"Next thing you know, Laura Bush will be talkin' bout horse diddlin' and bein' a desperate housewife!"
Posted on 05/05/2005 7:17:17 AM PDT by Dan from Michigan
School board bans band from performing 'Louie Louie'
5/5/2005, 7:20 a.m. ET
The Associated Press
BENTON HARBOR, Mich. (AP) — A pop culture controversy that has simmered for decades came to a head when a middle school marching band was told not to perform "Louie Louie."
Benton Harbor Superintendent Paula Dawning cited the song's allegedly raunchy lyrics in ordering the McCord Middle School band not to perform it in Saturday's Grand Floral Parade, held as part of the Blossomtime Festival.
In a letter sent home with McCord students, Dawning said "Louie Louie" was not appropriate for Benton Harbor students to play while representing the district — even though the marching band wasn't going to sing it.
Band members and parents complained to the Board of Education at its Tuesday meeting that it was too late to learn another song, The Herald-Palladium of St. Joseph reported.
"It's very stressful for us to try to come up with new songs for the band," eighth-grader Laurice Martin told the board. "We're trying to learn the songs from last year, but some of us weren't in the band last year."
Dawning said that if a majority of parents supports their children playing the song, she will reconsider her decision.
"It was not that I knew at the beginning and said nothing," Dawning said. "I normally count on the staff to make reliable decisions. I found out because a parent called, concerned about the song being played."
"Louie Louie," written by Richard Berry in 1956, is one of the most recorded songs in history. The best-known, most notorious version was a hit in 1963 for the Kingsmen; the FBI spent two years investigating the lyrics before declaring they not only were not obscene but also were "unintelligible at any speed."
— even though the marching band wasn't going to sing it.
OK, so the lyrics may or may not meet some dim bulbs decency test. But Hello! They weren't going to sing the lyrics. They were only going to play the tune.
Beam me up, Scotty.
Obviously a reference to a carribean flashing custom. Can't have that!
There's a bathroom on the right........
She cut a six in valley in the middle of my skull.......
Get y'er money for nothin and your checks for free.......
I never learned that, darn it! I just mumbled along . . .
Glad someone posted the dirty version!
our mid 1960s tax dollars at work. like the "parental advisory" sticker on modern albums, the hullabaloo about this song generated sold out concerts and tons of record sales across the country. One of the performers said in an interview that when they'd start singing that song, about half the heads in the audience would bow- they were looking down at a supposed lyric sheet trying to check and see if the words they sang were really obscene.
How are you going to get away with that? I offended someone yesterday by saying "oral sex". *grin*
Inspired by Chuck Berry's 'Havana Moon' and the Mercer/Arlen composition 'One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)' along with maybe some other conscious or subsonscious sources Richard Berry wrote down the lines spoken by a homesick and lovesick Jamaican sailor, who explains to a barkeeper named Louie that he wants to go back to his darling he's left on his home island. Nothing much of a literary highlight, but THE perfect pop lyric. You have to sing SOMETHING, and as long as the chorus is catchy enough to be remembered after having heard it only once, the rest doesn't really matter.
That's the main reason that so many different versions exist, especially the Kingsmen's unintelligible version has lead to many phonetic interpretations and misinterpretations that have added a lot to Louie Louie's legendary status.
Back in 1963, everybody who knew anything about rock 'n' roll KNEW that the Kingsmen's Louie Louie concealed dirty words that could be unveiled only by playing the 45 rpm single at 33 1/3. Eventually the FBI got involved, conducting a thirty-month investigation that led to Louie's reputation as a dirty song. This investigation led to the following most common set of dirty lyrics, collected by the FBI in Tampa,Florida in 1964 (and often used by Iggy Pop in his renditions of the song):
Oh, Louie Louie, oh no
Get her way down low
Oh, Louie Louie, oh baby
Get her down low
A fine little girl a-waiting for me
She's just a girl across the way
We'll take her and park all alone
She's never a girl I lay at home
At night at ten I lay her again
F--k you girl, oh all the way
Oh my bed and I lay her there
I meet a rose in her hair
Okay, let's give it to them right now!
She's got a rag on I'll move above
It won't be long she'll slip it off
I'll take her in my arms again
I'll tell her I'll never leave again
Get that broad out of here!
""It's very stressful for us to try to come up with new songs for the band,...."
Stressful? He ain't seen nothin' yet!
My favorite is still Sam Cooke ... dancin' with the chicken slacks.
sheesh this is obviously about milking horses...:o)
LOL!
I always though Robert Palmer was singing about a "dic*head in love".
We were musicians, I tell ya. We could play Louie Louie like champs.
And we thought the Taliban had some whacky notions of right and wrong?
Well, I guess Jimmy Buffet's "Let's get drunk and screw" isn't an option.
Anyone else from the Northwest remember when there was a campaign to have "Louie, Louie" made the state song of Washington?
This is silly, this song is a great band song.
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