When the Kingsmen covered "Louie Louie" it was peppered with errors, a curse word, and poor sound. It was not great and Herb Alpert said it was out of tune.

It wasn't even the best version recorded that month in the studio they laid it down on. You could barely hear what the teen singer was saying. And the band broke up during the 131-week run that it was on the charts.

But as rock n' roll would have it, the Kingsmen's version of Richard Berry's sea shanty song about a sailor who missed his boo would outsell all of the other versions of "Louie Louie," which is a feat since the tune has been recorded over 2,000 times.

The Kingsmen were a band of teenagers - Don Gallucci (keys), Jack Ely (vocals), Lynn Easton (drums), Mike Mitchell (guitar), Bob Nordby (bass) - in a part of Oregon in the early '60s that was entranced by the song.

When the group and a rival local band, Paul Revere and the Raiders, noticed how often their peers would play Rockin Robin's version of "Louie Louie" on the jukebox, they quickly recorded it.

The Kingsmen were aided by a local radio DJ at KISN who owned a teen dance club to cut the single on April 6. It cost them $50 and they did it in one take. Clearly.

A week later, in the same studio, using the same engineer, Paul Revere and the Raiders recorded a proper version, thanks to the backing of a different KISN DJ.

For months neither version made any headway nationally, even in October when The Kingsmen's version was re-released by a larger label.

But then two things that would kill the momentum in most scenarios occured. First a DJ in Boston named it The Worst Record of the Week which got kids to pay attention to it like never before, and it became a favorite there and soon everywhere.

Then, due to rumor and a whisper campaign that made it to the FBI, the song was accused of being indecent and immoral.

What kid doesn't want an immoral record with a party beat and a seven-minute runtime to dance to? The single flew off the shelves.

The Kingsmen's version was bad, in part, because Ely had blown his voice out the night before the recording from singing it for 90-minutes straight at crazy party.

The sound was poor because the studio only had three mics one for the drums, one for the guitar, and one high above it all for the recording of the room as a while which is why one of the most famous rock songs of all time sounds like it captured on a potato in a prison cell.

Because of that the imagination of the kids dancing to it went wild and the yearnings of the protagonist in "Louie Louie" could mean whatever they dreamt up.

According to the 119-page FBI file, parents and critics had an extremely dark imagination as their versions of the lyrics, which they had typed up and sent in to authorities were pornographic and crude.

After a two year investigation, which included slowing the 45 RPM speed of the single down to 16 RPM, the FBI judged that the lyrics were “unintelligible at any speed.”

The entire time the record was being talked about, written about, gossiped about and purchased. Yet it never could get past that Singing Nun, despite the fact she had zero buzz. How?

Conspiracy theorists suggest the suits at Billboard saw it spend two weeks as #1 on Cash Box but they didn't want to anoint an indecent song the top on their chart. So they let the Nun have her glory for much longer than she deserved.

But back to the FBI. Despite spending all that time, money, and effort looking for something indecent. A minute into the recording the Easton smacks his drumsticks and drops an f-bomb.

Although that word was not in the place in the song some of the complainants claimed it was, but there it was. And there it remains until this day.

So where are the Kingsmen today?

They are still in Portland where in October on the 60th anniversary of the re-release of the single on Wand Records, they kicked off a 24-hour Louie Louie marathon where 70 bands played the song for an entire day. There was a Tuvan throat singer, a marching band, and a bagpiper among the throngs of musicians.

“We have a group of mascots and furries who will be doing a cover of their own rendition of ‘Louie Louie,’” organizer Luke Strahota said before the marathon began. “We’ve got a band called Viral Tyrant doing a half-hour stoner doom metal version of ‘Louie Louie.’"

Black Flag is taking the next two weeks off for the holidays, but will be back on the road December 29 in San Diego on a month long tour of the west. Then they hit the midwest in March. Tickets are available on their website.