Fact #17844

John Madara (co-writer) : While The Twist was the No1 record in the country, I still had my record shop in West Philadelphia. After a record hop one evening, I came in the next day to the record shop with an idea to record a song called The Fly. So with our local house band, Carl and The Commanders, we wrote the song and went in and recorded it with Carl's band, and with Carl's lead singer. We went to Cameo and played it for Bernie Lowe and Kal Mann, where we were told that they really loved our record but would like to take our track and put Chubby Checker's voice on it as a follow-up to The Twist. So Bernie says to us, 'Either let us use your track with Chubby, or if you put out your version, we'll cover you.' So we decided to let Chubby do it. By the way, we never received any production royalties and we are still trying to collect half of our writers' royalties from the co-publisher!
(Source : interview with Forgotten Hits.com)