AUTOPSIES RESEARCH GROUP

The Automated Musical Instrument Company (AMI), starting with only $200 in working-capital, manufactured an automatic phonograph in 1927. They designed a mechanism for selectable music rolls which was later modified for use in juke-boxes. Justus Seeburg combined an electrostatic loudspeaker with a coin-operated record player in 1928. [1] [2]

‘Juke-joint’ (c 1940): from West African Gullah word ‘joog’ : disorderly, rowdy, wicked. (OED).

In 1922, the Automated Musical Instrument Company moved into a factory in Grand Rapids Michigan, the boyhood home of Gerald R. Ford Junior. The site was previously used by a hearse manufacturer. [3]

During the post depression era, ‘juke-joints’ proliferated offering drinks, dancing and blues music.

Post-war boom saw the AMI factory producing 100 machines per day for 245 days a year. Fuelled new audio technology. [4]

Popular culture of ‘malt-shops’ and ‘bobby-soxers’ demanded cheap entertainment. Juke-boxes gave the public a medium to hear the latest songs. Washington’s ‘Sit-down’ law required a tavern’s patron to remain seated while drinking and ‘not to walk to a juke-box with a drink in his hand’. [5] [6]

Counters showed the operator the number of times each record was played to enable retention of most popular and replacement of others. [7]

Between 1945 and 1960, British youth underwent a period of massive ‘Americanisation’. (Horn, A. Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture. Manchester: MUP, 2009).

There were less than 100 juke-boxes in Britain in 1945 and over 15,000 by 1958. 

Juke-boxes and youth cafes proliferated and became part of mainstream culture. (Horn: 130).

‘The main cam begins its cycle, raising the record lift-arm, opening the clamp- arm, closing the clamp-arm, releasing the tone arm and opening the operating switch (…) as the motor relay has dropped out this also de-mutes the amplifier’. (Napps Schultz Manga Operating Manual c.1958). [8]

Social revolt in a new context, that of petty-crime and swank. (Horn: 125)

‘As the number one manufacturer of commercial and home juke-boxes, (AMI) have been making places come alive for over 80 years’ (Rowe-AMI Advertising Copy).

‘The trappings of working-class dandyism, though spectacular in their expense and visual effects, symbolised little more than a naïve trust in the power of consumerism to transform humdrum realities’ (Horn: 126)

Art Brown made it through a strike and bankruptcy during his 29 years at AMI. His grandfather, father, mother, aunt, uncle and a brother worked there over the years. [9]

Kenneth Fearing, narrator of street-life, the world of dime-stores, cheap cafes, hustlers, city slang; writer of The Big Clock, 1946, marginalised for his commitment to techniques and attitudes formed during the depression:
      The juke-box has a big square face.
      A majestic face, softly glowing with red
      And green and purple lights.
      Have you got a face as bright as that?
      But it’s a proven fact; that a juke-box has no ears. 
      (Fearing, K. King Juke, 1938).

‘With a music catalogue offering of hundreds of thousands of songs, digital downloading jukeboxes appeal to all audiences creating an exceptional interactive music experience that will keep them coming back for more’ (Rowe-AMI Advertising Copy 2006).

That glamorous musical beast that was the juke-box has departed, its soundscape lost to the anodyne respectfulness of nostalgia. (Blake, A. Times Higher Education Supplement, 2009). [10]

‘When Rowe International (AMI) rolls out a juke-box to celebrate its 100th anniversary this year, it won’t come from a factory that operates in Grand Rapids, local workers learned Thursday. The iconic music maker on the city’s Southeast side told about 100 manufacturing workers that production would shift to Mexico in August, ending decades of humming equipment at 1500 Union Avenue’. (West Michigan Business News. Feb. 27th 2009). [11]

‘We’re not stupid. We saw it coming, but we hoped that it would last a couple more years’ said Brown, 52. ‘It’s kind of ironic on the 100th anniversary’. [12]


Simon Rothon

Invited contributor Simon Rothon is about to begin his PhD research at UCL into the French and English 'manly hero' in nineteenth-century adventure romances.

I’ve always admired them. I never knew them particularly well. I think they’ve got the fame and beauty to hear of their demise slightly before the fact of their demise. I’m going to call them, all of them, the Contraption, because now’s the time to be reflective, or at least to be solemn. 

We say the cosmos ended long ago, and here I’m referring to the old Greek idea of the cosmos, with the earth at the center, the fire tucked in beneath the moon, the incorruptible spheres nested up and up to the uppermost sphere of stars, which was very seriously called the “place” of the universe because everything needed to be somewhere. There are many theories about when the old cosmos died. I don’t think it did. I don’t think the new universe lives alone, and I think most of us are found in between the two. It’s those of us in between who love the Contraption.

The Contraption is neat and self-contained. In this way, it’s like the old universe. You pull the handle back and release the silver ball. The silver ball mounts elliptically through its aphelion. In this way, the Contraption is like the new universe. The ball gets to the heights because it’s born furious and innocent. It’s buffeted everywhere as it hurries or slouches to the underworld. In this way, the Contraption is like the old universe. There’s no divine hope for the silver ball, but skill and unpredictability. In this way, the Contraption is like the new universe. There’s hope for it in the precise astrology of the blinking lights. In this way, the Contraption is like the old universe.

I don’t know what it means that the Contraption is almost dead. Everybody wants to say it had a second life, a digital life, but I knew it never had a chance. It’s not our taste anymore too read so much from so little, especially not on computer screens. It carried the eye a certain way.

Jonathan Regier


Invited contributor Jonathan Regier is a writer and doctoral student in the philosophy of science at Paris 7. His first book of poems came out with Six Gallery Press in 2008. He's currently at work on the second, also for 6GP.