Conference hydra::dave_barry

1041.0. "The death of Richard Berry (who wrote "Louie Louie")" by BOOKIE::chayna.zko.dec.com::manana::eppes (Nina Eppes) Mon Mar 24 1997 12:16

Dave Barry
March 23, 1997

When I heard that Richard Berry, the man who wrote Louie Louie, had died, I
said . . .

Well, I can't tell you, in a family newspaper, what I said. But it was not a
happy remark. It was the remark of a person who realizes he'll never get to
thank somebody for something.

I remember the day I first heard Louie Louie. I was outside my house, playing
basketball with my friends on a "court" that featured a backboard nailed to a
tree next to a geologically challenging surface of dirt and random rocks,
which meant that whenever anybody dribbled the ball, it would ricochet off
into the woods and down the hill, which meant that our games mostly consisted
of arguing about who would go get it.

So we spent a lot of our basketball time listening to a transistor radio
perched on a tree stump, tuned to WABC in New York City. (I mean the radio was
tuned to WABC; the stump was tuned to WOR.) And one miraculous day in 1963,
out of the crappy little transistor speaker came . . .

Well, you know what it sounds like: This guy just wailing away, totally
unintelligibly, with this band just whomping away behind him in the
now-legendary Louie rhythm, whomp-whomp-whomp, whomp-whomp, whomp-whomp-whomp
. . .

And it was just SO cool. It was 500 million times cooler than, for example,
Bobby Rydell. It was so cool that I wanted to dance to it right there on the
rocky dirt court, although of course as a 15-year-old boy of that era I would
have sawed off both my feet with a nail file before I would have danced in
front of my friends.

I loved Louie Louie even before I found out that it had dirty words. Actually,
it turned out that it didn't have dirty words, but for years we -- and when I
say "we," I am referring to the teenagers of that era, and J. Edgar Hoover --
were all convinced that it did, which of course just made it cooler. We loved
that song with no idea whatsoever what it was about.

But for me the coolest thing about Louie Louie was this: I could play it on
the guitar. In fact, just about anybody could play it, including a reasonably
trainable chicken. Three chords, nothing tricky. This is why, when I -- like
so many teenage boys of that era -- became part of a band in a futile attempt
to appeal to girls, Louie Louie was the first song we learned. We'd whomp away
on our cheap, untuneable guitars plugged into our Distort-O-Matic amplifiers,
and our dogs would hide and our moms would leave the house on unnecessary
errands, and we'd wail unintelligibly into our
fast-food-drive-thru-intercom-quality public-address system, and when we were
finally done playing and the last out-of-tune notes had leaked out of the
room, we'd look at each other and say "Hey! We sound like the Kingsmen!" And
the beauty of that song is, we kind of did.

I continued playing in bands in college, and many other songs went into and
out of our repertoire, but we always played Louie Louie. Over the years,
musical and cultural critics have offered countless explanations for the
song's enduring appeal, but I would say, based on playing it hundreds of times
in front of a wide range of audiences, that the key musical factor is this:
Drunk people really like it. My band found that, if large beer-guzzling
college-fraternity members became boisterous and decided they wanted to play
our instruments, or hit us, or hit us with our instruments, all we had to do
was play Louie Louie, and they would be inspired to go back to dancing and
throwing up on their dates.

Sometimes people got a little TOO inspired. One night we were playing in a
frat house at the University of Pennsylvania, and during Louie Louie, an
entire sofa -- a large sofa -- came through the front window, which was not
open at the time. The crowd did not stop dancing, and we did not stop playing;
we kept right on wailing and whomping. That's the kind of indestructible song
Louie Louie is. I'm confident that it's one of the very few songs that would
be able to survive a global thermonuclear war (another one is Wild Thing).

I'm not defending it as art. I'm not saying that, as a cultural achievement,
it is on a par with the Mona Lisa, or Hamlet. On the other hand, when the Mona
Lisa or Hamlet comes on my car radio, I do not crank the volume way up and
wail unintelligibly at my windshield. I still do this for Louie Louie.

And for that, Richard Berry, wherever you are: Thanks.