Rock and roll is here to stay...I hope.
Any Saturday afternoon I was to be found at "The Coffee Nook" along with alot of others, listening to the Juke Box and we dancing on the checker board tile floor, the Twist may have been the most popular dance, but most of us just made up our own dance. We sipped the strong coffeehouse style coffee, well laced with sugar, and still some of us never finished the first cup. Many smoke their first cigarettes there, there is simply no way to look cool when you are hacking your lungs out. That didn't stop anyone though. Th old coffeehouse was one of the first buildings to be torn down, when the town decided they needed more parking lots.
In those day people danced to the Juke Box
Nov. 23, 1889: S.F. Gin Joint Hears World's First Jukebox
1889: The first jukebox is installed at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. It becomes an overnight sensation, and its popularity spreads around the world.
That first jukebox was constructed by the Pacific Phonograph Co. Four stethoscope-like tubes were attached to an Edison Class M electric phonograph fitted inside an oak cabinet. The tubes operated individually, each being activated by the insertion of a coin, meaning that four different listeners could be plugged into the same song simultaneously.
Towels were supplied to patrons so they could wipe off the end of the tube after each listening.
The success of the jukebox eventually spelled the end of the player piano, then the most common way of pounding out popular music to a line of thirsty barflies.
The machine was originally called the “nickel-in-the-slot player” by Louis Glass, the entrepreneur who installed it at the Palais Royale. (A nickel then had the buying power of $1.20 today.) It came to be known as the jukebox only later, although the origin of the word remains a bit vague. It may derive from “juke house,” a slang reference to bawdy house, where music was not unknown.
Source: Writersalmanac.publicradio.org
Photo: For a nickel a shot, a thrilled group tunes in on a screechy jukebox of the 1890s.
Bettmann/Corbis
This article first appeared on Wired.com Nov. 23, 2007.
