"And as far as polkas, they are a much maligned musical taste."
Posted on 07/11/2020 7:19:53 AM PDT by SamAdams76
I was driving with a younger relative this morning and had on the Sirius/XM 70's station in which Casey Kasem was counting down the Top 40 from the week of 7/12/75.
One of the songs in the countdown was "Please Mr. Please" by Olivia Newton-John in which she urges a fellow bar-fly not to play a certain song on the bar-room jukebox as it reminded her of an old love.
So as she repeatedly sings the verse "Please, Mr., please, don't play B-17", my young relative eventually pipes up to ask me what she means by "B-17". Is it the name of a song that was popular back then?
I then explained that there used to be a contraption called a jukebox that had several stacks of records in them that were usually placed in bars and casual restaurants at the time in which people could drop in a quarter and play three songs of their choice. Each song was numbered accordingly to order of the stack that it was placed in. So "B-17" would be the 17th record in the second stack. So if that record was selected, it would be mechanically pulled out of the stack and dropped into the queue (of records to be played).
It was actually a marvelous display of technology for the times. There was something magical about dropping a quarter, selecting your song and then listening to them play for the entire crowd.
Of course, all of that seems absolutely primitive to the younger generations, who have immediate access to millions of songs on their phone devices.
"And as far as polkas, they are a much maligned musical taste."
Put a quarter in the juke
Boogie til you puke
What do you mean “re-assemble?” Mine was never disassembled. No disassemble, no disassemble!
And when one of the ears broke off you had to jam a clothes hanger in there and wrap it with tin foil.
Yes....but, you usually had to WAIT for your selected song to queue up!
I saw one in action--fighting a brush fire in Whittier, Calif. in 1967.
Wow....what year/decade was that?
What amazes me is the diners where there with the remote stations with speakers and individual booths. Five tables could request 4 songs lets say. Deposit the money for the 20 choices. The machine would play them in the order they were in the rack. My first song from a jukebox was Hey Jude. Something like that would get maybe 5 people requesting from the 20 count. The song only got played once, so high profit song it was.
He got stopped--by a girl! He also got conquered by his duchess.
Wonder what happens with The Shat plays one of those booth Juke Boxes? /TZ
I'm sure bars sold a lot of extra drinks that way.
"Wait, we can't leave yet. My songs haven't played yet. I put a whole quarter in that machine and I'm going to stay here until I hear them darnit!"
"Bartender, set us up another round."
Foreigner - Juke Box Hero
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_TOsFvnmeQ
I remember going to a diner, as a small kid, with the table top, page flipping juke box stations.
I bet they did sell a lot of extra drinks, that way.
We had a juke box at a bbq restaurant that we’d go to. Dad would give us a handful of quarters and off we’d go.
Lol. I was amused at the episode that I saw a few years ago where they had a competition over their Green Stamps (or equivalent) and what to buy.
The girls wanted a sewing machine, and I forget what the boys wanted. But in the end, the parents traded them in for a color TV. Greg Brady shouted at the end: "A TV set! A COLOR TV set!"
Or 2019. I was born when MiGs and Sabres were dogfighting over Pyongyang and in terms of current events, 2020 is the worst year of my lifetime.
Circa 1973, fall, I got with and bought probably 1000 45’s from a jukebox firm in Norwich, CT. The real hot ones were the ones that were played out and sort of distorted now. Groove damage was common. I heard once that a vinyl groove would recover from stylus damage if played no more often than once every 24 hours. They all had the paper tabs for the display in the sleeves. Showed A and B side of every single. Some were specially made for jukebox play after a while.
Bingo!
The bigger question, and much more difficult; what was the song on button B-17 ?-—if there was one intended to be known ? Movie afficianados may know.
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