CULTURE WARS The Myth of Louie Louie.

 

I am willing to accept, years later, that Matt Welsh thought the "whole thing was a tempest in a teapot..." But honestly, that was not the he acted in January of 1964.  Because when the letter from the small town of Frankfurt, promoting a conspiracy theory, landed on the desk of the 41st Governor of Indiana, Matt Welsh wasted no time in spreading the lie as far and as fast as possible. That's what bad politicians do. They spread lies. Because it gives them a temporary advantage. 

Frankfurt (above), a town of 15,000 exclusively white citizens, 45 miles due north of Indianapolis, was very much in the news that January of 1964 because of the Hoosier obsession with high school basketball. 

 On Saturday, 28 December, 1963, Frankfort High School (above) had hosted a holiday invitational tournament in their new $4.5 million basketball arena (above right). The Frankfort "Hot Dogs" were eliminated in the afternoon game. That evening the team from Anderson, Indiana, met the reigning state champs, the Muncie Central High School Bearcats in what Indianapolis News sports writer, Corwin "Corky" Lamm,  described as "A basketbrawl".

During the final seconds of Anderson's upset win, a frustrated Muncie player slammed the ball into his opponent's face. The sight of blood emptied the bleachers. Players and fans went at each other with their fists. Somebody even punched an Anderson cheerleader into the bleachers. Frankfort police quickly got things under control, but according to Lamm, the principle causality was  "... one black eye for basketball". At the core of the hysteria which followed, but which was barely mentioned in the press, was that while the entire Anderson team was white, 3 of the 5 starters for Muncie Central (below) were African-Americans.

Interestingly, this seismic headline and editorial producing event was not mentioned in the perfidy letter to Governor Welsh, even though the letter was written less than 3 weeks later, and the author claimed to attend Frankfort High School, infamous scene of the "basketbrawl". Rather the writer of the letter postmarked 17 January, 1964 professed to be concerned only with an immoral musical machination which began 8 months earlier, and 1,500 miles away.

At about 10:00 a.m., on Saturday, 6 April, 1963, the 5 members of the rock and roll group The Kingsmen gathered in a recording studio at 411 Southwest 13th Street in Portland, Oregon. 

The local group had been playing together for about 2 years, with 18 year old Jack Ely  (above left) singing through his new dental braces and playing rhythm guitar. Mike Mitchel (above right front) played lead guitar, Dan Gallucci was on the organ, Bob Norby (above right rear) was on bass guitar and the group's founder, Lynn Easton, reluctantly played the drums. They had pooled their funds to pay the $36 fee for a 1 hour use of the equipment and a recording technician, because they were proud of their rock-and-roll rendition of a calypso song written by a Los Angles musician named Richard Barry - who no longer owned the song, having sold all rights 3 years earlier for $750.

Backstage during a show in 1957, Barry had quickly scribbled the lyrics to a easy going R&B love ballad he called "Louie Louie" - no comma between the names - on a roll of toilet paper. Seriously. The song told the story in Jamaican English of a young man forced to leave home to find work. "A fine little girl, she waits for me, catch a ship across the sea, Sail that ship about, all alone, Never know if I make it home...3 nights and days I sail the sea, Think of girl, all constantly....See, see Jamaica, the moon above, It won't be long, me see me love, Take her in my arms again, I'll tell her I'll never leave again"

The Portland studio mostly recorded voice-overs for commercials and documentaries. and had never recorded a rock band before. The Kingsmen formed a circle around Jack Ely, one microphone for each instrument's amplifier and a single mic suspended from the ceiling for the vocal - this was before multi-track recording. 

After playing "10 or 12 bars" to set sound levels the technician and studio owner Robert Lindahl (above), moved Jack "about 10 feet back" and then they "laid down" a single 2 minute 40 second version of the song. The band thought they were still rehearsing. Ely was yelling to be heard above the amplifiers and drums, and he started the last verse too early. Half way through the song, Easton dropped a stick. But at the end Lindahl announced, "Great! Wonderful! What do you want to put on the B side?"

According to Ely, "We pressed 1,000 copies. The five of us got 20 each to pass out at school...The rest went into distribution, and nothing happened for months." But the slowly growing sales so impressed New York based "Wand Records" they signed on to distribute  the recording.  But Wand, as part of the racist division in American music at the time, handled almost exclusively African-American artists. And as guitarist Mike Mitchel explained, "They had no idea we were white. By the time they found out...the song was climbing up the Billboard chart." In fact the Kingsmen's one take version of "Louie Louie" sold 12 million copies. When they later released it as part of an album, the cover did not include a photo of the band.  By then, for obvious reasons.

What the recording had was energy and spontaneity. What it did not have was enunciation. Teenage musicians across the country listened to the popular record over and over, copying the music, but the more they listened, the more versions of the lyrics they came up with. According to Mitchel, "Some students at Tulane University called Lynn's house one afternoon and said, 'We've heard the record and these are the words we hear. Is it true?' And then they sang some dirty lyrics. That was the first time we learned that some people thought the lyrics were obscene because, in the northwest, it was a well-known song that had been played by many groups."

But nobody in Frankfort, Indiana (above) had ever heard the song before, lest of all the self described student who did not sign the letter to Governor Welsh. But he or she was certain the lyrics they were hearing were  "so filthy that I cannot enclose them in this letter. ” However, students at Miami University in Athens, Ohio produced an obscene version of the lyrics, which compelled Jack New, Governor Welsh's executive secretary, to obtain a copy of the record - thus increasing sales by one more. According to Welsh "We slowed it down and we thought we could hear the words." At the time Welsh had no doubts, saying the supposed lyrics made his ears tingle. The Governor's Press Secretary, James McManus, assured the Indianapolis Star, the obscenities were "indistinct, but plain if you listen carefully."

But Governor Welsh (above)  did not bother to contact anyone at Wand Records, or even the band members in Portland, Oregon - whose families were available by dialing directory assistance. Instead Governor Welsh sent a letter off to his "friend", President of the Indiana Broadcasters Association, Ried Chapman (below).

Later Welsh insisted, "At no time did I ever pressure anybody to take the song off the air. I suggested...it might be simpler all around if it wasn't played." Fine distinction. Eager to help his friend, Chapman dispatched telegrams to stations statewide "asking" them to not play the record. 

Overnight "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen (above)went from the 4th most played song on Indianapolis radio, to zero. A few days later the Indianapolis Star called Portland and reported, "Young Singers Dismiss As Hooey Obscenity Charge in 'Louie Louie.'" Lynn Easton was quoted as saying, "We took the words from the original version by Richard Berry and recorded them faithfully. There was no clowning around. " 

But the editorial board of The Star refused to let go of the conspiracy, denouncing "...some stations" which have "decided to fill their programs with a cacophony of noise, and a collection of musical garbage. Call it what you like--folk music, rock 'n' roll, bop, hip or what-not." The paper offered no suggestion as to who should decide what was music and what was garbage, but the implication was clear, the Indianapolis Star knew the difference, and it was that " Negro Music" was garbage. 

Two Marion County prosecutors were assigned to investigate the dirty record. They played it at the standard 45 revolutions per minute, sped it up to 78 and slowed it down to 33 and a third. Their assessment was "the record is an abomination of out-of-tune guitars, an overbearing jungle rhythm and clanging cymbals."  Jungle rhythm sort of says it all, doesn't it? But it was not obscene. Surprisingly the 1 February edition of "Billboard, The International Music - Record Newsweekly", endorsed their own cabal - "...some shrewd press agent may also be playing an important role in this teapot tempest. Exactly whose agent is hard to pin down at this point." Hard because there wasn't one, because it wasn't about obscenity, it was about race, it was about "jungle music". Nobody said it, but  that was what it was about. And everybody on the right, knew it.  And still, nobody seems to have realized the band members were all white.

That January the United States Attorney General, Robert Kennedy got an almost identical letter, originating, supposedly,  from the parent of a student attending Sarasota High School in Florida. "...My daughter brought home a record of "LOUIE LOUIE"... The lyrics are so filthy that I cannot enclose them in this letter." Fifty years later it is reasonable to suspect an organized movement to suppress the "jungle rhythm" in Louie Louie. 

But in January of 1964, Attorney General Robert Kennedy did what Governor Welsh could have done.  Kennedy ordered the F.B.I to investigate, before he offered an opinion. At the same time the U.S. Post Office and the Federal Communications Commission also launched investigations. 

As the Associated Press reported, "All three agencies dropped their investigations because they were unable to determine what the lyrics were even after listening to the recordings played at speeds of 16 rpm to 78 rpm."

The foolishness of the entire matter had already been made plain when on 1 February -  the same day as the Billboard article about the supposed "Louie Louis" conspiracy - announced that the  song "I Want To Hold Your Hand" by The Beatles hit number one on the charts. It would stay there  for 7 weeks. 

The "45 "single record of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sold 10,000 copies in New York city alone. Nationwide it sold 5 million copies that spring. And it was replaced for another 2 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart by "She Loves You", also by the Beatles. It was the beginning of the British invasion, and the reign of the "Fab Four".  The Kingsman's "Louie Louie" was the last American record to top the charts for months. 

Frankfort, Indiana won no advantage in being the source de main for the "Louie Louie" conspiracy theory.  Nor did it gain any advantage from the press coverage of the "basketbrawl"  These events, which seemed so important to community leaders in 1964,  gained the town nothing. In the forty plus years since the 15,000 residents of "Gem City" -  so called because of its early investment in electrical lighting, - grew to a town of about 16,000 people. 

There are still almost no African-Americans in Frankfort. But the population is now only 72% white, with Hispanics making up 27%.  And 11% of all of those mostly whites live in poverty. Winning the Culture Wars in Frankfort may not be the cause of its failure to grow and prosper,  but clearly racism and fear has not helped the town. As the clearly enunciated clearly not obscene lyrics to the Frankfort High School fight song say, "All hail to dear old Frankfort, to the blue and the white that floats upon the breeze....may her glory never, never die."  But there are times when it looks like the town just might.  And the biggest obstacles it has to overcome are the twin obscenities of culture wars and  racism. But for God's sake, don't talk about either of them. Unless you use the secret code.

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WAR AS EDUCATION

 

I hate to admit it but that the effete, arrogant, pompous, intellectual, asthmatic and snobbish Frenchman Marcel Proust (above)  was right about at least two things - first, when he observed that “We learn from history that we do not learn anything from history”, and second that “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” 

Both of those profound insights struck me again recently when I stumbled upon an article in the  archeology magazine "Antiquity", which illuminated a forgotten memory of the work of a quiet rock hound  named Gerald Clark Bond. It may seem a complicated train of events, but please bare with me, while I try to explain how my mind works. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Professor Bond collected and cataloged rocks from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Bermuda. This may have once seemed an esoteric pursuit, but in that seemingly meaningless me'lange of bottom cores, which Professor Bond drilled through were thin layers of limestone pebbles,  which had nothing to do with the ocean floor nor the rivers which dumped their detritus onto the Continental Shelf in that region.

How did they get thousands of miles south and hundreds of miles off shore into of the Atlantic Ocean?  Professor Bond concluded the only delivery method that made sense was that an ancient glacier had ground against limestone cliffs, scrapping off pebbles and holding them trapped in its grip.

When the glacier then calved icebergs into the Atlantic, these floated south until they melted, and then dropped their limestone pebbles into the abyss. With extraordinary perseverance, Professor Bond matched those pebbles with a specific limestone cliff along the Canadian coast. And when other rocks from the same drill cores were identified as coming from nearby areas to those cliffs, the professor's suspicions were confirmed, and with it a way to measure climate change. 

More pebbles in a given core layer indicated more melting ice bergs, which hinted at warmer temperatures and rising sea levels.  Fewer pebbles thus meant cooling seas, and more water locked up as ice in glaciers.  What was amazing to Professor Bond was that there have been eight cooling periods, now called Bond Events, since the last ice age ended 11,000 years ago. 

Bond Events come in roughly 1,500 year intervals, giving an almost respiratory aspect to our planet's atmosphere. And like a smoker who develops a cough, the deposits on the sea floor, as well as ice cores drilled in Greenland and the Antarctic have recorded the increasing impact of humans burning fossil fuels on our planet's health, from wood fires to coal to oil. But they also record something else, equally as ominous.

See, when the weather cooled for Bond Event Seven -about ten thousand years ago - it seems that humans responded with the invention of agriculture.

Bond Event Four occurred about six thousand years ago, and it seems humans responded with the domestication of sheep and the invention of bronze. 

And Bond Event Three, which came four thousand years ago, brought on the collapse of great empires in Asia and Egypt, and, of more interest to this story,  in an act of war at a crossing of a slow, meandering river about 80 miles northeast of Berlin, Germany.

The river is the somnambulist Tollense (above). For more than ten thousand years, beginning in its namesake lake, the Tollense  has followed a sinuous 58 mile course through forests and bogs, winding this way and twisting that, as it hesitantly approaches the Peene River, which winds another 30 miles to the Baltic Sea just below the island of Usedom. 

In the peat bogs lining its banks and the mud of it's bottom, the Tollense has preserved for the last 3,200 years a record of one day, an example of humanity and inhumanity, and a desperate battle for survival in the high summer of  about 1250 BC.

The invaders were from the forests and mountains to the south, and were members of the Unetice culture. They were armed with bronze daggers, spear heads and hand axes. They were adorned with engraved bronze bracelets and wooden shields, and their robes were held together with bronze pins. They came mounted on horses, which ate millet, which did not grow this far north. That suggests rations, which suggests an organized raiding party, perhaps what would one day be called an army.

The Frisian villages close to the Baltic coast were the likely target. These peoples buried their dead in stone crypts, and prayed to the earth god Inguz, who drove his chariot across the sky as easily as he dived beneath the sea. The villagers enjoyed probably the best diet in Europe, with plenty of surf and turf. They fished in the lakes and the sea from long plank canoes and hunted the forests with curved bows. They raised cattle corralled behind their village palisades. But their weapons and tools were stone axes and baseball bat like wooden clubs. 

The bronze age had been late in coming to the Frisian Baltic coast. Copper and tin had to be heated to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit before they would form bronze, and that takes a lot of wood, and a knowledge of ceramics. A culture cannot afford that technology unless it has something to sell. And it was not until recently that these proto-Scandinavian tribes had organized and improved the production of their “metallum sudaticum”, amber. 

With each successive Bond Event, with each successive glacier pulse, the level of the Baltic Sea rose and then fell, Over and over great coastal pine forests grew, matured and were then drowned in the Baltic basin.  And with each storm tide more fossilized pine tree sap from those long dead forests washed up on the sandy Baltic beaches as amber.

Villagers gathered the amber in hand held nets, then carved it into beads, rings, bracelets or even Venus religious figures (above), and then traded them up  the "Amber Road" that reached all the way to Rome and Egypt.  On the return trip traders brought ceramics, bonze rings and gold pins. But few weapons.

By 3,400 years ago the Amber Road was a well established trade route, increasing the wealth of the villages on the namesake lake of the Tollense river, where Baltic amber could pause, be collected and worked, before moving on.  And the wealth of these artisans, fishermen, farmers and herders, 

attracted the interest of the Unetice forest peoples to the south and east. 

After a generation or two of escalating raids , about 4,125 years ago, shortly after the summer solstice, perhaps a thousand occupants of the scattered Frisian villages along the Tollense valley decided to gather their tools and their children and flee north, beyond the reach of the raiders. 

The logical place to rally the farmers was on the western bank of the Tollense, where a 10 foot wide causeway (above), had been built and maintained for over some 300 years,  about 7 miles north from the Tollense' joining with the Peene. 

For a wooden causeway to have been maintained for so long (above), the western bank must have been a traditional gathering place, perhaps with religious connotations.  

It seems likely the Frisians waited for the indecisive or the cautious to join up. Perhaps the old were too slow.  But it seems the farmers and herders were slow in discovering the causeway  across the river and bogs represented a bottleneck in their line of retreat.  Because it was here the raiders with their bronze axes fell upon the famers and herders with their stone arrow heads and wooden clubs.

The first indication of the death along the Tollense saw daylight in 1996, when a human femur  surfaced. Jutting from the base of its ball joint was a stone arrow head.  Rarely does archeology find such conclusive proof of a murder. Early excavations uncovered more human bones and wooden clubs. 

When the raiders were seen approaching, the livestock, the elderly, the women and children were sent downstream, with a small escort of the best fighters. But the majority of the Frisian men stayed behind, sacrificed to delay the attackers at the causeway.   

In 2007 massive excavations were begun, and have continue up and down the valley.  By 2018, after the bones of at least 100 individuals had been uncovered, it was estimated at least 5,000 men were caught in this battle, mostly young men of draft age - between 20 and 40 years old. The estimated death toll ranges from 750 to a thousand souls.   

Most carry injuries inflicted shortly before death; broken faces, damaged skulls, arrow heads embedded in arm and leg bones , even one penetrating a skull (above).  One fractured thigh bone was discovered displaying an injury still commonly suffered by horseback riders. 

A genetic sample of the bones uncovered so far show that none of the adults possessed the thymine nucleotide which would have allowed them to digest the lactose in cows' milk, something which only developed in European humans some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. In addition, five horse skeletons have been found, with bronze bridle fittings, hinting at an officer class among the invaders.  

The fighting at the causeway was desperate, with bodies left along the riverbank, and no quarter given.  The Frisians stone daggers and wooden clubs killed some of the first attackers, but the heavier bronze swords allowed the Unetice warriors to maim from a greater distance, and for longer.  Gradually the invaders cut down the outnumbered defenders. 

As with all battles before firearms, once the shield wall was broken the slaughter truly began. Running for their lives, the Frisians were struck down from behind, or, if they turned to fight, they were overwhelmed. Many of the bones show the cutting slices of bronze swords - although no bronze swords or axes were left on the field. The bodies lay were they fell, later being stripped of any metal of value, as the pursuers murdered their way up the valley toward the Peene.

Using ground penetrating radar to locate likely dig sites (above),  a mass of human bones were found  downstream a mile north of the causeway site. It seems the bodies were left unclaimed and unattended until a storm washed them downstream to a bend in the Tollense, where the current buried and preserved about 140 bodies in the mud and peat (above), "... like an ancient memento left between the pages of a forgotten diary". 

The wounded and crippled Frisians left behind were dispatched, often with a quick and brutal club blow to the head (above). We do not know yet how far up the valley the slaughter continued.  Nor do we have any accounts of the battle. Written history of this region would not begin until the old high German runic inscriptions carved 800 years later. 

But we can safely assume the Uentice and Frisian story tellers (above) sang about the honor and courage of those who fought, and the sacrifices of the brave men who died along the ancient banks of the Tollense. And we know the battle of the Tollense Valley had a major impact on the lives of people in the region. But, why in God's name were these young men murdering each other? Was it amber or gold? Was it slavery or freedom? Was it fish or faith? 

We have known for a hundred years that shortly after this battle, that we did not know about until recently, the people of northern Europe no longer lived in scattered settlements. Within a generation they began building fortified settlements (above), living safely behind walls with their animals and commuting daily to and from their farms outside.  And it seems logical to believe this change was all because of a 3,000 year old battle which we were ignorant of until 25 years ago.

Marcel Proust (above) began his most famous work, with the following words; "I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive... in some inanimate object...until the day...when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice...We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. "

But Proust wrote something else, while confined and working for three years in what would become in 1922 his death bed (above). "Remembrance of things past", he wrote, "is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”  The same can be said of the warriors of the Tollense valley. 

The latest thinking by the archeologists digging along the banks of the Tollense is that the battle was not a war but a robbery on a large party of traders.  Academics will likely argue the issue for decades, But to call it a war or a robbery is a game of semantics. Three thousand years after the event such definitions have little meaning.

Whatever the reality along the Tollense 3,000 years ago, we can be certain the elders of the Uentice and the Frisians both sang of the honor and courage displayed by the participants. But their religion, their nations, their cultures, their languages, their  homes, their hatred and their love, all they murdered and died for has long since turned to dust. They no longer matter. They are all dead and gone. Until we dig them up.

Excavated, they live again,  because we choose to make them live. We choose to resurrect their bones and recreate their world in our minds and our hearts. And in doing so, we recreate our own world. As Proust put it, "A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” 

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