August 22, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the jukebox was the greatest musical innovation of its day, changing our culture and how music was listened to and distributed. One man walks us through that history and shares his obsession with restoring these iconic machines.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Long before Spotify and other online streaming platforms, Americans listen
to music in a different way. To hear your favorite song,
you plopped a nickel, later a dime, and eventually a
quarter into a jukebox. Historically, the jukebox has brought people
(00:39):
together during times of war and strife. Ed Liss, a
former IT executive, is a jukebox collector and historian. He
has long admired these music machines and spent a lifetime
hunting and restoring the great American jukebox. Here's the story.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Well, I grew up in the Northeast Bronx, New York,
and I lived in an apartment house and at the
bottom of the apartment house or group of stores, one
of which was Rosie's Lunchinnette, And in the luncheonette there
was a world It's rebubbling jukebox that when I was
(01:27):
three years old, I used to stand on a chair
and watch the works, mechanism work, and stania shucking my
thumb moving from side to side as the music swayed,
the beat and the ten fifteen was really the first
jukebox that I ever saw and was with for many years.
(01:50):
Is a beautiful machine. Judging by the serial number of
my machine, it looks like it was made in late
May of nineteen forty heaven right before they switched to
going for to make a new model. But growing up,
the ten fifteen was the first to catch my eye
as well as many other eyes. It was a very
(02:12):
popular jukebox that came out right after World War Two,
and it was designed by the genius Paul M. Fuller,
who worked with Worldzer from nineteen thirty four about nineteen
forty nine, and he designed all their jukeboxes, who's a
brilliant designer. He used motion, light, bubbles, cavitation, everything to
(02:40):
attrack you to the eye to the jukebox, and it
was just beautiful. But the ten fifteen was unusual because
it was designed using the golden ratio completely, the golden
ratio one to one point six point eight. It was
made by a fIF BC by a Greek mathematician who
(03:06):
figured out how to design ratios that would make anything
you made visible to the eye appealing. Like the Parthenon,
for example, is made with the golden ratio of other
great works of art sculptures, but the ten fifteen is
one big arc of light, color, animation, bubbles, and it
(03:32):
has no protruding anything. It's just one big arc of
beautiful color and design. In its time it was called
the wild curve. But Paul Fuller was the master who
designed all the worlds of jukeboxes in the forties, using
all these different components of light, animation, gravitation, etc. And
(03:58):
of course the great audio sounds from the World's jukebox itself.
The Worlds Company as a company goes back to the
year sixteen hundred and fifty nine when it was in
Saxony before it became Germany, and their business was making
(04:19):
musical instruments. They made violins, the oldest cellos, all the
instruments that the masters made in Europe, and they used
the finest materials and they were instrument makers. In the
eighteen fifties, one of them, Forny Worldzer, came over to
(04:40):
this country to see if the market here would be
ripe for pianos that they would make. And they looked
at the American pianos at the time and thought that
they weren't as good a quality as what worlds can do.
So they opened an office in Cincinnati, Ohio and started
building pianos for the American market. But they're basically an
(05:07):
instrument maker. Jukeboxes came much later because before jukeboxes there
was mechanical pianos, sometimes referred to as nickelodeons. You go
into a Merry Go Round and you see a nickelodeon
playing and they sound beautiful. But Matt Worlitzer was a
(05:29):
master at building electro mechanical equipment. And in the USA
there were two places that were prone to bring skills
for woodworking on that level, and it was in Brooklyn
and Coney Island, and yeah, there was a northtown of
wand New York. So the world's a factory made musical instruments.
(05:54):
And then when jukeboxes came along in the early thirties.
They made their first jukebox in nineteen thirty four and
it was made in the north Tonawanda plant and they
had a half a mile long the plate was half
a mile long. It was humongous. But the engineering proudness
(06:17):
that they had and the amount of work that they
did in the house, the only thing that that was
important was speakers, coin equipment, and raw materials for lumber
wood cabinets. That's it. Everything else was made in the
house so as a self producing factory, an incredible engineering feat.
(06:41):
But the company was founded in sixteen fifty nine in Saxon,
Nature before it was suremany.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And you've been listening to Ed Liss, a jukebox collector
and historian and a guy who's been hunting and restoring
jukeboxes well for most of his adult life and had
a love affair the time he was three, sitting in
front of them, watching them work and listening to these
amazing sounds coming out of the beautiful founding speakers of
the whirlers or jukeboxes, of which the ten fifteen is
(07:12):
a work of art. Go to Google and search worlds
are ten fifteen and you will be impressed when we
come back more of the story of the jukebox here
on our American Story. This is Lee Habib, host of
our American Stories, the show where America is the star
(07:34):
and the American people, and we do it all from
the heart of the South in our small town of Oxford, Mississippi.
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our
shows will always be free to listen to, but they
are not free to make. If you love what you hear,
consider making a text deductible donation to our American Stories.
Go to our American Stories dot com. Give a little,
(07:55):
give a lot. That's our American Stories dot com. And
we continue with our American Stories. We've been listening to
Ed Liss map out the fascinating history of the jukebox
(08:17):
that has built a world class museum of music at
his home. He owns fifteen thousand records, mostly forty fives
and seventy eights, that were of the highest quality in
the heyday of jukeboxes, which introduced stereophonic sound. Let's now
hear Ed describe what he calls a resurrection of a
nineteen thirty seven rock holar rhythm king that was beyond restoration.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
During the eighteen fifties and sixties, when it was still slavery,
a lot of the slaves came from the country of Senegal,
and they ended up in like cities like New Orleans
and other southern places where they were dropped off and sold.
(09:10):
But the language in Senegal was called the Gola language
g u l lah, and basically there was a word
in the Gala language that meant to dance, and the
word was jug. That wasn't dancing like ballroom dancing. It
was like wicked dancing around the fire with the crazy
(09:33):
people dancing usually what you'd say like voodoo or something.
So it was that kind of dancing, wicked dancing. So
that became Anglo saxonized over the years. The jug to
a jug box jukebox. Jukebox is a dance box, and
(09:55):
it represents music that was brought in by I mostly
blacks and black slaves, and gravitated towards that type of
crazed music. White folks didn't like it and they frowned
on it, but they loved black music. They just wouldn't
admit it. White folks loved black music, no question. I
(10:19):
think when the American slavery ended and blacks were freed
and all that, musicians were able to express themselves in
a way that they could never do before. And a
prime example of that would be Lewis Armstrong, who really
(10:41):
changed everything because Louis Armstrong played progressive music. In other words,
he didn't read music note for note. His music was
played from the heart. So every time you play even
the same tune, it would be different and he brought
(11:01):
a feeling of freedom that lasted and permeated throughout the
early twentieth century, like in Harlem, and a renaissance of
music and jazz and poetry and all these other things
coming together in New York City, for example. But Louis
(11:24):
Armstrong was unique because he was the authentic person who
loved and was outstanding musically, and he was a great
person as a human being, no question. But his music
really changed everything because it made music more free. Black
(11:50):
music certainly, how black music could not be played in
places where white audiences were like on a jukebox, they
wouldn't have it. Most people would go to a cotton
club in New York to watch Stull Gllington. It was
black and it were all white. If you look at
the audience, there were no black people in the audience.
(12:12):
It were all white people. But there was a lot
of discrimination going on at that time. And even popular
people like Duke Ellington could not walk through the front
door of the cotton club. He was still had to
go through the back because he was black. So it
didn't make a difference. He was still what he was.
(12:34):
So music in this case, the black musicians had a
hard time getting your music heard, and the only way
you can get them heard outside of a live band
would be on a jukebox in a black juke joint
that catered to black patrons. White people did not go
to those places and listen to that music. They just didn't.
(12:58):
So discrimination was pretty big, and it took many years
and decades for that to kind of like subside a
little bit, not entirely, but enough to make it more palatable.
I know Billy Holliday, when Billy Holiday took a big
band role with in nineteen thirty eight, she worked as
(13:20):
in a big band for a year and she hated
it because she was subject to all kinds of racism
and amiliations and it was horrible, and she swore she'd
never do that again, and she never did. But I
always ask the question, why did musicians endure all these hardships,
(13:41):
all these hardships and amiliations. Why did they do that?
It's because they loved music. It's about the music. They
loved the music, and they loved people that could play
the music that they loved to play. Why they endure
all these other negative issues, It's because it's about the music.
(14:07):
It's always about the music. So Lewis Armstrong he was
the one who really started the movement of freedom of
expression in music. Where other people came after him, but
nobody could really top the beauty of Lewis Armstrong. He
(14:27):
was the best of the best, absolutely the best. You know,
if you take a look at the music and the
sound on a jukebox, you can hear the difference in
the sound between in the early thirties jukebox in a
late thirties jukebox. And the reason is that the early
thirties jukeboxes only had a dynamic range of about five
(14:48):
thousand cycles, which is not a lot, but unlike digital,
which is zeros and ones, everything recorded on an analog
jukebox was played back undred percent. What happened was in
the nineteen thirties there were advances made in microphone technology
that increased the dynamic range from about five thousand cycles
(15:11):
or hurtz to about twelve thousand cycles or hurts. So
one of the early thirties recordings Bing Crosby Camp Callaway,
Billie Holiday, all these people were basically recording music that
(15:33):
can only reach five thousand cycles from a seventy eight
rpm record. So he elimited in what the playback could provide.
But again everything recorded was played back one hundred percent.
Camp Callaway's an interesting story. He became popular in the
(15:53):
early nineteen thirties. His first big hit was Many the
Mucher and Many of the Mucher. It was a great tune,
the Heidi Hos song, and they called it But Minnie
the Mucher was basically a true story of a homeless
woman who lived in Minneapolis, and it was Minnie Gayton.
(16:13):
And Minnie Gayton was homeless and she used to walk
around the town in a shopping cart with her belongings,
and one day they found her frozen to death in
the middle of a two apartment buildings in the winter.
But she inspired Minnie the Moucher. And if you listen
(16:34):
to the song, the words of Minnie the Moucher to
talk about coke, cocaine, and opium on things of that nature.
I don't know how that is affiliated with Mini the Moucher,
but the song is about drugs.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And you're listening to ed Liss told the story of
the jukebox and through it a little bit of America history,
cultural history, musical history, and the story of race in America.
Two and how black musicians were treated, how black music
was treated, white people as he said, white people, as
(17:14):
he said, pretending not to like the music that they
actually liked. And ultimately it would take decades before those
barriers between black and white music would completely shatter, well
into the sixties. By the way, our Duke Ellington piece
with Terry teach Out, the late Terry Teachout, gets into
this territory brilliantly.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Go to our.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
American Stories and just write in Duke Ellington on the
search bar, one of our finest hours, a walk through
the twentieth century in every dimension. When we come back
more of the story of the jukebox by an aficionado
ed List here on our American Stories, and we return
(18:12):
to our American stories and with jukebox historian and collector
ed Lists of New York, He's brought back to life
numerous jukeboxes over the years, preserving a meaningful part of
America's music history.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Now let's return to ed every project I've done, and
(18:47):
I've done total well. I have nineteen restored machines, but
every project's different, and these machines are very complex. Oh
not for the faint of heart. I wouldn't do it
as a weekend warrior. You better know what you're doing
when you get involved in these we say will confound
you in less than five minutes. I have the last
(19:12):
machine I restored. It was it was not that far
from home, but it was incomplete, non working. It was
basically a pile of junk. And I don't know why
I bought it, but I bought it, and I must
have stared at it for several months before I was
(19:35):
able to figure out what to do with it. And
we ended up spending two and a half years and
over two thousand hours of labor bringing this pile of
junk back into a incredible piece of American music history,
(19:55):
absolutely stunning and needed everything. I found it a up
in Katona, New York, which is not too far from
where I live now, and the guy wanted to get
rid of it because it was just taking up space.
It had broken parts, missing pieces. I didn't know really
(20:16):
what it was until I took it home and realized
that what the hell did I do? But my technician,
who works on my cabinets, it was a brilliant creator,
said to me, I can restore this cabinet. And I
looked at him like he was crazy, because it had
no wheels, had no side, the bottom side was missing,
(20:38):
I mean everything on it. He did work something. So
we took it apart, piece by piece, and we had
really nothing to go by. We had to make a
brand new grill for the front, which is very elaborate,
and we had a very fuzzy picture on the Internet
that kind of showed us what it looked like. And
(20:59):
then we found a piece of wood in the cabinet
that had been put there as a brace which didn't
belong the originally and I was part of the original grill.
And from that errand piece of wood, we were able
to figure out what the grill looked like, what was
made of, how it was shaped, molded, type of wood
they used. Really it was like a clone. And after
(21:23):
two and a half years and two thousand hours of labor,
we brought this chipbox back to life. It also had
a first phonograph ever to use noise cancelation circuitry in
an amplifier. That means that all seventy eighth's, regardless of
the scratchy surface noise, the noise would be taken out.
(21:48):
And when I restored the amplifier I had to research
retired engineers and ask them how did this company put
in noise cancelation circuitry in nineteen thirty seven, and they
told me they used notch filters. And what are notch filters.
Notch filters the capacitors that basically eliminate noise in certain
(22:13):
frequency ranges. So if seventy eights couldn't go beyond five
thousand hertz or cycles on the sound spectrum, most of
the noise would be in the mid range. And that's
what these did. They targeted mid range noise and removed
it completely. I had to find a guy who was
(22:34):
long retired who knew how to do this in his amplifier,
and I hired him, John Weisner, the best amp restore
on the planet, and he knew how to do it,
and he did it. So I took this machine from
an unincomplete, non working pile of junk into a beautiful sounding, looking,
(22:59):
working jukebox. I'm very proud of it and all the
records in there. There are only twelve records, twelve seventy eighths.
Each one is matched to the era as Judy Garland
already saw Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Klambig seven. You
(23:20):
name it, and I got it. But it's only twelve selections.
But the fidelion it is so good that I get
chills every time I hear it. It's a nineteen thirty
seven Rocola. The mottle is the Rhythm King and it
was made nineteen thirty seven. In nineteen thirty seven, this
(23:40):
checkbox cost five hundred dollars, which was during the depression,
which was a fortune of money at that time. Five
hundred dollars in nineteen thirty seven was a lot of
money and we had to It was tarnished. Someone had
varnished it with his brown varnish on the cabinet, and
(24:04):
we knew that it didn't come out of the factory
that way, so we stripped it very carefully and under
it was beautifully book matched. The walnut, the components of
it and the materials I used was unbelievable, and we
worked with hand tools from the eighteen nineties to ensure
(24:26):
accuracy and perfection so that we were finished with this project.
This machine was absolutely perfect. You can go online anytime
on YouTube and watch the resurrection of the nineteen thirty
seven Rocola Rhythm King. It's seventeen minutes long, and it's
(24:52):
a glory to watch, and you can see what the
machine looked like when I got it to what it
ended up and sounded like when I was all done
with it. When we finished restoring the machine, we decided
to make a documentary of the entire restoration or resurrection process.
(25:12):
I called it a resurrection because this machine was beyond restoration.
It was a pilot junk and it needed to be resurrected.
And we resurrected it, and in the middle of November
of twenty sixteen, it played for the first time in
eighty years, eight decades. And when we heard the music
(25:35):
and heard the quality of the fidelity, we were absolutely floored.
We were like frozen in our tracks to hear this
machine singing again after eight decades of silence. And what
we heard was beautiful, beautiful sound, beautiful bass response, smooth bottom,
(26:01):
crystal clear notes. And you say, a very special speaker
called the Jensen Series X. It was a new type
of speaker that Jensen made and it was the first
time they used it in his jukebox, any jukebox, but
we had it raccooned. It was difficult because it wasn't
(26:24):
like usual speakers and had a few quirks to it,
but we got it done, and we got the whole
thing done, and the machine is restored now back to
brand new tradition in every way shaping form.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
And we're listening to Edliss talk about the restoration of
a grand, grand jukebox, and he talks about it with
this love, with this adoration that Americans are familiar with.
Any of you who have a desire and a love
for restoring things, be it cars. In my family, my
mom had a deep effect for restoring wood and furniture
(27:02):
back to its original form. And it was a time
consuming and painstaking process to do it. And when he
starts to talk about that recolar Rhythm King jukebox, he
called it a piece of junk that he returned to
its original magnificence. It wasn't a restoration, he said, it
was a resurrection. Edliss's story continues here on our American stories,
(27:39):
and we returned to our American stories and with jukebox
historian and collector Ed Liss, who is masterfully taking us
through the history of the jukebox and the role they
played in culture and the jukebox formed teenage social life
and determined the most popular teen hangout spots around. Let's
return to with the rest of this story.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Jukeboxes really became popular when prohibition was repealed in nineteen
thirty three, which allowed social gathering drinking. So jukeboxes became
popular because there was a cheap form of entertainment rather
than hiring a live band, which costs money. The early
(28:23):
jukeboxes were really glorified radio cabinets with phonographs in them
mechanisms in them. If you take a look at the
early wooden ones, they will look look like our deco
or they have different unusual wood markings on them. They
(28:46):
were made mostly from walnut, birch, and woods that basically
were good for absorbing sound. Keep in mind that in
the early years of jukeboxes they didn't have what's called
sound shaping. Sound shaping is basically the ability to shape
(29:06):
sound in a cabinet because you didn't have like equalizers
where you can do it by frequencies. So the cabinin
had to be made out of walnut or some kind
of a wood that would be positive towards music, like
a violin. We make a good violin or cello, you
(29:27):
got to use the best varnishes, the best woods veneers
and all that. The same with a wooden jukebox. You
got to use the best products that will make the
sound as good as possible without sound shaping. So the
early machines used basically radio cabinets that had phonographs in them,
(29:47):
and then in the nineteen thirties they invented what's called
phenolic plastic, which are plastic pieces that we had the
ability to shine light through them. The jukeboxes became more
attractive because they could be lit up, and then you
put in rotating cylinders so that the colors could change,
(30:11):
and bubble tube so that the bubbles would circulate. It
was called cavitation in science. But the jukeboxes at the
time were precisely tuned to the age. The way they sounded,
the way they worked, the way they looked, and certainly
the way they made you feel. Jukebox has a connection
(30:34):
that only a jukebox can make. Nothing plays like a jukebox,
nothing except maybe a live orchestra or band. But jukeboxes
had a certain sound, and even a jukebox from the
thirties or forties or fifties will sound different because the
technology they used, the records, they used. Everything they did
(30:58):
at that time was different and precisely tuned to the
age of that machine. When I find the machine, it's
usually dead, incomplete, non working, abandoned or whatever. You have
to have vision and grit to pull these back together,
(31:19):
because they're very complicated pieces of equipment, But as I
said earlier, they're precisely engineered. One machine I restored I
found in a garage in Bedford, New York, in nineteen
eighty eight, and it had been used in White Plains,
New York, in a restaurant whose operator who owned the
(31:43):
jukebox was right next to my father's business for forty
two years in White Planes, and I never knew that
jukebox was even there. So when I found that jukebox,
I restored it all with the original equipment in it
as in my collection, and it played all the big
band hits of the nineteen forties. I have another machine
(32:06):
called the Bomber Nose, which was built nineteen forty eight,
which looks like the tail gunner on an F twenty
four bomber and a tail gunning canopy, and it plays
twenty four forty fives. Originally it was a seventy eight machine.
It was converted to forty fives in the early fifties,
(32:28):
and when I found it, it had been already converted
to forty fives, but it was a mess and it
needed everything. So that machine now is called Grade one,
which means is the highest quality restoration. After all these years,
I restored it. All the machines I have basically tell
(32:50):
an interesting story. They all sound great. But you got
to keep in mind that when I get these things,
then i'm working during complete I got a research I
got to find the parts. I got to find a
skilled people that know how to fix them or restore them.
Not easy. But my interest is not just restoring the hardware.
(33:15):
It's in restoring the authentic experience of listening to what
it sounded like at that time, the artist, the music,
the machinery. It's all about the jukebox experience. And I've
restored that experience so that you can see history in
front of your eyes. And that's what's so thrilling about it.
(33:39):
It's it's history being restored authentically. So when I restore
a jukebox, it's got to be done right. I don't
cut corners. I do a lot of research first, but
then when I finished the project, I just can't believe
what I've done because it's so much work. But I've
(34:01):
got nineteen restored machines and they all work perfectly. So
I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish.
And again, it's authenticating the experience and restoring it the
way it was at that time. Well, in the nineteen fifties,
I lived in the northeast Bronx and there was a
(34:24):
bar on the corner of one of the streets, and
in that bar was a jukebox. Of course, so one
day a jukebox salesman walks in with a new model,
a new model jukebox. He wheels it in and he
(34:45):
pulls the one out of the wall, the plug out
of the wall, and puts the plug in to this
new one, and he says to the bar attended, he says, hey,
I can demonstrate this for you. Try this out for
a couple of days. Attend to said you can't do that.
This belongs to blah blah blah people and it's their machinery.
(35:07):
So he says it's okay, just leave it for a
couple of days. So the bartender makes a phone call.
Ten minutes later, two big goons walk in. Big goons
walk in and they ask where's the jukebox salesman? And
there he is sitting on a stool. So they go
(35:29):
over to the wall. They pull the plug out of
the jukebox. They roll it out the door, into the street,
into the gutter, into the sidewalk, which smashes into ten
thousand pieces. Then they go back inside and this poor
guy is sitting there at the barstool trembling. They take
(35:50):
one arm, one leg, a practice swing on each side
and toss them out the door. Demonstration over. So I
know one V two hundred never made it. He got
disyntegrated at that incident. So you never do that. In
the industry, it's called a romancing. You don't want to
(36:11):
romance people because that'll get you killed or get you
injured or something. But that location belonged to these people,
and any permission you wanted to do anything, you got
to go through them, or else you're gonna get your
butt tossed out the door, which is exactly what happened.
So that was an interesting story. There are the stories
(36:36):
like it. I have a friend who used to work
for an operator and one day he gets a call
in a horrible area in Bedford Stuyvesant, one of him
in the morning and he's behind a jukebox trying to
fix it, and all of a sudden the fight breaks
out and beer bottles and fists and chairs and tables
are flying all over the place. So he's standing behind
(36:56):
the jukebox. He puts two wires together, push the cover
on that, crawls on his hands and knees out the
door and the place was in a melee. So stories
like that, jukebox operators had the service machines at all
hours of the day because once the music stops, the
income stops, so you got to be around to fix it.
(37:19):
But in this case, uh, it wasn't a great situation.
Lots of stories like that. You have fights, well you
end up somebody's head goes through the jukebox or something
like that. Jukebox has never got any respect. But interestingly
enough that one of the greatest products this country ever made,
the Great American Jukebox.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
And a terrific job on our production team, and that
consists of Rush Jones, Micah Touchet, and Andrew Stein and
a special thanks to Ed Liss he's a former RIGHTD executive,
jukebox collector and historian who's long admired the machines and
spent a lifetime hunting and restoring great American jukeboxes. Indeed,
what ed is doing is restoring history, the story of
(38:03):
the jukebox, and Edlas's story too, and for restorers everywhere
who restore anything them to here on our American story.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Long before Spotify and other online streaming platforms, Americans listen
to music in a different way. To hear your favorite song,
you plopped a nickel, later a dime, and eventually a
quarter into a jukebox. Historically, the jukebox has brought people
(00:39):
together during times of war and strife. Ed Liss, a
former IT executive, is a jukebox collector and historian. He
has long admired these music machines and spent a lifetime
hunting and restoring the great American jukebox. Here's the story.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Well, I grew up in the Northeast Bronx, New York,
and I lived in an apartment house and at the
bottom of the apartment house or group of stores, one
of which was Rosie's Lunchinnette, And in the luncheonette there
was a world It's rebubbling jukebox that when I was
(01:27):
three years old, I used to stand on a chair
and watch the works, mechanism work, and stania shucking my
thumb moving from side to side as the music swayed,
the beat and the ten fifteen was really the first
jukebox that I ever saw and was with for many years.
(01:50):
Is a beautiful machine. Judging by the serial number of
my machine, it looks like it was made in late
May of nineteen forty heaven right before they switched to
going for to make a new model. But growing up,
the ten fifteen was the first to catch my eye
as well as many other eyes. It was a very
(02:12):
popular jukebox that came out right after World War Two,
and it was designed by the genius Paul M. Fuller,
who worked with Worldzer from nineteen thirty four about nineteen
forty nine, and he designed all their jukeboxes, who's a
brilliant designer. He used motion, light, bubbles, cavitation, everything to
(02:40):
attrack you to the eye to the jukebox, and it
was just beautiful. But the ten fifteen was unusual because
it was designed using the golden ratio completely, the golden
ratio one to one point six point eight. It was
made by a fIF BC by a Greek mathematician who
(03:06):
figured out how to design ratios that would make anything
you made visible to the eye appealing. Like the Parthenon,
for example, is made with the golden ratio of other
great works of art sculptures, but the ten fifteen is
one big arc of light, color, animation, bubbles, and it
(03:32):
has no protruding anything. It's just one big arc of
beautiful color and design. In its time it was called
the wild curve. But Paul Fuller was the master who
designed all the worlds of jukeboxes in the forties, using
all these different components of light, animation, gravitation, etc. And
(03:58):
of course the great audio sounds from the World's jukebox itself.
The Worlds Company as a company goes back to the
year sixteen hundred and fifty nine when it was in
Saxony before it became Germany, and their business was making
(04:19):
musical instruments. They made violins, the oldest cellos, all the
instruments that the masters made in Europe, and they used
the finest materials and they were instrument makers. In the
eighteen fifties, one of them, Forny Worldzer, came over to
(04:40):
this country to see if the market here would be
ripe for pianos that they would make. And they looked
at the American pianos at the time and thought that
they weren't as good a quality as what worlds can do.
So they opened an office in Cincinnati, Ohio and started
building pianos for the American market. But they're basically an
(05:07):
instrument maker. Jukeboxes came much later because before jukeboxes there
was mechanical pianos, sometimes referred to as nickelodeons. You go
into a Merry Go Round and you see a nickelodeon
playing and they sound beautiful. But Matt Worlitzer was a
(05:29):
master at building electro mechanical equipment. And in the USA
there were two places that were prone to bring skills
for woodworking on that level, and it was in Brooklyn
and Coney Island, and yeah, there was a northtown of
wand New York. So the world's a factory made musical instruments.
(05:54):
And then when jukeboxes came along in the early thirties.
They made their first jukebox in nineteen thirty four and
it was made in the north Tonawanda plant and they
had a half a mile long the plate was half
a mile long. It was humongous. But the engineering proudness
(06:17):
that they had and the amount of work that they
did in the house, the only thing that that was
important was speakers, coin equipment, and raw materials for lumber
wood cabinets. That's it. Everything else was made in the
house so as a self producing factory, an incredible engineering feat.
(06:41):
But the company was founded in sixteen fifty nine in Saxon,
Nature before it was suremany.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And you've been listening to Ed Liss, a jukebox collector
and historian and a guy who's been hunting and restoring
jukeboxes well for most of his adult life and had
a love affair the time he was three, sitting in
front of them, watching them work and listening to these
amazing sounds coming out of the beautiful founding speakers of
the whirlers or jukeboxes, of which the ten fifteen is
(07:12):
a work of art. Go to Google and search worlds
are ten fifteen and you will be impressed when we
come back more of the story of the jukebox here
on our American Story. This is Lee Habib, host of
our American Stories, the show where America is the star
(07:34):
and the American people, and we do it all from
the heart of the South in our small town of Oxford, Mississippi.
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our
shows will always be free to listen to, but they
are not free to make. If you love what you hear,
consider making a text deductible donation to our American Stories.
Go to our American Stories dot com. Give a little,
(07:55):
give a lot. That's our American Stories dot com. And
we continue with our American Stories. We've been listening to
Ed Liss map out the fascinating history of the jukebox
(08:17):
that has built a world class museum of music at
his home. He owns fifteen thousand records, mostly forty fives
and seventy eights, that were of the highest quality in
the heyday of jukeboxes, which introduced stereophonic sound. Let's now
hear Ed describe what he calls a resurrection of a
nineteen thirty seven rock holar rhythm king that was beyond restoration.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
During the eighteen fifties and sixties, when it was still slavery,
a lot of the slaves came from the country of Senegal,
and they ended up in like cities like New Orleans
and other southern places where they were dropped off and sold.
(09:10):
But the language in Senegal was called the Gola language
g u l lah, and basically there was a word
in the Gala language that meant to dance, and the
word was jug. That wasn't dancing like ballroom dancing. It
was like wicked dancing around the fire with the crazy
(09:33):
people dancing usually what you'd say like voodoo or something.
So it was that kind of dancing, wicked dancing. So
that became Anglo saxonized over the years. The jug to
a jug box jukebox. Jukebox is a dance box, and
(09:55):
it represents music that was brought in by I mostly
blacks and black slaves, and gravitated towards that type of
crazed music. White folks didn't like it and they frowned
on it, but they loved black music. They just wouldn't
admit it. White folks loved black music, no question. I
(10:19):
think when the American slavery ended and blacks were freed
and all that, musicians were able to express themselves in
a way that they could never do before. And a
prime example of that would be Lewis Armstrong, who really
(10:41):
changed everything because Louis Armstrong played progressive music. In other words,
he didn't read music note for note. His music was
played from the heart. So every time you play even
the same tune, it would be different and he brought
(11:01):
a feeling of freedom that lasted and permeated throughout the
early twentieth century, like in Harlem, and a renaissance of
music and jazz and poetry and all these other things
coming together in New York City, for example. But Louis
(11:24):
Armstrong was unique because he was the authentic person who
loved and was outstanding musically, and he was a great
person as a human being, no question. But his music
really changed everything because it made music more free. Black
(11:50):
music certainly, how black music could not be played in
places where white audiences were like on a jukebox, they
wouldn't have it. Most people would go to a cotton
club in New York to watch Stull Gllington. It was
black and it were all white. If you look at
the audience, there were no black people in the audience.
(12:12):
It were all white people. But there was a lot
of discrimination going on at that time. And even popular
people like Duke Ellington could not walk through the front
door of the cotton club. He was still had to
go through the back because he was black. So it
didn't make a difference. He was still what he was.
(12:34):
So music in this case, the black musicians had a
hard time getting your music heard, and the only way
you can get them heard outside of a live band
would be on a jukebox in a black juke joint
that catered to black patrons. White people did not go
to those places and listen to that music. They just didn't.
(12:58):
So discrimination was pretty big, and it took many years
and decades for that to kind of like subside a
little bit, not entirely, but enough to make it more palatable.
I know Billy Holliday, when Billy Holiday took a big
band role with in nineteen thirty eight, she worked as
(13:20):
in a big band for a year and she hated
it because she was subject to all kinds of racism
and amiliations and it was horrible, and she swore she'd
never do that again, and she never did. But I
always ask the question, why did musicians endure all these hardships,
(13:41):
all these hardships and amiliations. Why did they do that?
It's because they loved music. It's about the music. They
loved the music, and they loved people that could play
the music that they loved to play. Why they endure
all these other negative issues, It's because it's about the music.
(14:07):
It's always about the music. So Lewis Armstrong he was
the one who really started the movement of freedom of
expression in music. Where other people came after him, but
nobody could really top the beauty of Lewis Armstrong. He
(14:27):
was the best of the best, absolutely the best. You know,
if you take a look at the music and the
sound on a jukebox, you can hear the difference in
the sound between in the early thirties jukebox in a
late thirties jukebox. And the reason is that the early
thirties jukeboxes only had a dynamic range of about five
(14:48):
thousand cycles, which is not a lot, but unlike digital,
which is zeros and ones, everything recorded on an analog
jukebox was played back undred percent. What happened was in
the nineteen thirties there were advances made in microphone technology
that increased the dynamic range from about five thousand cycles
(15:11):
or hurtz to about twelve thousand cycles or hurts. So
one of the early thirties recordings Bing Crosby Camp Callaway,
Billie Holiday, all these people were basically recording music that
(15:33):
can only reach five thousand cycles from a seventy eight
rpm record. So he elimited in what the playback could provide.
But again everything recorded was played back one hundred percent.
Camp Callaway's an interesting story. He became popular in the
(15:53):
early nineteen thirties. His first big hit was Many the
Mucher and Many of the Mucher. It was a great tune,
the Heidi Hos song, and they called it But Minnie
the Mucher was basically a true story of a homeless
woman who lived in Minneapolis, and it was Minnie Gayton.
(16:13):
And Minnie Gayton was homeless and she used to walk
around the town in a shopping cart with her belongings,
and one day they found her frozen to death in
the middle of a two apartment buildings in the winter.
But she inspired Minnie the Moucher. And if you listen
(16:34):
to the song, the words of Minnie the Moucher to
talk about coke, cocaine, and opium on things of that nature.
I don't know how that is affiliated with Mini the Moucher,
but the song is about drugs.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And you're listening to ed Liss told the story of
the jukebox and through it a little bit of America history,
cultural history, musical history, and the story of race in America.
Two and how black musicians were treated, how black music
was treated, white people as he said, white people, as
(17:14):
he said, pretending not to like the music that they
actually liked. And ultimately it would take decades before those
barriers between black and white music would completely shatter, well
into the sixties. By the way, our Duke Ellington piece
with Terry teach Out, the late Terry Teachout, gets into
this territory brilliantly.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Go to our.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
American Stories and just write in Duke Ellington on the
search bar, one of our finest hours, a walk through
the twentieth century in every dimension. When we come back
more of the story of the jukebox by an aficionado
ed List here on our American Stories, and we return
(18:12):
to our American stories and with jukebox historian and collector
ed Lists of New York, He's brought back to life
numerous jukeboxes over the years, preserving a meaningful part of
America's music history.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Now let's return to ed every project I've done, and
(18:47):
I've done total well. I have nineteen restored machines, but
every project's different, and these machines are very complex. Oh
not for the faint of heart. I wouldn't do it
as a weekend warrior. You better know what you're doing
when you get involved in these we say will confound
you in less than five minutes. I have the last
(19:12):
machine I restored. It was it was not that far
from home, but it was incomplete, non working. It was
basically a pile of junk. And I don't know why
I bought it, but I bought it, and I must
have stared at it for several months before I was
(19:35):
able to figure out what to do with it. And
we ended up spending two and a half years and
over two thousand hours of labor bringing this pile of
junk back into a incredible piece of American music history,
(19:55):
absolutely stunning and needed everything. I found it a up
in Katona, New York, which is not too far from
where I live now, and the guy wanted to get
rid of it because it was just taking up space.
It had broken parts, missing pieces. I didn't know really
(20:16):
what it was until I took it home and realized
that what the hell did I do? But my technician,
who works on my cabinets, it was a brilliant creator,
said to me, I can restore this cabinet. And I
looked at him like he was crazy, because it had
no wheels, had no side, the bottom side was missing,
(20:38):
I mean everything on it. He did work something. So
we took it apart, piece by piece, and we had
really nothing to go by. We had to make a
brand new grill for the front, which is very elaborate,
and we had a very fuzzy picture on the Internet
that kind of showed us what it looked like. And
(20:59):
then we found a piece of wood in the cabinet
that had been put there as a brace which didn't
belong the originally and I was part of the original grill.
And from that errand piece of wood, we were able
to figure out what the grill looked like, what was
made of, how it was shaped, molded, type of wood
they used. Really it was like a clone. And after
(21:23):
two and a half years and two thousand hours of labor,
we brought this chipbox back to life. It also had
a first phonograph ever to use noise cancelation circuitry in
an amplifier. That means that all seventy eighth's, regardless of
the scratchy surface noise, the noise would be taken out.
(21:48):
And when I restored the amplifier I had to research
retired engineers and ask them how did this company put
in noise cancelation circuitry in nineteen thirty seven, and they
told me they used notch filters. And what are notch filters.
Notch filters the capacitors that basically eliminate noise in certain
(22:13):
frequency ranges. So if seventy eights couldn't go beyond five
thousand hertz or cycles on the sound spectrum, most of
the noise would be in the mid range. And that's
what these did. They targeted mid range noise and removed
it completely. I had to find a guy who was
(22:34):
long retired who knew how to do this in his amplifier,
and I hired him, John Weisner, the best amp restore
on the planet, and he knew how to do it,
and he did it. So I took this machine from
an unincomplete, non working pile of junk into a beautiful sounding, looking,
(22:59):
working jukebox. I'm very proud of it and all the
records in there. There are only twelve records, twelve seventy eighths.
Each one is matched to the era as Judy Garland
already saw Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Klambig seven. You
(23:20):
name it, and I got it. But it's only twelve selections.
But the fidelion it is so good that I get
chills every time I hear it. It's a nineteen thirty
seven Rocola. The mottle is the Rhythm King and it
was made nineteen thirty seven. In nineteen thirty seven, this
(23:40):
checkbox cost five hundred dollars, which was during the depression,
which was a fortune of money at that time. Five
hundred dollars in nineteen thirty seven was a lot of
money and we had to It was tarnished. Someone had
varnished it with his brown varnish on the cabinet, and
(24:04):
we knew that it didn't come out of the factory
that way, so we stripped it very carefully and under
it was beautifully book matched. The walnut, the components of
it and the materials I used was unbelievable, and we
worked with hand tools from the eighteen nineties to ensure
(24:26):
accuracy and perfection so that we were finished with this project.
This machine was absolutely perfect. You can go online anytime
on YouTube and watch the resurrection of the nineteen thirty
seven Rocola Rhythm King. It's seventeen minutes long, and it's
(24:52):
a glory to watch, and you can see what the
machine looked like when I got it to what it
ended up and sounded like when I was all done
with it. When we finished restoring the machine, we decided
to make a documentary of the entire restoration or resurrection process.
(25:12):
I called it a resurrection because this machine was beyond restoration.
It was a pilot junk and it needed to be resurrected.
And we resurrected it, and in the middle of November
of twenty sixteen, it played for the first time in
eighty years, eight decades. And when we heard the music
(25:35):
and heard the quality of the fidelity, we were absolutely floored.
We were like frozen in our tracks to hear this
machine singing again after eight decades of silence. And what
we heard was beautiful, beautiful sound, beautiful bass response, smooth bottom,
(26:01):
crystal clear notes. And you say, a very special speaker
called the Jensen Series X. It was a new type
of speaker that Jensen made and it was the first
time they used it in his jukebox, any jukebox, but
we had it raccooned. It was difficult because it wasn't
(26:24):
like usual speakers and had a few quirks to it,
but we got it done, and we got the whole
thing done, and the machine is restored now back to
brand new tradition in every way shaping form.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
And we're listening to Edliss talk about the restoration of
a grand, grand jukebox, and he talks about it with
this love, with this adoration that Americans are familiar with.
Any of you who have a desire and a love
for restoring things, be it cars. In my family, my
mom had a deep effect for restoring wood and furniture
(27:02):
back to its original form. And it was a time
consuming and painstaking process to do it. And when he
starts to talk about that recolar Rhythm King jukebox, he
called it a piece of junk that he returned to
its original magnificence. It wasn't a restoration, he said, it
was a resurrection. Edliss's story continues here on our American stories,
(27:39):
and we returned to our American stories and with jukebox
historian and collector Ed Liss, who is masterfully taking us
through the history of the jukebox and the role they
played in culture and the jukebox formed teenage social life
and determined the most popular teen hangout spots around. Let's
return to with the rest of this story.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Jukeboxes really became popular when prohibition was repealed in nineteen
thirty three, which allowed social gathering drinking. So jukeboxes became
popular because there was a cheap form of entertainment rather
than hiring a live band, which costs money. The early
(28:23):
jukeboxes were really glorified radio cabinets with phonographs in them
mechanisms in them. If you take a look at the
early wooden ones, they will look look like our deco
or they have different unusual wood markings on them. They
(28:46):
were made mostly from walnut, birch, and woods that basically
were good for absorbing sound. Keep in mind that in
the early years of jukeboxes they didn't have what's called
sound shaping. Sound shaping is basically the ability to shape
(29:06):
sound in a cabinet because you didn't have like equalizers
where you can do it by frequencies. So the cabinin
had to be made out of walnut or some kind
of a wood that would be positive towards music, like
a violin. We make a good violin or cello, you
(29:27):
got to use the best varnishes, the best woods veneers
and all that. The same with a wooden jukebox. You
got to use the best products that will make the
sound as good as possible without sound shaping. So the
early machines used basically radio cabinets that had phonographs in them,
(29:47):
and then in the nineteen thirties they invented what's called
phenolic plastic, which are plastic pieces that we had the
ability to shine light through them. The jukeboxes became more
attractive because they could be lit up, and then you
put in rotating cylinders so that the colors could change,
(30:11):
and bubble tube so that the bubbles would circulate. It
was called cavitation in science. But the jukeboxes at the
time were precisely tuned to the age. The way they sounded,
the way they worked, the way they looked, and certainly
the way they made you feel. Jukebox has a connection
(30:34):
that only a jukebox can make. Nothing plays like a jukebox,
nothing except maybe a live orchestra or band. But jukeboxes
had a certain sound, and even a jukebox from the
thirties or forties or fifties will sound different because the
technology they used, the records, they used. Everything they did
(30:58):
at that time was different and precisely tuned to the
age of that machine. When I find the machine, it's
usually dead, incomplete, non working, abandoned or whatever. You have
to have vision and grit to pull these back together,
(31:19):
because they're very complicated pieces of equipment, But as I
said earlier, they're precisely engineered. One machine I restored I
found in a garage in Bedford, New York, in nineteen
eighty eight, and it had been used in White Plains,
New York, in a restaurant whose operator who owned the
(31:43):
jukebox was right next to my father's business for forty
two years in White Planes, and I never knew that
jukebox was even there. So when I found that jukebox,
I restored it all with the original equipment in it
as in my collection, and it played all the big
band hits of the nineteen forties. I have another machine
(32:06):
called the Bomber Nose, which was built nineteen forty eight,
which looks like the tail gunner on an F twenty
four bomber and a tail gunning canopy, and it plays
twenty four forty fives. Originally it was a seventy eight machine.
It was converted to forty fives in the early fifties,
(32:28):
and when I found it, it had been already converted
to forty fives, but it was a mess and it
needed everything. So that machine now is called Grade one,
which means is the highest quality restoration. After all these years,
I restored it. All the machines I have basically tell
(32:50):
an interesting story. They all sound great. But you got
to keep in mind that when I get these things,
then i'm working during complete I got a research I
got to find the parts. I got to find a
skilled people that know how to fix them or restore them.
Not easy. But my interest is not just restoring the hardware.
(33:15):
It's in restoring the authentic experience of listening to what
it sounded like at that time, the artist, the music,
the machinery. It's all about the jukebox experience. And I've
restored that experience so that you can see history in
front of your eyes. And that's what's so thrilling about it.
(33:39):
It's it's history being restored authentically. So when I restore
a jukebox, it's got to be done right. I don't
cut corners. I do a lot of research first, but
then when I finished the project, I just can't believe
what I've done because it's so much work. But I've
(34:01):
got nineteen restored machines and they all work perfectly. So
I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish.
And again, it's authenticating the experience and restoring it the
way it was at that time. Well, in the nineteen fifties,
I lived in the northeast Bronx and there was a
(34:24):
bar on the corner of one of the streets, and
in that bar was a jukebox. Of course, so one
day a jukebox salesman walks in with a new model,
a new model jukebox. He wheels it in and he
(34:45):
pulls the one out of the wall, the plug out
of the wall, and puts the plug in to this
new one, and he says to the bar attended, he says, hey,
I can demonstrate this for you. Try this out for
a couple of days. Attend to said you can't do that.
This belongs to blah blah blah people and it's their machinery.
(35:07):
So he says it's okay, just leave it for a
couple of days. So the bartender makes a phone call.
Ten minutes later, two big goons walk in. Big goons
walk in and they ask where's the jukebox salesman? And
there he is sitting on a stool. So they go
(35:29):
over to the wall. They pull the plug out of
the jukebox. They roll it out the door, into the street,
into the gutter, into the sidewalk, which smashes into ten
thousand pieces. Then they go back inside and this poor
guy is sitting there at the barstool trembling. They take
(35:50):
one arm, one leg, a practice swing on each side
and toss them out the door. Demonstration over. So I
know one V two hundred never made it. He got
disyntegrated at that incident. So you never do that. In
the industry, it's called a romancing. You don't want to
(36:11):
romance people because that'll get you killed or get you
injured or something. But that location belonged to these people,
and any permission you wanted to do anything, you got
to go through them, or else you're gonna get your
butt tossed out the door, which is exactly what happened.
So that was an interesting story. There are the stories
(36:36):
like it. I have a friend who used to work
for an operator and one day he gets a call
in a horrible area in Bedford Stuyvesant, one of him
in the morning and he's behind a jukebox trying to
fix it, and all of a sudden the fight breaks
out and beer bottles and fists and chairs and tables
are flying all over the place. So he's standing behind
(36:56):
the jukebox. He puts two wires together, push the cover
on that, crawls on his hands and knees out the
door and the place was in a melee. So stories
like that, jukebox operators had the service machines at all
hours of the day because once the music stops, the
income stops, so you got to be around to fix it.
(37:19):
But in this case, uh, it wasn't a great situation.
Lots of stories like that. You have fights, well you
end up somebody's head goes through the jukebox or something
like that. Jukebox has never got any respect. But interestingly
enough that one of the greatest products this country ever made,
the Great American Jukebox.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
And a terrific job on our production team, and that
consists of Rush Jones, Micah Touchet, and Andrew Stein and
a special thanks to Ed Liss he's a former RIGHTD executive,
jukebox collector and historian who's long admired the machines and
spent a lifetime hunting and restoring great American jukeboxes. Indeed,
what ed is doing is restoring history, the story of
(38:03):
the jukebox, and Edlas's story too, and for restorers everywhere
who restore anything them to here on our American story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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