Johnny & Louise, or why I love Wikipedia (& YouTube)!

Last night I was going through my music library on the computer, obsessively filling in missing metadata on the songs. We have about 3300 songs in our digital music library, some from iTunes, some from the Olde Days of Napster, and most from our own CDs, and I have always tried to make sure that the basic info (title, artist, album) is correct. But recently I decided that, in order to be able to sort songs on the iPod by year, I need to make sure that the release dates are correct.

Hundreds and hundreds of the song files had no date at all, so I sat down with my Billboard magazine reference books (all Hot 100 singles and all Top 200 albums and their tracks from 1956-1996) and looked up the songs with missing years. I also changed anthology and collection years; for example, if I ripped "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" off REM's greatst hits album In Time, from 2003, I changed the date of the song file to 1994, which is when the song first appeared on their album Monster.

So last night, I was finally getting to the last hundred or so songs with missing data, and I went to look up the years of two songs by power pop band Shoes. I could only fine one of the songs in my books, so I thought, maybe Wikipedia. Sure enough, under the "disambiguation" area of the entry on "shoes" was a page for Shoes. But even more interestingly, there was also a page on a song called "Shoes" by the singer Reperata. I love this little-known song, which got as high as #92 on Billboard in 1975. In Columbus, however, it got a fair amount of airplay, I bought the single, and it's remained one of my favorite "unknown" pop hits.

It's about the wedding of Johnny and Louise, with people throwing rice, a bouzouki band playing, and guests dancing while Johnny & Louise sneak off and have marital sex. But for a narrative song whose meaning is all on the surface, it's got a kind of mysterious sound, with minor chords, a swirling choir break, and what I assume is an actual bouzouki playing.

Now for the YouTube part of this post. Though I have the song on my computer, I found a video on YouTube for it. It's actually one of a number of odd little videos which feature someone playing an old 45 on a turntable. The song plays and all we see is the turntable turning. It's not much as far as a video experience, but it does give us a chance to hear old songs which never had videos shot for them. I post it below, but I caution you that the audio is not very good. It seems to be being played off of an album, but it's speeded up, giving Reparta's distinctly low voice an almost "Alvin and the Chipmunks" tone. But it will give you some idea of the interesting ambience of the song. Enjoy, and thank Apollo, god of music and arts, for Wikipedia and YouTube.