Bill Orcutt - The Four Louies LP

 In 1957, R&B singer Richard Berry scrawled a few crude stanzas on a strip of toilet paper, and chant-sung them in fake patois over a shuffling rhythm to capitalize on the Latin craze tearing up the charts. "Louie Louie" didn't make much of a dent in the national consciousness in its first iteration, but when Berry and the Pharaohs took the song on the road up and down the West Coast, it became something of a regional sensation. In 1962, the Kingsmen carved their mush-mouthed, barely-pubescent first take of the nascent standard into acetate. The resulting 45 was a mega-hit (although Berry remained a pauper until legal wrangling finally made him rich shortly before his death in 1997). No one could quite decipher the words, so grown-ups assumed the worst, and the resulting hysteria culminated in an FBI obscenity investigation and trial ("Unintelligible at any speed," concluded the judge). The countless cover versions that followed the original hit mangled the song's blurry text into