I heard the original version of Louie Louie the other day. It’s the best.
The Kingsmen are associated with the song, but they were just carpetbaggers. Richard Berry was the progenitor. I like the relaxed, vaguely Caribbean sound of the first version.
I never understood why almost everybody couldn’t decipher the lyrics to the song, and made up all sorts of wild tales about what was being said, as I’d heard the words coming completely intelligibly out of Richard Berry’s mouth in the first place.
I’m trying to remember, but I think the Richard Berry version is in the soundtrack of Animal House somewhere. [Update: It isn’t. But they used it on Northern Exposure once] I played party music for money for a bunch of years, and there was a progression of cultural totems for the milieu. I always had the most fun in the “Otis Day and the Knights” kinda thing. I see the boneless MADD-supervised PC fun college-aged kids are allowed to have now, and I weep for them a bit. They need to rediscover their inner Elvis; a kind of rude, harmless infantilism. 1960 beats 1968, every time, if you hipsters are looking for a cool vibe to mine.
One of the most disconcerting moments of my entire life involved Louie Louie. I may have performed that song more than the Kingsmen ever did. Thousands of times. It was just another day at work to hear it or play it. All songs like that become a sort of aural wallpaper that you don’t notice much any more because you’ve been in that room so many times. I woke up late in the morning after playing some job that lasted until 2 AM. I worked all day in construction and all night in music trying to get by, and it lent an air of befuddlement to my life. A sleepy automaton vibe. The clock radio started beating me about the head, cajoling me to get back at it. I’m laying there in a half stupor, trying to remember what the hell day it was, and all I can think of is: That version of Louie Louie coming out of the radio is the worst version ever; who the hell is that? They should be horsewhipped.
As I fumbled for the off button, I realized it was a demo tape that someone had sent to the radio station, and I was playing on it.
Oh God oh God oh God not Pomp and Circumstance. I’m begging you, no Pomp and Circumstance. I played that goddamned execrable piece of merde eleventy-billion times, and on the trombone, to add insult to lip injury. Please please please please don’t ever make me play Pomp and Circumstance ever again, ever, hear it ever again, read its title, or even see little jots and tittles that look vaguely like the sheet music for Pomp and Circumstance.
I can picture it now, all those pimply adolescents marchin’ down the aisles between the battered metal folding chairs to get their blank High School diplomas because the real ones aren’t printed yet and four of the kids didn’t really graduate and have to go to summer school. They’re all fumbling around with that blasted tassel appended to that shabby mortarboard they’re renting — every single one, while we have to go ’round again with the blattering Elgar ONE MORE TIME.
I want to drive to England and find Sir Edward Elgar and harm his shrubs and sneer at his garden gnomes and discomfit his dog and make cutting remarks about the back of his drapes. I want to crank call him from one of those red phone booths and put a hankie over the receiver and ask him if he’s got Prince Albert in the can, but for all I know he knows Prince Albert and goes to the Hall with him to conduct Pomp and Circumstance for an audience of deaf people with no taste and he’d say, “Yes, he’ll be out in a minute,” and then I’d be flummoxed.
Well, at least it’s not Ravel. I mean, that guy drinks paint and writes down the effect.
Lawrence Brown moved to Los Angeles and they told him no one named Lawrence Brown was gonna get hired so he named himself after Dobie Gillis, and Sonny Bono got him a gig and he had a hit. Later on he grew the requisite 70s fro and had a bigger one. He’s dead now — as dead as the faux-Motown show he had going on. There’s probably a little puddle of cool where he was standing, though, right up to this very day.
Then Ramsay Lewis got ahold of it. Jazz musicians gotta play something. Might as well be that. It’s a big cow and he’s still milking it, as far as I know. He’s really swinging it here, and the snare drum is a metronomic gunshot blast, and the bass player’s just toying with it, trying to keep the greezy line reined in, because he wants to stretch out. Then at a minute and a half Ramsay loses his shit and starts playing the sort of stride thing that audiences applaud, but I notice it very shortly sends them on their way to the john or out for smokes. Let’s go out for white bread.
Pet Clark’s gonna give you the version you need if you think The In Crowd requires perfect diction. She clips her syllables like a German prison camp commandant, and sounds about as cool as Algebra class. There’s more brass than a foundry, and they sound like they’re all pounding some sort of big, musical nail.
No, we need the absinthe and hashish version. We need the version playing in de Sade’s elevator. We need to get an unstructured evening coat with a shawl collar and slink around the pool like a skink. We want mothers to reel in their children when we walk down the sidewalk — except we don’t walk on the sidewalk, ever. We step from the car, over the gutter full of butts and broken glass, to pass through the velvet rope, held aside.
There’s a drink on the polished mahogany bar for you, but you’re already carrying one.
So, England’s playing Poland in some sort of soccer game or melee or match or tilt or pitched battle or contretemps or whatever they call it over there. At half time, if that’s what they call that, the coach reportedly told his players a joke, which appears to have offended the usual people who like to be offended. It’s reported in the Mirror, and The Guardian, and on ESPN, and in The Daily Mail, and The Telegraph, and in USA Today. It’s featured on many websites and bulletin boards as well. It’s everywhere.
I don’t know if Roy Hodgson, the the coach of the English national football team, actually used the joke I wrote on April 25th of 2012 verbatim. This blog seems like an obscure place to find something unless you’re already looking for it. But I do know that every one of those newspapers I mentioned copied it directly from my Sippican Cottage blogpost, and not one of them offered any attribution, or a link. Here’s the text from my blog entry titled Feed The Monkey:
I recall a very bad joke from way back when we were still hurling men up into space, but hadn’t quite reached the moon yet:
NASA decided they’d finally send a man up in a capsule after sending
only monkeys in the earlier missions. They fire the man and the monkey
into space. The intercom crackled, “Monkey, fire the retros.” A little
later, “Monkey, check the solid fuel supply.” Later still, “Monkey,
check the life support systems for the man.” The astronaut took umbrage
and radioed NASA, ” When do I get to do something?” NASA replies, ” In
fifteen minutes, feed the monkey.”
Like most things I write on this blog, I wrote that right out of my head. I referred to nothing. The joke in its original form was told to me forty years ago or more. I remembered only the gist of it. In fact, as I remember it, it wasn’t as even as good a joke as I wrote it. But the wording of that joke is most assuredly mine own. And another “tell” in the use of that joke, unattributed, is that they didn’t call it NASA when they were shooting monkeys into space. Eisenhower organized NASA in 1958. I used the term NASA there because nobody remembers the space program’s name before then and it was just easier. Poetic license. The joke itself is one of those tiresome things that everyone knows, but has to sit through over and over no matter how many times they hear it, and it only elicits groans, not laughter. A duck walks into a pharmacy and says, give me some Chap-Stick and put it on my bill.
Oops, I forgot, if my stuff is going to be copypasta in Merrie Olde, it’s a mallard toddles off to the chemist…
“NASA decided they’d finally send a man up in a capsule after sending only monkeys in the earlier missions,” the joke goes.
“They fire the man and the monkey into space.
“The intercom crackles, ‘Monkey, fire the retros.’
“A little later, ‘Monkey, check the solid fuel supply.’
“Later still, “Monkey, check the life support systems for the man.’
“The astronaut takes umbrage and radioes NASA, ‘When do I get to do something?’
“NASA replies, ‘In 15 minutes – feed the monkey.’”
“Nasa decided they’d finally send a man up in a capsule after sending
only monkeys in the earlier missions. They fire the man and the monkey
into space. The intercom crackles: ‘Monkey, fire the retros.’ A little
later: ‘Monkey, check the solid fuel supply.’ Later still: ‘Monkey,
check the life support systems for the man.’ The astronaut takes umbrage
and radios Nasa: ‘When do I get to do something?’ Nasa replies: ‘In 15
minutes – feed the monkey.'”
Please note that the only editing they do, is to make what I wrote grammatically incorrect. They change NASA to Nasa, which is not how acronymns work, and turn “took umbrage” into “takes umbrage.” I decline very few verbs and no free drinks these days, but even I know it was correct in the first place. There’s about fifteen other news outlets I found, before I got bored, that use the whole thing copied and pasted, but attribute it to The Mirror, or The Telegraph, or The Guardian, because there’s honor among thieves, but not outside their coven, it appears. Others paraphrase the joke and use only the punchline verbatim.
If you enter the whole text into Google, it only returns two references, both to me, and a website in Great Britain called Orphans of Liberty, who printed the joke verbatim back when I wrote it, but gave me a link and attribution, so good on them, and hail fellow well met and all that.
Hey, maybe Roy Hodgson reads Orphans of Liberty, and he did tell my version of the joke verbatim to his team. I’d be tickled if that were the case. If so, Roy, you’re welcome to it. Sorry it wrecked your life, and you probably didn’t even get a laugh out of it for all your trouble. I warned everybody before I told it that it was a bad joke. But does anyone listen?
To the rest of you ink-stained plagiarists: Expect to hear from my lawyer, um, solicitor, er, barrister or bannister or beelzebub or bumbershoot or whatever you call a law-talking guy over there on that pile of rocks and coal you inhabit. To paraphrase Stanley Motss, ” I want the credit.”
We went to the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest on Sunday with new friends. We had more fun than a congressman left alone with the spoons.
Damariscotta, Maine, is a village about forty percent of the way to Canada along the Atlantic coast, with about 2500 people living in it, and at least that many gawping at it at any given time. It’s cuter than a baby trying to eat an apple.
Damariscotta is an Indian name that means something in Indian, I suppose. I don’t speak Abenaki, and neither do Abenakis, so there’s no use askin’, but I think it means: “Place we’ll burn down during King Philip’s War, and again a few times whenever we’re bored and the sheriff’s drunk during the French And Indian Wars.” The colonists got jealous of the Indians getting to burn the place down fortnightly, and burned the place down themselves so the British couldn’t occupy it during the Revolutionary War, or maybe so the bank couldn’t repossess it, I can’t remember, I was very young back then.
There’s a monument to the Indians in Damariscotta, at the site of the only evidence of the former landlords’ existence, which consists solely of a 1600-foot square, 30-foot deep dump, which is entirely made up of discarded oyster shells. The current locals, although no doubt keen to do so, have been entirely unable to locate the Indians’ enormous pile of smashed champagne bottles, but surely it must be around there somewhere.
The town is certainly twee, but that will only get you so far in this world. Towns in Maine look for some celebration of local culture that will galvanize the general public into a frenzied mob that will spend money willy-nilly if you can lure them to your burg. Our town of Rumford tried a Paul Bunyan day, but I don’t think they sold many axes, perhaps because, as I’ve noticed in the comment sections of the Bangor Daily News and The Portland Press Herald, most everyone has one to grind already. Damariscotta, which has a long tradition of brickmaking and shipbuilding, and of course being burnt to the ground, has had much more luck attracting people from far and wide to watch them desecrate pumpkins in amusing ways. It’s less crazy than it sounds; after all, bricklaying is hard work, and modern shipbuilding consists solely of sniffing fiberglass resin until your eyes are as red as a town drunk’s — if the town is New York. Pumpkins say: New England. Pumpkins mean: Thanksgiving. Pumpkins remind one… to get the furnace checked. It’s just fun to say “pumpkin.” Pumpkin!
Damariscotians gussy up pumpkins to look like this and that, set them out on the sidewalk, and judge them on their merits, and give out prizes, which should be attempted with the grammar school kids someday, too. They defy the local growers to find new and novel ways of force-feeding Miracle-Gro to a gourd day and night to produce the largest orange-y blob that can have a portion sent to a laboratory to determine if it’s a pumpkin, because it stopped looking like one after about five hundred pounds or so.
I witnessed them shooting pumpkins out of a big cannon at a van with great celerity. The pumpkins, I mean; the van didn’t move much. They threw pumpkins into the ocean with a catapult, instead of politicians, for some reason. I’m told that they hollow out pumpkins, put an outboard motor on them, and race them in the river, or pond, or estuary, or gulley, or sluice, or runnel, or whatever they have there. I had to be told because I was drinking Black and Tans in the haunted restaurant by that time, my ears ringing with the cannon percussion blasts, and my head haunted by the knowledge that people shoot pumpkins I’d eat at a van I’d drive.
The restaurant was identified to me as haunted, anyway. I was likewise informed that there’s a tour that points out all the local haunted houses, which includes most every building in town but the Rexall. No one ever wants to die and haunt a Rexall. It ain’t dignified. I believe to a certainty that I was supposed to be interested in the fact that the building I was in was haunted by someone besides a man with a liquor license, but I have a defective nature and I wasn’t; but I was fascinated to learn that out-of-plumb doorframes, squirrels in the attic, and a hint of cupidity is enough to get you a paying job lying to people “from away.” And to think I’ve been lying to strangers for free all these years, and on more diverse topics.
There’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed in small cities in the East. The really nice looking cities are made of brick, and all the buildings look like one another, because everything that was there before burned down eleven or four or nine times, until the residents all decided brick buildings were cheaper than a fire department, and built everything at the same time under a regime of architectural and intellectual coherence that is not abroad in the land just now. Damariscotta’s like that; Providence, Rhode Island, parts of Boston, and Portland, Maine are too.
One likewise cannot help but notice that in Damariscotta, the rhythm of the lovely brick buildings, with the occasional gawjus neoclassical residence smattered in, is broken only by the public library, which is fairly new, and built in the Prairie/International/Cow Barn/Reform School style, because reasons. There’s a plaque on the sidewalk that declares the entire downtown a member of the National Register of Historic Places, so you have to check with someone official about the color of the mortar you’re using to fix a brick on your haunted ice cream parlor or haunted Kinko’s or whatever you’ve got, but the town can hire Frank Lloyd Wrong to design the library and place it there like a dead cat at a picnic.
The library is called the Skidompha, a name somehow even less elegant than the building, because the club that raised money to build it wanted to make an acronym of all the last names of its founding members — at least those who performed in the 1885 town production of The Mikado. I do not wish to cast aspersions on these noble ladies, but I’m agog they couldn’t assemble a better acronym than SKIDOMPHA. They probably spent all their time trying to get the vote so they could close down all the local grog shops (haunted, natch), with not enough time left over for Scrabble. I also aver to no one in particular that I’d rather die and haunt a Rexall, forevermore, than go to see a local production of The Mikado.
Let’s see if we can do better, acronym-wise. SKIDOMPHA. Hmmm. Oh yes. Perfect for a summer vacation rental in Downeast Maine; like a telegram from an honest realtor: DAMPISH, OK?
Month: October 2013
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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