Format: 7″ Single

I want to tell you the story of the most famous sea chanty of all. At the heart of this story is a tale of woe about a lovesick sailor. I’m a sucker for nautical misadventure and let’s face it: doomed romance is a staple of the genre, as inevitable as the crusty captain and the fatal storm. But that’s not what this story is about. 

This story is about creativity, influence, and theft. It’s the story of rock and roll before we started calling it that. It’s the story of a song called “Louie Louie.” You’ve heard it before, and there’s not a thing you can do to stop me from giving it to you right now. 

Do you remember the first time you heard “Louie Louie”? Was it on the dance floor? At the movies? Was it an experience of wild abandon or ironic detachment? Do you know who wrote it or who made it famous? 

It’s not important when I heard it. But how and when that happened says something about our relationship to rock and roll, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, how challenging it is to put your arms around it when each of us has a different entry point based on when and where we were born.   

“Louie Louie” is one of those songs that slinks through the history of American music. It’s indifferent to genre, style, popularity or good taste, illuminating all of rock and roll along the way.

“Louie Louie,” it may surprise you to learn, was born in Anaheim, California, in 1956. 

Ricky Rillera and the Rhythm Rockers, a Latin and R&B band led by a pair of Filipino-American brothers, were playing at the Harmony Club Ballroom to a packed house of lowrider aficionados and car club enthusiasts. Richard Berry, a Black singer-songwriter from South Central was in the dressing room, waiting his turn to perform, when he heard the band perform the opening notes to “El Loco Cha Cha Cha” by René Touzet. Berry was spellbound. Listen to the first few notes and you’ll see why:

Berry jotted down some lyrics and quickly cobbled together a song. Though just 21 years old, Berry was already an accomplished songwriter who played with several doo-wop bands. He struck out on his own and the following year Richard Berry and the Pharoahs released “You Are My Sunshine” backed with “Louie Louie.” 

Berry jotted down some lyrics and quickly cobbled together a song. Though just 21 years old, Berry was already an accomplished songwriter who played with several doo-wop bands. He struck out on his own and the following year Richard Berry and the Pharoahs released “You Are My Sunshine” backed with “Louie Louie.” 

The song was a minor sensation in and around L.A. and was popular enough for Berry and his Pharoahs to play shows up and down the coast. They had a good run, and then it was on to the next song. Always hard up for cash, Berry sold his rights to the song for $750 so he could get married. 

And that was that. Or it should have been. In the early ’60s, the song took hold when Rockin’ Robin Roberts & the Wailers added “Louie Louie” to its set after finding Berry’s record in a discount bin in Tacoma, Washington.

The Wailers high-energy version of “Louie Louie” made it a rock and roll song, something most adults still hoped was a fad that would run its course. Ironically, it was “Louie Louie” that breathed new life into the genre. You can hear it at the bridge when Roberts improvises, “Let’s give it to them right now!” 

The song was so popular that all the other bands in Tacoma started playing it too, bands like the Bluenotes, the Ventures, and the Sonics. These bands all played “against” each other at dance competitions and battle of the bands, but there was no competition between these rock and roll outcasts. They supported each other and lent each other equipment and played on each other’s records. They were a community. 

Sound familiar? The garage rockers of the Northwest were forebears of the ‘90s Seattle rock scene in more ways than one. 

You’re probably thinking, “Now wait a minute. I thought the Kingsmen made ‘Louie Louie’ famous?” 

They did. How they did it is the most outrageous thing about this story. 

After “Louie Louie” spread to every dance hall in the Northwest, a pair of bands recorded the song in the same studio in the same week. 

The version recorded by Paul Revere and the Raiders, who had recently relocated to Portland from Idaho, is the better of the two, and by better I mean wilder. This doesn’t really come across in this lip-synced performance in which the band “plays” toy instruments, but you can imagine what this was like in a dance hall packed with a thousand sweating kids jumping all over each other. 

The Kingsmen’s version is timid and more tentative. There’s no power in it. No emotion. It’s kids playing a song about things they’ve never experienced. 

Paul Revere and the Raiders sold a shit load of records in the Northwest. The Kingsmen sold a few hundred, but someone from the label sent the record to a disc jockey at a radio station in Boston who played it not once but twice on the Worst Record of the Week segment of his show. Callers flooded the phone line, demanding to know how they could get a copy of “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen.

It didn’t matter that this was the weakest version in the Northwest. The people of Boston had never heard it before and fell under its spell, which is a shame. The song became a hit for a band the least deserving of the fame that came its way. Here’s why. 

Before the record broke in Boston, the drummer, the fucking drummer, essentially took over the Kingsmen, announcing he would now be playing the saxophone and singing most of the songs, and those who didn’t like it could go pound sand. The singer, Jack Ely, left. When “Louie Louie” started selling, this presented a problem because the drummer couldn’t sing the song nearly as well as Jack could. So he would lip sync it. 

Then something truly weird happened. Some kids started spreading the rumor that the lyrics to “Louie Louie” were obscene. Someone typed up alternate lyrics and these circulated among high schools and college campuses. Eventually, someone ratted “Louie Louie” out to the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover opened an investigation as to whether the record label was guilty of Intrastate Transport of Obscene Material because of course he did. 

Now, there was nothing obscene about “Louie Louie.” It’s perhaps the first time in nautical history a sailor was accused of indecency and was completely innocent. When Richard Berry conceived the song in Anaheim, he had a calypso song in mind: Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon,” particularly the lyrics performed in pidgin English. (There was a tradition, or at least a fad, of calypso songs beings sung in this manner that Chuck Berry leaned on when he did his version. “Louie Louie” is an endless chain of appropriation.)

Berry, with his rich baritone, carried the lyrics off well. The white teenagers of the Northwest? Not so much. 

When the Kingsmen recorded “Louie Louie” Jack Ely was still wearing braces on his teeth, and the mics in the recording studio were positioned at a weird angle, and he was nervous. It was his first time in a studio and he was just a kid. 

As a result, aside from “Louie Louie,” which, by the way, is the name of the bartender our sailor is pouring his heart out to, you can’t tell what the hell Ely is saying. 

Now it should have been an easy thing for the FBI to solve the mystery of the obscene lyrics. except the FBI didn’t want to solve the mystery. They wanted to prove the lyrics were dirty as a way of throttling this low-down dirty thing called rock and roll. Instead of listening to the half-dozen or so previously recorded versions and making out what the lyrics are supposed to say, they let their imaginations sink into the sewer. 

Incredibly, the investigation lasted 30 months, and when it was over, the world was a different place. JFK was assassinated. The British Invasion started. And millions of copies of “Louie Louie” flew off the shelves. 

Pick your favorite rock and roll band from the early to mid ’60s—from mild to wild—and chances are they recorded a version of “Louie Louie.” The Beach Boys, Ike & Tina Turner, the MC5. 

Inevitably, songwriters began to take the essence of the song’s chord structure and make it their own. 

Consider the Kinks “All Day and All of the Night”:

Or, the Troggs “Wild Thing”:

Even Richard Berry reworked “Louie Louie” in his song “Have Love Will Travel,” which the Sonics stomped to smithereens:

As the ’60s gave way to the ’70s “Louie Louie” fell out of style as rock became more complex, more sophisticated, more self-important. A brutally simple song about a drunken sailor wasn’t all that interesting anymore. The payola scandal changed the music business and helped usher in a model of consumption based on albums, not songs—though that trend is reversing. 

“Louie Louie” became a song for late at night when the musicians were too drunk or stoned to remember how to play anything else. It wasn’t party rock anymore, it was for when the party was over, or should have been over, but you want to give it to them one last time. 

On February 9, 1974, at the Michigan Palace in Detroit, “Louie Louie” was Iggy & the Stooges’ swan song. The last song it performed at its final show. Musically, the song is a fairly faithful rendition, but Iggy changed the lyrics, singing the obscene version of the song that had sent the FBI into a tizzy a decade before. Even after all these years it’s still shockingly lewd: 

It’s an ignominious end to an incredible run of three criminally underappreciated studio albums that would influence a generation of punk, hardcore, and post-punk rockers. The performance was released in 1976 as part of Iggy & the Stooges live album Metallic K.O.

A few years later in Hermosa Beach, California, when Black Flag was thinking about adding a cover song to help pad its set because the band’s songs were so short, Keith Morris suggested “Louie Louie” because he liked the version that Iggy sang on Metallic K.O., a record that American punks latched on to as a signifier of weirdo cool and a link to a past worth holding on to when rock and roll didn’t suck.  

There isn’t an official version of Keith singing “Louie Louie” but you can hear it on the bootleg recording made by Dave Nolte of the Descendents and the Last during Black Flag’s infamous performance at Polliwog Park in Manhattan Beach on July 22, 1979. Naturally, it’s the last song. (I’m not going to link to it but it’s not too hard to find.) 

Black Flag became infamous for closing out its shows with “Louie Louie.” The night Ron Reyes, Morris’ replacement, quit the band and walked off the stage at the Fleetwood in Redondo Beach, Black Flag played “Louie Louie” for an hour, with various members of the crowd taking a turn on the mic while Greg Ginn melted the frets off his plexiglass Dan Armstrong guitar. Promoters learned the hard way not to tell Black Flag they had time for one more song. 

Reyes’ replacement, Dez Cadena, recorded his version of the song with Black Flag for Posh Boy Records. There are no sailors in it. No moon. No sea. But it’s still sort of a love song. 

Before you check it out, pay close attention to the way it starts with a clatter of drums as it launches into the cursed riff. 

Sound familiar? It should. 

Maybe you can hear Nirvana’s brothers from the Northwest—the Wailers or the Kingsmen or the Sonics—in Nirvana’s “Louie Louie” but I can’t. I hear Black Flag’s deconstructed version, the ghost of a pop song in the chaos of those howling guitars.

Here’s what Kurt Cobain told Rolling Stone in January of 1994: “’Teen Spirit’ is such a clichéd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or ‘Louie Louie.’ When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, ‘That is so ridiculous.’ I made the band play it for an hour-and-a-half.” 

This story has a happy ending of sorts. Richard Berry who wrote a song about a sailor and sold it for $750 got the rights back to “Louie Louie” in 1986. He was still living in L.A. but was barely able to support himself. He was finally able to make a little money every time someone put his song in a movie or a TV show or a commercial, which happened a lot. He lived very comfortably for another decade and now his estate receives those royalties. 

There you have it. One man’s vision of a lonely sailor shook up L.A., rocked the Northwest, and made the country so crazy that its top lawmen tried to puzzle out the words of an imaginary deck seaman. It’s a testament to the power of rock and roll and the feelings it conjures up. 

Actually, it’s…

If you enjoyed this story, you might get a kick out of Dave Marsh’s excellent book Louie Louie, where many of these anecdotes come from. The details about Black Flag’s use of the song come from interviews I conducted for Corporate Rock Sucks. I found the Kurt Cobain quote in the book Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind by Jacob McMurray, which I highly recommended.

This post originally appeared in slightly different form in Message from the Underworld.

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Format: 7″ single

Notes: I *think* this is an original pressing due to the Unicorn logo. There was such bad blood with Unicorn that SST would never willingly put out a record with Unicorn’s name or logo on a repress, but maybe this is a bootleg. IDK. IDC. My copy is barely playable and the original art is long gone.

However, I find it interesting that Side 1 with “TV Party,” which was recorded in 1982 with Black Flag’s third drummer, Emil Johnson, was recorded after Side 2 with “I’ve Got to Run” and “My Rules” in 1981 with Black Flag’s fifth drummer, Bill Stevenson.

Confused? Read on…

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[The following appeared in the Sellout Edition of PssSST!]

You know who knows something about selling out? Henry Rollins, that’s who. That sounds like a set-up for a put-down but I promise you that it isn’t. I think Henry Rollins is one of the most fascinating writers of my generation.

Henry Rollins has been called a sellout pretty much his entire career. Everyone knows that before Rollins was Rollins he played in the band State of Alert prior to joining Black Flag. When he played Washington, DC, with his new band for the first time, his old friends in the scene called him a rock star and a sellout, which affected him deeply. Here’s what he had to say about it in Get in the Van:

“I learned something that night that stuck with me. I got shit from some of the people I thought were my friends. They told me that I had become some kind of a rockstar. The fact that I left Washington DC and came back in this “big” band was a sell out. Some people I knew treated me strange. It hurt at first, then I realized something. You’re going to do what you’re going to do and that’s all there is. That’s all you got and that’s that. From that night on I figured they can go get fucked.”

This is the Rollins I love. Vulnerable, reflective, assertive. He uses his intellect to protect his feelings and forge a new way of being in the world. This is a place that some people struggle to reach all their lives. The entry is dated December 3, 1981, nearly forty years ago. Rollins was 19.

When Rollins was in SOA, he had a job as a manager of an ice cream store, an apartment, a bank account, and a record player with a record collection, but he gave up all of those things to be in Black Flag. The band’s bare bones touring operation is the stuff of legend, largely because of Rollin’s diaries from those days, but the conditions at SST HQ weren’t much better. It was a vagabond existence where things like shelter, food, clothing, heat, etc.—things Rollins had taken for granted—had to be negotiated almost every single day.

The life he led as a member of SOA was cushy compared to his life in Black Flag, and yet Rollins was a rock star? No, Rollins sacrificed everything to be in Black Flag. The sellout wars are battles of perception and Rollins learned earlier than most that it’s a war you cannot win. The things you do matter. The things others say do not.

Rollins wasn’t the only one who was accused of selling out. After Black Flag released “TV Party” Ginn was asked by We Got Power if the band had sold out. This question was a bit thornier because of Black Flag’s entanglement with Unicorn, a label with a distribution deal with MCA. The song, which Black Flag re-recorded for the single, was co-produced by people attached to Unicorn, such as Daphna Edwards, who ran the label, and Ed Barton, who’d worked on many of War’s hits. The single’s lyrics differ slightly from the version recorded for Damaged, mainly to update the TV shows and schedules referenced in the song. (When Dallas moved from Friday to Wednesday night, Black Flag was on it!)

But the reason why people thought Black Flag was selling out with “TV Party” had nothing to do with Unicorn’s major label affiliation and everything to do with the way it sounded. The song is humorous and references pop culture. Also, there’s a clap track, which is always weird. When a punk band puts a clap track in a song it’s fair game to ask, “What were you thinking?”  

“I think TV Party is hilarious,” Ginn told We Got Power. “And if we would not do it because we might think we might get some criticism, that would be selling out, rather than saying, ‘Well, we’re gonna do what we like.’

But the questions about selling out kept coming. Rollins came to despise doing interviews. He hated the way fanzine interviews were stripped of context or magazine articles always had an agenda. He just wanted to say what was on his mind, but doing interviews made him feel like he was selling himself out.

Is it any wonder he threw himself into spoken word? Rollins’s “talking shows” provided a platform for Rollins to tell stories in his own way without editorial oversight. He could write his books and go on tour and he didn’t have to answer questions about selling out ever again.

And then this happened.

This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at Message from the Underworld.