Some younger people don't get the reference to "Don't Play B-17" in that Olivia Newton-John song.

[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.

[GnuThere]

Definitely some of the excitement was anticipatory - waiting for “your” song.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

What do you mean “re-assemble?”

Sold all my LPs right before I went off to college - my parents made it clear they had plans for my room, and storing my junk wasn't among them lol. Anyway, CDs had just started coming out around then.

But I'm having fun hunting down copies of my old LPs - a lot of the time, old records in dollar bins sound better than the new, remastered LPs that are being made of old music, but the hunt is half the fun.

[elcid1970]

Kind of like the mystery behind “Miss American Pie” lyrics.

[Tunehead54]

I wonder if B17 was "Your cheating heart" - Hank Williams? ;-)

Actually the lyrics suggest it was their shared favorite song.

In the corner of the bar there stands a jukebox
With the best of country music, old and new
You can hear your five selections for a quarter
And somebody else's songs when yours are through

I got good Kentucky whiskey on the counter
And my friends around to help me ease the pain
'Til some button-pushing cowboy plays that love song
And here I am just missing you again

Please, Mr., please, don't play B-17
It was our song, it was his song, but it's over
Please, Mr., please, if you know what I mean
I don't ever wanna hear that song again

If I had a dime for every time I held you
Though you're far away, you've been so close to me
I could swear I'd be the richest girl in Nashville
Maybe even in the state of Tennessee

[GnuThere]

We didn’t have a crank phone, but a party line.
There was a nosy old lady who would listen in.
I still remember my mom yelling, “JEWEL, GET OFF THE PHONE!!”

[Crolis]

I remember the AM radio in the 1975 Plymouth Van we had. I can still hear and feel in my mind the ka-chunk when you pressed a memory button and it mechanically moved the tuner to the pre-set frequency.

I also remember the silver floor button to the left of the brake pedal to switch on the high beams.

[Albion Wilde]

I recently said, “Pardon my boardinghouse reach” to a millenial friend as I reached my arm over his dinner plate to get the butter dish. He looked at me quizzically, so I explained it is an old saying implying that the kind of people who stayed in boardinghouses were likely to have rude table manners.

Then I had to explain “boardinghouse.”

I guess I should be glad I didn’t have to explain “manners.”

[Fiji Hill]

Juk Box Baby--Perry Como

When the Juke Box Baby takes the floor
Around the old juke box in the candy store,
The joint starts jumping till the roof
Comes tumbling down.

Juke box baby, you're the swinginest doll in town.

Juke box baby, put a nickel in for Maybelline;
Juke box baby, drop another in for Seventeen;
Juke box baby, whisper to your Daddy-O
Three little love words: Ko-Ko-Mo.

How're you going to get your homework done
When you keep that juke box on the run?
You don't dig Latin while you dig that crazy sound.

Juke box baby, you're the swinginest doll in town.

Juke box baby, I hear you knocking;
Juke box baby, the coin box hopping;
Juke box baby, tell me sincerely
That you're going to be no Tina Marie.

All your lunchtime money goes down the slot.
You can live on that if the music's hot.
You just ain't quittin'
Till you rock that clock around.

See you later, alligator;
Oh, hey ringadinga, what a dungaree doll I found.
Jike box baby, oh juke box baby,
You're the winginist, dinginist, swinginest doll in town!

[Tennessee Nana]

Duke Duke Duke Duke of Earl
Duke Duke Duke of Earl
Duke Duke Duke of Earl Duke Duke

That’s all I remover

:)

[foreverfree]

Beautiful song that will always remind me of that summer. And yes I always thought it was jukebox selection B17.

I miss Seeburg jukeboxes.

[cyclotic]

About 25 years ago, I got assigned to produce a process guide for part of my job. It was a waste of time and I was pretty sure nobody would ever read it.

Each point had a document number starting at A-1

Section B-17 read “It was our song it was his song but it’s over.”

Of course since no one ever read it, I never had any feedback.

[jeffersondem]

“The past is a great place to visit, but few could live there.”

Try staying alive in Chicago today.

[Albion Wilde]

There was something magical about dropping a quarter, selecting your song and then listening to them play for the entire crowd. .......................... In my era it was a nickle in the jukebox to play Earth Angel.

If you put a nickel in to play “Stay“ by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs in a Myrtle Beach diner or soda shop, everyone would get up and do “the shag” in the aisles.

(It was a dance, and very tame.)

[PallMal]

The thing is that when I was 18, as a matter of fact, most if not all of my friends at that age, knew more about past inventions, tech, what they did, etc. than today's 18 year old.

We knew cars had to be cranked up to start, even though those cars were no longer produced. We knew about the milk man, the ice man, the lady plugging in stuff to hook up telephone calls, etc., even though those entities were long gone.

You would think that in this day and age of the Internet and information age, today's teenager would be more in tune with how technology functioned a mere 20 or so years ago, not less. That doesn't seem to be the case.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

For years now, I’ve been thinking of a combined technology between juke boxes and spin displays.

http://www.spindisplay.com/

That is, a juke box can only hold 70 disks (140 A-B songs), but a well built spin display, perhaps holding DVDs or BR disks could hold thousands. Yet juke boxes can pick out a single disk and put it on the player.

So what if you had a heavy duty spin display, with a WiFi display of titles, that would select and retrieve a single disk at a time.

A big problem with DVD collections is that they are both heavy and take up a lot of space. A system like this might be able to hold 5,000-10,000 disks in an orderly manner in the floor space of an upright piano.

[RightGeek]

A few days ago someone showed me a video of teenagers stumped by a rotary phone but my favorite is one I saw a few years ago where Dad explained to the disbelieving kids that if you connect an antenna to the TV, you can watch for free.

[Campion]

I remember the very first TV my parents bought that had a remote. The remote two buttons — one turned the TV on and off, and the other changed the channel. It had no battery, and had what amounted to a bellows inside to blow air through an ultrasonic whistle. We didn’t have dogs ... I wonder how dogs reacted to one of those.

[Agamemnon]

I still have all the LPs I had as a kid in the 60's,'70's, and 80's. I belonged to RCA Victor and Columbia House record clubs and amassed quite a collection.

When the new record(s) arrived, I immediately played them on my SONY direct drive turntable = "diamond stylus", and while doing so I recorded them on to high quality audio cassette tapes (CrO2 w/Dolby noise reduction.) I played the tapes in my car mostly (a 1970 Buick Electra), and never played the vinyl record again.

So there they sit in my office (with all my "'78's") to this day -- most just played once.

FReegards!

[Albion Wilde]

One of my favorite scenes from the movie version of Tom Wolf’s book The Right Stuff, which was about the first manned space flight, was when the astronauts radioed back to NASA, “Houston, we have a problem!” and the large roomful of aeronautical engineers whipped out their slide rules. It’s often amazing to see how much people accomplished without digital equipment.

[ifinnegan]

There are still juke boxes.

They’re digital.