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14 January 2008

R&B Singer Richard Berry was on a package tour that included a salsa band when he heard a song that grabbed his ear: Rene Touzet's 'Loco Cha Cha,'. The progression in the opening and bridge was a total earworm, so he copped it and wrote a song of his own. Calypso was big at the time so he wrote some quasi-West Indian lyrics about a homesick sailor and a rock and roll standard was born. [More:]

Because of it's simple structure, the song became popular with early 60's garage bands, especially in the Pacific Northwest. It was covered ably by Rockin' Robin Roberts and The Wailers and Paul Revere & the Raiders (among many others) before falling into the hands of an outfit called the Kingsmen. The vocal mike was mounted in the ceiling of the studio, making Joe Ely's singing hopelessly garbled, leading moral guardians of the time to conclude that the lyrics were obscene (my mom says that her Catholic high school forbade the song to be played at school dances). The FBI was even called in. But the controversy drove the record to the top of the charts (the unbeliveable catchiness didn't hurt either). The song has become one of the most covered tunes of all time, reborn as girl-group pop, torch-singing, soul, semi-Cajun blues rock, back to salsa again, punk and thrash metal*. And why not? If "Like A Rolling Stone," is great rock and roll at it's most successfully ambitious and sophisticated, this is rock and roll at it's most succesfully crude, primitive, raw and obnoxious.

Oddly, when the Kingsmen's version broke big, 'sophisticated tastes leaned towards ersatz 'folk' music of the Kingston Trio/Pete Seeger variety, and the audience for that music would often trot out this song as proof that rock and roll was nothing more than crass greasy kids stuff. The story behind the song reveals that it was the rock and rollers, not the folkies who were the torch carriers for the oral tradition that the folkies held so dear.

For further elucidation, read this book.

*and the covers I've uploaded only scratch the surface. look here for more, and here for a list including 'spin-off' songs, of which there were plenty.
correction: the Kingsmen's lead singer was named Jack Ely. Joe Ely is a country singer of renown. sorry, brainfart.
posted by jonmc 14 January | 12:53
where ya gonna go?
way down low!
posted by quonsar 14 January | 13:04
I vote we take a collection and fly Jon and Pips out to Seattle, so they can go here.
posted by danf 14 January | 13:23
409 SW 13th, Portland, OR.

That's where The Kingsmen recorded the song. It's a fairly nondescript building at the moment. And, of course, Ely screwed up and came in early on one of the verses leading to one of the most overt mistakes in rock.

The story behind the song reveals that it was the rock and rollers, not the folkies who were the torch carriers for the oral tradition that the folkies held so dear.

How? Is "Loco Cha Cha" a folk song? I’m guessing not since it has “Cha Cha” in the title, which points to it actually being a part of the music trend in the late 40s and early 50s. It was the commercial appeal of the The Kingsmen's recording that caused everyone to cover it after them and since it came to be a part of the rock canon, people are still doing it today. It’s really more of a cultural signifier in that instance than “folk song”. And the way people hear it tends to be a commercial recording. Or is that just something from the Marsh book that I’ve successfully forgotten.

I'm seriously wondering, not trying to be an ass.
posted by sleepy_pete 14 January | 15:11
How?

In that it was patched together from various versions, even in it's 'original' form (Berry's) it was copped from the Touzet song, with each artist adding their own touches. The 'folkie' stuff popular at the time was all about preserving a false 'authenticity' that culminated in Bob Dylan getting booed for rocking out (even though rock and roll was the dirct descendant of the traditional musics they were trying to 'preserve.)

And I don't believe there's sucha thing as 'folk music.' There's blues and there's country or whatever, but that was popular music aimed at a particular audience is all, and since just about anywhere in the 20th century, there were radios and phonographs, the singers were influenced by 'pop,' music, too, so the whole folkie thing is fetishizing an idea of artistic purity that never existed.
posted by jonmc 14 January | 15:29
Authenticity doesn't exist, especially in the 20th Century, that's agreed, but music happened before 1900. Folk music, like folklore, folk art, or folk-x are passed through oral tradition, not commercial recordings. Adapting a song to a style of music has nothing to do with folk music, though.

I think you're confusing "folk music" for those that borrowed from actual folk music (Dylan, Baez, etc.) to create commercial recordings. I think you're also saying "folk music" is utilizing someone else's music to suit another person's own needs (creating a new version of "Louie, Louie" by playing it faster or in a different style isn't really folk--changing the lyrics to discuss politics of the day, or, somewhat, Iggy changing them to make fun of bikers, that's "folk"). "Loco Cha Cha" was a commercial song, correct? Maybe it was based on a folk song melody, but I'd lay money on it being written by someone besides Traditional.

the whole folkie thing is fetishizing an idea of artistic purity that never existed.

Unlike rock? This whole story is about false purity. That's why I'm confused as to why you would bring it up.

posted by sleepy_pete 14 January | 16:25
I think what we have here is nomenclature confusion.

Yes, "Loco Cha Cha," is a commercial recording, as is all the "Louies." But so were blues standards like "Hoochie Coochie Man," and "Dust My Broom." and the various artists who covered them all heard them and added their own touches to the song and took it somewhere new. Thus, oral tradition, commercial recordings or no. (consider it 'oral tradition' with a bigger loudspeaker)

The reason I brought the folk thing up at all (the main point of the post was to show the illustrious history of a great and important song), is that if you read contemporary accounts of the early 60's music scene, 'folk' artists of the Peter, Paul & Mary stripe used 'Louie' as Exhibit A of rock and roll's crassness and 'inauthenticity,' which to my ears seemed to be ridiculous.
posted by jonmc 14 January | 16:38
The Pretenders' "Louie Louie." Same title, different song.
posted by kirkaracha 14 January | 17:03
If you don't understand the lyrics, do another shot.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
posted by Ardiril 14 January | 17:08
I love her. How can I show her? || Spoilers Needed and, Hopefully, Inside

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