Hank Ballard and his band The Midnighters released the single “The Twist” in 1959, with absolutely no intention of inventing a new dance. In general, Ballard often made direct allusions to carnal pleasures in his songs, what kind of bed trick he meant by the word “twist” is known only to the author and the devil of rock’n’roll. However, performed by eighteen-year-old Chubby Checker, the song rose to the top of the charts, and his performance on the Ed Sullivan show made “The Twist” a hit for the second time in a year.
At that show, Chubby’s plastic bindweed demonstrated a truly new twist dance to the public for the first time. Evgeny Morgunov in “Kidnapping, Caucasian Style” quotes quite closely the instructions of the Checker himself on how to crush two cig-butts at once. If most still had doubts about the phenomenality of the new phenomenon, the success of Chubby Checker’s next single “Let’s Twist Again” caused a real dance fever all over the planet, simultaneously creating a new rock and roll genre. Even John Silver could dance now, skirts were no longer pulled up, girls weren’t making out with guys, acrobatic skills weren’t required.
After wiping dozens of soles, Checker presents limbo, fly and pony dances to the heated audience, followed by watusi, locomotions and other experiments. From the gloomy Finnic forests, a cheerful letkajenkka train creeps towards the Soviet-Finnish border. When the hype subsided, the dancers with sprained ankles would hobble home, and Chubby Checker would start complaining that he wasn’t the master of twist for long, he was a hostage for the rest of his life.
The twist entered the USSR with a slight (but very significant for young people) delay. In 1963, Tamara Miansarova not only made a splash at the Sopot International Song Festival with her absolutely not childish anti-war song “Sunny Circle”, but also brought a gift from Poland: the song “Ryzhik” (“Ginger”), in the original “Rudy Rydz”. The words and the tune were uncomplicated, suitable for a kindergarten matinee, but in a frankly twisty rhythm, many felt a faint breeze of change. This light breeze turned into a gusty wind when composer Yuri Saulsky and poet Mikhail Tanich composed their “Chernyi Kot” (Black Cat). They persuaded the same Tamara Miansarova to sing, who gave her part almost “from scratch”, after a couple of rehearsal takes. The arrangement was filled with cool swing syncopations cutting through the straight line of the ground beat, and the melody of the chorus was inspired by the subconscious of Saulsky, the leader of several jazz orchestras: Yuri Sergeevich could clearly hear Art Blakey with his “Are You Real” somewhere fragmentary and immediately forget for the time being. As soon as the record came out of the stamping, the “Black Cat” began to walk through the kitchens, living rooms and radios of Soviet citizens, twirling on soft paws. However, the true era of the twist began with the words “You’ve never been into our/Bright and beautiful city….”
Arno Harutyunovich Babajanyan was born in 1921 in the capital of the young Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Already at the age of five, he was noted by Aram Khachaturian himself as a child prodigy. Soon Arno was graduating from as many music schools as he had enough time for. In 1938, he entered Gnesinka. Then to Tchaikovsky. And then came the terrible Forty-First. Babajanyan, a student, was mobilized to build defensive structures near Smolensk, after which he was evacuated along with the Moscow Conservatory. After the War, he was sent to improve his knowledge in the Moscow Recreation Center of the Armenian SSR.
By 1960, Babajanyan was already an established academic musician and composer. Muslim Magomayev is a star of Italian opera, a unique baritone. The magic of twist and Leonid Derbenev brought them together to burn into the memory of their contemporaries a twist that is much more than a twist: “The Best City on Earth.” Nikita Khrushchev soon heard the song. Nikita, with his usual voluntarism, took off his shoe from his foreleg and tapped out a Morse code about the prohibition of the twist with his heel. The Politburo could not accept such a demarche, and the bald-headed country bumpkin, who did not know how to handle city shoes, was finally, with great delay, removed from office.
“The Best City on Earth” and, at the same time, the cancellated “Black Cat” returned to the air, but not for long: Babajanyan-Magomayev’s new smash hit, which overshadowed the previous ones, was called “Beauty Queen”. Meanwhile, a twist crept into Soviet cinema. Margarita Terekhova, Tarkovsky’s magnificently infernal future muse, dances an existential turntable in her debut work “Hello, It’s Me!” (1965). Before her innocent, desperately vicious and timeless dance, the fragile texture of Tarantino and his unfortunate cocaine addicts crumbles. Aida Vedishcheva will sing a song about bears only in 1967, while the charming Natalia Varley will articulate.
“Intoxicated by the Sun” is an excellent song by A. Babajanyan based on G. Karapetyan’s poems, translated by A. Gorokhov. Muslim Magomayev will re-record it a few years later, then it will sparkle with fresh colors. Meanwhile, Raisa Mkrtchyan records “My Yerevan” in her native Armenian, and the beat here is completely macabre, The Cramps are just kids compared to the fierce Armenians of the sixties. Arno Harutyunovich composes songs for the stars of the Socialist Camp: Arsen Dedic, Karel Gott et cetera. Maya Kristalinskaya sings “Only Love is Right,” Anna Herman prays: “Don’t Rush.”
Raisa Mkrtchyan – My Yerevan (mp3):
For a Soviet person, the words “twist” and “Babajanyan” meant the same thing. Of course, Arno Harutyunovich, like Chubby Checker, did not want to evaluate himself in just one category, but today we are talking about a twist. The Soviet twist became a phenomenon that surpassed Western patterns and turned into the original Soviet Twist. Where composers and musicians, playing a light style, had an academic school with considerable jazz skills behind them. Arno Babajanyan managed to organically weave ethnic elements into the pop music of his time. Just turn on “The Best City on Earth” at any party and see the perky twists from grandma, granddaughter and any three girls. The twist does not age.
Muslim Magomayev – The Best City on Earth (mp3):
