When I came into the coin machine business as a cub reporter for Cash Box magazine in 1964, there was a sort of symbiotic relationship between the recording industry and the jukebox business. For example, the New York operator association back then (Music Operators of New York) used to have an annual weekend “convention” every summer up at some Catskill Mountains resort, during which some representatives of the record labels would join us. The idea was for them to mingle with the Tartaglias and the Miniacis and try to sell some records. Record companies back then used to send free talent to the annual fall MOA show in Chicago to appear on stage at the concluding banquet. RCA and some other labels would also host hospitality suites in the show hotels for operators to enjoy.
I personally remember walking Diana Ross and her Supremes back to their hotel after MOA’s 1964 banquet show. And over my early years in this business, I’ve had the pleasure of bringing artists like Tammy Wynette and Bobby Goldsboro down to New York’s “coin machine row” (Tenth Avenue) and snapping front cover photos of them hugging new jukebox models for Cash Box. I very fondly remember introducing Tammy to New York distribution legend Al Simon when we did a Rock-Ola shoot and Al whispering to me “did she bring some albums we can give to the kids?” Talk about two worlds colliding . . . Tammy Wynette in her little cowgirl suit and Southern drawl with Al Simon with his Eastern European Brooklyn accent! Only in America.
I met a lot of recording artists over my time in the trade, but since digital music came along, hardly any over the past decades. My favorite memory had nothing to do with magazine affiliation: I belonged to a band called the Castle Kings which was signed to Atlantic Records. My lead guitar player was a Bronx dude named Frank Tinelli who knew a guy named Frank Miniaci who put jukeboxes out. Frankie and I brought a free box of our first single (Loch Lomand) to a place called Paramount Music in the East Bronx where we met Mr. Miniaci and got him to stick the records out on his route. As luck would have it, one of the locations turned out to be a bar called (believe it) Joe and Joe’s where we hung out. We played the backside off that record and sent Miniaci offspring through college with the quarters we shoved into that Seeburg box.
I’m reminiscing here because our former editor Steve White, now an attorney working from Portland, Oregon, sent down a link to a biography of Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic Records’ patriarch and the man who “discovered” my Castle Kings singing on the sidewalk outside his 57th Street office building in Manhattan. Ahmet signed my group to sing the same song with more acceptable lyrics written by him and his associate producer, Phil Spector. The record went nowhere, but the memory is in stone. The music business may have changed but the song is never-ending from that music vending machine we all call the jukebox.