The Sonics—“Louie Louie” (Etiquette 1965, 2:57)
The Kinks invented Power Chord Rock in 1964 in the UK, and lo, it was good. We Yanks (via Link Wray’s “Rumble” in 1958) had already provided the world with Distorted Dread Rock, but it remained for this Pacific Northwest teen dance combo to match The Kinks’ achievement Stateside.
As has been endlessly documented by musical “scholar squirrels” (to re-deploy Gore Vidal’s term of caustic affection for academic historians), EVERY self-respecting rock band in the I-5 corridor started playing some variant of Richard Berry’s original, Cuban-inflected “Louie Louie” right around the time “Rumble” hit, with the charmingly inept Kingsmen actually topping the charts in 1963.
Soon after, President Kennedy was shot and then, if you credit John Waters’ account, The Beatles destroyed rock and roll.
This belated, thoroughly unfashionable blast therefore arrived as “The Last Word in Louies”, a shocking prefigurement of both the late-‘60s Detroit of MC5/Stooges and of late-‘80s Seattle Grunge, tucked away on a b-side, probably because the band hadn’t written it and its management didn’t want to miss out on any possible royalties.
In 1983 Rhino Records released The Best of Louie, Louie, a small first step toward documenting the world’s most popular rock song. Alongside the likes of Black Flag (1st runnerup, all-time!) and the Rice University Marching Band, The Sonics’ version came head of the class, clearly a ground zero for punk, heavy metal (as we once called it) and anti-social teenage BLARE in general.
It also marks the debut of a device of arrangement that, nearly four decades later, I codified as “The Bryan Adams Part”, one of the linchpins of a presentation entitled “Taxonomizing Sludge!” that my old pal Tim Midgett and I gave at EMP’s 2nd Pop Music Conference in 2003.
To wit: At some point, preferably near the climax of a given song, everything drops out, leaving a split second of silence, followed by the unaccompanied, crushing onslaught of distorted guitar chords.
And then, in this case, one of the most throat-shredding screams ever emitted by the human larynx.
If I had to boil down for a Martian what “it” IS that made rock music the joy of my life, there could be no finer aural aid than this guitar/vocal Tandem Scream from the Id. They say Grunge was “raw”, but it may as well be The Tijuana Brass compared to these two minutes fifty-seven.
– Tom Kipp
This gem of musical sophistry is excerpted from Tom Kipp Weighs in re: Ten Songs …and cheats a little, as usual!, please check it out for the full story.
