Welcome to Kevin's Louie Louie Home Page. This page is dedicated to the song Louie Louie, which I consider the most important piece of art produced in the United States. It is the first song in the Western Music tradition which achieved the ideal Beethoven attempted to create his Ninth Symphony. This is an incredible accomplishment considering the song only has three chords and 84 words.
Louie Louie was written by a black blues musician from Los Angeles named Richard Berry in 1955. The song is about a Jamaican Sailor telling of the longing for his girlfriend to a bartender named Louie. The song sold fairly well when it was first released, but was destined for obscurity by the time the sixties rolled around. As legend has it, a Seattle musician named Rocking Robin Roberts found a copy in a used record store and decided to record it. His version of Louie Louie became popular in the Pacific Northwest where two teenage rock bands from Portland raced to get their version of Louie Louie out first. Although Paul Revere and the Raider's version was more popular with the youths in the Northwest, the Kingsmen's version was the one that hit the big time with record sales of over 8 million. This short song, written by a Black bluesman and made popular by a suburban teenage rock band, quickly became one of the most recorded and influential songs in the world.
The beauty of Louie Louie is that it only has three chords which are repeated over and over throughout the song. Lyrics are not a problem as the Kingsman's version of Louie Louie was undecipherable (it took the FBI 18 months to figure this out, but we'll get to that later). Soon every pimply-faced 16 year with a guitar and amp was out in his parents garage playing Louie Louie over and over until the neighbors went berserk and threatened bodily harm. It is estimated that there are now currently over 1,000 different recordings of Louie Louie. These run the gamut from the Rice University Marching Owl Band to multiple versions by Iggy Pop . There is a version of Louie for everyone. There also has been two Louie Louie collections from Rhino Records, and one from Jerden Records.
The lyrics to Richard Berry's original were pretty straight forward, even with the Jamaican slang. However, the words in the Kingsman's version were undecipherable. Since parents could not understand the lyrics they thought they must be dirty and the song was banned by many radio stations. The FBI and FCC were called in and they launched an investigation. After many hearings and analysis the FCC declared that the song was "unintelligible at any speed". Of course the controversy around the song was one of the primary reasons that the Kingsman's version sold 8 million copies. Naturally groups ad-libbed the lyrics and there are hundreds of different versions of the song. Since I will coming up for tenure in a couple of years, I will not link or print most of them, but Bloom County had some great ones.