Paul Revere & The Raiders
by RICH ARITHMETIC
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this post appeared on the 1980’s Cassette Culture Blog on April 29, 2025
How did Louie Louie affect the birth of another classic garage rock record?
Stop me if you’ve already heard this: Back in the early Sixties, the Pacific Northwest was rife with a gritty type of garage rock that would evolve over time to be called “punk” and, later, “grunge.” One of the earliest practitioners of this Pacific NW rock style was Robin Roberts and his band, The Wailers, whose teenage audiences were going crazy over The Wailers’ rendition of a mid-’50s song they’d discovered by L.A. artist Richard Berry — Louie Louie, a Calypso-influenced song about a sailor longing for his baby. But in the hands of Roberts and The Wailers, the calypso song became a barn-burning raver that was so avidly embraced by teenage dance crowds that every Northwest band worth its salt was also required to perform “Louie Louie.”
So popular was Louie Louie that in the VERY SAME WEEK of 1963, two Pacific NW bands recorded the song at the very same studio. Although Paul Revere & The Raiders was the more accomplished and more popular of the two regional bands, it was the version of Louie Louie by The Kingsmen from Portland, Oregon, that became a national smash-hit. The genius of The Kingsmen lay in their accidental variation of the rhythm of the song’s chord changes. You all know the Louie Louie rhythm, right — a 1-2-3 pattern (ba-ba-ba) followed by a 2-beat rhythm (ba-ba). This particular beat-pattern stands in stark contrast to the more plodding 4-beat pattern (ba-ba-ba-ba) followed by the 2-beat ba-ba rhythm that all the other bands played, including both The Wailers and The Raiders.
Are you following what I’m saying about this rhythmic change in the song’s chords?
The new rhythm pattern of the chords was so catchy all by itself that The Kingsmen’s version of Louie Louie shot up the charts. And, now, ever since 1963 numerous bands have made hit records using that same 3-beat followed by a 2-beat rhythm, including such massive hits as More Than A Feeling by Boston and Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. Nobody even remembers the previous beat pattern of the song.
And though The Raiders’ version of Louie Louie wasn’t the smash they’d hoped for, the band was not to be denied. Now that they realized the “secret sauce” of their rival’s version of Louie Louie, The Raiders created a brand-new song using The Kingsmen’s 3-beat/2-beat rhythm to drive the compelling punk lust of Just Like Me with Mark Lindsay’s snarling vocal growl giving the song its requisite nastiness and becoming a garage-rock classic in its own right.
You hear the same beat, right?