“I followed the sound of a jukebox coming from up the levee…” A lyric from the song “Somewhere Down The Crazy River” composed by Robbie Robertson. I’ve always liked the song for the atmosphere that it creates. Who hasn’t been tempted to enter an establishment because of the cacophony of sounds and gaudy lights of a jukebox?
Elvisrecords were a staple in the old jukes. So, too, were Carl Perkins, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and so many others. I’m sure you remember your “song” ready to be played every time you and your date wanted to dance.
When I played drums in a band, a few years before I got into radio, the guys would take their earnings from a dance and head to a little restaurant on the street where I grew up. There we would have something to eat and we would also feed coins into the jukebox in our booth. We’d talk over the songs we played and dream about the day when one of our original songs might get a play on the radio and in a jukebox.
In one of the most popular tv series, one that paid tribute to an earlier time, Ritchie and the “Fonz” would end up at the diner. It was usually left up to the “Fonz” to bang the jukebox–just so–to get a song for free. (I think he used his feet to kick the machine in one special spot to get the music to play.) The series was, of course, Happy Days. That 70’s Show was also a tribute to a time when jukeboxes were starting to finally wind down.
Now we go into nightclubs and listen to music played by a dj who is sometimes even more popular than the songs he’s spinning on his turntables. In sports bars we have other entertainment to fill the background. In these mega-sports bars it’s mostly a visual medium with large-screened tvs playing whatever sporting event that happens to be on cable or satellite. You can even play trivia along with thousands of other people all over the continent using a portable device that’s brought to your booth. Again, you watch the results on a large-screened tv.
Occasionally you will find a retro-themed restaurant that has those small jukeboxes on the wall in each booth. You can still get “three plays for a quarter” in the one that’s close to where I live. If you don’t like the music coming out of the small speakers you can put your quarter in the slot, make your selection, and in time your favorite songs will play. In fact, most of the songs in this one restaurant are all the old classics we used to listen to when we fed the machines our coins. It’s not yet a lost art.. You just have to look for them if you’re nostalgic for the sound of a jukebox.
The jukeboxes that really bring back the memories are not only the ones on the wall of a malt shop booth. The one I’m also remembering in this blog took up major floor space in some corner of a dimly lit establishment, like a honky-tonk, playing the hits and lighting up the dancers who swayed in front of it. You might get nostalgic every time you see a movie that features a scene in a dingy bar off to the side of some lost highway. The star might walk up to the machine in a dark corner, look over the selections, drop some coins into the slot and begin to move to the music pounding out of the speakers. Lucy Katlin in the column Elements of Style in the October 1987 issue of GQ magazine, made this telling observation about the jukebox itself: “Confidants in love-laced intrigues, grand maestros of barroom bacchanalia, stolid consolation to the lost and lonely, …”
As late as the 1980s, it was estimated that in the U. S. there were no more than 80,000 light-ups. You might think that a lot, but consider this. In the era when jukeboxes were at their peak, there were at any given time close to a half a million in operation. This was according to Charles R. Cross in an article in the December 1982 issue of Esquire magazine.
It used to be that jukebox operators did not have to worry about performance rights. Lucy Katlin wrote, “For years jukebox operators were exempt from performance royalties. But with an overhauled copyright law in 1976 came an $8 dollar annual fee on every coin-op phonograph.” At the time of this writing it had jumped to $63. As Lucy Katlinwent on to write, “Throw in the initial investment of about $2,500 dollars (for a box that can return about $50 dollars a week) and you’ve got yourself a mighty expensive barroom doodad. For many proprietors, jukes were just more trouble than they were worth.” And you can now understand why you don’t find too many of them operating, except in the basement rec room of a home where the owner has lovingly restored a model he or she has found either in an antique shop, or tossed unceremoniously on a junk-heap somewhere. One person’s junk is another’s treasure…
Today you can buy a cd jukebox for your den or rec room. You can program it to play onlyyour favourites, but something might still be missing–probably a little of the magic we remember. Do a search on the internet and you might see a little of that magic in articles and photos of the big jukeboxes we remember.
Some radio networks in the U. S. use computer-controlled cd jukeboxes.
In some out of the way places in the United States and here in Canada you’re more than likely to stumble upon one still in operation. If you did a lot of traveling in the past, you might be nostalgic for those old roadside diners you frequented for meals. These were fixtures on every major roadway a long time before there were the fast food restaurants of today. You might be remembering counters covered in formica, coffee that was strong enough to keep you awake on your drive, and booths along the large picture window where you could watch the traffic on the highway while listening to your songs on the jukebox. It seemed the jukebox was just as much of a fixture as the salt and pepper shakers and the napkin dispensers.
Automobile magazine recently reported that most of the diners that did well between the 1940s and the 1960s are either boarded up or have disappeared entirely to make room for the newer restaurant chains. Because baby boomers are such a nostalgic bunch, some companies have made a business of fabricating replicas of the classic diners we all remember. I would imagine that, given the choice, some people might choose to grab a burger at one of these replicas.
Maybe some day you’ll be nostalgic for your Walkman or your cd player, a favorite boom-box, an i-Pod or a cellphone that you can download your favorite tunes on. It’s the same feeling some people have for the old jukebox they remember on their dates. That could be part of the reason why we like putting coins in “one-armed bandits” in casinos. Old habits die hard.. The music we expect to hear is the ringing of the bells in the slot machine as the coins fill the tray below. The jukebox was a much better bet. At least you got something for your money.
The date was November 23rd, 1888, that the first jukebox was installed in an establishment in San Francisco. One can only imagine how archaic that beast must have been. It might have been nothing more than a penny to listen to a scratchy disk through the ear-piece of an old wind-up phonograph that must have seemed the latest in technology at the time.
***
Don Jackson
I love that song too. Somewhere down the crazy river
- Penny LI still try and make a point of having (my) time from 9.00pm to11.00pm as that is my free time. I am officially (old)now,but I look after my wife and grandkids. but I will not give up my Sunday to Friday time with CHFI 98.1 for love nor money. By the way most Donut Diners still have their Wherlitzers. Around Niagara anyway.
- Victor Gray