Here we go…back into the music studio to solve one of the great mysteries of early rock’n’roll: What are the “real” lyrics of the hit song “Louie Louie?”
The tune was composed nearly 70 years ago as an innocent little calypso number in 1955, written on toilet tissue paper by Richard Berry, a doo-wop bass vocalist in Los Angeles. He was seeking to capitalize on America’s fascination with the sounds of chart-topper Harry Belafonte.
(Berry’s classic, melodic riff from “Louie Louie” is eerily parallel to a song named “El Loco Cha Cha,” recorded by Cuban-American band leader René Touzet. Just saying….)
“Louie Louie” was first recorded in 1957 by Richard Berry and the Pharaohs. On some Caribbean island, a shrimp boat sailor is telling his bartender friend named Louie that “me gotta go,” because a “fine little girl she wait for me” in Jamaica. The whole story unfolds as a Cajun folksong in just two minutes and eight seconds.
“Three nights and days me sail the sea / Me think of girl, oh constantly / On the ship I dream she there / I smell the rose in her hair.”
“Me see Jamaica moon above / It won’t be long, me see me love / Me take her in my arms and then / I tell her I-I never leave again.”
In 1961, the song was covered in Tacoma, Wash., by “Rockin’ Robin Roberts and the Fabulous Wailers.” They juiced it up instrumentally and put some rock’n’roll energy into the original lyrics. It’s quite an impressive rendition.
“Louie
Louie” was discovered again in 1963 by a group of five guys in Portland, Ore.,
known as the Kingsmen. They remade
the song, ramping up the organ, electric guitar and percussion input. Vocalist
Jack Ely put the emphasis on “Louie Lou-eye.”
The
band recorded the song in a rather bizarre setting. They circled a single
microphone located several feet above them that was dangling from a cord hung
from the ceiling. Ely was wearing dental braces that caused him difficulty in
articulating the lyrics. The words came out rather muddled and garbled.
“That provided hormonal teens and their excitable parents license to imagine they were hearing all kinds of lascivious lyrics,” reported music historian Andrew Amelinckx.
“The
Federal Bureau of Investigation got involved after being sent letters from
across the country,” Amelinckx said. Some of the letter-writers included what
they believed were the “true” lyrics. “For more than two years, FBI agents
tracked down leads while the agency’s scientists attempted to decipher the song
and determine if the band’s single violated the federal law that banned the
interstate transportation of obscene matter,” he added.
As Dave Marsh wrote in his book “Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World’s Most Famous Rock ‘n Roll Song,” Jack Ely sang the words “with so tangled a tongue that not even FBI scientists could decipher them.”
By the end of 1965, the FBI file contained 119 pages, but on Dec. 2, 1965, an assistant U.S. attorney recommended dropping the investigation since there was "no evidence of a crime.”
The FBI totally missed one cuss word in the song, Amelinckx said. That utterance occurs about 54 second into the recording, when the band’s drummer, Lynn Easton, dropped one of his sticks and blurted out a four-letter word that is barely discernable.
“Louie Louie” lived on in infamy, Jim Esposito wrote. “You couldn’t go to a dance where it wasn’t played four or five times. And all the bands always knew the dirty version.” To be continued.
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