Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 7, 1993 TAG: 9308070077
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by LEX ALEXANDER LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I taped the song, then replayed that tape at 1 7/8 inches per second, 30 inches per second, and every speed in between. I played it for wards. I played it backward (no Satanic messages). I spliced it, looped it, phase-shifted it, reverbed it, tremoloed it, flanged it and graphic-equalized it. If I'd had charcoal, I'd have barbecued it.
I concluded that, with rock 'n' roll as with religion, some things are just ineffable. So imagine my surprise to read 14 months later in a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal that the lyrics to "Louie Louie" in fact are not dirty.
So why has "Louie Louie" held a spell over two generations of American teens? What is it about those three cheap chords, those tattered vocals, and that stumbling duh-duh-duh, duh-duh rhythm that captures us somewhere down in the ganglia, where we're barely distinguishable from salamanders?
If you have to ask, you'll never know, which is both the point and the key flaw of this book by rock critic Dave Marsh. Marsh argues convincingly that the history of "Louie Louie" is the history of rock 'n' roll (minus, it must be observed, the plane crashes).
Part history and part philosophy, this book posits the song as the apotheosis of "termite culture," as distinguished from the dominant "elephant culture." In Marsh's eyes, termite culture undermines elephant culture, making us all freer.
Why is the song so subversive? Because it is popular despite its inherent shortcomings, and this is the part Marsh gets right: Purely technical assessments of the song, he says, "miss, or omit, the limited relevance of craft when confronted by absolute transcendence."
"Louie Louie" transcends not only through that stumbling rhythm, which Frank Zappa says forces us to interpret everything around it differently, but through its chords. Like no song before or since, it embodies the I-IV-V power pattern to which anyone with the slightest musical inclination in his head and mayhem in his heart responds with an immediate vision of power and possibility, grasped with an intensity to rival the newborn babe's sucking reflex.
Problem is, anything that gives people who don't have it a sense of power and possibility tends to arouse fear and loathing in those who already have it.
This is well-traveled - indeed, rutted - ground for Marsh, a virulent civil libertarian. Nonetheless, he's got a point here. Sure, it beggars belief that the FBI spent 2 1/2 years trying to prosecute people on obscenity charges over a song that isn't obscene. But it did, yielding the only bit of eloquence in the history of bureaucracy: The FBI lab ruled the song "unintelligible at any speed."
Having gotten most things right up to this point, Marsh inexplicably blows his own credibility by at tempting to analyze the lyrics to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," starting by asking the former Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten, the foremost living example of "the limited relevance of craft when confronted by absolute transcendence," whether Rotten knows those lyrics.
"Yes," Rotten replies with a leer. "But I know something more important. Never get involved with drugs. You always get caught."
Does Marsh take the hint? No - he runs out and buys the sheet music. He's disappointed, of course, and he tries to offer this lesson: "Knowing what's in the documents results in elephantine bloat. But a true termite knows the stories that reside in the heart and soul of the matter."
Just so, which is why Marsh's book survives his misbegotten at tempt to undermine his own thesis. That said, in true rock 'n' roll fash ion I'll give Marsh credit where it's due by copping his ending:
Me gotta go.
\ " `Louie Louie': The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock Song" By Dave Marsh Hyperion. 207 pages. $19.95.\ Lex Alexander is a reporter for the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record. His only paid public performance of "Louie Louie" consisted of improvised lyrics. They do not survive.
by CNB