Actually, the official lyrics are "Loo Way Loo Way, ooohh mah henna hing ga goo gah goo. Jah jah jah jah jah jah!" And so on. They couldn't fool us. We know baby talk when we hear it.

The complete murdering of the lyrics to "Louie Louie" by Kingsman frontman Jack Ely is not just legendary; it is the subject of a two-year investigation by the FBI for a charge of obscenity. The charges were dropped, after the laboratory concluded that the lyrics were "unintelligible at any speed." This suggests that for two years, for two whole, long, merciless, cruel, agonizing years, a bunch of Federal gum-shoes had to gather in a little room every day and play "Louie Louie," at 33 and a third, at 78 RPM, at 45 and 12 and 133 and hyper-chipmunk speed and super-slow dying-cow speed.

Clearly, some of the agents must not have been able to take this and went insane. If so, the FBI is covering it up. And moral guardians would not have this much fun again until the '80s when somebody played a heavy metal record backwards, heard "Yahgzeb-btu huWAAAq Quilro Mummu mummu mummu zyot," and screamed "That's the devil talking! Now I'm possessed!"

Oh, for the place: Portland, Oregon. That's where The Kingsmen were from.

But how can we pay attention to such mundane detail when we have here the song at the very center of rock and roll? This is one of the most-covered songs in all of rock music. So much so that it has its own website: louielouie.net - that's a lot of covers, over 1,500, in fact. A radio station named WMXP in Peoria, Illinois covered up their abrupt change in format by briefly becoming "All 'Louie Louie' all the time," playing nothing but covers of the song for a six day marathon before starting their new format.

And Frank Zappa, of course. We'll take any excuse to mention Zappa. Zappa zapped "Louie Louie" a lot, even though he had a love-hate passion for the song. He flowed freely between quoting the song between bars in dozens of different compositions, to spitting fury over it in interviews (he used it for an example of why people "wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit them on the ass"), then back to playing it for a joke on stage. Including the legendary organ loft performance at Albert Hall, commented so brilliantly by Terry Gilliam in the liner notes of Strictly Commercial that we aren't going to try to do it justice here.

The original songwriter is Richard Berry in 1955. This poor guy hardly even gets mentioned for his most famous song. Berry was a doo-wop singer of the typical '50s run of group bands, including The Penguins, The Cadets, The Chimes, The Flairs, The Crowns, The Dreamers, and eventually formed his own group called The Pharaohs. But by this time, had he been so tired of the whole business that he simply named his group "The Plural Nouns," no one would have blamed him. He barely even got paid for his own song, and never saw much commercial success otherwise.

We could go on, but even a heavy book wouldn't be able to cover every facet of this song's place in rock history. It calls for a movie. It's time for The Louie Louie Story, and we want it before Christmas.

Pete Trbovich
June 16, 2010 Louie Louie Songfacts
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