The war behind the scenes over rock's relentless party song

Their mindless and irresistible 1963 rock anthem, whose considerable effect on pop music is still being felt today, may end up having an equal impact on the music business. This past April, after a five-year lawsuit, the Kingsmen triumphed in court over the record company that had stiffed them. And they did so using a novel, and improbable, strategy that could serve as a model for abused bands in the future—and put the fear of Louie into some sectors of the recording industry.

The Kingsmen's victory made headlines around the country, but its real significance was not generally understood. The case was mostly perceived to be another battle for back royalties, similar to that waged by many R&B artists of the '50s who have pursued their record companies in recent decades for the money they never got.

But what makes the Kingsmen's case unique, and maybe revolutionary for the record business, is that the band decided to kiss off the royalties they'd already lost. They opted instead to make a bet on future profits by trying to wrest ownership and control of their original master tapes from the Nashville company that held them. To the surprise of many industry experts, they succeeded.

The Kingsmen, now middle-aged, are still out touring 100 nights of the year, with just one of the band's original members. (They'll play a Fourth of July show in Seattle next month.) In winning their case, they aren't collecting any huge pot of cash—far from it. They face a massive task just to get out from under legal bills that are well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. *What they've won is the opportunity to exploit "Louie, Louie" for themselves. Only if they can find new life in the "Louie, Louie" phenomenon, new markets for what Entertainment Weekly called "the World's Greatest Party Song"—only if we don't get sick of that inane record and continue to love it and want to hear it over and over again—only then will the Kingsmen actually reap any reward from their long legal struggle.

"Louie, Louie" was produced at the first-ever recording session by a group of half-assed Portland high schoolers who would never play anything as memorable again. (In fact, the singer whose "style" helped make the song so popular was out of the band before the record even hit the airwaves.) How exactly this tune first made it up to the Northwest is, like every part of the "Louie, Louie" story, a subject of great controversy and debate. Written in 1957 by an LA rhythm and blues man named Richard Berry, the song became a staple of the early '60s Northwest rock scene, played and recorded by all the popular bands of the time: the Wailers, the Sonics, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and the Kingsmen (whose name may, or may not, have been taken from a brand of aftershave).

The song itself is just your basic three-chord throw-away, like "Twist and Shout" or "Satisfaction." The famous rhythmic figure that made it so catchy—duh duh duh. duh duh—was derived from a Latin cha-cha that Richard Berry once heard. The descending triplet yelps on the chorus—"yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah"—came from the Wailers' legendary singer Rockin' Robin Roberts. What the Kingsmen added that day was a feeling, a kind of archetypal teenage energy. With its cloddish musicianship, woozy swagger, and strained, incoherent vocals, the Kingsmen's version captured the definitive feeble-headed, sexed-up, couldn't-give-a-shit, rock 'n' roll attitude.

As writer Dave Marsh recounts in his book, Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock 'n' Roll Song, the Kingsmen's single had only modest success when it was first released in May 1963. Then rumors of unknown origin began swirling that the garbled lyrics were obscene. Suddenly kids, parents, politicians, and federal agents around the country were hearing things like, "I felt my boner in her hair," and "Each night at 10, I lay her again." An FBI investigation of the recording lasted for two and a half years, until a judge declared the lyrics to be simply unintelligible.

The real words (which singer Jack Ely hadn't quite mastered) were harmless: a sailor lamenting to a bartender named Louie about his too-far-away girlfriend. But then as now, controversy means cash, and even today, Windswept Pacific, the company that owns the copyright on the late Richard Berry's composition, refuses to allow the true, innocuous lyrics to be reprinted. "We want people to continue to fantasize what the words are," explains Chuck Rubin, who engineered Richard Berry's sale of "Louie, Louie" to Windswept (for a price that, Rubin claims, is topped only by the sale of "Happy Birthday" 10 years ago, which went for a reported $25 million). However, the original lyrics can be found on several Web sites, and were printed, in apparent violation of the copyright, on the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in April.