Showing posts with label original. Show all posts
Showing posts with label original. Show all posts

Thursday, 6 March 2025

Louie Louie

 

Cover version of the month #106
The Kingsmen cover Louie Louie by Richard Berry and The Pharaohs

I recently watched the magnificent 24-Hour Party People film for the first time in ages. Steve Coogan is outstanding as Tony Wilson (with a little dash of Partridge) while the formation of Factory Records, development of Joy Division, Ian Curtis' suicide, opening and mismanagement of the Hacienda, reliance/total piss-take on New Order's money and chaos of the Happy Mondays are portrayed with the right levels of honesty, empathy, bemusement and humour.

In the film, local punk fan Jon the Postman regularly gets up at the end of gigs to sing the evergreen garage band anthem Louie Louie, determined to keep the party going and sing his favourite song. Jon would go on to form a band and often guest with others. This led to him appearing with The Fall on Live 1977 album singing a ramshackle version. 

Louie Louie is a song I most definitely heard for the first time in McChuills. It was, and still is, regularly played by Old Nick in the bar. Probably by most DJ's at some point as well!

Covered by well over 1,000 bands/artists, including The Sonics, Iggy Pop, Motorhead and The Clash, I was convinced that the original was by The Kingsmen, as that was the version referenced by the bands and in the numerous articles I had read over the decades. However, it turns out that a guy called Richard Berry wrote and recorded the song with his band The Pharaohs back in 1955.

I'd never heard the original until I started researching the song for this blog. On first listen, I have to admit to finding it pretty uninspiring. I guess I'm used to the rawness of The Kingsmen and The Sonics, while The Pharaohs version is slower and smoother.

But the laid-back groove did grab me on second listen. It is undeniably catchy, allegedly inspired by Latin rhythms, particularly René Touzet’s El Loco Cha Cha. Berry crafted a story about a sailor longing for his love while stranded on a foreign shore. 

The story of the song, author, rights, publishing and ownership are quite something! There is a book in there for someone! A few google searches will direct you to some cracking articles.

By the mid-80's Berry was living on welfare and then the drinks company California Cooler used the song in a commercial. Despite the fact Berry had sold the rights to the song almost immediately after writing it, he still owned the radio and TV performance rights. He became a millionaire!

Richard Berry & The Pharaohs version

Lets travel back to 1963 though, when a young band from Portland, Oregon, called The Kingsmen took a raw, raucous approach to Louie Louie, generating immediate ripples and recording something so important that it has left a permanent mark on guitar music, stamping their name into rock history. 

This could well be the most important cover version of all-time.

Apparently The Kingsmen played a 90-minute version at a teen club the night before recording. Can you imagine if that was unearthed?! What I find remarkable is how they create such a dirty sound when they look so clean cut! 

Louie Louie by The Kingsmen is gloriously messy—recorded in one take with a distorted, almost unintelligible vocal from singer Jack Ely, who had to stand awkwardly to sing into a microphone hanging from the ceiling (they were essentially recording in a radio studio), resulting in a primal energy that would define garage guitar music for generations. It's so pure and real that it is completely timeless.

Beginning with an organ riff, everything else falls in behind and the energy grabs you immediately as Ely goes straight to the chorus, his words tumbling and stumbling into each other as he flies through the you take me to where you gotta go in double quick time.

Louie, Louie, oh no, you take me to where you gotta go

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah baby

Louie, Louie, take me to where you gotta go

Ely is like the original Julian Casablancas of The Strokes. Sounding like he is making it up as he goes along, a detached cool don't give a f**k attitude. You can just about make out what he is saying, although the lyrics would be the subject of much debate among teenagers in America who would speculate and write their own on pieces of paper and pass them round. Amazingly, and brilliantly, this led to the FBI were investigating the song! Lets just say that the lyrics that kids were passing around were not exactly clean! Rock n roll!

A fine little girl, she waits for me

Me catch a ship across the sea

Me sailed that ship all alone

Me never think I'll make it home

After a second chorus there is an audible shout of fuck from someone somewhere (believed to be the drummer)  on the recording and Ely continues to tell his tale of sailing across the seas to his girl.

Following the second verse and another chorus, Ely screams OK, lets give it to 'em right now leading to an outstanding 30-second guitar solo over the simple and sublime organ riff. It is electrifying! The Kingsmen are in the zone, lost in the moment and no matter how many times you listen, they draw you in with them.

There is a false start before the next verse, beautifully covered with a beautiful roll by drummer Lynn Easton (my wife's name!) and then they go into it for real. This just adds to the cool, raw, unpolished, urgent vibe. The energy. You can't teach this. You can't produce this or arrange it. If you're lucky, you might capture it.

Louie Louie by The Kingsmen got off to a slow start, just 1,000 copies were initially pressed by Jerden Records, then it got picked up by a larger label, Wand Records. Remarkably, things picked up after a DJ played it as his worst record of the week! 

Sometimes, the best songs are the simplest ones, built on passion rather than perfection. The infectious energy created from Louie Louie is still being felt today. It's a classic three-chord wonder that has been covered by everyone from The Sonics to Iggy Pop, The Beach Boys to Otis Redding, The Kinks to The Clash. 

The Richard Berry original and the landmark cover version by The Kingsmen of Louie Louie are added to my Everything Flows Cool Cover Versions playlist on Spotify which also features all of the songs listed below. Search for the title or CLICK HERE

Richard Berry original

The Kingsmen version

Previous covers of the month blogs

13. Hurt
39. ABBA-esque
40. Jumpin' Jack Flash
64. Lola
82. Drop
87. Indian Rope Man + bonus Strawberry Fields Forever + This Wheels On Fire
92. Valerie
101. Shout!



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Saturday, 18 September 2021

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun


 Cover version of the month #71 - Cyndi Lauper covers Robert Hazard

I know!!!!

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is a cover version! I've checked and it is true!

Robert Hazard wrote the original and recorded it in 1979! Check it out HERE 

I've not really been able to trace what happened to the song between 1979 and 1983. It's possibly Hazard (now passed away) pressed some copies for a single release and then it came out on his eponymous 1982 album. But somehow Cyndi Lauper, possibly through producer Rick Chertoff, was approached to update the song and reclaim the lyrics from Hazard's original male point of view.

The timing, for the MTV generation, was absolutely perfect. Lauper, singing from a female perspective, rearranged the song to become an anthem of female solidarity.

As a debut single, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, was an absolute gift for Lauper, who, through putting her own stamp on it, completely changed the original meaning behind the song. It's not too bold a statement to say that, in a strange way, Lauper completely rewrote it. Bright, colourful, playful, catchy and bold, this was technicolour pop perfection, a declaration to the world.

Lets go back to the original that I never knew existed!

It's kind of new wave punk, not very good, the pop qualities that Lauper and her team brought out are kind of hidden away. Listening to Hazard's version is like listening to a cover. It's kind of like someone to sound like a cross between The Clash and Blondie by way of Elvis Costello, but not managing it. 

The qualities of the song are there, but the hooks are not emphasised. Hazard is singing to his parents that he's been out all night with girls who just wanna have fun with him. The band tear through it too quickly, missing the fact that the playful backing vocals near the end are a real hook.

Lauper destroys the original, her version is pulsating with energy, with vibrancy and with (ironically) originality. If Hazard was modelling his version on bands/sounds of the time, Lauper and her production team (who deserve immense credit) pull out all the stops to make Girls Just Wanna Have Fun sound like absolutely vital pop music.

Lauper finds the hooks and plays with them, the little section after the second chorus being the first example, but its the after the third chorus that the hooks of the song are hammered home - time after time ... for over 2-minutes.

And in the video, Lauper and her girls are having fun, dancing through the streets of New York City back to Lauper's bedroom for a big party that looks like great fun.

I really enjoy researching songs for this regular feature, this month I'm just blown away that this wasn't written by Lauper, or specifically for her. She just totally makes it her own.

See below for a full list of songs to feature in my cover version of the month blogs. You can also search for Everything Flows Cool Cover Versions for my Spotify playlist or CLICK HERE.

Note - the orginal version of the song isn't on Spotify;

Robert Hazard original

Cyndi Lauper original video

Previous covers of the month

13. Hurt




Some boys take a beautiful girl/And hide her away from the rest of the world/I want to be the one to walk in the sun/Oh girls, they want to have fun.”


Lauper, in her own words says


“I left home at seventeen,” she wrote. “I took a paper bag with a toothbrush, a change of underwear, an apple, and a copy of Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit.”

"It was originally about how fortunate he was 'cause he was auy 




 female subjects. Lauper found the lyrics to be misogynistic, and took it upon herself to rewrite them from a female perspective, rearranging it into the song heralded today as “an anthem of female solidarity.

"Girls Just Want to Have Fun" is a song written and performed by American musician Robert Hazard who released the single in 1979. It is known as a single by American singer Cyndi Lauper, whose version was released in 1983.[1] It was the first major single released by Lauper as a solo artist and the lead single from her debut studio album She's So Unusual (1983). Lauper's version gained recognition as a feminist anthem and was promoted by a Grammy-winning music video. It has been covered, either as a studio recording or in a live performance, by over 30 other artists.

The single was Lauper's breakthrough hit, reaching number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and becoming a worldwide hit throughout late 1983 and early 1984. It remains one of Lauper's signature songs and was a widely popular song during the 1980s. The "Rolling Stone & MTV: '100 Greatest Pop Songs': 1-50", "Rolling Stone: "The 100 Top Music Videos"" and the "VH1: 100 Greatest Videos" lists ranked the song at No. 22, No. 39 and No. 45, respectively.[2][3][4] The song received Grammy Award nominations for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. In 2013, the song was remixed by Yolanda Be Cool, taken from the 30th anniversary reissue of She's So Unusual.[5]

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