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 performance in 1971, one listener repeatedly slammed her head into the stage, shouting "Stop, stop, I confess!" Nonetheless, the work's relentless progression, melting into Farfisa dreamscapes, would eventually inspire some of the most palatable manifestations of American minimalism.
Bill Orcutt's latest release for Fake Estates, his ongoing opus of obsessive rearrangement, seamlessly melds these audio landmarks. Fittingly, Reich described Four Organs as "the longest V–I cadence in the history of Western Music," and as such, it neatly envelops all of Louie Louie within its single chord. Intuiting this, Orcutt deftly overlays the opening salvos of these sonic cognates into a zig-zagging 4/4 cadence, which unfolds over side one with an incongruously conventional rock dynamic structure. The Four Organs' sustained organ threads suggest Louie Louie's vocal line, whether by accident or Orcutt's design. Organ drones dominate Side 2, with Louie Louie forced into counterpoint. We can hear just how out of tune the Kingsmen were, unsalvageable by any pitch correction software, with that damned maraca inexplicably sliding into a pulsing but syncopated 6-beat bar ending with the door-slam finality of the original Kingsmen 45.
Taken together, Louie Louie and The Four Organs represent key signposts in musical evolution: proto-punk, proto new age; reviled by the squares, yet efficacious in blowing forward-looking minds. In 2025, Orcutt has reinvigorated both well-worn standards with some of their old mojo, and their novel, pulsing setting provides a whiff of what made them revolutionary in the first place. — TOM CARTER
- 1. The Four Louies I
- 2. The Four Louies II
