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 but what it’s really about is 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 a song 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 understand 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 Pharaohs 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 Pharaohs 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 animosity 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 shitload 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, a concerned parent 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 of the crime. 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 of “Havana Moon” and Richard Berry (no relation) went with it. “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 studio were positioned at a weird angle. It was Ely’s first time in a recording studio and he was just a kid. He was nervous as hell.

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 collective imaginations sink into the sewer. 

Incredibly, the investigation lasted 30 months, and when it was over, the world was a different place. JFK had been assassinated. The British Invasion had begun.

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 naturally 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 to play 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 KO.

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 KO, a record that early 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 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 a love song. Sort of.

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. Our friend 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 my book, Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records. I found the Kurt Cobain quote in the book Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind by Jacob McMurray.

Jim Ruland’s new book Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records is out now. He is the co-author of My Damage with Keith Morris, the founding vocalist of Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and OFF! and Do What You Want with Bad Religion. He write a weekly newsletter about music and books called Message from the Underworld and is currently working on a book with Evan Dando of the Lemonheads.