The Louie Report

Here’s something worth celebrating – after an long illness, Kent Morrill of the Wailers returns to the stage, joining the Neil Rush Band to sing THAT SONG! Welcome back, Kent!

This week, the LOUIE of the Week award goes out to Jr. Cadillac for their very rare recording of LOUIE LOUIE captured live in 1974 at the Evergreen Ballroom, with Jimmy Manolides on piano, and special guest artist Rube Tubin on guitar. There’s a few things that make this particular recording especially noteworthy: 1) Jr. [...]

Two months after the Ventures performed with the Fabulous Wailers at the Moore Theater in Seattle to celebrate their new collaboration “Two Car Garage,” Bob Bogle, founding member of the Ventures has passed away on Sunday. He suffered from Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and became too frail to play with the Ventures in his waning years. But [...]

I missed the big show with the Ventures and the Fabulous Wailers that took place in Tacoma last month…. the day before International LOUIE LOUIE Day. It’s hard to be everywhere, unfortunately… Luckily, this performance is being shared as streamed video that you can watch RIGHT NOW! Go to 6:36 on this clip, and you [...]

Tomorrow, Saturday, April 11th is International LOUIE LOUIE Day! To celebrate this special event, I will be sharing a rare, never-before-seen video from the E.P. video archives of a LOUIE LOUIE performance that took place at the infamous KFJC MAXIMUM LOUIE LOUIE marathon. It was at this event where I realized what a significant song [...]

Between Richard Berry, the man who wrote LOUIE LOUIE in 1955, and The Kingsmen, the band that transformed this song into the iconic garage rock anthem of 1963, there existed a great wealth of musical groups in the Pacific Northwest playing this song all over the region. Some of the earliest bands in the Pacific [...]

There will not be a LOUIE FEST this year. Here’s the official word from the LOUIE FEST MySpace page: Due to circumstances beyond our control, LouieFest ’08 is cancelled. Information will be available in the coming weeks regarding LouieFest ’09. We have some great sponsors lined up and this will be the biggest and best [...]

As I continue to do a lot of really tedious work trying to make damaged Hi8 video footage viewable, I thought I’d share a very rare color photo of Rockin’ Robin Roberts. Rockin’ Robin Roberts is a very important person in the legend of LOUIE LOUIE. His version of the song recorded with the Wailers, [...]

One of the most discussed topics in the rock music community is the organization known as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This week, there was an announcement about the latest inductees to this organization – Madonna, Leonard Cohen, John Mellencamp, The Ventures, and The Dave Clark Five. For the most part, I do [...]

The Wailers may not have reached their goal of 1,600+ guitars at the recent LouieFest, but it looks like they did reach a new world record for drummers. Getting 250+ drummers to perform LOUIE LOUIE is pretty darned cool, if you ask me… Check out this YouTube clip from Woodstick 2007: