Besides groupies and recording contracts, what do Frank Zappa, Julie London, Iggy Pop, Barry White, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Blondie, the Beach Boys, David McCallum, Toots and the Maytals, and the Kinks have in common? You guessed it. They--and thousands of other artists--have all performed versions of  the most easily recognizable rock ‘n’ roll song of all time: “Louie, Louie.” This three-chord wonder has been singled out by many critics as the definitive rock ‘n’ roll song. Yet it wasn’t until seven or eight years after it was originally recorded that most American teenagers heard it for the first time. 

    In 1955  Richard Berry, a young black musician, was playing in Los Angeles with a Mexican group called Ricky Rivera and the Rhythm Rockers. One of the bands songs, “El Loco Cha Cha Cha,” had a contagious rhythm figure in it that Berry just couldn’t get out of his mind. And while he was waiting backstage to perform at the Harmony Club Ballroom one night, the words “Louie, Louie” popped into his head and superimposed themselves around the persistent riff; “the rest just fell into place.”  His main lyrical influence: a composition called “One for My Baby,” which was sung from the viewpoint of a customer who was speaking to a bartender named Joe. In it, the singer said: “One for my baby/ One for the road/ Set ‘em up Joe.” In Berry’s composition, the bartender became Louie and the customer was telling Louie how he intended to sail to Jamaica to find his true love. The speech patterns and the use of Jamaica in the song were inspired by Berry’s exposure to Latin music, and by Chuck (no relation) Berry’s “Havana Moon,” a similarly styled song that was popular at the time. 

    When Berry wrote “Louie, Louie,” he was under contract to Modern Records. But because of a dispute over the royalties for the sixty plus songs he had written for the label, he saved the tune until his contract expired and he could record it for Flip Records. Flip released it in 1956 and it became a respectable R&B hit, selling (according to Berry) around 130,000 copies. A year later, however, sales had tapered off, and Berry needed some money for his upcoming wedding. So he sold the record sales publishing rights to “Louie Louie,” retaining only the radio and television performance rights. He philosophically chalks this sale up to “experience.” After all, who could have predicted the bizarre set of circumstances that would, a few years later, turn this song into a monster hit? 

    About five years later in Seattle, Washington, an obscure singer by the named of Rockin’ Robin Roberts discovered Berry’s recording  while browsing through the bargain bin of a local record store. “Louie, Louie” soon became Roberts’ signature song and he took it with him through a succession of local bands. Finally, he joined one of the area’s more popular groups, the Wailers (no relation to Bob Marley’s contingent), and they decided to cut the song for their own Etiquette Records label. It was a regional hit in the Northwest. But when Liberty Records released it nationally, it flopped. 

    Kids in most of America still didn’t know the song, but in Portland, Oregon, “Louie, Louie” was hot. One night a Portland Top 40 band called the Kingsmen were playing a local dance with friendly rivals Paul Revere and the Raiders. During one of their breaks, they happened to notice that a lot of their audience had gathered around a juke box, and were dancing enthusiastically to the Wailers’ record. Since this reaction was exactly what the Kingsmen were looking for in their own performances, they decided to include the song in their act; each member agreed to learn the song by their next rehearsal. But the only one to follow through on the pact was lead singer Jack Ely. Consequently, he had to teach it to the rest of the group; when he remembered it incorrectly, no one knew it. He taught the band a l-2-3, 1-2, l-2-3, 1-2 version, rather than the Wailers’ l-2-3-4, 1-2, l-2-3-4, l-2 rendition. The result: he made the tune faster. It’s interesting to speculate: would the song have been as successful if Ely hadn’t accidentally altered it? 

    Anyway, the group got the response they were looking for. They were asked to play it as much as eight or nine times a night. [Authors’ note: at the time, it was basically an extended instrumental for the Kingsmen. “We played it instrumentally for several years before we recorded it,” says a band member. “And we featured a drum solo.”] One Friday in May, 1963, the band decided, just for kicks, to do a marathon version of the song to see who could last longer, the dancers or the band. Even bass player Bob Nordby, who didn’t sing, warbled a few verses just to keep the song going for approximately forty-five minutes. Despite the band’s boredom, audience response was so positive that arrangements were made that night to record “Louie, Louie” the next day. 

    Actually, the Kingsmen had been wanting to get into the studio for some time. Their reason: a summer job. “That’s really what ‘Louie, Louie’ was intended for,” members of the band admit now, “an audition tape for a job on a steamship line for the summer. To Australia. We never got there, though. We had this hit record instead and had to go play the White House. And Wyoming. And Iowa”. After pooling their money to come up with the $50 they needed for the two-hour session, the group went to the only recording studio in Portland and made their demo. Facilities were, at best, primitive. Mikes were placed next to amps that had been muffled with coats and blankets. Jack Ely’s lead vocal was yelled up to a mike that was suspended near the studio’s fifteen-foot ceiling--which explains the garbled lyrics that ultimately helped make the Kingmen’s record so successful. Strange twist: the very next day, Paul Revere and the Raiders, with Mark Lindsay on sax, went into the same studio to record their version of “Louie, Louie.”   Both the Kingsmen and Paul Revere’s versions got local airplay, and Revere’s actually did much better at the outset. 

THE KINGSMEN: “Radio stations in those days used to promote their own shows: dances, record hops, local supermarket openings. . . and the Kingsmen were the house band for a station called KISN -- y’know, we’d go out and do all the shows with all the jocks. And so, as soon as we recorded ‘Louie, Louie,’ of course, they put it on the air. . . Paul Revere’s version got instant play all up and down the West Coast as soon as it was released; ours was only played in the Portland area, basically. But after a few months, toward the end of ‘63, a copy or two of our record got back to Boston. A disc jockey named Early Bird on an FM rhythm and blues station started playing it, thinking that we were an East Coast rhythm and blues group or something. There was no precedent for this type of sound east of the Rockies. Eventually, Arnie ‘Woo-Woo’ Ginsberg on WBZ started blasting it all over the Northeast. Then it spread out all over the East Coast, into New York City. And then it became a national hit”.
 
     Going back a few months: after “Louie, Louie” began getting airplay in Boston, it was picked up for pressing and distribution by Wand Records. It fared well; by September, the record had reached #94 on the Billboard charts, and was climbing rapidly. But the final shot-in-the-arm that boosted the record to the top of the charts for four months caught even the Kingsmen off-guard; someone, somewhere, decided that the words were dirty. Without warning, rumors spread that Ely’s slurred vocals were laced with obscenities, and soon every teenager in America was trying to figure out what Ely was “really” singing. They even did it at the band’s live performances. 

THE KINGSMEN: “It was kind of disheartening at first. Before we knew that there was this ‘dirty lyrics’ controversy, we thought that something was wrong with the band because we’d be playing all night long and when we’d hit our closer, which was ‘Louie, Louie’--at the time our only hit--everyone would stop watching us. No one would pay attention any longer; they’d all pull these pieces of paper out of their pockets and start reading along. . .and singing. And they’re going, ‘Y’know, which version is right?’ It was weird, having all these people come up to you like that.”  J. Edgar Hoover certainly wasn’t going to stand for obscenity on the airwaves (neither was the state of  Indiana, which banned “Louie”). The FBI and FCC launched a “Louie, Louie” investigation, playing the record at every speed from 16 to 78 rpm. They called in both Jack Ely and Richard Berry to testify about the lyrics. And in the end: the FCC concluded that, “We found the record to be unintelligible at any speed we played it.” They hadn’t found what they were looking for, but the FCC’s efforts weren’t entirely fruitless--they helped create a rock ‘n’ roll classic. With all that “negative” publicity, the record took off. It sold over eight million copies. “Well, you know,” a member of the Kingsmen laughs today, “when the FBI and Lyndon Baines Johnson say, ‘You can’t do this,’ that  really does wonders for record sales.”

UPDATE (From The Associated Press; November 9, 1998)
 
   For more than 30 years, the Kingsmen got no royalties from their classic recording of the garage-band standard “Louie, Louie”. Today, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that finally let them collect. The court, without comment, rejected an appeal by two companies that held the rights to the recording and admitted they paid no royalties to the band. The case is Gusto Records vs. Peterson, 98-449. The Kingsmen’s 1963 version was not the first recording of  “Louie, Louie” and it wasn't exactly the most on-key -- but it was a massive hit and has been a party favorite ever since. Federal officials launched an obscenity investigation of the band’s recording but finally declared it “unintelligible at any speed”. The band signed a contract in 1968 that was supposed to pay its members 9 percent of the profits or licensing fees from the record. But the Kingsmen got nothing, and in 1993 they sued Gusto Records and GML, which owned the rights to the recording.

   After the companies' lawyer acknowledged they paid “not a single dime for 30 years,” a federal judge canceled the 1968 contract and granted the musicians the right to all royalties from the time they sued. The judge also held the companies in contempt when they refused to surrender the master recording. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld those rulings last April. The companies subsequently turned over the master recording and paid overdue royalties of roughly a few hundred thousand dollars, said Kingsmen’s lawyer Scott Edelman. The band members, most of whom live in the Seattle area and who still go on tour, “are delighted to finally have the masters back in their control after not getting any royalties and getting the run-around,” Edelman said in an interview. In the appeal acted on today, the Nashville-based companies’ lawyers argued that the case did not belong in a California court. The fact that the companies signed licensing agreements for “Louie, Louie” with California-based firms was not enough to justify having the case heard in that state, the appeal said.

   “Louie, Louie” was written in the 1950s by Richard Berry, who sold it for a small sum. In 1986, an artists’ rights group helped Berry collect about $2 million in royalties.