2009 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Christopher Doll

Christopher Doll is an Assistant Professor in the Music Department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He specializes in music since 1900, and is currently writing a book provisionally entitled Rock Harmony Revealed.Panel(s):
Groovekeepers
Friday, April 17, 2009, 9:00 - 10:45Abstract:

"(Dis)satisfaction as Song: Blues, Jazz, Rock, and the Dawn of the Sexual Chord Progression"
In 1957, rocker Richard Berry recorded his then-new song "Louie Louie." At the time, no one could have predicted the impact this track, upon being covered by the drunk-sounding Kingsmen in 1963, would have on the American and British music scenes. (Frank Zappa, late in his life, went as far as to call "Louie Louie" an "Archetypal American Musical Icon.") The song itself is a curious combination of pidgin-English lyrics derived from Chuck Berry's "Havana Moon" with an instrumental riff forged from bits of both Afro-Cuban jazz (the opening chords of René Touzet's "El Loco Cha Cha") and African-American blues (a guitar hook dating back at least to 1928). The Kingsmen's slurred words gave rise to "Louie Louie"'s mythical hypersexual aura, while Richard Berry's riff went on to define a whole new musical structure for rock'n'roll—the four-chord vamp.

But the most fascinating aspect of the "Louie" legacy is the fact that the four-chord vamp, post-"Louie," has retained its coital associations. Myriad songs after 1963, including the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," Neil Diamond's "Cherry Cherry," and the Romantic's "What I Like about You," employ a "Louie"-like riff to convey their hedonistic subject matters. The four-chord vamp has thus become a kind of sonic sign for sexual (dis)satisfaction. In this paper, I will offer a historical and hermeneutical map of this sexual chord progression, tracing its origins and its startling rise (pun intended) to commercial prominence.