‘Louie Louie’ Titillated Teens, Inflamed Parents

Jack Ely’s name is unknown to many, if not most, Americans. He died Monday in relative obscurity at 71. Yet half a century ago, Ely was the central figure in a controversy that intrigued teenagers, outraged their parents and sparked a two-year investigation by the FBI. It is a story of a generation gap gone wild and a federal agency with way too much interest in censorship.

Ely sang for an Oregon-based pop quintet called the Kingsmen. In April 1963, the group cut its second recording. Ely, then 19 with braces on his teeth, shouted the song into a microphone suspended from the ceiling to approximate a “live” sound.

The song was “Louie Louie.” The primitive recording method, plus Ely’s mouth metal, produced barely intelligible lyrics — sparking a national phenomenon and scandal.

“Louie Louie” was written and recorded in the mid-1950s by Richard Berry, a Louisiana-born rhythm-and-blues singer. The song, in Jamaican patois, tells of a lonely sailor pining for his love: “Fine little girl she waits for me / Me catch the ship for cross the sea / Me sail the ship all alone / Me never think me make it home.”

As Berry sang them, the words are entirely understandable and not the least vulgar.

In the Kingsmen’s version, the lyrics are basically the same, but hardly any of them can be understood. Therein lay the problem.

The record, an unexpected hit, rapidly climbed the charts. Part of its success doubtless was due to the rumor — started who knows where, by who knows whom — that the words were obscene. Teens bought “Louie Louie” by the tens of thousands, not only dancing to it but listening to it over and over for the supposed vulgarities.

It didn’t take parents long to catch wind of the rumor and react.

“Who do you turn to when your teenage daughter buys and brings home pornographic or obscene materials being sold … in every city, village and record shop in this nation?” an outraged parent wrote then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. “My daughter brought home a record of ‘Louie Louie’ and I … proceeded to try to decipher the jumble of words. The lyrics are so filthy that I cannot enclose them in this letter.”

There is no record of what this parent imagined the words to be, but the song’s second and final verses are: “Three nights and days me sail the sea / Me think of girl constantly / On the ship I dream she there / I smell the rose in her hair / Me see Jamaica, the moon above / It won’t be long me see me love / Me take her in my arms, and then / I tell her I’ll never leave again.”

In the wake of the powerful British Invasion, the Kingsmen’s recording dropped off the charts in February 1964, but the parental complaints didn’t stop. Finally, the FBI got involved.

The bureau bought copies of “Louie Louie” and slowed the 45 rpm record down to 33 rpm to better understand the words. It didn’t work.

The FBI gave up in May 1964.

But in June 1965, a parent wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, asking whether the unintelligible lyrics constituted “a subliminal type of perversion.”

The case was reopened. Agents contacted the writer, Richard Berry, who said his version certainly was innocent.

Members of the Kingsmen were called in — except, apparently, Jack Ely — who denied that the record had anything off-color. According to a 1965 FBI report, one band member “said the Kingsmen and their management have attempted to counter the charge, but apparently the more said about it, the more the talk of the obscenity spreads.”

In late 1965, the FBI finally closed the case. An investigator concluded that there was “no evidence of a violation of the Federal Interstate Transportation of Obscene Matter statutes.”

The bureau, however, never formally exonerated Jack Ely and the Kingsmen — it just said it couldn’t figure out the words.

These days, the song is celebrated every April 11 — Richard Berry’s birthday — on International Louie Louie Day.

Henry McNulty of Cheshire is a communication consultant and was the first op-ed editor at The Courant.