‘Louie, Louie’: How a misunderstood masterpiece sent the FBI on a two-year goose chase
As an organisation, it would seem that the FBI has seen more well-manicured arseholes than every one of the late Hugh Hefner’s pool parties combined. To any mind outside of the brainbox headquarters of American law enforcement, it would appear that launching an investigation into a song for obscenity is perhaps the greatest PR stunt on the part of the song that you could ever inadvertently pull. Tantamount to FC Barcelona publicly scouting a South American 12-year-old or DEFRA looking into why a particular harvest of strawberries is proving quite so delicious, the declared investigation was always going to kickstart an unwanted frenzy of attention.
If teenagers love one thing more than a bit of iconoclasm, then it’s the sort that comes with a federal stamp of disapproval. Beyond the groove, catchy riff, and scream-along chorus, the FBI ensured that ‘Louie, Louie’ entered the annals of rock ‘n’ roll history by subjecting it to an 18-month investigation. This goose chase sealed its fate as the most misunderstood song ever written. And perfectly encapsulated the rift between radical youth and stilted old age in the modern era.
The song itself is the sort of old rock ‘n’ roll standard that anyone with a guitar, or even a tennis racquet and a lively imagination, was having a go at covering in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Then, just as ‘House of the Rising Sun’ had been bumbling about for a century before finding a place to call home in The Animals’ vivified back catalogue, The Kingsmen delivered the quintessential version of ‘Louie, Louie’ in 1963, securing its place in pop culture history.
For the track, the group went for a befitting slack-jawed vocal style that has proved butcher-proof for the millions of drunken karaoke imitations that have followed. This drawled out eight-pints-deep style made the lyrics basically incomprehensible. This was a masterstroke.
When it came to the FBI in that era, anything incomprehensible was a sworn enemy of the state. The counterculture movement was a rising force, and this had J Edgar Hoover and his cronies on high alert. Just because they couldn’t understand the lyrics didn’t mean that the youth in revolt weren’t picking up on some subversive sonic code in the commercial, bumbling jingle. After all, for years the authorities couldn’t understand the enigma code and that certainly turned out nefarious.
Thus, when this mystery racket hit the airways, Hoover responded by deploying FBI agents to tirelessly listen to the song over and over for 18 months at various speeds and frequencies. The dream of being a secret agent is one that many young kids share, under the James Bond proviso that you skirt the underbelly of the world as a besuited benevolent guardian of society, not that you endlessly twizzle a frequency nob while listening to a kid from the Portland, Oregon, attempting to sing in the vague hope that something unknown but dastardly has been seeded into a lo-fi garage rock recording.
The FBI’s conclusion following their investigation—which also involved a spy ghosting the young band when they embarked on a tour—was that there was simply no knowing what the hell they were trying to say. In the process, they ensured that the song was a hit that charted for an unprecedented two summers in a row. They also gave us a musical paradigm for the strange ways of the FBI in the swinging sixties.
Remarkably, it would seem that nobody bothered to check the lyric sheet all along. The track was first written by Richard Berry in 1957 based on a Latin song named ‘El Loco Cha Cha’, but Berry sold the rights to Flip Records Label for $750 in order to buy an engagement ring, logging its contents in legal contracts. This is, as I’m sure you’ve already worked out, another prime example of the costly toll of tying the knot. Poor old Berry missed out on endless royalties and ended up living on welfare at his mother’s house in South Central Los Angeles after his career in music began to falter—a turn of events that typically upends matrimony bliss.
In the interim, the song made its way around the States and, ultimately, to a brace-clad bunch from Portland. The Kingsmen’s proto-garage rock recording is incomprehensible out of pure happenstance more so than design. The high school friends had a studio with three measly microphones booked for one hour and one hour only. ‘Louie, Louie’ was recorded in a single take; it even features the drummer shouting “fuck” when he dropped his stick, the singer Jack Ely coming in on a verse so early that it leaves enough time for Rocky to pick himself up off the canvas, and so much upbeat attitude that it could whisk Admiral Nelson off his column and have him dancing a jig in Soho.
As Ely said himself regarding the incomprehensible vocal take, “It was more yelling than singing because I was trying to be heard over all the instruments”. Not to mention the fact that he had to lean back to sing into a microphone hanging from the roof and awkwardly dangling above an amp. He was also singing with the sort of rudimentary ‘60s orthodontic mouthpiece that was the equivalent of having a model railway line nailed across your gnashers. It turns out he was even yelling into the wrong side of the mic. Everything about the ordeal typified the very definition of shoddiness.
But that was its beauty. For millennia, kids were kept away from the revered catholic world of Western culture. It was all about pride and prejudice—quite literally. Yet, there were some young lads who were so green that their singer didn’t even know how to work a microphone, but they were doing something new, fresh, and full of energy. That’s all that mattered. That’s all that matters still when you listen to its thundering enthusiasm. All in all, the single cost them $50 bucks to make, and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.
Room for a conspiracy?
In typical counterculture fashion, perhaps this allows just a little wiggle room for a potential conspiracy. This is all entirely hypothetical tittle-tattle, so please, I implore you, do not take this with any more than a mouse’s grain of salt; the last thing the world needs now is another damned theory. But, purely for fun, let’s imagine the presentiment that the FBI knew that casting their federal peepers upon the track would inadvertently promote it all along, and the goose chase was actually part of an orchestrated promotional ruse.
Why would they do that? Well, this much is proven: The Congress for Cultural Freedom was an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. This group promoted American capitalist ideals. It promoted modern artists like Jackson Pollock as part of those ideals. This group was also a funded offshoot of the CIA. Thus, it has been argued that the CIA purposefully elevated modern art both in terms of value and acclaim as a way to diminish socialist realism. In other words, those daft Commies are still doling out drab pictures of bushes for pennies, whereas Pollock is quite literally extolling the freedom of the human soul on canvas, and his bright new world deserves to be handsomely rewarded.
If that much is true in art, then just maybe they looked at the potential for abstract music to kick up a cultural fuss that stood in energised opposition to classical Soviet stuffiness. Maybe young kids seizing the main chance and making a mint off little more than a catchy riff and an urge to thrill is a revolution that they were happy to get behind in any inadvertent way they could. Or perhaps that’s a load of twaddle that affords Hoover far more tactical intelligence than he was capable of. Not to mention the hefty sum that was squandered listening along. Either way, even this mere thought experiment exemplifies why the song is a bonafide masterpiece: it captures far more than a few chords and a butchered vocal performance in its glorious 163 seconds.
The song that fought the law…
As for the incomprehensible verse, well, in the Berry original, it reads, in a very Yoda-like style, as follows: “Three nights and days I sailed the sea/Me think of girl constantly/On the ship, I dream she there/I smell the rose in her hair/Louie, Louie, oh no, me gotta go, yeah, yeah.”
While this whole ordeal might sound absolutely absurd, it did get me curious about doing my own investigation. I began fiddling with my record player, and lo and behold, if you play it in reverse, at the right frequency and RPM, you hear it loud and clear: the hidden message…
