In 1960, Chubby Checker put "The Twist" on the pop charts. Lately, he's been trying to put his own twist on the history of pop music.

First, Checker addressed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Nobel Prize committees in a 2001 Billboard ad, comparing his contribution to pop culture to that of Edison with the light bulb and Alexander Graham Bell with the telephone.

Last year, he staged a "good-natured" protest for "musical recognition" outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction dinner. Checker was making a plea for radio play, but he also wanted something from the Hall. The pop legend, who has yet to be inducted, was asking for nothing less than a 30-foot statue of himself doing the Twist in the courtyard of the Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It doesn't matter to him that no other rock pioneer has been singled out in that way.

Although Checker did not write "The Twist" and didn't come up with the dance, he claims that he sparked the movement of "Dancing Apart to the Beat."

"Anyone who has made any music that has a beat to it since 1959, it all comes across my desk," says Checker, who will act as grand marshal of Saturday's Celebrate the Season parade. "A lot of people don't like me for saying this. People get irritated when I say this. [They] say, 'Who do you think you are that you could make such a claim?' But if you watched television in 1958 and watch television after Chubby Checker, the world has changed."

To start from the beginning, he was born Ernest Evans in 1941 and grew up in Philadelphia, working while in high school as a chicken plucker in a poultry shop. The boss there called him Chubby even though he really wasn't. Chubby's knack for entertaining customers got him signed in 1959 to Philly's Cameo-Parkway label, where he had a minor hit with "The Class." He then came to the attention of Dick Clark, whose wife actually dubbed him "Chubby Checker" as a clever take on the name Fats Domino.

In 1960, he did a little thing called the Twist. Clark originally wanted Danny and the Juniors to record it, but they turned it down. Checker recorded it one evening in July 1959 in 35 minutes and after a ground swell of excitement, it became a No. 1 hit in the summer of 1960 -- and then again in 1961!

"It was just a song," Checker says. "There was no dance to it. Hank Ballard wrote a song, and the kids in the neighborhood made up a little dance to it. And the radio stopped playing the song. And no one was ever going to see the dance that the kids put to it. It was over; it was finished. It's not something I came in and ripped off. We took a dead body and resurrected it and gave it life and told people what it was."

The Twist, in case you just arrived on the planet, was, Checker says, "putting out a cigarette with both feet and coming out of the shower and wiping off your bottom with a towel to the beat of the music. If you're wiping off your bottom to the beat, you can't touch your partner at the same time."

Dick Clark has said, "The most significant thing that ever happened in rock 'n' roll was the Twist."

Checker seems to agree. "That is equal to Alexander Graham Bell saying, 'Watson, is that you?' "

Checker became, if not the King of Rock 'n' Roll, the King of the Rock 'n' Roll Dance Craze, doing the Pony, the Fly, the Limbo and the Hucklebuck. He sees those old dances as extending all the way to the current hip-hop scene.

"The hip-hop dance they do is the Pony. That's Chubby Checker. If you throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care, you're doing the Fly, that's Chubby Checker. And if you're doing the Fly, you have to be doing the Shake. You know the Nasty Dance? When you act like you're having sex? That's the Hucklebuck. We were the first people to put that to music. The boogie. Before Chubby Checker, the boogie didn't exist."

Checker would like to get props for that. But he doesn't even think the hip-hop nation knows who he is, despite hitting the dance charts last year with a hip-hop track called "Limbo Rock Remixes Plus Original Master," credited to Chubby C & OD featuring Inner Circle.

"The disc jockeys don't play my songs. They play 'Twist and Shout' by the Beatles, who have nothing to do with the Twist at all. What's the excuse for any format not playing the only song to be No. 1 twice since God breathed breath into Adam? The Twist. What's the excuse for that?

"Oldies radio," he says, "plays the Beatles and oldies radio plays the Stones. And rock stations play the Beatles and rock stations play the Stones. And they don't play Chubby Checker."

And, one might point out, they don't play Chuck Berry either.

"Chuck Berry didn't do anything," he insists. "He didn't change anything. Elvis didn't do anything. We love him. I love him. I love Chuck Berry, too. He didn't change anything. He just got in the ring, like a boxer, boxed 15 rounds and left. Chubby Checker created the boxing ring that they dance in."

Checker also took notice last week when Rolling Stone named "Like a Rolling Stone" the greatest song of all time.

"Bob Dylan got the No. 1 rock and roll song of the century," he says. "That's given by men and women. The only song to be No. 1 twice since man walked on the planet -- that's God-given, that's a gift from God. Man can't give the gifts God gives. Five albums in the top 12. That's God given. Nine double-sided hit songs. That's a gift from God."

God wasn't quite as generous after the dance crazes when Checker tried to hit with folk music later in the '60s and then disco in the early '80s. But he doesn't blame the Twist for holding him back.

"Why would Walt Disney want to be disassociated with Mickey Mouse? Doesn't make sense. That's my answer to that question."

These days, Checker still resides in the same place near Philly where he's lived since 1965, and he is still actively touring, while avoiding for the most part the typical oldies packages where you just show up and play the hits. He was trained, he says, in the old days to be the kind of performer, like Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr., who can carry a stage for an hour or two.

As a concert-goer, he shies away from other people's shows, but he did just see two of his favorites.

"I saw Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney play in California, and I was ecstatic, because I don't watch performers because they're all so lousy compared to what I do. I don't say that because I think I'm the best in the world, I'm just very good at what I do. When I see something that's less than what I do, I just don't want to look at it. There's a lot of hype out here, a lot of people getting their music played. They have a little bit of talent, but they get a little push from the radio community, and because of that, they make a lot of money."

Asked if he had favorite performers from the early rock 'n' roll era, Checker seems to change his tune somewhat.

"I always say that it was Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino, they were the guys. They were the people who were unequaled, unmatched by anyone. All of us were just fragments of these people. They were the wonderful ... they were the rock 'n' roll people, they were the ones. And there weren't any other. There was Jackie Wilson and James Brown. They were good, but they didn't have the excitement that those guys had."

About his claims to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Seymour Stein, a member of the committee that helps select inductees, has stated that Checker has been under consideration for induction to the Rock Hall and that he will continue to be considered.

The statue is much more of a long shot, but Checker is holding out hope. "They need to digest it. It's a big pill to swallow. They need to investigate and see if my claims are correct. And do I deserve to get what I ask for. A lot of people have innovations, but there isn't one artist who lived on this planet who can say they changed the way people danced. And they're doing that to everybody's music since we came on the scene."

Scott Mervis can be reached at smervis@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2576. Chubby Checker

Where and when: He will be grand marshal for the Celebrate the Season Parade Downtown at 9 a.m. Saturday. Tonight from 7 to 9, he will be at Borders in Bethel Park to sign his latest releases, "Classics" and the Limbo Rock Remixes."