Louie Louie: the song the FBI spent two years trying to understand
Three chords, a shouted count-in, and a vocal so muffled that the singer’s own bandmates could not repeat it. In 1963 a group of Portland teenagers recorded Louie Louie in one take, and within a year the United States government was playing it at every speed it could think of, looking for the filth it was sure was there.
A love song from a sailor
The song began as something gentle. Richard Berry, a Los Angeles rhythm-and-blues singer, wrote it in 1955 after hearing a Latin dance number with a “duh duh duh, duh duh” bass line he could not get out of his head. His lyric is a sailor in a bar telling the bartender, Louie, how much he misses the girl waiting for him in Jamaica. Berry sold his share of the rights a few years later for about $750 to pay for his wedding.
It became a staple of the dance bands of the Pacific Northwest, passed from group to group and getting rougher with each hand-off.
One take, one microphone
In April 1963 the Kingsmen paid roughly fifty dollars for an hour in a Portland studio. Singer Jack Ely, wearing braces on his teeth, had to shout up at a single microphone hung from the ceiling, and the band, who thought they were playing a rehearsal, blasted through the song once. Listen closely and you can hear Ely come in with a verse too early, stop, and wait for the band to catch up.
The result was a mess, and the mess was the point. The record sold in the millions, reached number two on the American charts, and Ely’s slurred, straining vocal became the most-argued-about performance in rock and roll.
The FBI listens
Because nobody could understand the words, teenagers decided they must be obscene, and typed up “real” lyrics that circulated from school to school. A parent in Indiana wrote to the attorney general; the governor of Indiana declared the record pornographic and had it pulled from the state’s radio stations. The FBI opened an investigation under the laws against transporting obscene material across state lines.
For more than two years agents played the record at 33, 45 and 78 revolutions per minute, interviewed the record company and a band member, and compared what they heard with the schoolyard versions. Their conclusion, recorded in a file that now runs to well over a hundred pages, was that the song was “unintelligible at any speed”. They never interviewed Jack Ely, the one person who knew what he had sung.
What is actually in there
Berry’s original words, harmless and a little sweet, are what Ely was singing. The one thing the FBI missed is the part fans still point to: about fifty-four seconds in, after a dropped drumstick, the drummer can faintly be heard cursing in the background. It is the only obscenity on the record, and the government listening for it never noticed.
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