— LENNON / MCCARTNEY
Intending to make a start at last on a long-planned essay on the jukebox, he bought a ticket to Soria at the bus station in Burgos. The departure gates were in a roofed inner courtyard; that morning, when several buses were leaving at the same time for Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, they had been thronged; now, in early afternoon, only the bus for Soria was parked there in the semicircle with a couple of passengers, presumably traveling alone, its baggage compartment open and almost empty. When he turned over his suitcase to the driver — or was it the conductor? — standing outside, the man said “Soria!” and touched him lightly on the shoulder. The traveler wanted to take in a bit more of the locale, and walked back and forth on the platform until the engine was started. The woman selling lottery tickets, who that morning had been working the crowd like a gypsy, was no longer to be seen in the deserted station. He pictured her having a meal somewhere near the indoor market of Burgos, on the table a glass of dark-red wine and the bundle of tickets for the Christmas lottery. On the asphalt of the platform was a large sooty spot; the tailpipe of a since vanished bus must have puffed exhaust there for a long time, so thick was the black layer crisscrossed by the prints of many different shoe soles and suitcase wheels. He, too, now crossed this spot, for the specific purpose of adding his own shoe prints to the others, as if by so doing he could produce a good omen for his proposed undertaking. The strange thing was that on the one hand he was trying to convince himself that this “Essay on the Jukebox” was something inconsequential or casual, while on the other hand he was feeling the usual apprehension that overcame him before writing, and involuntarily sought refuge in favorable signs and portents — even though he did not trust them for a moment, but rather, as now, promptly forbade himself to do so, reminding himself of a comment on superstition in the Characters of Theophrastus, which he was reading on this trip: superstition was a sort of cowardice in the face of the divine. But, even so, the prints of these many and different shoes, including their various trademarks, layered on top of each other, white on black, and disappearing outside the circle of soot, were an image he could take with him as he continued his journey.
That he would buckle down to the “Essay on the Jukebox” in Soria had been planned for some time. It was now the beginning of December, and the previous spring, while flying over Spain, he had come upon an article in the airline magazine that featured this remote town in the Castilian highlands. Because of its location, far from any major routes, and almost bypassed by history for nearly a millennium, Soria was the quietest and most secluded town on the entire peninsula; in the center of town and also outside of town, standing by themselves in a desolate area, were several Romanesque structures, complete with well-preserved sculptures. Despite its smallness, the town of Soria was the capital of the province of the same name. In the early twentieth century Soria had been home to a man who, as a French teacher, then as a young husband, then almost immediately as a widower, had captured the region in his poems with a wealth of precise detail, the poet Antonio Machado. Soria, at an altitude of more than a thousand meters above sea level, was lapped at its foundations by the headwaters of the Duero, here very slow-moving, along whose banks — past the poplars that Machado called “singing” (álamos cantadores) because of the nightingales, ruiseñores, in their dense branches, and between cliffs that repeatedly narrowed to form canyons — according to the appropriately illustrated article, paths led far out into the untouched countryside …
With this “Essay on the Jukebox” he intended to articulate the significance this object had had in the different phases of his life, now that he was no longer young. Yet hardly any of his acquaintances had had anything to say when, in the last few months, he had embarked on a sort of playful market research and had asked them what they knew about this piece of machinery. Some, including, to be sure, a priest, had merely shrugged their shoulders and shaken their heads at the suggestion that such a thing could be of any interest. Others thought the jukebox was a kind of pinball machine, while still others were not even familiar with the word and had no idea what was meant until it was described as a “music box” or “music cabinet.” Precisely such ignorance, such indifference stimulated him all the more — after the initial disappointment at finding, yet again, that not everyone shared his experiences — to take on this object, or this subject matter, especially since it seemed that in most countries and places the time of jukeboxes was pretty much past (he, too, was perhaps gradually getting beyond the age for standing in front of these machines and pushing the buttons).
Of course he had also read the so-called literature on jukeboxes, though intending to forget most of it on the spot; what would count when he began writing was primarily his own observations. In any case, there was little written on the topic. The authoritative work, at least up to now, was probably the Complete Identification Guide to the Wurlitzer Jukeboxes, published in 1984 in Des Moines, far off in the American Midwest. Author: Rick Botts. This is more or less what the reader recalled of the history of the jukebox: it was during Prohibition in the United States, in the twenties, that in the back-door taverns, the “speakeasies,” automatic music players were first installed. The derivation of the term “jukebox” was uncertain, whether from “jute” or from the verb “to jook,” which was supposed to be African in origin and meant “to dance.” In any case, the blacks used to gather after working in the jute fields of the South at so-called jute joints or juke joints, where they could put a nickel in the slot of the automatic music player and hear Billie Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, or Louis Armstrong, musicians whom the radio stations, all owned by whites, did not play. The golden age of the jukebox began when Prohibition was lifted in the thirties, and bars sprang up everywhere; even in establishments like tobacco stores and beauty parlors there were automatic record players, because of space limitations no larger than the cash register and located next to it on the counter. This flowering ended, for the time being, with the Second World War, when the materials used to make jukeboxes were rationed — primarily plastic and steel. Wood replaced the metal parts, and then, in the middle of the war, all production was converted to armaments. The leading manufacturers of jukeboxes, Wurlitzer and Seeburg, now produced de-icing units for airplanes and electromechanical components.
The form of the music boxes was a story in itself. Through its form, the jukebox was supposed to stand out “from its not always very colorful surroundings.” The most important man in the company was therefore the designer; while the basic structure for a Wurlitzer was a rounded arch, Seeburg as a rule used rectangular cases with domes on top. The principle seemed to be that each new model could deviate from the previous one only so much, so that it was still recognizable. This principle was so firmly established that a particularly innovative jukebox, shaped like an obelisk, topped not by a head or a flame but by a dish containing the speaker, which propelled the music up toward the ceiling, proved a complete failure. Accordingly, variation was confined almost exclusively to the lighting effects or to components of the frame: a peacock in the middle of the box, in constantly changing colors; plastic surfaces, previously simply colored, now marbled; decorative moldings, once fake bronze, now chromed; arched frames, now in the form of transparent neon tubes, filled with large and small bubbles in constant motion, “signed Paul Fuller”—at this point the reader and observer of this history of design finally learned the name of its main hero and realized that he had always unconsciously wanted to know it, ever since he had first been overcome with amazement at encountering one of these mighty objects glowing in all the colors of the rainbow in some dim back room.