When the iPod in your pocket can accommodate an entire record collection, it might seem perverse to park a machine the size of a Transit cab* in your sitting room just to play a hundred singles, but anyone old enough to remember the 1950s should have a place in their heart, if not their home, for a jukebox. The classic machines \u2013 chrome and plastic fantasies, built by Wurlitzer, Seeburg and Rock-Ola, but conspicuously indebted to the drawing boards of Detroit \u2013 are core components of rock\u2019n\u2019roll\u2019s iconography.<\/p>\n
That keen-eyed chronicler of teen America, Chuck Berry, confirmed as much in \u2018School Days\u2019. On the dot of an enviably early three o\u2019clock finish, his students closed their books and hit the local juke joint, where they would \u2018drop the coin right into the slot\u2019 to hear \u2018something that\u2019s really hot.\u2019 The closest to a juke joint during my school days was a caf\u00e9 near the station whose teddy boy clientele rendered it out-of-bounds to grammar boys, so when four o\u2019clock rolled around I headed home to my Dansette, stacked the spindle with singles, lay on the floor with my head by the speaker, and willed my homework to do itself.<\/p>\n
Although I had no idea whether a dime was worth five or ten cents, I did know from Berry\u2019s \u2018Roll Over Beethoven\u2019 that as long as you had one, the music would never stop. But the rampant ambitions of post-rock\u2019n\u2019roll recording artists saw the two-and-a-half minute form supplanted by the LP\u2019s half-hour-plus, and by 1968 singles were outsold by albums. The styling of a 1950s jukebox seemed as pass\u00e9 as a razor-finned Cadillac, its clunky mechanism and monaural sound similarly anachronistic, its rack of 45s old hat.<\/p>\n
Some time in the early 1970s I picked up a 1957 Seeburg KD200 Select-O-Matic from a caf\u00e9 in the Old Kent Road for \u00a3100. A used car deaIer might have classified it as a good runner, but the selection mechanism worked, the valve amplifier and big speaker made the singles I still collected sound the way they were meant to, and guarding the speaker grill were those three tall chrome fins, their inset taillights glowing red.<\/p>\n
The jukebox in \u2018Roll Over Beethoven\u2019 blows a fuse; over the years, mine merely began to show its age. Like a senescent relative, my Seeburg\u2019s once silent functions became both audible and unpredictable. I played it less, and the passing of its 50th<\/sup> birthday without a single celebratory record being selected pricked my guilt. Eventually I googled \u2018jukebox\u2019 with the name of the man who had last fixed it twenty-five years before, and found Rob Edwards still in Thornton Heath and still repairing jukeboxes.<\/p>\n While my Seeburg underwent an overhaul that included a complete \u2018re-cap\u2019 \u2013 worn capacitors, Rob explained, being the primary cause of those intrusive noises – I washed the singles and swapped some with others I hadn\u2019t heard in years. I also downloaded software for printing period labels, which I shuffled and reshuffled into five piles, wondering where else Larry Williams would rub shoulders with J J Cale and Scritti Pollitti, and working myself into feverish excitement at the prospect of hearing the exhilarating opening instrumental bars of the O\u2019Jays\u2019 \u2018For The Love Of Money\u2019.<\/p>\n As it was, the first record that came to hand when Rob asked me to check no part had suffered in transit was \u2018Papa\u2019s Got A Brand New Bag\u2019, and what struck me as the stylus wound through the grooves was that Chuck Berry hadn\u2019t being fanciful when he\u2019d described listening to a jukebox as \u2018feeling the music from head to toe,\u2019 because its output is a visceral as well as aural experience. A jukebox doesn\u2019t do background music. Not only is conversation killed when it\u2019s cranked up, but the look, lights and moving parts are unavoidably eye-catching. And when did you put on a record and watch everyone in the room get up and dance? When the right 45 is playing on a jukebox, it happens every time.<\/p>\n *This is an illusion. A tape measure showed that it\u2019s not even as tall or wide as a Smart.<\/p>\n (Originally published in November 2008)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the iPod in your pocket can accommodate an entire record collection, it might seem perverse to park a machine the size of a Transit cab* in your sitting room just to play a hundred singles, but anyone old enough to remember the 1950s should have a place in their heart, if not their home, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions\/52"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}