Happy Birthday Jukebox!

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).

 

LShana Tova!

That means Happy New Year in Jewish. Which also means, I'm off duty today. Back tomorrow.

Start (Conference) of Something New: Oh and my birthday

I love starting new things, the initial rush of an idea that takes over your world and won't go away. It's a little like falling in love. Which is odd because I'm usually a bit more cautious in love than I am in dreaming.  But I hope I've gotten over that a little bit too.

Point is: Follow-through is a weaker part of my character where I'm actively seeking improvement. Which is way today I'm attending the Start Conference put on my my friends Jeff Veen and Bryan Mason. TSC is about starting your own business, an idea that's intrigued me, even before Booktour.com. I know all about getting an idea and trying to bring it to life. That's the part I'm good at. Giving it legs and letting it walk? I could be better.

That's what I'm hoping to learn today, this wonderful day, my birthday, the beginning of my 35th year. I feel better, fuller, happier to be alive today than I did at 25, 15, maybe ever.

"Anna-Louise wake up," I say. "Wake up. The world is alive."  -Shampoo Planet

Americana after the 4th of July :

Still in that 4th of July spirit as I will be until roughly, Halloween? Allow me to recommend a gift for yourself or the favorite cheeseball in your life from Etsy.com Americana Primitive category which has enough rustic stars & stripes and red-on-white-on-blue to make Betsy Ross go goth.

I'm particularly fond of this Miss Liberty and Uncle Sam sculpture:

As well as these more practical kitchen cannisters.

Which yes, look like something where your grandmother might have hidden away gingersnaps. Not mine, mind you, who was a Detroit Jewish socialite and believed everything in the home should be made of deep wood and thick enough to hold a truck in place on a hill.

It's a style choice for me then, without root. I love the look of old Americana. I didn't grow up with it don't relate to it (other than as a proud American) and don't mind that most of these Etsy choices are made by ordinary working craftsmen, artists and collectors, not disadvantaged/homeless/veterans/talks to Jesus/born 200 years ago artists who seem to be the litmus test for much of what we consider "folk" and "primitive art" these days. Nope these are just folks working in the tradition so weirdos like me can celebrate the 4th of July all year long.   

Thoughts for the 4th of July:

Let us remember this in November...

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

--June Jordan

Pre-4th of July Celebration, Courtesy of the Muppets:

I would watch Sam the Eagle peeling an orange. He's that great (via Laughing Squid)

Day of Attonement:

Going under for Yom Kippur. Easy fast everyone!

July 14th...

Happy Bastille Day!

For the Miracles:

"For the miracles,
For the salvation,
and for the triumphant victories which You performed for our forefathers in those days,
at this time."

Happy Channukah everyone!

On Holiday...

After a morning that resembles getting struck by a meteroite, I have departed for the Thanksgiving holiday. Please enjoy yourselves and your time with family, friends and loved ones.

In keeping with my promise for National Blog Posting Month, I'll continue to post once a day. But no promises that'll be anything great.

See ya Monday, everyone!