3 Songs For A Quarter

This piece first appeared in June 11th, 2009 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Jukeboxes were once found in almost every bar, most truck stops, and many restaurants. They contained 50 or so 45 rpm singles (those are small, vinyl records for those of you too young to remember anything before MP3s), and that meant that you had 50 supposed “hit” songs and 50 “B side” songs that nobody ever listened to.

If you spent any time in a place with a jukebox, 50 songs wore thin in short order. I realized this while shooting pool at a bar one night.

The Shamrock was an old bar, long and narrow, that occupied a sliver of real estate in downtown Marquette. It was just wide enough for a bar and a row of tables near the front, with a pool table and a frequently silent jukebox near the back. The Shamrock was where the old men went to drink and college kids stumbled into while bar hopping. After a round or maybe two, they would discover that the Shamrock wasn’t a place for them.

On that night, a customer came into the bar and went almost immediately to the jukebox and played the popular song du jour. Not five minutes after the song ended, another customer came into the bar and, not having heard what had just been played, selected the exact same song. Then, incredibly, the whole scenario happened one more time. It made me wonder just how many times in the course of a day people who work in places with jukeboxes suffer through a musical nightmare such as this.

All of this was brought to mind recently when I came across a song on the Internet that I had first heard on a jukebox several years ago.

Gary, a good friend of mine, owned a pizza joint, and I would often stop in for a visit and a couple of beers. He had recently installed a jukebox, and I happened to stop in while he was performing some sort of maintenance on it. It wasn’t a new jukebox when he bought it, so it didn’t have an owner’s manual, and Gary was always learning something new about it whenever he opened the thing up.

This particular evening, he discovered that the jukebox kept track of the number of times each song had been played. This allowed the owner to have some idea of what was popular. This led us to wonder what the least played song was.

The least played song on the jukebox was a version of “Release Me,” a song made popular by Ray Price and Englebert Humperdink among others, and was recorded by a band called Stumpus Maximus and the Good Ol’ Boys. It had been played twice. We were compelled to listen to what may have been the worst song on the jukebox.

It would be some time later that I would learn that Stumpus Maximus et al. was just a name used for the B side of a Def Leppard single. The music was performed by Def Leppard, but the vocalist was Def Leppard’s tour manager, who started out the song sounding like a drunk karaoke singer and eventually turned the song into a scream-fest by the end of it.

It was awful. We loved it.

Another jukebox of note in my life was located at a little bar outside of Deerton called the Tioga, which, following bar protocol, had a jukebox located near the pool table. The Tioga was one of my favorite haunts during my 20s, and I knew, for better or for worse, everyone who frequented it. One of the regulars was a woman who would play Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” on the jukebox over, and over, and over whenever she came in. It wasn’t unusual for her to play that song a dozen times in an evening. I don’t think she had the slightest clue of what the song was really about (it’s a song about the life of a musician on the road) or that it pertained to absolutely nothing in her life.

After a year or so of this I had had enough. On a slow night at the bar I took it upon myself, with the bartender’s blessing, to sabotage the jukebox. The original electrical plug on the jukebox had been damaged at some time during its life and the jukebox now bore a replacement plug, the kind that you’d buy at a hardware store and install using a screwdriver. I unplugged the jukebox and disassembled the plug. I disconnected the wires inside of the plug and then reassembled it. It was months before anyone got around to troubleshooting the problem.

When the jukebox was finally repaired, the Tioga was once again the home of “Turn the Page Fest,” and to this day I cringe at the very thought of that song.

If I were a believer in karma, I would know the reason why I found myself frequenting a bar where a woman would psychotically play the same song over and over. I completely deserved this retribution. After all, I was the one responsible for making “Release Me” the most played song on Gary’s jukebox, and I did it for the sole purpose of annoying the bartender, because she hated the song. What goes around comes around.