Louie Louie
Rock'n'Roll Anthems, vol.2
Louie Louie may not be the best song ever written in rock'n'roll, but
it's certainly the most popular. No other song was covered more frequently,
not to mention countless reworks and re-editions. There's at least a three
degree separation from anything in rock'n'roll to this catchy song. But -
this song carries a beautiful rock'n'roll story behind its simple chord progression,
a story that possibly defined rock'n'roll the way we know it now. And it was
all just an accident...
Everything starts one evening when Richard Berry, a Louisianian in
Los Angeles, set down and scribbled Louie Louie lyrics on a piece of
napkin one evening in 1956. By his own admition, there was several
songs that influenced Louie Louie. Nat King Cole's Calypso Blues
and Chuch Berry's (no relation) Havana Moon are just most obvious ones.
Soon Richard Berry decided to record Louie Louie as a b-side to a 45
that was supposed to launch his new band The Pharaohs. Richard Berry obviously
didn't believe in the song himself. Especially when in 1959, just two years
after Louie Louie release, he sold all the rights to his songs for miserable
amount of 750$. When he sold the song, he didn't know that a bunch of kids
in nort-west really dug the record.
In 1961, Rockin' Robin Roberts and his Wailers recorded their own version
of the song and redid it in a much tougher garage variant - not so much different
from the one we know today. Ventures also had some local success with their
instrumental version of the song and the loudest band on earth, The Sonics
pushed the song to its limits by playing it so loud like they only could.
That was about time when people started competeing to play this song as loud
as possible.
In 1963 two bands in Oregon, Paul Revere & The Raiders and The
Kingsmen recorded the song about the same time and spread the popularity
of the song beyond north-west. Their versions followed the one popularised
by The Wailers two years earlier. But it was The Kingsmen version that gave
an international kickstart for this song and made it an anthem.
The legend goes like this... The Kingsmen were hired by a cruise line to record
Louie Louie as a comertial. They came to the appointed studio and found out
not only that they won't get paid but that they have to pich 50$ to use the
studio at all. Besides that, the studio was some old third class hole. They
decided to go ahead and record the song anyway. But now, this is where the
rock'n'roll spirit comes to point again. They were so pissed off that they
decided to make the version really bad and loud with the singer Jack Ely mumbling
the lyrics as if he was sick or drunk. Of course, the cruise line rejected
the song, but no recording was tossed at the time and the band decided to
put it out as a single... But that wasn't the only thing they let go...
I find interesting that many rock musicians let rumors go just to spread the
fame. That can all also be traced back to Louie Louie and The Kingsmen.
The rumor in this case was that the Jack Ely's lyrics were filthy and full
of bad words. Rumor spreads like fire and teenagers across the USA start buying
the record just to find out what was all about! It finished up as #2 on Billboard
that year. Soon, worried parents heard the rumor as well, but most of them
were confuse, as nobody could really tell what were the lyrics. The rumor
went so far that the FBI started their own investigation about the lyrics
and they continued it for two years until they finally published report stating
that the lyrics were not filthy, but simply untelligeble! What an absurd and
bizarre case!
Actually, with Louie Louie rock learned became a really dangerous matter
giving headaches to politicians all over the world. But the real beauty is
when rock does it delivering defiant energy and performance on purely aestetical
principles. That's when rock is most dangerous... because, when it's directly
political in its lyrics, it soon becomes funny or just outdated, like most
of the protest (Vietnam) songs in the sixties or nuclear threat songs in the
eighties. But, that guitar in Kingsmen's Louie Louie still scares the
shit out of people...
What happened here is that rock with this song became a serious art in a very
goofy way. Of all small and simple things in life, rock became the most important
in many lives and it all happened with this song. It didn't change the world,
but it made it a much more fun place to be and it made this earth a much more
bearable place to live. They put Johnny B. Goode on that golden record to
go to space. I think Louie Louie should've been there. It tells more
about us Earthlings using no words at all!
Once the geinie was out of the bottle nothing was the same. Powerful riff,
spontaneity and defiance of the song intrigued tons of bands who played rock
at the time. Famous Yardbirds covered My Girl Sloopy adding Louie Louie
riff to it, and the song very soon became a big hit for The McCoys as Hang
On Sloopy. The Troggs in England took a country song Wild Thing credited
to Chip Taylor from a catalogue mixed it up with Louie Louie riff and
there was another hit and a great song, another rock'n'roll anthem, that ended
up being covered by many as well.
Things didn't stop there, many other garage bands at that time were very inspired
by the sound of Louie Louie, and used that same chorc progression adding some
more meaningful lyrics to it, like The Remais did in Why Do I Cry,
The Rumors in Hold Me Now, Outlaws with Don't Tread On Me...
Even the Stones couldn't resist, just hear Get Off Of My Cloud!
Phil Spector recognized the power of Louie Louie as well. He nicely
quited the riff in his monumental production of You've Lost That Lovin'
Feelin' by The Righteous Brothers. It went on, in 70's the Louie Louie
riff was heard in the production of The Grease musicle, just hear Summer
Nights. Obviously, the riff was used to underline the toughness of the
male character. Another interesting usage of this riff was when Lou Reed included
it on his song Vicious which openned Transformer, album that
was a turning point of his career, record that influenced rock'n'roll as much
as Louie Louie did!
At the same time, the song continued its life by being covered in countless
different versions, most significantly by Stooges and MC5 who handed it over
to punk rockers, like Black Flag. Punkers liked to play around with lyrics
changing them all the time. Hard rockers also loved because of its big guitar
sound, for example, Motorhead used it as a b-side to their first single. There's
also many versioins in tens of different world languages.
At the same time, as rock'n'roll kids started to grow up, the song turned
also into a nostalgic anthem, as some people say the greatest party song of
all times. Thereby it was included in countless number of commertials, high
school pep bands used it for cheerleading... Fat Boys did a really funny rap
version of the song too... the list goes on... really, the riff is so easy
to grasp that it is basically the first thing most aspiring guitar players
learn and thereby a song that most of the bands use to tune up, practice or
just to raise up the temperature on a gig.
The epicenter of Louie Louie madness was in 1983 when a californian
radio station KFJC played 63 hours and 800 versions of the song in
a row. At the same time, Rhino published their legendary Louie Louie
compilation. In 1992 rock critic Dave Marsh found the song interesting
enough to tell a whole history of rock'n'roll from the perspective on Louie
Louie only! Yep, the guy wrote hundreds of pages just about this song
and made actually an interesting reding in this book entitled Louie Louie:
The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock 'n' ROll Song; Including
the Full Details of Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen,
J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. , and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing, for the
First Time Anywhere, the Actual Dirty Lyrics (also a candidate for the
longest title ever, heheh)!
But lets get back to the people who were most responsible for the song, Richard
Berry actually regained rights to the song and in 1993 he was payed out 2
million dollars for it, and that's pretty much all he made as he died four
years later. The Kingsmen also lost their rights to their version of the song
but they also got back those rights in 1998 after fighting five year long
legal battle!
But the song
lives on and interest in it still grows... there's a particularly meticulous
website called Louie
Loue Pages and delivers more than you ever wanted to know about this
song.
At the end of this article, I would like to thank a friend of mine from Spain,
who calls himself Litus65. He helped me out with this show giving me a whole
busload of Louie Louie versions I never even dreamed of...
Louie Loue Pages
louielouie.net
The Kingsmen Page (LouieLouie.org)
I Fought The Law (Rock'n'Roll Anthems Vol.1)
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