When Richard Berry and the members of the Pharaohs pitched up at Los Angeles’ Radio Recorders, on 16 March 1957, they could not have guessed that the second song they recorded in a three-hour session would eventually be regarded as the most famous rock‘n’roll song of all time – the subject of a multitude of cover versions and via its most famous cover, that of the Kingsmen, the subject of an FBI investigation.

For 22 year-old Berry, ‘Louie Louie’ – which he had written a year or so earlier, and based largely on Nat “King” Cole’s ‘Calypso Blues’ and the Rene Touzet Orchestra’s ‘El Loco Cha Cha’ (which is where the ‘duh-duh-duh-der-der’s came from) – was nothing more than one of a bunch of songs that he hoped might bring him more fame and fortune than anything he’d created for his previous employers, Modern Records. But his new home, Flip Records, proved no better equipped for chart hits than Modern. Originally issued as a B-side, ‘Louie Louie’ came and went with no fanfare.

It did, however, work its way up the Northwest Pacific coast, towards Oregon and Washington, where, by the early 60s, it was in the repertoire of several significant local bands, including the Wailers and Paul Revere & the Raiders. A lesser local act, the Kingsmen, cut their shambolic version of the song in early 1963. Its charm lay in its sheer ineptitude and, although it took the best part of the year to do so, it got all the way to #2 on the Hot 100 in the winter of ‘63.

The full story of ‘Louie Louie’ and a sampling of the many diverse recordings of the song can be found on Ace’s “Love That Louie” CD. In an ideal world the song would have set Richard Berry – one of R&B’s true greats – up for life. But he sold his publishing on the song for a pittance, to buy an engagement ring for his future wife Dorothy, and it was not until the autumn of his life that he regained the ownership of one of rock‘n’roll’s most valuable copyrights.