That time Indiana teens ratted out dirty ‘Louie Louie’ lyrics, and the FBI got involved
Editor's note: This story was originally published in 2019.
Two small-town Indiana teenagers got upset with the obscene lyrics they heard in a new rock 'n roll song on the radio, so they did something about it. They wrote a letter to the governor.
The governor read the letter, and he did something about it. He sent an aide to a record store to buy the record. He sat down and listened to it — at several different speeds. Convinced the record might indeed be dirty, he alerted the Federal Communications Commission. He contacted the Indiana Broadcasters Association and requested that member radio stations remove the song from their rotation.
"Record held naughty, air ban asked"read the headline on a Jan. 23, 1964 Indianapolis News story that described the governor's swift reaction to a letter of complaint from "a Frankfort resident." The letter, we know now, was sent by two Frankfort residents, friends acting jointly. They were students at the high school.
Within days the recording would be under investigation by the FCC, the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
This sounds like an uplifting after-school special on TV (empowered youth!) but in fact was the start of one of the dumbest battles in the history of America's culture wars. Nothing would come of this legendary goof-up, not a single conviction, not even an arrest.
The year was 1964, January. The musicians were the Kingsmen, out of Portland, Ore. The recording was their cover of "Louie Louie," about a mariner who pines for a girl. The governor was Matthew E. Welsh, D — Ind.
And the two Frankfort teenagers who started it all?
They've never been identified, let alone interviewed — until now.
Finding the Frankfort teens
We found the Frankfort teens — we located Ground Zero of a nationwide controversy — via Gov. Welsh's archived correspondence. Governors hang on to their mail when they leave office and turn it over to the Indiana State Archives. The archives are open to the public. Academics sometimes find governors' old letters handy in unwinding weighty matters of historical importance.
But what is unwound here is not something weighty but rather an absurd misunderstanding that led to parental panic and nanny-state overreach at a time when many adults were alarmed at the growing rebelliousness of youth culture.
The Frankfort teens are now in their 70s. One is male, one is female. They've never spoken publicly about "Louie Louie." They've never been asked about it.
We called them up. They spoke haltingly and not at length. They seemed embarrassed, and who wouldn't be? What an uncool thing they did. But they were kids. They are wiser now.
They insisted on anonymity — and got it. Why rat out two people who 55 years ago had, in good faith, tried to save the nation from moral degradation?
Days after Gov. Welsh swung into action, both Frankfort teens sent follow-up letters to the governor, thanking him for getting on the "Louie Louie" case with such decisiveness. (The governor saved them; they're in the archives.)
"You should be given a round of applause for your strong stand against this record," wrote the male, a senior. The lad then defended youth: "Much is written about the declining morals of the American teen-ager. However, most people don't realize that if the morals are declining, and I doubt if they are, it is because of 'smut' such as this record, put out by adults whose only concern is in making a fast buck."
The female teen, in her junior year, wrote: "I hope the publicity does not harm you personally in any way. I doubt that this could be possible when the public must surely realize that you too are interested in protecting we young people from a flood of obscene records."
Governor gets flak, praise
The governor did receive some flak. Several dozen letters, also archived, were harsh, like this one: "Welsh: Are you out of your mind? There is nothing wrong with Louie Louie. — Furious."
But he got just as many letters of support, like this one: "Dear Governor: I realize that your action will be questioned by some but it will be appreciated by a host of people who still believe in moral principles and Christian dignity."
And this: "Honorable Sir: We are glad the protest about the record came from Frankfort, Ind. as our son, a young minister there, is trying hard to make the city a cleaner place for youth."
But the Frankfort teens who'd started it all were not basking in victory. They were laying low. The girl's father feared a lawsuit from the Kingsmen, she recalled the other day.
His fear was unfounded because sales of "Louie Louie" only soared with the controversy. Still, when a TV news crew from Indianapolis came to Frankfort High, she and her male co-conspirator hid in the principal's office. One person's righteous whistle-blower is another person's rat-fink snitch.
The female Frankfort teen-now-septuagenarian, who still lives in the area, said when she first heard "Louie Louie," she liked it. "The beat and everything was beautiful," she said recently. "But you couldn't understand the words, they were all garbled. One of the kids in my class was dating someone at Purdue, and he somehow got a hold of what he said were the words. Some of them weren't very nice."
Pre-internet fake lyrics spread
"Louie Louie" was written by a minor songwriter and performer from Los Angeles named Richard Berry (no relation to Chuck Berry) and was recorded several times in the 1950s, including by Berry, in 1957. In those recordings the lyrics were discernible. Those recordings created no stir and not a lot of sales.
The Kingsmen released their garbled version in May 1963. At some point after that, scraps of paper circulated through American high schools and colleges on which were written naughty lyrics of a sexual nature. These were purported to be the Kingsmen's actual lyrics.
In that divided time, when "generation gap" was a household term, these scraps of paper (some typed, some handwritten) were effectively an underground code for kids, a pre-internet inside joke. (The flap was not by any stretch Indiana-centric; the FBI would later field complaints about dirty "Louie Louie" lyrics from such far-flung cities as Tampa, San Diego, Detroit and Shreveport.)
The fake dirty lyrics were well-crafted in that they matched up convincingly to the record. But so does the banter on the Youtube channel "A Bad Lip Reading." The actual lyrics of "Louie Louie," Richard Berry's, also matched up convincingly.
Here's a Richard Berry stanza:
"Three nights and days I sailed the sea/Me think of girl ah constantly/Ah on that ship, I dream she there/I smell the rose ah in her hair." (Find the complete, actual lyrics at the bottom of this story.)
The first four words of the matching dirty stanza are "Each night at ten" (the rest is too raunchy to print here though not too raunchy for the internet; Google it).
For "Three nights and days" to be mistaken for "Each night at ten" shows just how garbled the Kingsmen's recording was. Lead singer Jack Ely years later explained that the braces on his teeth had recently been tightened (Ely was 19), and on top of that he'd had to tilt his head awkwardly in order for his voice to reach the recording studio's lone microphone.
Music industry staple
Since the time of "Louie Louie," poor enunciation has become a music industry staple. From Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (1968) to Pearl Jam's "Yellow Ledbetter" (1992) to Young Thug's and Rich Homie Quan's "Lifestyle" (2014), audiences have become accustomed to not knowing the words to songs.
But in 1964, pop singers made themselves understood. "Louie Louie" was released into a world where Bobby Vinton's "There! I've Said it Again" and "Dominique," by Jeannine "The Singing Nun" Deckers, were chart-toppers. Listen for 10 seconds to "Dominique" or "There! I've Said it Again" and you'll better understand the freak-out over primal "Louie Louie."
The raucous sound of the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" struck some people as wrong regardless of the words. Leroy New, Marion County's chief trial deputy prosecutor, listened to "Louie Louie" over and over along with Gov. Welsh's men. New contemplated filing obscenity charges but told the Indianapolis Star he "couldn't say one way or another" if the record was obscene. He was, however, certain the song was "an abomination of out-of-tune guitars and overbearing jungle rhythm and clanging cymbals."
But it's not against the law to be an abomination, and on February 11, 1964, three weeks after Gov. Welsh sounded the alarm, the FCC, the U.S. Postal Service and the Justice Department dropped their "Louie Louie" investigations. FCC staffers had listened to "Louie Louie" numerous times. They listened to it at 45 rpm. They slowed it down to 16 rpm. They sped it up to 78 rpm. They found the song, in the words of a commission spokesman, "unintelligible at any speed." .
But not everyone wanted to give up the smut hunt just yet. Gov. Welsh's press secretary, in a bit of double-talk that was impressive even by a press secretary's standards, early on had pronounced the "Louie Louie" lyrics "indistinct" but "plain if you listen carefully."
A person describing herself as a member of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs of Flint, Mich. was still on the case nearly a year and a half later, as was the FBI. In June 1965, she wrote to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover: "I can realize that you are unable to comment on your current investigations. But dauntless we are and we now have in our possession a recording made directly from the Kingsmen's 'Louie, Louie.' The 45 RPM 'Louie' was played at 78 RPM, taped at twice the regular speed and then slowed down so that it now plays somewhere between 45 and 33 1/2 RPM. At this speed the obscene articulation is clearer."
Kingsmen profit from the publicity
No lead was too silly for the squares to pursue. The FBI did not quit investigating "Louie Louie" until November 1965.
The beneficiaries of all this were of course the Kingsmen, who thanks to the publicity sold hundreds of thousands of records and became nationally famous. In 2007 Rolling Stone magazine pronounced their recording of "Louie Louie" “the #4 most influential recording of all time.”
When suspicion first landed on them, however, the Kingsmen seemed to run scared. "We took the words from the original version and recorded them faithfully," Lynn Easton, the group's drummer, told the Star in the days after Gov. Welsh launched his assault. "There was no clowning around."
Later the Kingsmen relaxed and grew bold, and they did clown around. A spokesman for the band thanked Welsh for helping boost sales of the record ("it's hard to keep up with orders") and offered to buy the governor a hearing aid so he could "hear the sounds of the world around him."
Matthew Empson Welsh was not (generally) some clueless fuddy-duddy. In some ways he was ahead of his time. Three years before the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, Welsh pushed a law through the Indiana General Assembly that created the Fair Employment Practices Commission. In 1964 he blocked the segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace from getting the endorsement of Indiana's convention delegates.
Welsh was 81 in 1993 when he sat for an interview with the noted music critic Dave Marsh. Marsh was writing a book about "Louie Louie." "I thought the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot and not worth any extended pursuit," he said. "I have no interest in it either way."
Similarly, the Frankfort teens went on to become serious, solid adults. The man is a lawyer in Minnesota. The woman taught school in Indiana for many years. In January 1964, the woman recalled the other day, the two were in the Frankfort High gym, milling around before rehearsals for the annual talent show. They began talking about dirty "Louie Louie," and they agreed the record needed to be stopped.
Recently, when asked in phone interviews about "Louie Louie," both became impatient.
"Look, I was in high school," the man said. "I was a small town high school kid. I did a lot of kooky things in high school. It wasn't that big a deal to me. I never became a part of the story back then, and the story never became a part of me.
"Why not ask me about something important? Like climate change. I'll talk about that. I'm passionate about it, I've got a granddaughter. The science on climate change has been clear for years. Unfortunately it's become political."
The man said he has never spoken about "Louie Louie," has not told even his children about his role in the saga.
The woman said she'd told her family, and they'd chuckled about it. She says now that ratting out "Louie "Louie" was the wrong thing. "We shouldn't have sent that letter out (to the governor)," she said. "It wasn't a bad song, it wasn't dirty. We didn't have all the information. This was an immature mind. We didn't think."
Several people, including the rock historian Peter Blecha, who has written about "Louie Louie," think that the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie," while hewing to Richard Berry's original, clean lyrics, nonetheless does contain an obscenity.
The FBI, the FCC and all the others missed it, but between the 50 and 54 second mark on the recording, Blecha has claimed, drummer Lynn Easton accidentally strikes the rim of his drum.
"F---!" Easton exclaims, or seems to exclaim. You can definitely hear something, and it definitely sounds like "F---!"
Someone might want to investigate.
"Louie Louie"
Lyrics by Richard Berry
Louie Louie, oh no, said we gotta goAye-yi-yi-yi, ISaid Louie louie, oh baby, said we gotta goA fine little girl, she waitin' for meCatch a ship across the seaSail that ship out all aloneMe never think how I'll make it homeLouie Louie, na-na-na now, said we gotta go, oh noSaid Louie Louie, oh baby, said-a we gotta goThree nights and days I sailed the seaMe think of girl ah constantlyAh on that ship, I dream she thereI smell the rose ah in her hairLouie Louie, woah no, said we gotta go,Aye-yi-yi-yi, ISaid Louie Louie, oh baby, said we gotta goOkay, let's give it to 'em right nowMe see...Me see Jamaica, the moon aboveIt won't be long me see me loveTake her in my arms againI'll tell her I'll never leave againLouie Louie, oh no, said we gotta goAye-yi-yi-yi, ISaid Louie Louie, oh baby, said we gotta goI said me gotta go nowLet's hustle on outta hereLet's go!
source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/onehitwonders/louielouielyrics.html
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Kingsmen's ‘Louie Louie’ lyrics dirty? Well, the FBI got involved.