The Four Louies
🖈 Not all products are in-stock at our store location.
Supplier item availability is updated weekly; however, stock levels are fluid and availability cannot be guaranteed. We will notify of any extended delays, or when an order cannot be fulfilled.
2025 repress. 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 guesstimated verse with varying shades of angst and filthiness. Less than a decade later, Steve Reich's Four Organs (built from a stacked dominant-11th chord with wayward pitches gradually trickling out either side like pancake syrup) made its concert debut. Its introductory staccato fanfare poleaxed unsuspecting uptown highbrows in an almost rockist fashion, and while the piece was tolerated by the art mob, Reich's work didn't fare so well in uptown concert halls. At a Carnegie Hall p
Tracks
Details
Catalogue Number: FAKE018LPFormat: Vinyl LP
Artist: Orcutt, Bill
Release Date: 02 May 2025
Genre: Pop
Label: FAKE ESTATES
Distributor: Rocket Group
