Preface To Jukeboxes: This Used To Only Cost A Nickel?

Even with the magic of the iPod, I still wish I had a jukebox. I'd take a digital jukebox - surely they make them that way now - just as long as it's big & full of flashy lights & lets you pick songs from a list. A jukebox is second only to a radio show in having near-complete control of what the people around you are listening to.

There are two jukeboxes in my memory that make me happy.

One was in Garland, Texas, when I was growing up. This one played 45 rpm singles. My sister Karin, de facto (yet resenting it) babysitter for me & my little brother, would occasionally take the two of us with her (& her incredibly skanky friend Tanya) down Cranford & across Saturn Road to a place called Paco Taco. (Maybe it was Paco's Tacos, but I remember it as Paco Taco.) There was a jukebox there, along with what was probably medicore Taco Bell-y Mexican food, although this was the mid-70s, so I don't even know if there were Taco Bells at the time. The jukebox, though, Karin loved. She always played one song - a song I can't think of ever without thinking of her - which was Foghat's "Slow Ride." In that way kids get when they're trying to be a part of something they don't entirely understand, my little brother & I would get excited, too, when she played the song - & I seem to remember that the food always came at the end of that song.

Whether it happened more than once or twice, I don't know. But it apparently stuck in my head. It's a happy memory.

The other jukebox probably no longer exists. either, but it resided for a time in the back area of an Austin dive called The Hole In The Wall. It played CDs. My buddy Mike & I would go there, &, since we were both pretty inept with the pool cue, we invented new rules for pool that weren't as embarrassing as the ones everyone else used, & we'd drink pitchers of beer - ah, & I'd smoke, back in those lovely days when I was a smoker & you could smoke in bars - & get increasingly drunk as we'd get increasingly worse at pool. (One of the rules of our pool, if I remember correctly, was that, if you made a particularly bad shot, you had to give your pool cue to the other player, since it was obviously the cue's fault, & you wanted your opponent to have the bad luck.)

The Hole In The Wall's jukebox was pretty piss-poor, so mainly we'd listen to what other people programmed, but I in particular loved to play "pool" to two songs on that pathetic nickelodeon: the Knack's "Good Girls Don't" & Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run." I can't recall if there was anything more hip on that jukebox, but other, cooler jukeboxes (which seem to be cool only because they have the last few Johnny Cash records & "Sandanista!" by the Clash on them) never seem to impress me much anyway.

A jukebox is more about where it's at than its content, it seems to me. Those two jukeboxes were at the right place & the right time to make me happy & therefore to give me happy memories.