Put Another Twenty In The Jukebox

Do you know how you can absolutely love and hate something all at the same time? I imagine it is what heroin addicts feel toward their smack. I know for sure it's how I felt about cigarettes before I finally got that demon off my back. It's also how a lot of people feel about their parents.

I have a new one on my list. The modern jukebox.

I loved in back in the 80s and 90s when jukeboxes in bars went to the kind that had whole CDs instead of just singles. It was a great way to be able to hear your favorite song off of an album even if it wasn't the "hit" from it. So most would have, say, REM's Green and U2's Joshua Tree because Stand and With Or Without You were hits, but one could choose to play World Leader Pretend and One Tree Hill instead. It was a great time for jukebox history. Sure, they were a little more expensive but it was worth a little more for the choice. And it wasn't that much more, you could still get something like 20 songs or more for five bucks.

But there's a new sheriff in town, so to speak, in the world of bar music. I speak, of course, about the internet-connected jukebox.

I have seen them in the last few bars that I've hung out at here in Manhattan, from dives like Rudy's in Hell's Kitchen to nicer bars like Crossroads on the Upper West Side. They are clearly taking over. And I'm conflicted. I love it so much and I hate it so much.

First of all, as a music lover how could you not love that you can find a ton of songs to choose from when you are hanging in a bar? Especially when you are someone who listens to stuff other than what gets played on the radio (does radio still exist?). Being able to subject my fellow bar patrons to Billy Bragg singing "I've got a socialism of the heart" just makes me really happy. Looking around to see who digs it and who just doesn't get it is a great way to silently judge people.

And sometimes you are just in the mood to tap your feet to California Stars while you are having a cocktail, and when one of those machines is in the bar you're hanging at you know you can whenever you want.

But there are oh so many downsides.

The big thing is that it gets expensive. Now five bucks will get you 13 credits, which doesn't sound too awful on the surface. But there is a catch. A single credit will get you one play of a song that is loaded on the machine itself. And it looks at first like they have a lot of CDs to choose from, even if it might be more mainstream, ordinary stuff. But on closer look your choices are much more limited. When you choose an album you find out that only a couple (sometimes only one) songs are available, and often the one you wanted is not among them. The answer of course is to go to the on-line section of the juke and search for that song. But guess what? The searchable songs cost two credits each to hear.

Ah, there's the rub. Dammit, you have your heart set on a song and then you find out it's double the price. You really want to hear it though, so you say "fuck it" and order it up. Next thing you know, every song you want to hear is something you have to pay double for and your five dollars has turned into a paltry seven songs. That really cuts into the beer money.

And even with the searchable database of over 100,000 songs that they advertise on the machine, you can still (at last check a while back) only find a grand total of one Robyn Hitchcock song, Jewels For Sophia. And absolutely no Dresden Dolls songs.

So even a jukebox hooked up to the web of the wide world still suffers from musical ignorance.

There is also the downside that, in a mirror of the way I like to spread the musical genius of the artist I'm into, there can always be that guy in the bar who is trying to relive the glory days of when he was captain of his 80s high school football team and loading the machine with the likes of Every Rose Has Its Thorn and You Don't Know What You Got (Till Its Gone). Not only that, but he is also choosing the "play now" feature, which moves your song to the front of the queue for yet another credit. That is really damn annoying. Even more annoying when he gets all emotional and stands up to air the guitar solos that he finds "deep".

Of course the worst thing about these new machines is that the bars themselves tend to take a character hit. A lot of what gave a bar its personality was the jukebox. Every bar was different according to what the owner put in his jukebox. Each place had its own distinct personality based partially, some places even mostly, on the jukebox. It's one of the many things that make local bars better places to hang out than a TGI Fridays or a Bennigan's. We lose that one, what's next?

I was hanging out at my old college a couple of weeks ago and stopped at one of my old haunting grounds called the Jackson Street Pub. They still have their CD jukebox and it's still cheap. And they apparently haven't changed it since I graduated, so I guess its character would be "Deni's college years" of the early to mid-90s. This may or may not be what you'd like in a bar, but it was great for me. It was a big Nirvana, REM, Pearl Jam and No Rain night at the Pub. And Freebird. It was so much fun.

And I wouldn't have picked a lot of those songs if my choices were less limited. That kind of delicious time warp that happens to certain bars will become less and less common.

So I really hate the new jukes.

But that doesn't stop me from throwing too much money in them when I'm around one.