Here’s a great question for the Family Feud TV show: “Which object, not a musical instrument, would you associate with the history of rock ’n roll music?” There’s an excellent chance the most common answer would be the jukebox. I would vote for that, anyway.
Well, on a recent “bucket list” cruise on the Great Lakes, we stopped in Cleveland on Lake Erie and visited the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Guess what? There’s not a jukebox (nor a photo of one on its busy walls) in that entire museum. I asked one of the guides about this and learned they haven’t had a music box in the place in around 14 years. So, instead of playing Rock Around the Clock or Good Golly, Miss Molly on something like a Wurlitzer round-top bubbler, I punched out a couple of rounds on Stern’s Foo Fighters pin that’s on display (and free play) on the building’s top floor (see pic).
The whole Hall of Fame is sort of gritty, loud (naturally enough) and crowded (at least when I was there). My biggest thrill was seeing its primary exhibit devoted to Atlantic Records’ late patriarch Ahmet Ertegun, the man who “discovered” my band the Castle Kings back on 57th Street in NYC in the early ’60s. Ahmet co-founded the HOF, so it was only fitting to see him up there next to Mick Jagger smiling down at the kids and their parents. Happy days for me and my buds in Ahmet’s studio, along with memories that still delight. Too bad we didn’t have a whole lot of talent nor record sales!
Back in my early days in coin-op, the industry was often called “the jukebox business.” Later of course, that turned into “the video game business” and sometimes the “arcade industry.” I met some nice folks during that Great Lakes cruise who, as often happens, asked the perennial question? “Do you still work?” Said I: “Yeah, I make the magazine for the jukebox and games business.” Reactions to this swung wildly from “That must be great fun” to “Really?” I usually explain that there’s at least one publication for every industry and I publish the one for this business. Questions followed, and some others were just as surprised as I that no jukeboxes were at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This unearthed lots of historical memories for the older folks, usually about how they loved to dance to the machines when they were teenagers.
Truth is, we don’t need a machine at a Cleveland museum to know the jukebox’s place in Americana. And, we have our own hall of fame with the Wurlitzer 1015, with or without bubbles, already inducted into its first go-round. There are fewer jukeboxes actually standing on location floors these days with more hanging from the walls sending out digital music than from 45rpm discs. Speaking with Kenny Rogers once, I asked him if the passage away from vinyl records bothered him, and he said not at all, that he liked any medium that played his music. And music is the product after all and it’s been nice to see it delivered from such pretty machines that have come from coin-op these many, many years. BTW: I also learned that Neil Sedaka (who starred on the cover of RePlay’s second issue back in 1975) isn’t featured in the Rock & Roll museum either. Shame, shame, shame!