Kingsmen Win ‘Louie Louie’ Suit

The rock ‘n’ roll classic “Louie Louie” made money money, but the Kingsmen haven’t received any royalties for at least 30 years--and they should, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The band that recorded the hit version of the rock standard in 1963, a record that spawned a generation of garage bands and a fruitless federal obscenity investigation, signed a contract in 1968 that was supposed to provide them with 9% of the profits or licensing fees from the record.

They never got a cent, said the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena. In 1993, the Kingsmen, some of whom are still on tour, sued Gusto Records and Highland Music Inc., which held the rights to the recording. A federal judge rescinded the contract, granted the musicians the right to all royalties from the time they sued, and held the companies in contempt when they refused to surrender the master recording.

In a 3-0 ruling, the appeals court said the judge’s decisions in favor of the Kingsmen were “well-reasoned and supported by ample evidence.”

Robert Besser, a lawyer for Gusto Records, declined comment.

Jeanette Bazis, a lawyer for the five members of the group, said the Kingsmen, including three of the original members, performed Thursday night to a sellout crowd at the Target Center in Minneapolis.

Bazis declined to estimate how much money the record was still generating. But she said recent sources of royalties include the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” the television show “3rd Rock From the Sun,” Coca-Cola commercials and compilation albums.

“Louie Louie,” written by rhythm-and-blues artist Richard Berry as a Jamaican love song in 1955, has been recorded more than 1,000 times, according to a collector at the time of Berry’s death in January 1997. The hit version, by the Kingsmen in 1963, featured Jack Ely’s almost-incomprehensible lead vocal--shouted into a microphone 12 feet above his head in a primitive studio in Portland--and the song’s signature three-chord, 10-strum guitar rhythm.

Rumors on every high school campus in the country that the lyrics were obscene prompted a federal investigation, which concluded that the words were unintelligible at any speed. Berry’s actual lyrics, sung by Ely, were a sailor’s lament to a bartender named Louie about his lost love and contained not a hint of impropriety.