If Jack Ely had stood closer to the microphone on the morning of April 6, 1963, when he entered a Portland studio to record a version of the song “Louie Louie,” then the history of popular music would have been different. Ely, a former vocalist of the Portland garage-rock band the Kingsmen, passed away at his home in Oregon last week. He was seventy-one years old. For five years, from 1959 to 1963, Ely sang with the Kingsmen, a group he founded with a childhood friend. The Kingsmen’s most famous recording is “Louie Louie,” a song written by Richard Berry and first recorded by Berry and his band, the Pharaohs, in 1957.

On that April day in 1963, the only microphone available to Ely was located several feet above him, hanging from the ceiling. Ely was wearing dental braces, and his bandmates, who were gathered around Ely in a circle, played their instruments loudly. The result was an incomprehensible vocal that, in time, would make Ely the most celebrated interpreter of a song which is close to being pop Esperanto. “Louie Louie” has nonetheless made brethren out of musicians as various as Black Flag, the Beach Boys, and Barry White. A, D, E minor, runs the chord progression. Easy. As for the lyrics, it doesn’t matter how you sing them, or even really what you sing, though you might consider beginning with the words “Louie Louie / Oh no / Me gotta go.” Really, though, the floor is yours. Sing your grocery list. Pull random words from a hat. “Blue eye, blue eye / Oh no / A wig on a cone,” as one version on YouTube has it.

The legend of the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” has been told almost as many times as the song itself has been covered. (There’s no accurate count for either, but both must number in the thousands.) First released in May of 1963, and then re-released that October, the Kingsmen’s version climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart. The song’s popularity among a new generation of rock-and-roll teen-agers brought it to the attention of some concerned citizens. One of them, the father of a teen-age girl, wrote to Robert Kennedy, who was then the Attorney General, to complain about the song’s possible obscenity, prompting an F.B.I. investigation. “This land of ours is headed for an extreme state of moral degradation,” the incensed parent wrote to Kennedy. (Remember this the next time someone tries reminiscing to you about the good old days before pop music was full of sex and vulgarities.)

Several possible versions of the song’s lyrics, included with the F.B.I.’s report, do make for a rather startling read. In the second verse, for instance, Ely might sing, “At night at ten / I lay her again / Fuck you girl, oh / All the way.” Or perhaps his words are more onanistic: “Every night and day / I play with my thing / Fuck your girl / All kinds of ways.” The F.B.I. investigation dragged on through 1965, with each laboratory examination of the record deemed inconclusive: no one could determine what Ely was singing, so the record couldn’t be declared obscene. Ben F. Waple, the secretary of the Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.), wrote to Wand Records, which was responsible for the October, 1963, pressing of the record, to ask “whether, even though unobjectionable lyrics were used in recording the song, there was improper motivation on the part of the singers … in making the recorded lyrics so unintelligible as to give rise to reports that they were obscene.”

Ely’s performance was a result of accident rather than design. Though the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” has gone down in pop history as one of the medium’s more endearing (and enduring) moments of amateurism, the group’s members were not inexperienced musicians. Ely studied classical piano as a child, and joined a vaudeville group called the Young Oregonians when he was eleven years old. The group performed cover versions of Elvis Presley songs, to which Ely contributed guitar and vocals. It was through vaudeville that Ely met a young drummer named Lynn Easton, with whom he would form the Kingsmen. The Kingsmen learned “Louie Louie” not directly from Richard Berry’s original but from another cover version by the Wailers, whose recording of the song was released in 1961. It was this version, which he heard played on local jukeboxes around Portland, that Ely brought to the band’s rehearsal room.

It was surely a reflection of the era’s unspoken desires that so many listeners, including those at the F.C.C., were eager to hear obscenities or “improper motivation” in the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie.” The song was kept from the Billboard top spot in late 1963 by “Dominique,” a piping acoustic ditty about the good deeds of Saint Dominic, performed in French by Jeanne Deckers (otherwise known as The Singing Nun), a member of the Dominican Order. The Beatles were only months away from their first Billboard No. 1 hit, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Never mind if the obscenities were imagined—“Louie Louie” promised its listeners stronger stuff. As a member of the Flint Junior Woman’s Club argued, with admirable logic, in a 1965 letter to J. Edgar Hoover, it hardly mattered what the actual lyrics were when “every teenager in the country ‘heard’ the obscene not the copywritten [sic] lyric.”

The longevity of “Louie Louie” as a sordid and subversive rock-and-roll anthem could hardly have been predicted by its original author, Richard Berry, who wrote his song’s lyrics in a fake Jamaican patois, in an attempt to capitalize on the American calypso craze of the mid-fifties. (Harry Belafonte’s album “Calypso” reached the top of the charts in 1956, the year before Berry recorded “Louie Louie.”)

The song’s origins go back further still. Berry lifted his iconic riff straight from “El Loco Cha Cha,” a song by the Cuban-American bandleader René Touzet. In Touzet’s arrangement the riff was played on piano, complemented by a jaunty brass section. In Berry and the Pharaoh’s recording of “Louie Louie,” the riff was sung in the manner of doo-wop. The mixed and uncertain origins of “Louie Louie” (even “El Loco Cha Cha” was based, in turn, on another Cuban tune) have helped to make the song infinitely renewable. For what it’s worth, my favorite version is the 1972 recording by the Jamaican group Toots and the Maytals. Though their arrangement dispenses with the stomping garage-rock rhythm that made the Kingsmen’s version so influential, the lead singer, Frederick (Toots) Hibbert, rivals, even exceeds, Jack Ely for indecipherability, and for sheer verve.

Ely never recorded another hit with the Kingsmen—he left the group while “Louie Louie” was still on the charts, in late 1963, after a dispute with Lynn Easton. It was Easton who was responsible for the sole actual obscenity on the Kingsmen’s recording, one which the F.B.I. never picked up upon. The song was recorded in a single live take. Fifty-six seconds in, Easton drops his drumstick. “Fuck!” he yells. You can hear it, if you listen hard enough.