Happy Birthday Jukebox!

Smokler on November 23, 2008

Wurlitzerbubbler

On this day in 1889, someone dropped a coin in the world’s very first jukebox. The pioneering music machine (then called a "nickel-in-the-slot player") resided at the Palais Royale Saloon at 303 Sutter St. in San Francisco. Its father, 44-year-old Louis T. Glass, ran the Pacific Phonograph Co. located down the street and had the crazy idea that a machine that played music on a wax cylinder for a nickel, a kind of public record player, might be fun. Amplifiers hadn’t been invented yet so four music fans would group around the device at once, listening on sets of earphones, similar to a language lab in a library. When Amplifiers  come along in 1927 they gave birth to the social curse of putting the wrong song on the jukebox and having the whole establishment look at you funny.Back then, the machine only played one song anyway. You had to change the cylinder every few days.

The name "jukebox" derives from "juke joint" as the device was first marketed as a way to hear music made popular by juke joints and not available on commercial radio: country, blues and jazz. And by bringing "race music" into the public space where it wasn’t really allowed, the jukebox effectively integrated popular music, making the heretofore scatological sounds of black and working class white America part of the American vernacular itself.

The jukebox also gave birth to what we now call "Top 40 radio." The number "40" came from the number of singles a jukebox had space for in the late 50s and early 60s. Radio programmers then created the Top 40 format when they noticed the same songs kept getting played on jukeboxes. Big surprise: The Wurlitzer Bubbler model (pictured above) is considered a dominating icon of early rock n’ roll era. The television show "Happy Days", a nostolgic look back that time, opened with shots of a Seeburg M100C jukebox.

Today jukeboxs are available in CD, mp3 and ipod ready forms, an amazing case of the chicks coming back home to roost. Remember the early days of the ipod when journalists called it "A jukebox in your pocket?" Remember the Musicmatch Jukebox software, the PC forerunner to iTunes and now, the backbone of the Yahoo Music service? How the phrase "celestial jukebox" symbolic for access to dream of all the world’s music available at anytime for a reasonable price. Symbolic of a music lover’s gateway to heaven as the device has been for the last century.

So happy birthday jukebox. We should thank you for a lot more than memories. Your humming presence in the corners of our public lives expanded what we thought music was and by that, what we thought our nation’s culture could be.

We owe you a lot more than a shout of recognition and a whirl around the room. It’s you who made us a simple promise filled with a country’s worth of possibilities: Spin a nickel and watch the world come alive.

(via The Writer’s Almanac).

 

We Journey Fans Never Stopped Believin’…

Smokler on November 18, 2008

So yesterday I heard that Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’" is the most downloaded catalog song on iTunes. Sources speculate that the song has received added boots from a) Being the victory song of the 2005 World Champion Chicago White Sox and b) the music choice for the closing scene of the series finale of "The Sopranos."

My opinion? Because it is perhaps the greatest singalong rock song in history, that’s why. Its 27 years old and still as joyous, fun and triumphant as ever. And have you ever heard a piano opening that wonderful. No, you haven’t. There isn’t one.

Journey gets a lot of hate. They’re silly, they’re lame, they’ve got bad hair, they beat up my girlfriend, whatever. You don’t like DSB, the fault lies with you. The proof is in the numbers, haters. I say suck it.

And now we sing.

Read Recently “The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard

Smokler on November 17, 2008

Thewritinglife
   

Title: The Writing Life

Author: Annie Dillard

Origins: I’m a huge admirer of Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and a huge fan of books about writing. I’d bought this one twice, in hardcover, at two separate book sales without realizing the duplication.

Synopsis: Really a collection of seven memoir essays/philosophical treatises on Dillard’s approach to her art. Like much of her work, the product of a well-read, thoughtful yet tightly held mind. Dillard does not  give specific advice or even open her own process up for examination. Instead she invites you to watch her think. Although she doesn’t say so, her thoughts are still being born when they alight on the page. Even then as I read and reread, I understood whom Annie Dillard was at the moment she wrote these words but the hallways ahead and behind were dark. It may be because Dillard is a private person and doesn’t give of herself in her prose. Or, more interestingly, it may be because she finds solutions less illuminating than process.

Verdict: Useful yet erratic. In seven chapters, Dillard’s got 3 classics, 2 forgetables, one hardly-there and a concluding story about the death of friend that goes nowhere and seems inserted by an overzealous junior editor at Dillard’s publishing house. But at a a modest 111 pages, 3 diamonds of seven are plenty. Chapters 1,3 and 5 if you’re curious. The others are bunting.

This is a book you’ll read with the pen if you enjoy underlining quotes, books to look up later and graceful turns of phrase you can later repeat to friends. All the Dillard I’ve read contains an average of three priceless sentences per page in prose thick and shimmering as a leopard’s pelt. Its luscious to read again then repeat out loud, even if no one’s there to listen.

Will you walk away with five tips on how to be a better writer? No. The Writing Life is Annie Dillard’s dispassionate look at what works for her, inspiring, but ultimately there as reference, not counsel, support group or best friend.