Rockin' Robin Roberts with the Fabulous Wailers - Louie Louie b/w Rosalie (1961) | Tacoma Garage

Everybody knows the Kingsmen's Louie Louie. This is the record they copied. Etiquette ET 45-0290. The recording is 1961, the pressing is 1985, and the labels say both: side one reads copyright 1961 Etiquette Records, side two reads copyright 1985 Etiquette Productions. The original 1961 single was Etiquette ET-1 with Mary Ann on the back. This one swaps in Rosalie, a Robin Roberts song taken from the Wailers album At The Castle, where it rates as the second strongest track on the record. Richard Berry wrote Louie Louie in Los Angeles in 1957. Robin Roberts bought Berry's single, made the Fabulous Wailers learn it, and they cut it in the summer of 1960 in Joe Boles's basement studio on Admiral Way in West Seattle. The Wailers were a Tacoma band locked into a contract that would not let them release anything new, so Roberts, Kent Morrill and Buck Ormsby sat in a Tacoma restaurant and started their own label. Etiquette Records, and this was its first release. Ormsby was in a studio when he realized a rival band was cutting the same song, ran out with a copy of the Wailers version that did not even have a label on it yet, and took it straight to KJR radio. It went to number one across the region in 1961 and again in 1962. In April 1963 the Kingsmen and Paul Revere and the Raiders each recorded Louie Louie at the same studio in Portland, days apart, both working from this arrangement rather than Richard Berry's. Etiquette went on to sign the Sonics. Robin Roberts, born Lawrence Fewell Roberts II, died in a head-on collision near San Francisco in December 1967. He was twenty seven. The flip side comes off an album the Wailers recorded live at the Spanish Castle, the dance hall on Highway 99 halfway between Seattle and Tacoma, deliberately built on county land so neither city could police it. Jimi Hendrix went there as a teenager and later wrote Spanish Castle Magic about it. It was bulldozed in 1968. 0:00 Louie Louie 2:44 The flip 3:01 Rosalie 🎧 Rare 45rpm Vinyl Rips - promo singles and obscure 7-inches: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj0yF7-9YQ9pZAodT9-v-Lehtz7BPAlxi 🎧 Full Vinyl Rips - rare psych and rock LPs: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj0yF7-9YQ9pEOi1yCUyAZikNmWVdz8Hn 🔴 Live Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6:30am PT, one record from my collection: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj0yF7-9YQ9qEwJJg-w9RXM0MsbSk5H3F 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vinyl_piper/ I sell my doubles and extras here: https://vinylpipershop.com/ Written in Los Angeles in 1957. Recorded by a Tacoma band in a Seattle basement in 1960. Released on their own Tacoma label in 1961. Copied by two Portland bands in 1963 and sent around the world. Four cities, six years. #FabulousWailers #LouieLouie #NorthwestGarage #45RPM #VinylCollector