The Dirtiest Hit Record of 1962

And no, it wasn’t “Louie Louie”

If you look over the Billboard’s Top 100 chart for the year 1962, you’ll see a bunch of hits that, to our less innocent 2024 eyes, have a kind of wink-wink, hee-hee raunch.

“Boom Boom”

“Alley Cat”

“Ginny Come Lately”

“The Stripper”

“Multiplication” (with the immortal couplet “Take two hares/With no cares/Pretty soon you got a roomful of rabbits”)

“The Lonely Bull”

“Let Me In”

“Quando Quando Quondo (When When When)”

But the steamiest, most salacious hit of ’62, peaking at #3 on Billboard, was actually a duet by Chubby Checker and Dee Dee Sharp, both of whom recorded for Philadelphia’s Parkway Records.

It was called “Slow Twistin’,” and it gyrated in under the radar, its fundamental carnality disguised by the national dance craze that was still ongoing.

Chubby had already had huge hits with “The Twist,” “Twisting U.S.A” and “Let’s Twist Again.” And pop artists from Joey Dee & the Starliters (“The Peppermint Twist”) to Gary “U.S.” Bonds (“Dear Lady Twist”) to the Marvelettes (“Twistin’ Postman”) the great Sam Cooke(“Twistin’ the Night Away’) were getting in on the action. Dee Dee had had her own dance hit, “The Mashed Potatoes” (followed up with “Gravy,” another loaded title).