The simple garage song that cost the US government millions of dollars
It’s 1963, you’re a conservative, and the world seems to be going to shit. The president’s head has recently been blown off, which you’re more nonplussed about than most, considering he was a little too lefty for your tastes, but the fact that the patent on LSD has recently expired, sending hippies into a legalised frenzy is driving you equally potty. These bums, with their different ways of doing things, are more feared than the VD testing tent at the Madi Gras festival.
Thankfully, you can do something amazing with your life; you’re J Edgar Hoover. As the head of the FBI, you know you have more well-manicured arseholes at your disposal than every one of Hugh Hefner’s pool parties combined. These men and women, but mostly entirely white men, are also conservatives who are angry with these hairy freaks having fun in peculiar ways that you can’t quite understand and, therefore, fear.
As you drive along Pennsylvania Avenue one December morning a matter of weeks after JFK’s head fell off, you’re rigorously wondering how on earth you can stop the wanton revolution of the great unshaven. Then it fizzles onto your radio, “That was ‘Louie Louie’ by a little radical band called the Kingsmen from out in the friendly little town of Portland, Oregon. That track first hit the airways on Arnie Ginsburg’s show ‘The Worst Record of the Week’, but now it’s cracked the top ten for the first time; how about that?”
Enraged, snippets of the DJ’s patter flash before your bespectacled eyes like bird todd splattering on your freshly washed windscreen. The words “radical”, “friendly”, and “Ginsberg” infuriate you. You pull over, punch the steering wheel to set the airbag off only so that you can yell into it like a pillow, “How the fuck can the ‘world’s worst record’ now be a hit?!” Evidently, in your blustering fury, you’ve cooked the books to elevate it from the worst song of the week on a local station to the world’s worst.
Eureka, there can only be one explanation: it’s terrible because it isn’t a song at all, it’s not trying to adhere to normal standards, that mumbling lyricism you’ve just heard wasn’t simply inaudibly distorted by a slapdash recording, it was commie code and now it’s tearing its way through the disenfranchised minds of this once great nation’s youth like a virus of fucked-up ideals pertaining to peace, free health care, and hairy fucking women.
But you remember, you are J Edgar Hoover, and you can do something amazing with your life. You will stop this incomprehensible but nonetheless merciless virus at all costs. The streets aren’t looking clever, but that’s a perennial problem you never seem to have been able to fix, too impossible to even bother with. So, instead, you decide to throw tens of millions at solving the mystery of what the damned Kingsmen are garbling into the poor rock-addled psyches of this great nation whose citizens you hate so dearly.
If it takes 18 months, then by God, it’ll take 18 months. Your first plan of action is to get a team to work around the clock trying to crack the record’s code, listening to it at various frequencies, tempos, backwards and sideways endlessly until the gig is up. These FBI agents were inspired to join the force for just this reason: to sit in the same room for a year and a half listening to the same seven-inch single in every way imaginable. This is the James Bond difference-making they imagined when they signed up.
And as for the Kingsmen, if these ungodly teenagers are the source, then they must be ruthlessly monitored. Alongside the team of highly trained record listeners, you will assign a spy to trail the teenagers on their forthcoming tour, a tour which you inadvertently help to promote by condemning the record publicly.
You’re over a year into the investigation now. No leads have emerged. You drive along Pennsylvania Avenue once more, glancing at yourself in the rear-view mirror, your hairline visibly receding in real time like footage of a tsunami played in rewind. Its pace quickens as that bastard song ‘Louie, Louie’ hisses onto the radio. It’s a hit for the second summer in a row. You’ve gotta hand it to them, these commies are good. Perhaps too good. You call off the investigation and conclude it’s just a $50 song recorded haphazardly by kids blundering onto a bandwagon in a shitty studio and letting the vigour of youth do the work over a catchy riff, but you couldn’t be too careful. It’s cost millions of dollars and countless hours of time, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
You satisfy yourself with the undeniable knowledge that while the virus may have caught on, it’s surely been rendered benign, evidenced by the fact that the symptom of hairiness and strange liberal behaviour persists, but no fatalities of actualised change have been recorded. And that’s your ultimate victory. The evidence reverbs and warms you through old age, as it unspools before your eyes: A nation so obsessed with battling communism that it has amassed trillions through capitalism and lets millions die of poverty among their ranks just to prove a point—a point not too dissimilar to investigating the words to a pop song with a printed lyrics sheet for almost two years.
You were J Edgar Hoover, and you did something truly awful with your life.
