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Does anybody mind if I slip two bits into the jukebox? Man… that sounds… so familiar.
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Love the songs on the juke box. Likely I played or heard everyone of them at the local hang-out back in the day except one. Holy Man by Diane Kolby was entirely new to me. I googled and found it. Interesting. Not bad, not great.
I will give you a bag of coins.
The Diner’s jukebox is better than the one at the Waffle House, although it has no Waffle House-themed songs.
One of my first commercial flights in the late 1990s still had the headphones with tubes. Don’t remember the quality but I’m sure it wasn’t great. I remember when the channel rotation on an airplane included an ATC channel and you could listen in to the pilots.
Listening to James speak on TV series opening songs made me think of the The High Chaparral series. The theme song was terrific. The series was one of the best westerns made, much along the lines of Lonesome Dove.
He ALMOST had me reconsidering Muzak. Almost.
Not really, but it was fun hearing him rationalize it.
Shoe polisher bit was the funniest thing I’ve heard all week. Laughed out loud causing my wife to ask, “What’s so funny?”
You had to be there.
As long as we’re talking about music, what big band, (is playing what song), as you enter the diner?
It’s production music. The cut is called “Big Band Basie.” James used to use “Let’s Dance” by Benny Goodman. We had to change it because copyright issues.
Hah! Thanks. That just popped out of deep memory.
If you look at it as proto-ambient, it’s a fascinating subject. It’s music meant to be heard, but not engaged with at the top level. Furniture music, as the man called it in 1917. There’s so much talent in the works – the arrangers, the musicians – and it’s all intended to sooth and delight without ever grabbing you by the lapels. A genial anesthetic, a ubiquitous mood.
Weren’t there supposed to be subliminal messages in Muzak? The Thy Shall Not Steal Mombo? The Pickup Some Extra Soda Foxtrot?
Muzak makes me think of the supermarket scene in The Stepford Wives.
I knew about the Star Trek theme. I presumed Gene Roddenberry was unique in swindling the composer out of half the royalties. I didn’t know that there were a lot of other instances where a TV producer is presented with an instrumental theme music for his show, writes some crap lyrics that will never be used in the shows, and declares himself to be co-writer so he can harvest half the royalties from the theme music.
Apparently songwriters were also frequently cheated by record producers in a similar way (let’s change these two words) and even their own managers.
It’s a story as old as copyrighted music.
You truly are an artist, James.