for Joey Dee and the Starliters stretched to thirteen months.

Old black-and-white photographs show people ten-deep at the door of the club, waiting in a line that stretched for blocks. The Twist no longer was limited to sock hops and beach parties. Adults were doing it at the Peppermint Lounge, where revelers danced on the tables and where, on any given night, you might spot the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor, Nat “King” Cole, Ted Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, or Liberace. 

It was a brief moment of innocence, when a handsome young man and his demure wife occupied the White House, no one suspected that Soviet missiles would wind up in Cuba, and Vietnam barely rated a mention on the evening news. The party at the Peppermint Lounge was going to last forever, and three aspiring teenage singers who wanted in were Veronica Bennett, her sister, Estelle, and their cousin Nedra Talley.

They’d already won an amateur-night contest at the Apollo, the legendary Harlem theater, and when the manager of the Peppermint Lounge saw the three pretty black teenagers standing outside with their beehived hair and skirts as tight as a second skin, he mistook them for part of the show and sent them to the stage, where they danced. Ronnie Bennett knocked the place out when she joined Brigati on Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” Brigati fell head over heels for her, and the two dated on and off, unbeknownst to their parents, for two years. The trio was hired by the club and paid $10 a night to dance and sing behind the Starliters. Fans would later know them as the Ronettes and their lead singer as Ronnie Spector.

In October 1961 Joey Dee and the Starliters signed with Roulette Records, and their song, “Peppermint Twist” spent three weeks at number one on Billboard’s Top 100. They added their old one-two-three kick, one-two-three jump to the Twist, and suddenly everyone had a new dance. Meanwhile, Checker’s “Twist” topped the charts again. Everywhere you looked, adults and kids were kicking, jumping, and going round-and-round.

Late in 1961 the band recorded a live album, Doing the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge (one single from it, a cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” spent nine weeks in Billboard’s Top 40). This was followed by more albums, several appearances on Bandstand, and two movies, Hey, Let’s Twist (1961), a fictionalized history of the Peppermint Lounge that marked the unbilled screen debut of Joe Pesci—the Newark-born actor later played guitar for the Starliters—and Two Tickets to Paris (1962). “We were becoming a piece of Americana,” Brigati says.
When Joey Dee and the Starliters weren’t appearing at the Pep, they toured the United States, Europe, and the British West Indies. In 1965, while playing at a club called Trudy Heller’s in Greenwich Village, DiNicola met the actor Peter O’Toole, who walked up to him and said, “I have to shake your hand.”

“Why?” DiNicola asked.

“Because,” O’Toole replied, “when I was in that bloody desert making Lawrence of Arabia, your record was my only link to civilization.”

In December 1962, Joey Dee and the Starliters gave up their gig as the Pep’s house band when they were chosen to headline Murray the K’s Christmas Extravaganza at the Brooklyn Fox Theater; the iconic rock ’n’ roll deejay was offering too much money to turn down. The following year, the band toured Europe. In Stockholm their opening band was a quartet of mop-haired young men from Liverpool, England. Afterward, the Beatles asked about their chances of making it in the States. DiNicola was blunt. “You aren’t playing much original material,” he told them. “You’re doing rock ’n’ roll and doo-wop standards. We have the real thing in the States—the Shirelles, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers—and they do it better.” He laughs at the memory. “I never would’ve predicted their success,” he says, but he’s glad that John, Paul, George, and Ringo never held his advice against him. When they first visited New York, in 1964, they insisted that their pal Murray the K take them to the Peppermint Lounge.

Through 1964 and ’65, Joey Dee and the Starliters remained a group, but band members kept moving on and DiNicola had to hire new talent. Charles Neville joined up, later to hit it big with the Neville Brothers. Felix Cavaliere, Gene Cornish, and Brigati’s younger brother, Eddie, also became Starliters, eventually leaving to form the Young Rascals. And then there was a young, wild-haired guitarist from Seattle. “He showed up at my house for a tryout with just an electric guitar,” DiNicola says. “I had sound equipment in the garage, and he plugged his gu itar into an amp, and after he played for 30 seconds, I said, ‘You’re hired.’ ”

The guitarist was Jimi Hendrix, who soon proved himself such an accomplished showman that DiNicola began giving him solos, during which he’d do splits or play his guitar behind his back or with his teeth. Playing for a year with Joey Dee and the Starliters had a lasting impact on Hendrix. As his biographer, David Henderson, observes: “With Joey Dee [Hendrix] got to savor the Twist craze right up close….It was like Joey Dee was a high priest, a messenger bringing a sacred message to all. Right there [Hendrix] witnessed the power of word and music….The Twist included all ages and all kinds of people, and it was not necessarily youth-oriented. The Beatles in ’65…were essentially a listening experience, a pleasant experience compared to the uncouth Twist parties.”

Yet it was the Beatles and the British bands that followed them that changed American pop and dimmed the limelight around Joey Dee and his Starliters. The halcyon days of the Peppermint Lounge were on the wane as well. In late 1965, the New York State Liquor Authority announced it would close the Pep because one of its owners had failed to disclose his criminal record.

These were lean years for DiNicola and the assortment of Starliters who signed on and fell away. They returned to playing smaller venues, and the paychecks diminished as well. Morris Levy, the owner of their record label, Roulette, was alleged to have ties to organized crime; in 1988 he would be convicted on two counts of conspiracy to commit extortion.“When I signed with Morris,” says DiNicola. “I was like a tuna swimming among the sharks.”
At the Woodstock festival in 1969, the appearance of Sha Na Na, a virtually unknown group that specialized in golden oldies, rekindled interest in early rock ’n’ roll and doo-wop. (Sha Na Na later landed its own TV show and took a star turn in the movie Grease.) Riding on the group’s coattails, Joey Dee and the Starliters were reborn, taking an honored place on the oldies circuit, which is where we pick up their story on a warm, breezy September afternoon in 2004.

The concert at Lodi’s Memorial Park is scheduled to begin at 7:30 pm, but seating is first-come first-serve and 
people begin arriving around 2. They bring lawn chairs to set up on the wide cement terraces of the band shell and carry pasta and eggplant Parmesan in aluminum containers. There’s plenty of laughter, big hellos, and hugs and kisses reminiscent of a family reunion, which, essentially, it is. DiNicola once lived in Lodi; Brigati has relocated to Montville; and the newest singing Starliter, Newark native Bobby Valli, the younger brother of Frankie Valli, now lives in Bloomfield.

“They only do this for Joey,” says Pat Polito, one of the volunteer ushers. “I was in grammar school in Lodi when Joey was playing the Peppermint Lounge. At lunchtime the girls would go over and wait by his house and hope he’d come out so they could get his autograph.”

Onstage, the musicians go through a sound check. Valli does a verse of his brother’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” Their voices are eerily similar, and a jolt of recognition runs through the audience. Everyone turns toward the stage, as if expecting to see the Four Seasons. “They’ve been reacting like that for over three years,” Valli says, “ever since I became a Starliter.” 

By the time evening shadows start to fall, more than 3,000 fans have gathered, filling the band shell and spilling out into the park. DiNicola vaults into the spotlights in a white suit and tie, still trim and compact. Valli, long and lean as befits a crooner, is all in red, and Brigati, who seems to have aged little since his days at the Pep, wears blue. The band kicks into “The Peppermint Twist,” and the place erupts. Before you know it, people from seven to seventy are up dancing with Joey Dee and the Starliters, some even getting onstage. They twist and bump, do the jitterbug and the Monster Mash. Wherever there’s an open space, dancers are moving with the music.

Valli performs songs of the Four Seasons; Brigati, who helped arrange many of the hits that his brother, Eddie, wrote for the Rascals and who sang backup on their albums, sings a medley of those tunes. The crowd applauds and keeps dancing, and it seems to go on and on, timeless and ecstatic, as Joey Dee and the Starliters rock Memorial Park, dancing and singing on a gorgeous September night, the music bestowing the blessings of grace and memory, the air so cool and satiny it must be blowing in from a more innocent time, when young and old alike danced the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge.



Illustration by Tim Barrall

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