When it came to email, Thursday was a day that I was absolutely drenched with attention in the aftermath of the Michigan high school marching band story. In case you missed this news item, here’s what happened:<\/p>\n
A pop culture controversy that has simmered for decades came to a head when a middle school marching band was told not to perform “Louie Louie.”<\/p>\n Benton Harbor Superintendent Paula Dawning cited the song’s allegedly raunchy lyrics in ordering the McCord Middle School band not to perform it in Saturday’s Grand Floral Parade, held as part of the Blossomtime Festival.<\/p>\n In a letter sent home with McCord students, Dawning said “Louie Louie” was not appropriate for Benton Harbor students to play while representing the district even though the marching band wasn’t going to sing it.<\/em><\/p>\n This is the only time I’ve ever heard of anyone ever objecting to the lyrics of an instrumental<\/strong> rendition of this song. Quite bizarre.<\/p>\n On Thursday, MSNBC contacted me to appear on the ‘Connected Coast to Coast’ TV show hosted by Ron Reagan and Monica Crowley to discuss this controversial song. While it might been interesting to appear on this show, via satellite at my local news station, I thought that Jack Ely should be their number one choice for this roundtable discussion. After all, who better to discuss this controversy than the original singer of the iconic rendition that inspired countless garage bands? Jack left the Kingsmen before it ever became famous, so he missed out on a lot of the attention when this thing climbed the charts. I got the MSNBC people in touch with Jack, who’s living out in Oregon, and he did a phone interview. MSNBC didn’t need two LOUIE LOUIE experts on their show, and I wasn’t all that anxious to race over to a television station after spending three very long days at the INPUT 2005 documentary conference in San Francisco. Did we really need to see the director of the still-unfinished documentary on the TV screen?<\/p>\n Besides…. all my favorite shirts were in the laundry basket…..<\/p>\n You can read all the various reports of this LOUIE LOUIE story if you Google “Louie Louie” under a news search. The most popular link I received was the AP story from the Yahoo site: There’s a lot of LOUIE info to swim through, and I’d like to thank all of my friends out in cyberspace for their input, with a special nod to Andy Martello in Chicago, who’s got his own LOUIE website as part of his
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\nhttp:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20050505\/ap_on_fe_st\/no_louie_louie
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\nTales from AndyLand blog.<\/a><\/p>\n