Let's Give It To 'Em Right Now!

To drive the point home, as he came to the end of the second verse and approached the song's bridge, Rockin' Robin raised his squeak-perfecto voice to the point where you thought it was going to run out of hormones and break completely, and uttered for the very first time in human history a line heard 'round the world:

"Let's Give It To 'Em Right Now!"

At that moment Rockin' Robin Roberts entered the lists of true rock'n'roll immortals, as sure as the guy who convinced Leiber and Stoller that it was better to write a song about a hound dog than a stray cat, as definitely as whoever told Little Richard to sing about tutti-frutti rather than Neapolitan. His cry is pure inspiration - "Let's give it to 'em, right now" yowled breathlessly and, what's more (and better), totally out of context. Here the guy goes singing about lost love and separation from home and, all of a sudden, his misty remorse and nostalgia curdles into a cry for vengeance: "Let's give it to 'em, right now."

Richard Berry never thought of inserting that line because it had nothing to do with what he was singing about. But Berry and his Pharoahs told a fictional story, and Rockin' Robin Roberts and the Wailers were spilling their guts.

Give 'em what? Rich Dangel knew and he gave it to 'em before Rockin' Robin's yelp had faded: a guitar solo that raced pulses in its simple emblematic urgency, ripping the cover off that cool calypso before returning to the glories of duh duh duh. duh duh. In that swift interpolation, Rockin' Robin Roberts did way more than breathe new life into "Louie Louie." He made it a song that everybody who'd claim it without nicknaming it had to know. It's too mystical to say that the Wailers' "Louie" made the Kingsmen's version inevitable -- or maybe not mystical enough, since inevitability suggests that there are no miracles -- but they did more than prepare the way.

Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock'n'Roll Song; Including the Full Details of Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen, J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I., and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing, for the First Time Anywhere, the Actual Dirty Lyrics

by Dave Marsh

selected by Greg