Today is International LOUIE LOUIE Day!
Today marks the 22nd time we’ve celebrated this special day! As noted on the LouieDay.org page, it was April 11, 2003 that a group of kindred spirits (LOUIE LOUIE enthusiasts) discussed Richard Berry‘s birthday on the Yahoo Louie Louie Party group and decided that April 11 should be designated “Louie Louie Day” as an annual recognition of this great song. Four years later in 2007, a somewhat more organized effort to promote this concept under the auspices of the newly formed “Louie Louie Advocacy and Music Appreciation Society” (LLAMAS) occurred. Multiple press releases were sent off by LLAMAS, and thanks to the persistent efforts of dedicated LOUIE enthusiasts, Louie Louie Day is now officially registered with the National Special Events Registry and Chase’s Calendar of Events, the two leading sources of special events, holidays and observances!
Today, on what would have been Richard Berry’s 90th birthday, there is some special LOUIE LOUIE news to report!
First, we’re excited to see that some new LOUIE LOUIE recordings are being released in 2025. There is a brand new compilation of diverse LOUIE LOUIE recordings that was assembled for a charitable cause. The album is entitled “Hunger Is Violence,” which features fourteen unique reinterpretations of Louie Louie, courtesy of Diet of Worms, a label based in Dublin, Ireland.
All proceeds from the sale of this release will be donated to the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a non-profit organization working to raise awareness of the human rights abuses faced by the Palestinian people and to campaign for their rights and freedoms.
This recording is available at Bandcamp as a cassette or digital download. Like all the releases I’ve seen on Bandcamp, you can listen to the music free of charge, and if you do buy a product, the band receives better royalties than the standard streaming sites.
Second, Bill Orcutt recently created a new record called “The Four Louies,” which shall be performed at two special shows celebrating this release in California next month.
UPEND, which is promoting the first show, provided this superb overview:
Although known best as a guitarist, Bill Orcutt has a prolific sideline using digital software to create head-spinning process music where mathematics are no less important than sound itself. But he began cross-pollinating those interests with his 2024 album The Four Louies, an improbable, inventive collision of two landmark 20th century works built around the organ. The Farfisa defines the definitive version of the garage rock staple “Louie Louie” by Portland’s Kingsmen. The 1963 hit is driven by an indelible staccato organ riff that cycles all through the brilliantly primitive song. Seven years later Steve Reich composed his early minimalist classic Four Organs, in which an array of lengthening chords overlap in shifting combinations, driven for the entirety of its fifteen-plus minutes by a steady pulse played on a pair of maracas. On The Four Louies Orcutt crafted a remarkable marriage of the two pieces which, in theory, couldn’t seem further apart. He didn’t merely bring the two pieces together, but he essentially recomposed them into something new through accretion and subtraction, doubling certain lines in different channels or repeating others only to make them vanish sixteen bars later. What might suggest a novelty on paper brings a mix of raw power and intricate arrangement to loudspeakers, unceremoniously knocking down any borders between punk, experimental, and new music.
Orcutt has started to perform pieces from his digital oeuvre, and he’s decided to translate The Four Louies hybrid for live instrumentation in 2025, assembling a kind of meticulously synchronized double quartet to simultaneously address the two separate compositional sources, while forging something entirely new from the basic building blocks. Of course, it’s possible that the line-up might be even larger, depending on where the juggernaut lands. With Orcutt as the mad conductor (and guitarist), two different groupings of players will perform his chopped-up and remade version of the Kingsmen and Reich pieces, with grimy garage tradition duly represented by Orcutt himself and the new music part of the equation presided over by Bay Area legend William Winant (a true legend who’s not only worked closely with Jon Hassell, John Zorn, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, and Sonic Youth, but who previously toured in Reich’s ensemble), who will shake maracas with marathon stamina. Orcutt expects performances to be acts of reinvention and transformation, with the musicians latching onto the most repetitive passages and letting them rip, pulled in by the music’s ecstatic magnetism. This is particularly true during the drone section of Reich’s piece, as the ensemble promises to bust through the fixed harmonic forms to generate something wide open and psychedelic. The Four Louies may seek to balance two disparate traditions structurally, but the live shows will absolutely tilt toward the in-the-red fury of the Kingsmen, bringing a decidedly visceral, high octane attack to the work. Depending on the performance space, the musicians will likely form a large circle in the room, facing one another as they zoom off into infinity.
Friday, May 30, 2025
UPEND
Zebulon
Saturday, May 31, 2025
The Lab, 2948 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103
The Lab
The Four Louies recording can also be purchased at Bandcamp, as a Limited edition 12″ LP or digital download.
The third LOUIE mention is the new album by The Limiñanas – “Faded“, which includes the song. This particular version was recommended to me by a couple of friends, and I thoroughly enjoyed the album. The Limiñanas are the brainchild of Lio and Marie Limiñanaa. They are a French psychedelic garage band from Cabestany, Pyrénées-Orientales, and has been active since 2009. As I took a look at their Wikipedia page, I saw they’ve been quite busy – four soundtracks, music shared on prominent TV shows, as well as a lot of albums. I was especially tickled to see that their compilation “Electrified” (favorite tracks from 2009 to 2022), had an album cover that paid homage to an iconic album from the Pacific Northwest.
Like the other LOUIE recordings that I mentioned, this album is also also available at Bandcamp (vinyl, CD + digital download) as well as Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music.
Lastly, I want to mention that LOUIE LOUIE was a featured topic on the UK TV quiz show “University Challenge” which is similar to “Jeopardy” but with college students as contestants. My friend Alec Palao of Ace Records was mentioned in this little tidbit at the 4:15 mark.
As you may or may not know, last year on the weekend of LOUIE LOUIE Day, a special road marker for Richard Berry was installed at his birthplace in Extension, Louisiana by the Northeast Louisiana Music Trail, a non-profit organization established to honor the rich musical heritage of Northeast Louisiana.
As always, we look forward to hearing more stories about how folks celebrated LOUIE LOUIE Day, so please feel free to drop us a line (Louie at LouieLouie.net) or visit the LOUIE LOUIE Party at Facebook!
REFERENCE LINKS:
http://www.louieday.org
Bandcamp – Hunger Is Violence compilation
Bandcamp – The Four Louies by Bill Orcutt
Facebook – Bill Orcutt – Facebook page
Bandcamp – Faded by The Limiñanas
University Challenge S54E32 – UCL v Open University – the YouTube clip