‘Louie Louie’ singer Jack Ely dies in Oregon at 71

When he stood on his toes, leaned his head back and shouted “Louie Louie” into a microphone 52 years ago, Jack Ely had no idea he was creating a rock 'n’ roll classic. Nor, for that matter, did the lead singer of the Kingsmen know he was laying the groundwork for one of the first federal investigations into dirty song lyrics. Ely, who died Tuesday at age 71, had simply walked into a tiny Portland recording studio with his band one day in 1963 to cut an instrumental version of a song that had been a hit on Pacific Northwest jukeboxes.

My father would say, 'We were initially just going to record the song as an instrumental, and at the last minute I decided I’d sing it.’

Ely’s son, Sean Ely

The sound engineer raised the studio’s only microphone several feet above his head. Then he placed Ely in the middle of the musicians to create a better “live feel” for the recording. The result: About the only words anyone could clearly understand were in the song’s first two lines: “Louie Louie. Oh no. We gotta go.” Some people began to claim they were hearing lewd words about a girl the singer was to meet up with. Radio stations began to ban “Louie Louie,” and the FBI launched an investigation, eventually determining the song was “unintelligible at any speed.”

Celebrity Louie Louie