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‘Louie Louie’ Writer Shared Little of Limelight

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Around his South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood, he was known both to children and cronies as Captain Louie, the friendly old gent with the naval officer’s cap whose favorite line was “Hey, man!” and who liked to write songs about good lovin’ and good times.

But to music fans around the world--especially on college campuses where his signature tune has reigned for generations as the frat crowd’s ultimate garage band anthem--Richard Berry, who died Thursday, will be remembered as the man who penned “Louie Louie,” the infectious and often unintelligible rock ‘n’ roll standard recorded by more than a thousand bands.

In the last decade, Berry’s career was revitalized after a successful end to a 25-year battle to reacquire the million-dollar rights to the song he had given up after selling it and seven other tunes to a record company for a couple hundred dollars to pay for his first wedding.

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The 61-year-old Berry died in his sleep in the same West 54th Street home where he lived and wrote music for the last 40 years, leaving behind his mother and five children, one of whom spent Friday fielding calls from friends and fans nationwide.

“A lot of people are calling to hear his old phone message where he played some music and told them to give Captain Louie a call back,” said his daughter, Christy, a drummer and singer who performed with her father. “I guess people just want to hear his voice one more time.”

One of Friday’s callers was a member of the rock band the Kingsmen, whose 1963 version of Berry’s song became “America’s No. 1 party song” and whose muddled, cryptic lyrics created a national mystery that caught Berry up in an FBI investigation into their meaning.

Born in 1935 in the town of Extension, La., Berry came to Los Angeles as an infant and learned to play piano while attending Jefferson High School. Although he wrote hundreds of songs, mostly ballads and upbeat rhythm numbers, he eventually came to associate himself with the one he wrote about a Jamaican sailor who tells a bartender named Louie there’s a beautiful girl waiting for him and that he’s “really got to go.”

After having sold the rights to “Louie Louie” for a veritable song, Berry struggled to make a living as a musician and spent years on welfare before returning to college in the 1980s for a degree in computer data entry.

After reacquiring most of the song’s rights in 1985, Berry spent the last decade of his life touring and promoting it and other tunes he wrote for performers, including singer Etta James and the Coasters. All the while, he continued crooning in his baritone voice for the choir at his local Baptist church until a heart ailment slowed him down in recent years.

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Before he died, Berry--who walked with a telltale limp from a childhood hip injury--was preparing for an appearance at a Long Beach nightclub to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of “Louie Louie.”

“My father was proud of that song,” recalled Christy Berry. “But I think he was most proud of his college degree, the fact that he went back to school, got a diploma and a job and got off welfare. He always thought of that as the premier achievement in his life.”

According to family members, Berry wrote the lyrics to “Louie Louie” on several sheets of toilet paper after hearing a tune with a similar Latino beat at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Anaheim. His original version, with clearly articulated and inoffensive lyrics, was released in February 1957 as the B side to “You Are My Sunshine,” a song favored by his mother, Bertha.

“Louie Louie” soon became a regional hit, but didn’t really take off until it was recorded by the Kingsmen, a release that led Berry to be questioned by FBI agents reacting to the public’s impression that the mumbled lyrics to the group’s 2-minute, 13-second version of the song were obscene.

“Dad just couldn’t believe it,” Christy Berry said. “He had to play his original version for the agents.” In their report, the agents concluded that the lyrics to the Kingsmen’s version were “indecipherable at any speed.”

Jack Ely, lead singer of the Kingsmen, later acknowledged that he slurred the words because he had learned the song off a jukebox and couldn’t understand all the lyrics.

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Eventually, more than 1,200 “Louie Louies” were recorded: There were disco versions, rock versions, marching band versions, country-western renditions, even electronic music versions. Everyone from San Francisco’s all-female Guttersluts to the Rice University Marching Owl Band have taken a crack at it.

Whenever fans asked her father to recite the real lyrics, Christy recalled, he would laugh them off and say, “If I told you the words, you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

In 1985, two years after calling a New York lawyer, Berry realized his dream of regaining control of the song whose spirit has permeated the heart of the American culture.

“Getting those rights back changed Richard’s life,” said Chuck Rubin, president of Artists Rights Enforcement. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer man. He wrote the tune that became the premier rock song of all time. Even today, I think children are born with a little chip in their brains, and on it are some of the lyrics to ‘Louie, Louie.’ ”

In his last years, Berry took care of his mother, wrote songs and phoned Christy daily at work. “Once he called and said, ‘Hey man, can you get me one of those captain’s hats?’ And I said, ‘Why, Daddy?’ And he said, ‘Cuz I want a captain’s hat. That’s gonna be my new name, Captain Louie.’ ”

Sitting at the dining room table where her father recently wrote her a ballad called “Don’t Pretend,” Christy Berry turned toward the white captain’s uniform slung over the arm of a nearby chair.

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Next week, after a memorial at the Greater Cornerstone Baptist Church in South-Central, she will bury her father in that uniform.

“It’s already hit me, how am I going to go on without that daily telephone call?” Christy said, fighting back tears. “He was my father, my best friend, my girlfriend, my hero. I miss him already.”

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