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October 19, 2024: Singles Going Steady -- All Vinyl 45 Throwdown

Rattle the quarters in your pocket for the jukebox because we are goin' ALL VINYL 45s tonight in honor of WFMU's "Singles Going Steady" week. Peep the webcam link below (video, no audio) for the Starlite Lounge 45 Altar, and be sure to get your pledges in for WFMU's October Hellraiser! I'd love to see the number of supporters climb DEEP into the 20s before we roll out at 1 AM.

Use this link to support the Hotwire Mandate on WFMU!

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Records are trash.

And yet, I love them. Acquiring them has been a big part of my life since I was a kid, and yet, I do not consider myself a collector.

I treat records badly. Throw them around, leave them sitting on the turntable for a week to gather dust.

Touching the bumpy middle bit where the music lives.

A few years ago, I completed a major life mission, which was acquiring a vinyl jukebox. (See photo, above.) I bought it off a friend from WFMU who needed to clear out space in his home.

Jukeboxes take up a lot of room. They are also heavy AF and moving it from his house to mine required a truck, a dozen bagels, and two friends, one of whom hurt his back pretty badly during the process. They both still talk to me, which I am genuinely surprised by. (Maybe it was the bagels.)

I never thought of myself as a 45 guy. There are a lot of great songs that exist on 45s, but they often also exist on longer records -- the kind which you can put on and then sit down to enjoy the music for a little while without having to stand up again almost immediately.

45s don't allow for that. Put one on, and thee minutes later, you have to stand up and flip it over. Three minutes isn't a long time.

Stone age technology offers a solution for this. The jukebox. Load 100 or so 45s into one, punch a few buttons, and presto, you are free to move about your home and enjoy projects such as cooking, reading, or chewing on a box of roofing nails, all while the songs you've selected on the jukebox play in continuous order in the background.

"But wait", you say. "What about streaming? Or digital files?" (I cannot help but notice that you seem very satisfied with yourself when saying this.)

"Yes, yes", I say. "Streaming and digital files are all well and good, but they do not involve clunky, mechanical parts which, after a few minutes of being powered on, fill the air with the pleasant and familiar scent of warm oil and old machinery. Also, a jukebox has many light-up doodads which, when working in partnership with a tatty string of Christmas lights tacked to the wall, can make your nice, suburban living room look like a dumpy East Village bar from the early 90s."

"Oh", you say.

My jukebox had cancer when I first got it. By that I mean its gills were caked with what I eventually decided was years worth of nicotine, absorbed in whatever tavern this thing lived in throughout the 1970s prior to my friend from WFMU acquiring it. The first thing I did when I got it home was go through an entire box of Q-tips to clean all of that gunk out. This cured my jukebox of cancer.

Anyway, like I was saying, records are trash and I treat mine badly. But I now love 45s because I love my jukebox. It's an old, ornery thing that routinely blows fuses and which requires constant nursing along, but it fills my home with wondrous and delightful sounds, especially on Friday nights when my wife, daughter, and I are usually cooking dinner as a family.

OH BUT THERE IS A BIG FUCKING PROBLEM. My jukebox only plays the kind of 45s that have the big hole in the middle. And some records (especially the kind made in Europe) have the regular tiny hole in the middle, presumably because of socialism.

However, I learned through Doing My Own Research that there exists a magical tool called a record dinker, which was created for the explicit purpose of punching a big hole in a small hole'd 45, so that it can be played by a jukebox.

Just thinking about how there was a time in recent history when someone had to get up in the morning and go to work at a factory where record DINKERS were made fills me with awe at the scale of the universe. That is some real Neil deGrasse Tyson shit right there.

Anyway, I don't have one of these dinkers, but a (different) friend from WFMU does, and every once in a while, he lets me use it so that I can punch big holes into records (which we have already established are trash) that have small holes, so they can be played by my jukebox.

And yes, I take great delight in knowing that I probably have the only jukebox in New Jersey with 45s by artists like Destroy All Monsters, the Slits, Wedding Present, Minor Threat, the Ex, Public Image Ltd., Spectrum, the Gun Club, and the Lunachicks loaded into it. These are all great sounds to accompany the act of cooking dinner with your family.

But records are still trash.