Last month, I was in Cleveland for a family reunion to see relatives on my father’s side of the family. My father, Don Kurlander, is 94 and has spent much of his life in Cleveland, where many know him as a dedicated and caring gastroenterologist. But as a teenager, he worked at his father’s drugstore, Kurlander Drugs where they had a jukebox, and he still recalls playing his favorite song, “Peg o’ My Heart,” a 1947 #1 instrumental hit by Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats. That was just a few years before record store owner Leo Mintz would sponsor DJ Alan Freed to start playing the rockin’ tunes that rebellious teenagers like my Uncle Louis loved.

A decade later, my father married my mother, Jeanne, whose father Jack Cohen helped pioneer the jukebox industry in Cleveland and organized his fellow operators into the Phonograph Merchants Association,. On my way into town, I connected with Nick Comella— the grandson of Charlie Comella, a good friend of my grandfather who was one of those original operators. Charlie’s business, Cadillac Music, started in the back of J.C. Music and Novelty on Euclid Boulevard over 80 years ago. It is now occupies an entire city block in Carnegie and is the largest supplier of TouchTunes in Cleveland. In thinking about our upcoming podcast on Cleveland, jukeboxes and the birth of rock and roll, I asked Nick what bar in the city was the most historic, and he mentioned Hotz Café, in the Tremont section on Cleveland’s South Side, which first opened in 1919.

The bar was opened by John Hotz, a Rusyn immigrant, to serve the working-class steelworkers and other Slavic immigrants who largely populated the area. It opened the year before Prohibition, and the place survived as a speakeasy, serving patrons including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and FDR, who visited before his election as President in 1932, and Eliot Ness, who had come to Cleveland after taking down Al Capone in Chicago, as the city’s Public Safety Director.

When we were making Jack and the Jukebox, a documentary about my grandfather, Billy Levine, whose father Sanford Levine ran Atlas Vending with his brother Ruby, and was BFFs with my Grandpa Jack and Charlie Comella, recalled how his father always said Prohibition was the most fun time in his life. That was also around the time the jukebox emerged in bars across America as a cheap form of entertainment. Hotz has had many machines over the years, but now has a TouchTunes digital jukebox operated by Cadillac, and Nick was gracious enough to connect me to John Hotz, the grandson of the original owner, who upon hearing I was coming to town, suggested I stop by and talk to his wife Sheila who would be behind the bar.

As I drove to the Tremont section on Cleveland’s South Side on a rainy night and approached Hotz Café on the corner, it reminded me of the bars my Uncle Louis, who took over the business from my grandfather, used to take me to when, as a teenager, I went with him on his jukebox routes.

Sheila greeted me warmly, like a friend she had known for years. I soon found out she had been working there for decades along with her sister Carrie, having grown up in the neighborhood. The bar was crowded with regulars and others who had discovered the place in this now-gentrified part of the city. But it had a timeless, welcoming quality, with a beautifully-lit bar, framed photos of the generations who had made Hotz what it was, and a sign quietly announcing the bar’s history from 1919 to 2026. Sheila told me how I had just missed a church group who came in religiously on Fridays and Saturdays, and explained the young people who had just arrived were from one of the local medical schools.

As Sheila went off to serve customers, I struck up a conversation with a couple next to me. He had grown up nearby and remembered drag racing in the streets as a kid. They were waiting for an Eric Church song his wife had queued up on the jukebox before heading out.

The TouchTunes jukebox glowed at the end of the bar and played tunes across genres, from Jackson Brown to George Straight to Gladys Knight and the Pips to Rush and Pearl Jam. A guy named Steve took an adjacent stool, a bandana around his head, and shared that he came here regularly after his double shifts at the steel mill. He bought me a round of grape freeze shots, which were delicious, and when I mentioned I was working on a jukebox project and had come via friends at Cadillac Music, Steve and his friend Ryan, sitting next to him, immediately recognized the name. They were big pool players, and Cadillac supplied the amusements at other local spots, too.

Hotz has no pool table, but it has a shuffleboard game that has been there since 1936. Steve and Ryan crossed over to play a guy with the med students, and I used the chance to take a look at what was on the walls around the place. There were a photo of Babe Ruth and various framed articles talking about the bar’s long heritage. One told how John Hotz never cashed a check for $13.65 that Babe Ruth wrote after buying a round for the entire bar. Another about how during World War II, five members of the Hotz family went overseas to fight for this country, and when they came back, two of the sons took over the bar. And a piece recounting how Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep and the crew of The Deerhunter once came into the place when it was shooting around Tremont, hoping to film, but were turned down by Andrew Hotz who was running the bar at the time. There was also a collage of customers with a handwritten sign at the center saying “Hotz Cafe is the best” and hanging with the patrons who were in the bar that night, it was easy to see why people loved this place.

Steve and Ryan returned after handily winning the shuffleboard game. When I asked if they played the jukebox a lot, Steve smiled and pulled up his phone to show me his TouchTunes app with over 45,000 plays. Ryan said he had over 25,000.

Embarrassed to admit I hadn’t downloaded the app yet, I quickly installed it and picked two songs connected to my grandfather. The first was “Jingle Jangle,” the track that broke in Cleveland through the “Hit Tune” program my grandfather started as part of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association— a tune my students know from the video game Fallout, set in a post-apocalyptic 1950s.

I then played Frank Sinatra’s “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” as Frank had credited my grandfather with supporting his early career, stopping his show when he opened Cleveland’s Richfield Coliseum in 1974 to tell the crowd, “I want to thank Jack Cohen for helping me get my start.”

Sheila recalled a stretch when the bar had its own jukebox and bought their own records. Vinyl and jukeboxes are both making a comeback amongst this new generation who long to have music they don’t have to subscribe to and, in the aftermath of the pandemic and with concert ticket prices out of control, long to share songs with a roomful of people.

She also shared a great story about an older lady who came into the bar years ago and talked about when Eliot Ness came around, they’d hide all the liquor in the planters next door. My Uncle Louis once explained that the reason Cleveland had so many bars was that during Prohibition enterprising businessmen smuggled booze from Canada across Lake Erie. Ironically, Eliot Ness, the hero of Prohibition, would struggle in Cleveland, losing an election for mayor in 1947, and struggle with alcoholism and die almost broke. His memoir was published shortly after his death which became a hit TV series and a movie. It’s still unclear if Robert De Niro ever had a drink at Hotz Cafe, but he did play Al Capone in The Untouchables.

Elliot Ness is buried in Lake View Cemetery on Mayfield Road near Alan Freed, whose tombstone, at the suggestion of legendary guitarist and Sopranos star Stevie Van Zandt, is in the shape of a jukebox. Down he road is the grave of my Grandpa Jack, who was good friends with Leo Mintz and supplied his store Record Rendezvous with used jukebox records. It was Leo who convinced DJ Alan Freed to play those rockin’ records on his Moondog radio show on WJW and started preaching the gospel of this new music across the country. That’s a big reason the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland just a ten minute drive from Hotz Cafe.

Leo Mintz is buried in Mount Olive Cemetery, where my Uncle Louis was laid to rest last November. He was one of those original rock-and-roll-crazy teenagers who listened to Alan Freed, and told me all this history that he had lived. At Louis’ funeral were more people than my wife and I had ever seen who came to pay their respects— many from locations like Hotz where Louis used to come in and service their jukeboxes and where he knew everyone’s favorite songs.

It was hard to fathom all the history Hotz Café had seen as the various jukeboxes in the place played the soundtrack. The entire time I was there that Saturday the jukebox never stopped. But my favorite moment was when someone played Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and I caught a glimpse of Sheila singing along.

The beers are still reasonable at Hotz, and the atmosphere is warm and welcoming. To think of all that Hotz and this country have gone through in the past century, it is wonderful knowing that a place like this still exists. As I headed out, I was grateful for that, and for the music and community that the jukebox and places like this keep alive, which in so many ways reminded me of the best of America.

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I usually publish a new Jukebox Substack on Sundays, but we're deep in editing the first episodes of our Jukebox Chronicles podcast. So instead I'm sharing some photos courtesy of Tom "Grover" Biery and his son Levi. I first met Grover and his wife Jacqui in a baby group when we were living in L.A. and he was an executive at Warner Music.

By coincidence or fate, Jacqui grew up in Cleveland as best friends with Harriet, who would marry my cousin Peter Kusner. Peter came along after my Grandpa Jack, the jukebox pioneer, had passed, but everyone says he inherited Jack’s entrepreneurial spirit, and it was through Peter’s generosity that we started filming our documentary, Jack and the Jukebox, last year.

But earlier this summer, Grover and Levi came by Pittsburgh. Grover — whose nickname comes from his deejay days — had just picked Levi up from college in Maine, and they were driving back to L.A., stopping at Grover’s favorite record stores along the way. While at Warner, he’d been a key player behind the “back to vinyl” movement and an early supporter of Record Store Day. So we had breakfast in Millvale and visited The Attic and Jerry’s Records, the latter of which Grover credits with his own musical education, growing up in the small town of Jamestown, PA.

We were about to head out to Akron to film the Band Box jukebox and Devo coming back to play their hometown. Grover had brought two early bootleg Devo albums he got in a record store in Jersey, and was telling me how Akron, the former Rubber Capital of the World had once been called “America’s Liverpool” — one of the country’s first indie music scenes, to be followed by Athens, Georgia, with R.E.M. and the B-52s, and Seattle with grunge and bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

As they went along their journey, Levi and Grover texted photos which they’ve graciously allowed me to share. The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, featured A jukebox Experience Elvis Costello with eleven sections. In Part I, a 1944 recording of Woody Guthrie singing “This Land Is Your Land” sits next to Dylan’s own “Song to Woody” which the kid from Minnesota, Robert Zimmerman, wrote for his musical hero when he first came to New York. When Woody was in the hospital in 1961, Bob played him that song and knew Woody’s catalogue so well he called himself a Woody Guthrie jukebox. Part 3 has the first take of “Just Like a Woman” alongside “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” which John Lennon wrote inspired by Bob’s songs (and perhaps by some of the Norwegian wood that Bob introduced the Beatles to). There are also covers, like Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” and Nancy Sinatra performing “It Ain’t Me Babe” which I would love to hear.

This Seeburg DS 160 from 1962 sits in the Stax Museum in Memphis, on the site of the Soulsville, U.S.A. neighborhood where the studio was located. As Grover and the museum's website put it, Soulsville is arguably one of the most talent-packed neighborhoods in the world— Aretha Franklin, Memphis Slim, Memphis Minnie, and Booker T. Jones all called it home, and its two recording studios, Stax and Royal (home of Hi Records), produced some of the most soulful music of the last century. The Seeburg had a feature that advertised "The Artist of the Week" with title strips featuring a single artist's mini-album. For a quarter instead of a dime, you could listen to a whole side of an artist's latest record. This was an evolution of the "Hit Tune of the Month" idea that Billboard credited my my grandfather Jack Cohen and the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association with inventing in 1941.

This stunning 1942 Wurlitzer sat in Nashville at the Country Music Hall of Fame, amidst exhibits on Dolly Parton, the Grand Ole Opry turning 100, and Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. It was designed by Wurlitzer's Paul Fuller during WWII, when wartime restrictions inhibited the use of metal and plastics. After the war, Fuller would design the iconic Wurlitzer 1015, nicknamed The Bubbler for the bubbles that flowed through its glowing tubes up toward that art deco cathedral.

But the jukebox itself has a story. It was a gift to John Prine for a song he co-wrote with singer-songwriter Steve Goodman but refused to take credit for. The parody they composed, "You Never Even Called Me by My Name" skyrocketed into the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in 1975 when outlaw country star David Allan Coe recorded it. After receiving big royalty checks for the song, a grateful Goodman bought that jukebox for John. Goodman died of leukemia at just 36, and Prine cherished this machine, keeping it in his home and filling it with a mix of obscure country, classic R&B 78s, and his favorite Christmas singles. Watching the mechanical changer flip the old 78s reminded Prine of his father, an Illinois factory worker who loved taking his sons to local honky-tonks when they were kids.

The Biery family (they have 3 other kids besides Levi) and I have talked about why a new generation has fallen back in love with vinyl and why even in the age of Spotify, Touchtunes jukeboxes are thriving. Despite the algorithms pushing what people should listen to, or AI bands, people long for community and it has always been the music that has brought people together.

On June 3rd, we went to Akron to shoot the community that had gathered to watch Devo play their hometown and the Band Box jukebox operated by Bell Music, run by David George, the grandson of another associate of my grandfather’s Ed George. We have been editing the footage from our shoot in Akron (do podcasts have shoots?), and I was just listening to our interview with singer/songwriter Tim Easton who lives in Nashville, but delivered the Akron Beacon Journal as a paperboy for the families of Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney of The Black Keys, and of Chrissie Hyndes of The Pretenders when he was growing up. Tim got his break opening for Willie Nelson and has been around the country touring with everyone from Wilco to Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. Tim told us:”If you’re a traveling musician like myself, you go into bars and check out the jukebox before you would order the drink, because you want to know if this is a place you can hang out in…“

I kept thinking of Grover and Levi’s trip and the images they sent me from Nashville. Memphis, and Tulsa, and the other stops they made in towns like Cincinnati where King Records first recorded James Brown and where Wurlitzer itself started musical instruments before the company branched out into jukeboxes. When we got back to our hotel in Akron, my former student and cameraman Owen Gambill and our producer/editor Adam Kilburn told me to turn on the Food Network, and convinced me there might be a TV show here — something like “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” or Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” with music. Because every jukebox tells a story of a place and a community.

But for now, we're busy putting together the first two episodes of The Jukebox Chronicles as a podcast. It's cheaper than a TV show — and honestly, we're struggling to cover the cost of post-production, including the legal clearances and music rights, and looking for sponsors, as I don't think anyone wants to hear me doing covers of Devo, Joe Walsh, The Black Keys, or The Pretenders.

If you're so inclined to support this work, feel free to become a paid subscriber of this Substack, or drop a nickel in our jukebox by going to www.jackandthejukebox.com to make a tax-deductible donation. You can also reach out to me directly by clicking the "send message" button below. If you appreciate these stories, you can do what people have always done with a good song on a jukebox— share it with your friends.

Before we go back to the editing room, I feel compelled to share a few photos of beautiful old jukeboxes we filmed at Cadillac Music, where John and Nick Comella and their Dad Jimmy, still run the 81-year-old business their father Charlie Comella started in the back of the building that housed J.C. Music— where my Grandpa Jack's coin-operated automatic phonograph business was headquartered. Cadillac is the leading supplier of TouchTunes jukeboxes in Cleveland, including the Hotz Cafe, a legendary Cleveland bar where Babe Ruth once drank and where scenes from The Deer Hunter were shot with Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep. Today a new generation listens to the digital TouchTunes jukebox there where customers pay extra on a app to “jump the line” to impress would-be sweethearts, just like kids did with quarters when I was growing up.

I always wished my family head kept all those great jukeboxes we were surrounded by. Luckily, the Comellas have quite the collection in their lobby. Below are just some of them including a Wurlitzer Bubbler designed by Paul Fuller which after World War II sparked a new revolution called “Rock and Roll” which will be the subject of one of our podcasts.

John introduced me to Ben Thoburn, who with his wife Sarah is the proprietor of CoinOp Amusements and has a whole warehouse of jukeboxes. There's a photo of Ben as a kid, sitting inside the base of a jukebox his father was working on.

I was reunited with the Comellas last year when I discovered that they were still active with the Amusement and Music Operators of America, an organization started by jukebox operators back in my Grandpa Jack’s day. Below is Ben and I holding a sign for one of The Association’s gatherings, and a photo of my Grandpa Jack and me at age 4, as he was taking me to the 1963 MOA convention in Chicago.

Every jukebox tells a story — of a place, and of a community.

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We were about to go record material for our podcast

Grover stopped by Pittsburgh as he had just picked Levi. up from college in Maine, and they were visiting some of Grover’s favorite record stories— (in Pittsburgh, that was The Attic and Jerry’s records. But as they continued to go on their journey, they texted back with some of these photos.

The Jukebox experience was in Tulsa and was a piece they saw at the Bob Dylan Center.

Jacqui is lifelong friends with my cousin Peter Kusner’s wife Harriet.

Grover was an executive at Warner Music for years, and helped lead the movement back to vinyl and was an early sponsor of National Record Store Day Grover had just picked Levi. up from college in Maine, and they were sitting some of Grover’s favorite record stories— (in Pittsburgh, that was The Attic and Jerry’s records

(and trying to. raise a few additional nickels to cover the music rights so I don’t have to sing the soundtrack :).

As you regular readers may know, this project began as a documentary about my Granda Jack and the Cleveland coin men and how the jukebox helped give birth to rock and roll and spun America out of control. But Grover and Levi stopped by Pittsburgh just before we were about to go film in Akron about the music scene there and the Band Box jukebox. . F

There were visiting some of Grover’s favorite record stories— (in Pittsburgh, that was The Attic and Jerry’s records—- and were starting a cross country club

from a cross-country trip my friend Grover Biery took with his son Levi

this summer, picking his son up in Maine as he graduated from college and driving him back to L.A.

The theme of our podcast is “Every Jukebox Tells a Story: Of a Place and a A Community” and that really came home to me when longtime friend Grover Biery and his son Levi showed up in Pittsburgh just before we were filming our episode in Akron about The Band Box Jukebox there. When we were living in L.A., Grover was the General Manager and VP of Warner Music, and was

As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday this weekend, and you hear John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever play somewhere over the fireworks, we at The Jukebox Chronicles want to give a nod to the machine that democratized American music with a couple of facts here that may surprise and even shock you. (NSFW)

The idea of music for the people goes back to our Founding Fathers. Ben Franklin was doodling around with his Glass Armonica because he thought a good invention belonged in the public square, not locked away for the few. And Thomas Jefferson — who loved those European drawing rooms as much as anyone — still believed music shouldn’t belong only to the aristocrats. It belonged to the rest of us too.

Above is a 1941 newspaper photo of bandleader Tommy Dorsey, and stars of the RCA Victor Dance Caravan — among them Lucy Monroe, a descendant of President Monroe known as the “Star-Spangled Soprano” for singing the national anthem thousands of times at rallies and ballparks across the country. They are on a sound truck with my grandfather Jack Cohen, his associate Leo Dixon, and fellow coin-operators of the Ohio Jukebox Operators Association. The article talks about how they drove around Cleveland asking their fellow citizens to “buy a share in America,” drumming up the record-breaking crowds that packed the Dance Caravan’s shows — a month before Pearl Harbor. And that was just the beginning of their efforts to support their country during the war.

The Blue Part of The Red White and Blue

In January 1942, just as World War II was getting started, Billboard Magazine ran a one-year look back on “Cleveland’s Hit Record” campaign where operators picked one record that would go in front of 3000 plus machines across Northern Ohio. That tune would then be advertised on buses, streetcars, in newspapers — even on the back of an elephant when the circus is in town. Billboard credits the idea as the brainchild of Phonograph Merchant Association Vice-President Jack Cohen. My grandfather at the time was the chair of the Advertising and Picnic Committee. The piece quotes Jack as saying the idea is not to go with “sure-fire hits,” but discover new tunes that have not only become hits in Cleveland, but across the country.

There is a big focus in the piece on how the songs have been picked along patriotic lines. They cited the example of Arms For the Love of America written by Irving Berlin which is dedicated to Cleveland’s Defense Industries. Another hit cited is “Bless' Em All” which the article talks about was not charting until the CPMA promoted it using innovative techniques like placards on street cars and by putting it in all the defense plants in Ohio with satirical lyrics to what was described as a comedic “novelty song.” That seemed a nice, patriotic gesture except the song was written by an officer in Dunkirk during World War I, and the British version of “Bless ‘Em All” is known as "F*ck ‘Em All" The original that was the ultimate “fed-up” anthem for frontline troops in the first world war became a gallows-humor staple during the horrors of WWII. Soldiers sang “F*ck ‘Em All” to vent about the grim realities of their service— targeting the brass with lines like “F*ck all the sergeants and W.O. 1s [Warrant Officers], f*ck all the corporals and their bastard sons." The U.S. jukebox industry laundered it into a sanitized, morale-boosting American novelty hit. (The NSWF video that somehow made it passed YouTube. is linked at the end.)

Meanwhile, Cleveland Mayor Frank Lausche cited the CPMA and the “Hit Tune” program for championing civic pride and boosting morale during the war. The Billboard article quotes the Mayor as stating publicly that he “approved of the clean, wholesome entertainment from the phonos.” Mayor Lausche will become Governor and crackdown on gambling in the state which drove my grandfather’s associates from the Mayfield Road Gang out to finance The Desert Inn casino in Vegas which is a whole other chapter we will get to in another post.

Juke Manufacturers Go To War

It wasn’t only the jukebox operators supporting the war effort. When the government halted civilian production, the biggest jukebox makers turned their factories over to the war. Wurlitzer at its North Tonawanda plant made bomb proximity fuzes — a device later ranked with the atomic bomb and codebreaking as one of the secret technologies that won the war. Rock-Ola became one of only ten manufacturers of the M1 carbine rifle. Seeburg retooled to make aviation equipment for our Air Force, developing radar technology which would also be key to our victory.

On the home front, there was rationing. (My mother Jeanne recalled somehow her father got a hold of a steak to eat every night.) The government requested that records be melted down for their shellac and metals like aluminum and copper which were in short supply. The Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association swung into action, turning their locations into collection stations, with operators “stirring up enthusiasm for the their customers for this patriotic work.” Prizes were even offered to those who melted down the most records. My mother always told me that her father who could never resist a good contest, melted down all his own records, and won a ride in an Army Jeep so that he could give a ride to the whole neighborhood.

The CPMA of course brought in some hot recording artists, Johnny Long and his Orchestra, and Country Western singer Elton Britt to perform at The Palace. In 1941, Johnny performed his Back Up the Red, White and Blue with Gold, the official song of the Treasury’s War Bond Department, at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s birthday ball in Washington. And Elton had a hit with There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere released just after we entered World War II, that tells the emotional story of a disabled “mountain boy” who desperately wants to fight for his country despite his physical limitations. It became a massive patriotic phenomenon, crossing over from country music to the mainstream pop charts selling millions of copies and becoming the first country music recording to earn a gold record.

Britt also performed his song for FDR at the White House, but all that did not keep someone from stealing his six-shooter before the show. The police were notified, but it was still missing. Then right after his show, Britt was just reclassified 1-A and was to report for induction two weeks later. For all those saying this should be a streaming series, yes, you can’t make this stuff up.

By the way, Elton’s “Uranium Dream” is used on the Amazon series Fallout as has been Cleveland hit tunes “I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire” and “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.”

These were not the only stars the CPMA brought to town. Below is my Grandpa Jack and the CPMA folks with The Andrews Sisters. Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree was a Hit Tune that also raised funds for the Defense Fund and their hit Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy would become a WWII anthem later made a hit by Bette Midler. They brought Gene Autry the singing cowboy in who also became a war hero and poignantly Glenn Miller whose Cowboy Serenade was a hit tune” and tragically died in a plane crash in the war. Jack also brought in a guy he had recommended to Tommy Dorsey as a vocalist, who all the women whose men were overseas went crazy for. My mother said how Frank Sinatra sung her and my Aunt Barbara to sleep in their basement and how there are multiple reports of Frank stopping his show when he opened the Cleveland Coliseum and thanked Jack Cohen for helping start his career.

Music For All The People.

In 1941, Homer Capehart, the Wurlitzer executive, told a room full of Ohio operators at a rally in Cleveland that the jukebox, standing in every corner café, diner, and tavern, was nothing less than “the poor man’s symphony.” It was a machine that crossed cultural boundaries and operators made sure they were given to servicemen. In a 1942 Phonogram profile, talking about how fast JC Music is growing, Jack listed his hobby as “promoting the Stage Door Canteen.” Irving Berlin wrote the song “I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,” a Cleveland Hit Tune. The canteens were places a serviceman could go — in a strange city, or on his way to the front — to get a meal and hear some music before shipping out. The association put a jukebox in Cleveland’s servicemen’s clubs and USO halls, and in the military canteens themselves, here at home and overseas with no nickel required. The Phonogram mentions also how they even put a jukebox in the army induction center so on their last day of civilian life, the soldiers could hear songs like The Star-Spangled Banner, God Bless America, and John Philip Sousa marches.

Because the war involved a cross-section of Americans, military jukebox featured records that were jazz, hillbilly, gospel, swing, and bebop. In some parts of America, this music was segregated, but not on these jukeboxes The CPMA and the Ohio association had been bringing in artists of color all along — the King Cole Trio, Duke Ellington, The Ink Spots. That mixing of races and of genres, on a tavern wall and a barracks floor is where the sound teenagers would fall for after the war came from. They would call it rhythm and blues. In Cleveland, a disc jockey and record store owner would soon give it another name: rock and roll.

The Association also put a machine in a location that served Black servicemen. During all this, the President of the Ohio State Automatic Phonograph Operators Association was Leo Dixon who also was an officer with the CPMA. In the trade papers, Dixon’s race is never mentioned; but the men who worked with him remember him as Black. I’m still trying to learn more about who he was. What the papers do show is a leader as eloquent and patriotic as any in the industry. In 1942, Leo told his members they would keep sacrificing “as many things as this country needs to keep it forever free.” And at the 1945 banquet, with the war nearly won, he said the association could “rightfully point with pride to the part we have played in civic affairs and the war effort— the Red Cross, the War Loan Drive, the March of Dimes, the Stage Door Canteen, the hospitals.” The trade called his one of the most progressive associations in the country. And when Dixon stepped down, it was my grandfather Jack, who had served as his VP for the state organization, who moved up to take his place.

This patriotism amongst the coin-operators was the common spirit of the country back then. Operators came from all sorts of ethnicities— Italians, Jews, Lebanese, African Americans— and the music on their machines reflected the many neighborhoods they served. Of course, America still had its small-minded thinkers and prejudice To address that, shortly after the war, Frank Sinatra — the skinny kid my grandfather had tipped Tommy Dorsey to hire — would win a special Academy Award for a short film preaching tolerance. In The House I Live In, he sang that the “hundred million” people who made up America come from every kind of place and faith, and that this is the very thing worth loving about it.

One longs for that unity again — though, frankly, more of it may still be here than we think. In every bar and diner and restaurant, then and now, are Americans who share each other’s music and love this country equally.

One last irony about all this. As you hear John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” play this weekend. Sousa, who served as director of the U.S. Marine Band, was famously against recorded music. But it was partly because he spoke up that the law was written so musicians get paid when their songs play on a jukebox. And it was during World War II that operators like the CPMA promoted his marches.alongside the other patriotic tunes — the very machine he fought, carrying the music that still evokes pride in our flag and country.

So, to paraphrase a song I had no idea was dirty until today: Bless ‘em all. And bless this country.

Happy Fourth, America!

John Philip Sousa wrote “Stars and Stripes Forever” Christmas Day 1896, coming back from Europe on a ship as he longed to see “the red, white, and blue.”

The CPMA promoted Sousa’s marches as well as “Bless ‘Em All” which became a hit novelty record during the war, but turned out, the British version was totally blue.

Frank Sinatra reminding us of the America we were fighting for.

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Having been back in Northeastern Ohio for Father’s Day weekend, and spoken to David George, another 3rd generation jukebox operator whose grandfather like mine started his company in 1935, I have been thinking about the origin story of not only my own grandfather Jack Cohen (ne: Jack Povelski, as he was born in New York), and of the jukebox itself. This whole journey has been a mystery, and I remember several years ago when I was in the Bay area and first heard my cousin Jeffrey Cohen, the son of Jack’s brother Ben, tell me how he remembered hearing my grandfather talk about “the incredible Homer Capehart.”

Hearing Jeffrey’s own story itself was revelational, as his father and Uncle Harry, began their record store Record Mart at 814 Prospect Avenue, just five blocks down from Record Rendezvous, (now a cannabis dispensary) that, according to a Cleveland Press article I found, began with used jukebox records Jack gave them. Jeffrey with his brothers Alan and Hersh would work at Record Mart when it became Appliance City as the jukebox era gave way to television. Jack shared a legendary love for food with his brothers, and Ben and Harry joyfully leaned right into their large statures on their promotional storefront materials. On their iconic custom matchbooks, featuring jovial caricatures of the two brothers, they proudly advertised themselves as “The Biggest Dealers in Town”

This vibrant family dynamic is captured beautifully in the photos of the whole family gathered together for cousin Sandi Ruben's wedding on June 21, 1959. Her father Herky—the youngest brother—was involved with JC Music, specializing in fixing those complex Wurlitzers. In the sibling portraits from that day, Jeffrey is in the back behind Alan in the pin stripes, with Hersh standing beside them. That’s my Grandpa Jack out in California at a barbecue, standing beside his brother Ben, staring at steaks like no man has ever looked at a woman.

Jeffrey would end up a musician in San Francisco in the 1960s and eventually co-write with Narada Michael Walden, the song Freeway of Love for Aretha Franklin. The song won a Grammy award in 1986, just a year after St. Elmo’s Fire (”Man in Motion”) would go to number one, with a music video with Demi Moore dancing on a Wurlitzer jukebox. The song won in the R&B category which is what they used to call “Race Records” before Alan Freed, at the prompting of Record Rendezvous owner Leo Mintz, started calling this music “Rock ‘n’ roll.”

In the song, Aretha sings about driving down the freeway in a pink Cadillac, and I would learn more about Homer Capehart from John Comella, whose grandfather Charlie Comella started Cadillac Music in the back of J.C. Music, Jack Cohen’s coin-operated phonograph business. My mother Jeanne told me how her father Jack never used the word “jukebox” as he always told people he was a “phonograph merchant,” which was due to how “jukebox” still had a stigma at the time of “juke joints” which, as seen in Sinners was a place where some thought people danced wildly to “the devil’s music: which caused young people who listened to it to commit sinful acts.)

The world's first coin-operated phonograph was born in San Francisco when two entrepreneurs, Glass and Arnold, attached a "nickel in a slot" mechanism to Thomas Edison's invention, the phonograph. On Nov 23, 1889, Louis Glass and William Arnold made the device where patrons could put a tube in their ear and hear a cylinder recording which at the end of the record told them "Go to the bar and buy yourself a drink." If you want to really geek out, this was part of a rivalry like the AI wars today, as Thomas Edison only made his Edison Class M Electric Phonograph in 1888 because a rival start-up backed by telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell as beating him at his own invention. Glass worked for the Pacific Phonograph Company, which was trying to get people to use the device for dictation, but Glass bet that people would pay a nickel to listen to music. He installed his device in the Palais Royale Saloon at 303 Sutter Street in San Francisco. Edison himself dismissed the idea of using his invention for a cheap amusement until he heard that this device had made $1,000 in its first six months, what would be $35,000 in today's dollars.

But the coin-operated phonograph business would not take off until in the late 1920s, an Indiana popcorn-machine salesman named Homer Capehart met inventor Thomas Small in Cleveland. Small had a device that would play multiple records on one machine (the wax cylinders were now 78 platters.). Capehart bought Small’s patent and created The Orchestrope and the Capehart 400 phonograph line which was a massive success until the crash of the stock market in 1929 wiped him out. A serial entrepreneur, Capehart who had been fired by his own board and lost the rights to his own name, later turned all this into a Simplex system which he sold to Rudy Wurlitzer’s company which had made theater organs. Wurlitzer almost went bankrupt when Warner Brother’s Jazz Singer was a hit. But to show how little faith the company had, when the first coin-operated device that played 10 records came out in 1934, The Debutante, they only made 300 of them. But the device was so popular that in 1935, when my Grandpa Jack of Cleveland and Ed George of Akron first went into the business, Wurlitzer made Homer Capehart their vice-president.

I learned from Ben Thoburn, of Coin-op Amusements, who is a Capehart aficionado himself, that a jukebox when they first came out almost cost as much as a car at the time. Since respectable banks would not back such a bet, operators across the country sometimes got loans from alternative places like businessmen who had made their money in speakeasies during prohibition. That was the case in Chicago, as written about in Gus Russo’s books The Outfit and Supermob with Sam Giancana and the successors of Al Capone getting into the coin-op business after Eliot Ness put “Scarface” away in Alcatraz for tax evasion. “The Untouchable” Ness’ next chapter was in Cleveland where he was brought in as “Chief Public Safety Officer” to clean up the town. That is a whole other story involving Lew Wasserman, who started in show biz as the PR director for the Mayfair Casino backed by the Mayfield Road Gang, and became the head of MCA/Universal where in 1982 he gave me a Duke University/MCA-Universal Scholar Award which landed me in Hollywood.

I always wondered why my Grandma Gert had insisted that I should tell Lew Wasserman I was Jack Cohen’s grandson when I first went out there. But at the time, I didn’t comprehend how Lew had built the Music Corporation of America into the largest talent agency in the world, by first promoting acts which had hit records which Jack Cohen, who invented the Hit Tune of the Month program in 1941, as vice-president of the advertising committee of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association. My grandfather passed away in 1965, but I had grown up hearing the story of how he had bet his life savings in the middle of the depression on these coin-operated phonographs. My mother and Aunt Barbara had different recollections, but apparently my grandmother was either totally supportive or threatened to divorce him.

As my mother explained, Jack was both a born gambler and a visionary who could see the future. Her father understood while no one had the money for phonographs or even a record at the time, everyone had a nickel to play their favorite song. The sales pitch for these early jukebox operators was they would approach owners of bars, restaurants and drug stores, convincing them that having music in their establishments would get patrons to stay around for another beer or milkshake. (My father Donald Kurlander was a soda jerk for his father Julian at Kurlander Drug and remembers playing his favorite song "Peg of My Heart" on the jukebox there.) The deal was the operators would charge a modest rental fee taken out of the nickels, and then split revenues with the proprietors usually fifty/fifty.

Thanks to scrapbooks kept by Virginia Holcomb, the meticulous secretary for the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association, I have a photo of my Grandpa Jack and Grandma Gert at the 1937 Wurlitzer Century Club convention. In order to be invited, one had to have 100 machines which included the top 336 operators in North America. An article in the Buffalo newspaper and Billboard described what was an event made even more extraordinary in that it was during the heart of the Great Depression. This three-day celebration including on opening night not just top recording artists performing, but magic acts including Houdini's brother and boxing matches. There is a photo of Homer ringside. This was followed by a tour of the Wurlitzer factory outside of Buffalo where this was also a three-ring circus and a clambake. That must have delighted my grandfather who, like his brothers, was obsessed with food.

I was overjoyed to spot my Grandpa Jack and Grandma Gert in the photo of the guests.

The 1937 publicity brochure also shows “Cape” in overalls, on horseback and taking a pledge to support all the Wurlitzer operators and make 1938 even better. A Billboard article talks about how Wurlitzer’s profits were up 300 percent and concludes with Homer Capehart’s final remarks, telling the assembled “this is a good business and let’s keep it clean.”

That final remark might seem innocent enough, but by the late 1950s, Homer Capehart had become a Republican Senator and sit on a committee with Senator John F. Kennedy on what will be known as the "Rackets Hearings." JFK's younger brother Bobby Kennedy, as Chief Counsel, would go after the jukebox industry for its underworld associations. But that is another chapter, in this extraordinary forgotten history.

My cousin Jeffrey and his writing partner Narada also wrote a hit song for Clarence Clemons and Jackson Browne in their duet You're a Friend of Mine in 1985. During the making of St. Elmo's Fire the year before, I was at that Born in the USA tour concert with Andrew McCarthy when we ran into Rob Lowe, who told us he had just been back stage getting tips from The Big Man. It was for the scene where Rob's character Billy wails on the saxophone and then plants a kiss on Demi Moore's character Jules as she dances atop that Wurlitzer jukebox. Oh, these jukebox tales keep on spinning.

Carl Kurlander is a writer, producer, and documentary filmmaker, and the grandson of Jack Cohen, co-founder of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association. He co-wrote the film St. Elmo's Fire and went on to a career in television and film and producing documentaries that have appeared on the Smithsonian Channel, the BBC, PBS, and CBS Sunday Morning. Jukebox Chronicles and the documentary Jack and the Jukebox grew out of the history of the business he learned from his Uncle Louis Kusner, Billy Levine, the son of Jack's best friend and CPMA VP Sanford Levine, and the Comellas of Cadillac Music — and a desire to celebrate a forgotten star: the jukebox, which changed the way we listen to music and the music we listen to.

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I’m writing this in my grandfather’s chair. He passed away when I was six, but his memory I’ve treasured, kept alive by the many stories I’ve heard. Anyone who ever encountered Jack Cohen always described him as one of the most unforgettable characters they ever met. I grew up hearing from my mother how her father was the President of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association, had invented the “Hit-Tune-of-the-Month” and helped kickstart the careers of everyone from Frank Sinatra to Harry Belafonte.

Last year, I was reunited with his brothers-in-arms, so to speak, when I looked at the above photo of my grandfather and me at the 1963 Music Operators of America convention where the caption talks about how “Jack Cohen left a hospital bed only weeks before but managed to attend the show and couldn’t resist bringing along his grandson, Carl Kurlander, age 4, who insisted on seeing how grandpop makes a living.”

My Uncle Louis Kusner, who took over my grandfather’s jukebox business after he passed away at just 61, was also a great storyteller, and as I visited him and my Aunt Barbara over the past few years, he shared a secret history of a Cleveland I had never known. Louis had been a teenager in the 1950s who listened to Alan Freed on the radio and went to buy those records in two stores on Prospect Avenue: Record Mart, owned by Jack’s brothers Harry and Ben, and Record Rendezvous, owned by Leo Mintz, a good friend of my grandfather, who started his shop with used jukebox records. Doing some research at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame archives led me to Norm Nite, who inducted Alan Freed into the Rock Hall of Fame and wrote the book “The House That Rock Built,” and I thought there might be a documentary here about the untold story about the jukebox and why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was not in New York, Detroit, Memphis, or L.A., but on the shores of Lake Erie.

We were set to start filming on March 21, coincidentally the anniversary of the Moondog Coronation Ball, the world’s first rock concert, hosted by Alan Freed and sponsored by Leo Mintz. On that Monday, I looked up the MOA to see if it still existed, and saw an organization which seemed to be related, the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA), and noticed that one of their officers was Nick Comella. I knew the name Charlie Comella, as when I was struggling academically in 4th grade, my mother cashed in debentures from the Seaway Loan Company which my grandfather had started with Charlie and Sanford Levine, to send me to private school, and I remember meeting his formidable secretary, Virginia Holcomb, at the headquarters in the Leader Building — now known as the building where Superman works for the Daily Planet. A quick search for Cadillac Music, Charlie’s jukebox business, revealed it was “Cleveland’s largest supplier of TouchTunes and coin-operated amusements since 1941.”

On that Monday, I sent an email and got a call later that day from John Comella, Charlie’s grandson, who said he was looking at a photograph of my grandfather and his and also sent me this photo of J.C. Music on Euclid Avenue, where Charlie’s jukebox business began in the back.

As if a greater hand were at play, John said he was headed to the AMOA convention in Las Vegas, but he would be happy to have me come by on Friday when we were filming. Nervously, I appeared at the doors of Cadillac Music with a film crew, and was shaking hands with John’s father Jimmy and his brother Nick, and they showed me this photo which was hung in Jimmy’s office. There is Sanford Levine — whose son Billy had been connected to me by my Uncle Louis, and who described his father as Jack’s BFF. Next to him is Sanford’s brother Rudy, a partner in Atlas Music, and Charlie Comella with the cigar, looking like another character straight out of a movie.

I went upstairs and they showed me piles of photos which Virginia had meticulously preserved, as well as minutes from the Phonograph Merchants Association going back to when it first started in 1939. I had read scores of articles in Billboard about the incredible list of performers the CPMA had brought in as part of its Hit Tune Program — Gene Autry, the singing cowboy; Guy Lombardo and his big band; a young vocalist named Frank Sinatra when he was singing with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra; Tony Bennett, when he was first starting. They also listed Count Basie, Nat King Cole, and the Ink Spots — which reaffirmed what I had learned about Ohio jukebox operators promoting Black artists at a time when radio stations refused to play them. John showed me a photo of my Grandpa Jack with a fellow operator, Leo Dixon, president of the Ohio Association of Coin Operators, and Duke Ellington from 1942, as well as a signed photo from Alvino Rey and the King Sisters, as John explained Alvino was a pioneer with the electric guitar and how his grandchildren had started Arcade Fire, one of John’s favorite bands, who dedicated their first album, Funeral, to their grandfather’s memory.

Downstairs there was a breathtaking collection of jukeboxes which looked like they should be in a museum, including an early model Wurlitzer that may have been the Simplex P-10 which came out in 1934, the year my grandfather was getting into the business, and played a whopping ten whole 78 platters. (The Debutante had come a year earlier, but Wurlitzer — until then a musical instrument company known for theater organs — had so little faith in these coin-operated phonographs that they only made three hundred.) There was a rare machine called the Air Hostess, where customers were connected to an operator who would play their requests — though it didn't work, because the guys would stay on flirting with the operators. And there was a magnificent, glowing AMI Singing Towers from the eve of World War II — a nearly six-foot Art Deco masterpiece from the company that would eventually become Rowe, one of the last legacy giants still dominating commercial venues today, including having a mobile app, AMI Music, which they launched in 2012.

But the one that conjured up the most — and went straight to my heart — was the Wurlitzer 1015, otherwise known as The Bubbler. Paul Fuller designed it in 1946, drawing on advances in plastics and materials that had come out of the war, with arched tubes that bubbled and rotating color cylinders that made it glow. I still recall Owen Gambill — my former student, now our cinematographer, all of 24 — and Adam Kilburn, our editor in his early thirties, looking wide-eyed when we first came and John pressed the button and a record magically arose from its glowing cathedral. It was Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame," a song Adam later used in our trailer.

The song strips on this machine feature early rock pioneers including Elvis's "Jailhouse Rock" and "Hound Dog" (originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton), Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock," Little Richard's "Lucille," Jerry Lee Lewis's "Great Balls of Fire," and Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll" — with later additions like Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues," Aretha Franklin's "Respect," and Sinatra's "Chicago" mixed in. As my Uncle Louis had explained, at home his parents listened to Mantovani easy listening music on the console in the living room, but it was this jukebox that let him and other teenagers after WWII choose the music they loved. (*Interesting note— before the war, there were no “teen-agers” as half the country dropped out of the high school to work in fields and factories, pre-child labor laws. In 1944, Life magazine ran a photo essay which first popularized the term.) This was the music Alan Freed played on WJW in Cleveland that would be syndicated across the country and fuel a cultural revolution in the 1950s called "rock and roll."

At Cadillac, there was also a Band Box jukebox, where a tiny orchestra played whenever a customer dropped a nickel in the connected jukebox. Our sound man Noel Dannemiller recognized it from growing up in Akron, where the Band Box had played in an Italian restaurant named Luigi’s. Noel had wonderful memories of watching the Band Box play when his father had taken him there growing up, and where he now takes his own kids. As I have written about in the past Substacks, that jukebox was also listened to by legendary rockers including Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, Joe Walsh of the Eagles, the Black Keys, and the members of DEVO. On June 3, we went to film Devo’s homecoming as they returned to play the Akron Civic Theatre.

This past Thursday, I met David George, the President of Bell Music, who operates that jukebox and who, like the Comellas, is a third-generation coin operator. The company had been started by his grandfather Ed George in 1935, around the time my grandfather got into the business. All these entrepreneurs had to be risk takers, as, according to jukebox collector Ben Thoburn, whom I met through John Comella, an automatic coin-operated phonograph back then could cost almost as much as a car. (They were never referred to as jukeboxes in the ‘30s, as that connoted juke joints in the South where that wild jazz music would play and who knew what would happen.) Coin men like Ed and my grandfather had to convince bar and restaurant owners that putting a machine in their places would help their business, as customers, watching each nickel during the Depression, would stay and order another malted or beer.

David showed me some old photos, and it was astounding to see the row of well-dressed route men who serviced the locations for Ed George Novelty — just as my grandfather’s business was officially J.C. Music and Novelty. Amusements back then included everything from bowling and pinball machines to punchboards — a primitive form of counter-top gambling where players punched out tiny slips of paper from cardboard holes in search of a prize. Like J.C. Music, Ed George Music helped raise funds for war bonds during World War II, and by the 1950s, the Bell Music Company had grown into the largest coin-operated machine service in Ohio. Like my grandfather and his fellow coin operators of the CPMA, Ed was civic-minded, and he helped Danny Thomas, a fellow Lebanese-American, raise funds for St. Jude’s hospital.

When I showed David a photo of the cedar-paneled rec room where my grandfather and his friends played cards, he smiled and said his grandfather had a similar setup. Like my grandfather, he loved Vegas, and he would be inspired in the mid-1970s to risk everything again on a nightclub, Tangier, in Akron. This was a massive entertainment complex with banquet rooms, lounges, and a cabaret showroom, which Ed described to the local papers as “Vegas comes to Akron.” It hosted top performers like Tina Turner, Ray Charles, James Brown, The Righteous Brothers, Joan Rivers, and Tony Bennett. The venue was legendary until, in 2020, it was bought by the LeBron James Family Foundation, which transformed it into House Three Thirty, designed to “bring dreams to life through world-class dining, retail, arts, entertainment and mentorship offerings while providing life-changing opportunities.”

When I asked David how his grandfather had the guts to place such a bet on the Tangier, he explained that his father, like most of these coin men, started with nothing and built their empires one nickel at a time.

After I left Bell Music, I went to hear David Spero’s Upbeat Show in downtown Cleveland, where he talked about how his father Herman Spero had produced a pioneering television show that was syndicated in over 100 markets and showcased early performances of yet more legendary musicians. He showed clips of Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Page, Marvin Gaye, Randy Bachman, John Denver, and Otis Redding. Poignantly, Otis sang “Try a Little Tenderness” before his plane crashed the next day. He also showed interviews the host Don Webster did with The Beatles and Mick Jagger. David had a front-row seat for all this, at 13 holding cue cards for the acts, and later becoming the talent coordinator who paid them. He would go on to have his own career as a manager for musicians like Joe Walsh, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, and Ringo, and he told the packed house about the time Marvin Gaye sang “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” with Tammy Terrell, who gave him a kiss he still remembers.

After that show at The Music Box in downtown Cleveland, I wandered over to 814 Prospect Avenue where my grandfather’s brothers Harry and Ben had the record store they opened. Like my grandfather, they loved food and used their barrel-sized girth to advertise themselves as “the biggest dealers in town.” Today, there is a sign in the window that says “The Winking Lizard.” My film crew always loves going to one of that restaurant’s locations near my cousin Peter Kusner’s house — and we noticed the TouchTunes jukebox there is run by Bell Music. When I called to check on the Prospect spot, I reached Kelly, who told me they had moved a few blocks away, but got excited when I asked about the jukebox and told me her staff loves to play Beyoncé, along with a few artists I’m too old to recognize. Which made me happy. The next generation is making the jukebox their own.

300 Prospect, where Record Rendezvous was, is now a marijuana dispensary. That is interesting as several people have told me how The Vous, as it was affectionately known, had a party atmosphere. A few mentioned how, before the store opened, Leo Mintz liked to start his day with a shot of bourbon at the Savoy Deli that Sanford Levine opened with his brother Rudy. They also served sliced corned beef — my Grandpa Jack's drug of choice. Though Alan Freed is often given credit for popularizing the phrase “rock and roll,” I have heard from multiple sources — including Leo's son Stuart and his grandson Doug Trattner — that it was Leo who upon watching the kids rolling into his store and dancing to that rockin' beat, first started using the term before Freed. It should be noted that "rock and roll" had been used for decades in blues songs as a euphemism for what parents feared their kids would do if they listened to this wild music.

As I went into Klutch Cannabis, it was nice to see how the dispensary pays homage to this story, with a whole wall welcoming customers to “The Cradle of Rock ‘n’ Roll” with a photo of Leo Mintz in front of his store and memorabilia throughout the store from The Vous and the Moondog Coronation Ball. I laughed when one of the clerks told me how some of their senior customers had been there as teenagers== probably now visiting to get something to treat their glaucoma.

Alan Freed’s final resting place is on Mayfield Road, down the road from my grandfather. His tombstone, per Stevie Van Zandt of the E Street Band and The Sopranos, is in the shape of a jukebox.

Alan Freed has often been referred to as “the father of rock and roll.” But in Ohio, that story has many fathers, and on this Father’s Day, I just want to toast my grandfather, my Uncle Louis, the Comellas, and the Georges. It says on Freed’s inscription that he promoted music that provided a joyful soundtrack for hope and change. The same could be said for Ohio’s coin men. Perhaps one day they all will find a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for their contributions.

Below is the trailer for our documentary, “Jack and the Jukebox.” But there are so many chapters to this story it has inspired our upcoming Jukebox Chronicles podcast and maybe even a series because “every jukebox tells a story.”

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Last year, I took my wife Natalie to see the Eagles at the Sphere in Las Vegas. At the end of the night, Joe Walsh and the band closed with “Heartache Tonight” as giant jukeboxes spun across the screens all around us. Little did I know how that performance connected to everything my Uncle Louis — the coolest guy I knew, who took over my Grandpa Jack’s jukebox business after he died in 1965 — had been telling me about the jukebox business back in Cleveland, and the mystery of why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ended up downtown on the shores of Lake Erie.

This chapter of the story begins blocks from my Uncle Louis’ old house in South Euclid — because the man who managed Joe Walsh, along with Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Eric Carmen of the Raspberries, and Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople, who wrote “Cleveland Rocks,” lived just a street away. His name is David Spero, and he’s a legend. As I talked with Norm N. Nite, who wrote The House That Rock Built, and Terry Stewart, the longest-serving Rock Hall of Fame CEO, his name kept coming up: along with other Cleveland music powerhouses — Jules and Michael Belkin who produced The World Series of Rock, Milt Maltz, owner of WMMS, and Hank LoConti of the Agora — David played an essential role in persuading Ahmet Ertegun and Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner to bring the Rock Hall to Cleveland.

David has enough stories to fill a book — A Life in the Wings, which has just about every major music figure you can imagine, from the Allman Brothers to Paul McCartney — and he’s been the subject of a documentary. This week I’m heading back to hear him tell stories about his father, Herman Spero, at The Music Box. Because just as my grandfather was a pioneer of a new technology called the jukebox, Herman was a pioneer of the new world of television — and the show he produced, Upbeat, which from 1964 to 1971 was seen in the top hundred markets in the country, featured a staggering roll call of future Rock and Roll Hall of Famers.

There was The Who and The Rolling Stones, James Brown and Jackie Wilson, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, B.B. King, The Monkees, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Steppenwolf. The only national television appearance The Velvet Underground ever made happened on Upbeat. So did Simon and Garfunkel’s first national appearance on TV, crammed into the bleachers with the audience, singing “Sounds of Silence.” Local kids got their shot too, before anyone knew their names: Joe Walsh with his band The Measles, Glenn Frey and Bob Seger in the Mushrooms.

Above are from the 30th anniversary special, produced in 1995, that aired on Channel 5 — with photos of Jimmy Page performing with The Yardbirds shortly before he would leave to start a band called Led Zeppelin, Little Stevie Wonder, and Otis Redding in what was sadly his last performance. As Don Webster, the host of Upbeat, tells it, Otis and his band performed that night at Leo's Casino, and the next day headed out on a plane to Wisconsin that crashed — killing Otis and all his band members, except the drummer, who met a girl in Cleveland and missed his flight. Otis's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" would become a hit posthumously.

David had a front row seat to all this, starting at 13 working for his Dad holding cue cards. Don Webster, who I knew as the weather man on Channel 5 growing up, even got a chance to interview The Beatles when they were in town on their 1964 tour.

In his book, A Life in the Wings, David talks abou how, decades later, he ended up managing Ringo and how he was in a recording studio in London with Yusuf/Cat Stevens when Paul McCartney dropped by and sat in on the sessions.

Yes, Philadelphia had Dick Clark and American Bandstand, which was mostly teenagers dancing to hit records with the occasional artist lip-synching. But Upbeat put the performances front and center, and it was unusual for its time in another way: it showed Black and white teenagers dancing together, less than a decade after Alan Freed’s own TV show was canceled because Frankie Lymon danced with a white girl. Herman believed society should be color blind, and he wanted the best — the best of rock and roll, the best of Motown and Stax — no matter what. When a Birmingham affiliate cut the picture and kept only the sound rather than show those kids dancing together, Herman didn’t much care what they thought; he only cared whether the music was good. Years later, at a Rock Hall tribute, Jerry Butler said Herman “treated every artist like they were the Beatles.” But ultimately, Upbeat was about the music.

When I spoke with Deb Casini-Klein, the producer of Channel 5’s “Morning Exchange” in the ‘80s and ‘90s, who grew up in Cleveland “Rock and Roll crazy,” she told me about the house band, The Grasshoppers, and their heartthrob singer, the one they called Benny 11 Letters because his last name Orzechowski was so hard to pronounce. A teenager named Ric Ocasek was watching at home, and he and Benjamin Orr would go on to form The Cars.

David moved up to talent coordinator, and started making his own radio show on a reel-to-reel tape deck. He would become a popular deejay on various Cleveland radio stations including WMMS, the Buzzard.

Cleveland History : The Soundtrack of Our Lives

David’s Upbeat Show on Thursday is the kickoff of Cleveland’s history series — and that’s the other reason I’m so excited, because the more I find out about all this history, the more I want to know about a Cleveland that is cooler than I ever imagined.

Through my Uncle Louis and the people who knew my grandfather, I discovered the forgotten role Cleveland’s jukebox operators played — not just in the city’s music scene, but in breaking hits nationwide, through a “Hit Tune of the Month” program that Billboard credits my Grandpa Jack with inventing. They broke hits like “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree,” “Deep In the Heart Of Texas” and “I Don’t Want To Set the World On Fire” by putting them in the front of 3500 jukeboxes in Cleveland which led to them climbing the national charts. There is a photo of my grandfather with Duke Ellington from 1942, and he and other operators regularly promoted Black artists when many radio stations wouldn’t play them.

After the war, my grandfather became the President of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association and he started to throw Hit Tune Parties that were the precursor to Alan Freed’s Coronation Ball. When I spoke with David a few months ago, he had a deep appreciation for how much power the jukebox had back then, when operators controlled the majority of records sold in America. As David put it, things became hits on the jukebox before radio.

My grandfather was older than Herman Spero, who was born in 1924, but they both went to Glenville High School. My Grandpa Jack had to drop out to support the family when his Dad died in a car accident, but along the way, he met another Glenville grad, Lew Wasserman, who would go on to become the head of MCA (the Music Corporation of America) and own Universal Studios. Lew would be responsible for me going out to Hollywood on an MCA-Universal Scholar Award. A few years later, I would write the movie St. Elmo’s Fire with director Joel Schumacher for Columbia Pictures, which ironically was during a time when David took a break from music to be the Managing Director of the Midwest for Columbia/TriStar.

During World War II, my grandfather was promoting patriotic records, raising money for defense bonds, and donating jukeboxes to the Cleveland Canteen where service men could be entertained. Meanwhile, a young Herman Spero was overseas in the Army, organizing andproducing USO shows, getting valuable production experience that would come in handy for his future career.

After he came back, he booked shows around Cleveland including at Mushy Wexler’s Theatrical, a favorite nightclub located in the wild Short Vincent area that attracted everyone from celebrities to politicians to gangsters. It was where Joe DiMaggio went to drown his sorrows the night the Indians ended his 56-game hitting streak. The place had incredible entertainers like Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, who was Dino Crocetti when he dealt my grandfather hands at The Mounds Club, one of Cleveland's many illegal casinos.

The Theatrical was also the unofficial headquarters for Shondor Birns, who the FBI called Cleveland's Public Enemy Number One, but who, according to my Uncle Louis, my grandfather called a good friend. “Just don’t F&*k with him,” Louis recalled Jack telling him. Shondor's associates from the Cleveland Syndicate would later build some of the first casinos like The Desert Inn in Vegas.

Herman would later have his own encounters with the mob, when he started producing boxing shows on television. Some of these individuals controlled boxing and wanted Herman to make sure the fights ended the way they wished. He refused. In what sounds like something out of a movie, there was a staged "accident" that ran the family off the road, and for a stretch they were moved away under witness protection before coming home to Northeast Ohio for good.

Television would prove the jukebox’s biggest opponent. Since The Depression when they were called “the poor man’s symphony,” jukeboxes had become ubiquitous in every drug store, bar, and restaurant. But my grandfather knew television was a threat since the 1948, when he saw nickels were down when people stayed home to watch the Cleveland Indians win the World Series. The Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association even mailed flyers to customers across Ohio, urging them to turn off the set and keep the jukebox playing ("TV for the home, music for the tavern").

My Grandpa Jack knew times were changing and tried to launch a television show with his “Hit Tunes” concept. But it was Herman Spero who would master this new medium, producing everything from Polka shows to kids shows like Romper Room where young David Spero appeared. He was even part of a live TV commercial, but got in trouble when he was supposed to drink a glass of milk with the sponsor Hershey and instead called out for Bosco, like his mother made him.

In 1964, The Beatles landed in America, changing everything. Because of Herman Spero and the long tradition of Cleveland being a great place for musicians, Upbeat became the show which showcased what became a revolution not just in music, but in the culture. In talking with David and others about the Cleveland music scene, it was clear this place was different.

It was where a former jukebox route man, Hank LoConti, opened The Agora, which became the club where everyone from Springsteen to David Bowie to Iggy Pop played. A few years after Upbeat ended, Jules and Michael Belkin launched their World Series of Rock, filling stadiums with the biggest acts in the world, from Crosby, Stills and Nash to Pink Floyd.

In researching all this, I went down to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame archives, and it turns out David, among his many hats, was the Vice President of Programming and Education at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He produced the successful MTV show Live At The Rock Hall which aired for two seasons and featured such artists as Linkin Park, John Mayer, Avril Lavigne and Alicia Keys. And in unlocking the mystery of why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is not in New York, Nashville, or L.A. — going beyond Alan Freed popularizing the term “Rock and Roll” here — it started to make sense why so many musicians, from Tina Turner to Pete Townshend, wrote letters of support for the Rock Hall being here.

When we interviewed Dennis Barrie, the Hall’s first director, he talked about tracing a line through all of it — the jukebox operators, record stores like Record Rendezvous, deejays like Alan Freed and Bill Randle, shows like Upbeat, the Belkins — one Cleveland ecosystem that David knew all along and that I’m only now discovering.

My grandfather Jack Cohen is buried on Mayfield Road not far from Alan Freed’s final resting place. At the suggestion of Stevie Van Zandt, Freed’s marker is in the shape of a jukebox. On the other side is an inscription talking about how Freed provided “a joyful soundtrack for hope and change.” The same could be said for Herman Spero, who sadly, like my grandfather, died way too young at 55.

I smiled when I read in David’s book how he would make deals at Cleveland delis like Jack’s, eating a corned beef sandwich, which was also my grandfather’s favorite. One more thing which David and my Uncle Louis had in common was the importance of family. My Uncle Louis was married to my Aunt Barbara for over 60 years, and David and Ellen are about to celebrate their 50th.

On Thursday, June 18th, doors will open at 5 p.m. at The Music Box for David’s Upbeat Show, with storytelling beginning at 7 p.m. Here’s the link to make a reservation: https://musicboxcle.com/event/the-upbeat-show/. It says the event is free, but the stories David will be sharing are priceless.

Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter ("St. Elmo's Fire"), TV writer/producer ("Saved by the Bell"), and award-winning documentary filmmaker. His films include "The Shot Felt Round the World," on the Salk polio vaccine (Smithsonian Channel, BBC; CINE Golden Eagle), and "Burden of Genius," on transplant pioneer Tom Starzl — a Best Documentary winner at the Cleveland International Film Festival, set to air on PBS next year. He has just completed "Becoming August Wilson," and his latest film, "Jack and the Jukebox," is currently in production — the inspiration for this Substack and "The Jukebox Chronicles" podcast, coming soon.

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Every jukebox tells a story. Of a place. Of a community. Of the soundtrack of our lives.

How did I find myself in a restaurant called Luigi’s with a group of DEVO fans — Devotees, as they call themselves — who had come from across the country to see their favorite band play the Akron Civic Theatre in their hometown? It all started with our sound mixer Noel on a documentary I’ve been making about my grandfather, a Cleveland jukebox pioneer. He told me about the Band Box jukebox at Luigi’s, and the artists who came out of this former Rubber Capital of the World and listened to it during their formative years — The Pretenders, The Black Keys, Joe Walsh, The Waitresses (“I Know What Boys Like”) and DEVO.

At Luigi’s — which has delicious pizza, baked lasagna, baked spaghetti, and salads loaded with cheese, by the way — I met Jim Boyce, who I’d connected with on a “Friends Who Like Devo” Facebook group, and who’d sold me my ticket to the sold-out show. Jim first discovered the band when he was ten years old:

Jim Boyce: “I discovered Devo on a jukebox. I was a dirty kid in South Jersey, hanging out in a campground rec room we weren’t supposed to be in — and that jukebox had ‘Whip It’ on it. That caught my ear, but then I saw a B-side, and two more songs, all off the Freedom of Choice album. That was the first album I ever bought. I’ve been a Devo fan ever since.”

“Freedom of Choice” is the name of this episode, because that’s what jukeboxes gave teenagers after World War II — the chance to press a button for music that wasn’t what their parents listened to. That music came to be called rock and roll. But in the early 1970s, when Devo formed — the band of Kent State art students Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale — they confounded everyone about what rock music should be. And their group was born out of tragedy:

Jim: “Devo was born in 1970, during the Kent State shootings. Jerry Casale was one of the organizers — he witnessed his friends being shot. That was the moment these artistic students realized how seriously the world was going the wrong way. They came up with the theory of devolution — that man is going backward. That’s the message behind every Devo song.”

Welcome to a special preview of The Jukebox Chronicles — a new podcast series exploring how the jukebox, the Spotify of its day, plays the soundtrack of our lives, and how the music it plays brings us together and forms a community.

The World’s Tiniest Orchestra

That Band Box jukebox was installed at Luigi’s in 1951 — the same year a former Akron deejay named Alan Freed went on the air in Cleveland with his Moondog House, spreading the gospel of “rock and roll.” Teenagers would drop a coin, the curtain would open, and the world’s tiniest orchestra would play. Some of the original puppets are gone, replaced by Barbie and Ken dolls, but the band still brings smiles — whether it’s Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore,” or The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” featuring Joe Walsh, who got his start at Kent State in a band called The Measles. The music still fills the beloved Akron restaurant families have been coming to for generations.

Our sound mixer, Noel Dannemiller, who grew up in Akron recalls:

Noel: “I grew up going to Luigi’s — we loved watching the curtain open and the band play. One of my great memories with my father, eating pizza, watching the band. Now I take my kids there.”

Noel and his son Fritz went to Firestone High School, the same school Chrissie Hynde, Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney of The Black Keys, and singer/songwriter Tim Easton went to. Fritz is a musician in his own band and was doing sound for our production as Noel wanted to be able to enjoy the day while his favorite band was in town.

Tim Nolan, a music event manager and super-fan, showed me a photo he had gotten from Chrissie Hynde of her in front of Luigi’s:

Tim: “That’s an early photo of Chrissie Hynde in front of her first car — a green ‘71 Pontiac LeMans — outside Luigi’s, which everyone finds ironic because she’s vegan now.”

Chrissie Hynde ate at Luigi’s (which has vegan options by the way) and listened to music on that jukebox. So did Devo, the Waitresses, Tin Huey, the Numbers Band, and so many other Akron area bands. For Tim, who has been obsessed with music since he was three years old, the jukebox was always the heart of it:

“The music brought everyone together. That’s why the jukebox mattered — you could listen to whatever you wanted. It gave you a freedom you couldn’t get everywhere else.”

The Band Box is connected to a jukebox across the room operated by Bell Music — a third-generation family that started in the coin-op business in the mid-1930s, just like my Grandpa Jack Cohen and his best friend Sanford Levine did. They knew that even in the middle of the Depression when no one could afford records, everyone still had a nickel to play their favorite song on the jukebox. My grandfather and his peers started the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association which Billboard Magazine credited with inventing the idea of a “Hit Tune of the Month.” Records operators chose ended up advertised in the front of 3500 machines in Northeastern Ohio. They broke songs like “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” “Jingle Jangle Jingle,” and even “Deep in the Heart of Texas” that became hits locally before climbing the national charts. Another of those operators was Charlie Comella, who started Cadillac Music in the back of my grandfather’s J.C. Music building. It was Charlie’s grandson John Comella who first showed us the Band Box in his jukebox collection that Noel recognized as the same one had grew up seeing at Luigi’s.

Beside me at that jukebox is Tim Easton, who began his career busking the streets of Europe with Beck before either had recorded anything, got his first break opening for Willie Nelson, and has since recorded and toured with members of Wilco and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers along with making more than a dozen of his own albums. Tim grew up in Akron and came home just to see Devo play once again in their hometown.

Tim Easton: “Mark Mothersbaugh told the Akron Beacon Journal this might be Devo’s last show at the Civic…. The last time they played here it was with the Black Keys — and I was their paper boy. Both their families were on my route, and so were Chrissie Hynde’s parents. I delivered the Akron Beacon Journal to all three.”

Tim’s high school art teacher once showed him a drawing Chrissie made when she was in school of Ray Davies of The Kinks — a man she would later have a child with, and whose song “Stop Your Sobbing” became the first hit for The Pretenders.

That record introduced Chrissie Hynde’s soulful voice to jukeboxes across the UK and US in 1979, released through Real Records and Sire — run by Seymour Stein, who flew to London to sign the Pretenders and would later help bring the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Cleveland. The Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket” hit number one on jukeboxes the next year. And one of Chrissie’s first bands, Sat. Sun. Mat., was at Kent State, where she played with future Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh.

Our Vinyl Guru, Punk Pioneers, and Akron as America’s Next “Liverpool”

I got a crash course on the Akron music scene when my friend Tom “Grover” Biery made a surprise visit to Pittsburgh three days before the Devo concert — someone I’d gotten to know back in L.A. when our kids were in the same baby group. Grover spent twenty years at Warner Music, where he rose to Executive VP and General Manager. He once took me down to his basement in the Hollywood Hills — and, it being the music business in L.A., I wondered if it was to do a line of coke or something — but there he revealed his real addiction: a pristine vinyl pressing of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. Grover — his handle from his deejay days — told me about his vision to bring vinyl back, and I really thought he was on drugs. While I moved home to Pittsburgh to teach, Grover spearheaded the “Because Sound Matters” imprint at Warner, inspired by Neil Young, who’d come into the offices preaching the importance of sound quality. Pairing top audiophile engineers with the master tapes, he helped launch a vinyl experiment that in eighteen months went from $300,000 to over $5 million — and helped ignite the modern vinyl revival. In 2008, he became an early sponsor of Record Store Day, and along the way promoted the careers of acts like Linkin Park, the Flaming Lips, and Akron’s own Black Keys.

Grover stopped by because he was on a road trip with his younger son Levi, who’d just graduated college in Maine, the two of them driving back to California by way of Grover’s favorite record stores. We met for breakfast at the Lincoln P&G Diner in Millvale — and as Grover sat down, I noticed the plaque marking the spot where Michelle Obama once had pancakes. Over breakfast, he showed me two Hardcore Devo albums he’d picked up in a Jersey record store: rare early recordings from 1974 to 1977, before the band had a deal, back when audiences would walk out or throw beer bottles at them.

After a way-too-big Lincoln breakfast, we walked around the corner into The Attic, an iconic Pittsburgh record store, where we met Tony behind the counter — who, like Grover, was encyclopedic about the Akron scene. He showed us The Akron Compilation, a 1978 record from the British label Stiff Records featuring Akron bands like Tin Huey, the Bizarros, the Rubber City Rebels, and the Waitresses. Stiff put it out around the time Brian Eno was producing Devo’s first album — the label had fallen so hard for the city’s music that it called Akron “America’s next Liverpool.”

Grover talked about how Akron was one of the first regional music scenes in this independent record movement, to be followed by places like Athens, Georgia — home of R.E.M. and the B-52’s — and then Seattle, with the grunge movement that produced Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

We also went to Jerry’s Records in Pittsburgh, which Grover credits with his own music education, having grown up in the small town of Jamestown, PA. “They’re communities,” he said of record stores. “Wherever I go, when I walk in, we immediately bond over music.”

Record stores, jukeboxes, and independent venues that don’t use Ticketmaster were once seen as fading away. But particularly after COVID, they’re being rediscovered as people long for community and for music that isn’t suggested to them by an AI algorithm. Noel had put me in touch with Jill Bacon Madden who owns Jilly’s Music Room, a club next door to Luigi’s and graciously let us film our interviews there. Jill loves Akron and has spent years nurturing its music community — keeping the music going even through Covid with weekly residencies and livestreams — and she’s part of NIVA, the national independent venue association, a sign of new hope for live music.

Jill connected me with Nick Nicholis, who in 1976 co-founded the Bizarros and started his own label, Clone Records, that put out LPs like Bowling Balls from Hell, featuring bands Grover and Tony had told me about: Tin Huey, the Rubber City Rebels, and the Waitresses, I reached out to Nick, and the next day was a guest on his radio show, From Akron & Beyond, which he co-hosts with Bob Ethington of the band, Unit 5. Their program digs into the past, present, and future of the “Akron Sound” — which I’d learned so much about from Grover.

Nick and Bob described how the Akron punk scene grew out of what happened to the rubber industry in the 1970s:

Nick: “My parents were immigrants. You grew up right in the shadows of Goodyear — when it rained, the rubber would wash out of the sewers and you could smell it. Anything light-colored, with the smokestack residue, you couldn’t keep it from looking rubber-coated.”

Bob’s father worked for Goodyear, and the conformity of the assembly line and the blue-collar work ethic bred a mentality that, as the rubber jobs vanished, you could manufacture music by creating your own label. The United Rubber Workers strike led to a band called the Rubber City Rebels taking over a bar called The Crypt which became Akron’s CBGB, where Devo and many others played.

Devo watched the tire corporations reduce generations of blue-collar workers into robotic, compliant cogs on the assembly line, only to discard them when the factories began shutting down. So they mimicked that corporate uniformity — the identical yellow radiation suits, Noel had told me they bought from a janitorial-supply house next to Luigi’s, and the plastic “Energy Dome” hats. Even their cover of “Workin’ in the Coal Mine” embraced the dehumanizing, individuality-stripping aesthetic forced on the rubber-mill workers.

Because Akron and nearby Kent had venues like The Crypt and later The Bank, these bands got the stage time to get better — the way the Beatles had the Cavern Club in Liverpool. And when the gigs ended, they all headed to Luigi’s:

Nick: “It used to be open till four in the morning. We’d get there pushing three, take the big table in the middle, and you could tell everyone else there was in a band — long hair and stage outfits, or the matching suits of the lounge acts. Bob: Wedding bands. You could just tell. And then, after about ten minutes, there’d be this shift — all these cops started coming in. Nick: Their shift had ended, so they’d come in. And as we were leaving, all these stunning women would start arriving — clearly the dancers and the strippers. The late-night denizens, all congregating in this one place. That was the Luigi’s we all grew up with.”

Lessons from the Devotees

How do I begin to describe the Devotees I met? It’s not what you think. Yes, some wore the energy domes, or the strange Booji Boy mask Mark Mothersbaugh wears in concert — and when I asked how they got all that through airport security, they just laughed. This is a band with satire at its core, and the people who follow it turned out to be a welcoming community that refreshingly embraced their differences.

I met Doug, whose marriage had somehow survived his admitting he spends what he earns on front-row tickets to Devo shows, because it’s just a more meaningful experience up there. He never let go of the band, and he’ll tell you exactly why:

Doug: “We’re all politically different people, from different parts of the world. We just get it. We’re nerdy — a collection of deep thinkers and creative people. People that maybe don’t fit in. And I’m proud of that.”

I met Crysta, who’d grown up in a small town in New Zealand and now lives in Parma, Ohio, wearing a pink dress with energy domes strategically placed:

Crysta: “People think New Zealand is an exotic place — it can be, a little. People think the same of Parma… Coming to the show tonight is like a family reunion. I’m seeing so many of the people I met last year at Devotional again, and it’s just beautiful. I think the people who get the message come together.”

Tim Nolan talked about how the Devo world is so inclusive with a message:

Tim:“Welcome, everyone — but especially the nerds, the geeks, and the losers.”

Spending time with the Devotees, I understood the deeper meaning inherent in DEVO’s music. Their song “Freedom of Choice” is actually about “Freedom From Choice” which a society that values passivity and shuns original thought, wants you to have. Devo’s second album Duty Now for the Future implies it is the duty of every individual to stand against blind conformity, to be themselves, to do something to resist the de-evolution we are facing.

After lunch, we went next door to Jilly’s, and I interviewed Jim who was wearing an energy dome that lit up with the words: “Devo was right.” I asked how long he’d had that.

“I just put it on last year — and it feels like they're so much more right now. They didn't want to be right. They were seeing the way things were going in the late '70s, the Reagan era, warning us we needed to change. And we didn't. Here we are."

Finally, it was time to interview Noel himself as Fritz recorded his father. Fritz was not only was the sound engineer at Jilly’s, but also a talented musician. His high school band, Detention, won the 2019 Tri-C High School Rock Off at the Rock Hall — and then Covid cancelled the SXSW slot they’d landed, so they played Jilly’s instead during the shutdown. They went on to play festivals, opening for bands like Kesha and Vampire Weekend.

In 2021, Detention was playing DEVOtional, the annual Cleveland gathering for Devo fans, the year Fred Armisen — a friend of Devo — turned up.

Fritz: “He’d done this awesome SNL skit where a bad wedding band of dads plays a punk song called ‘Fistfight in the Parking Lot’ — so we decided to cover it. We saw Fred in the green room beforehand and said, ‘Hey, Fred, we’re doing your song, come watch.’ While we were playing, I looked over and saw him on the side of the stage, smiling and nodding along. And on the last chorus, he ran out, grabbed my microphone, and started singing with us.”

Fritz has a new band, Cat Stanley, who play house parties around town, just like Devo did half a century ago. As we interviewed Noel, he informed us about the glasses he was wearing:

Noel: “I broke out my Mark Mothersbaugh glasses for you today. Mark has an eyewear line — this is the bag they came in, and that’s Mark as a kid. He’s always worn glasses; his eyes have always been bad. And I have his glasses now. Quite literally.”

I read an interview with Mark where he talked about how fans would steal his glasses when he went into the audience during shows. He had grown up wearing “welfare frames,” but then designed his own line. But I suddenly realized that Noel, the consummate professional who worked as a sound man for folks like Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, and Johnny Mathis because he was the clean-cut, tattoo-free crew guy, had a secret life as a Devotee where he might be the biggest Devo fan of all. Noel explained why it was such a big deal for the band to be playing the Akron Civic Theater.

Noel: “Devo playing in Akron, where they’re from, playing the Civic Theater, which is a really great old vaudevillian theater. The stage is just awesome, as has the sky with like the the lights in the ceiling with the clouds that that are projected over. It’s just a magical place. And it’s kind of a I think it’s like a unicorn show. You have Devo, Akron Civic Theater, like three of the things that, you know, I really want to be a part of tonight.”

He also articulated what I had been feeling as I talked with all the band’s fans.

Noel: “It’s the Devo community— they’re all in for each other. Somebody needed a ride from Columbus and couldn’t get here, so they put it out — can anyone get this person to Akron for the show? And somebody did. It’s the best of humanity.”

Outside the Civic

As we headed over to the Akron Civic Theatre, we spoke to DEVO fans who had come from everywhere to see the band play this historic show in their hometown — for what it might be their last time. After all, Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale have been doing this over 50 years and are in their mid-seventies.

We met a family of three generations who had come from around the country — and who all had gone to Firestone high school.

“Firestone High is a bastion of creativity. This is a city of innovation. There’s something beautiful about being weird and creative — more important now than when I came of age in the ‘80s with MTV, when people didn’t get the bigger message… Is it in the water? It’s in the water. Maybe it was in the rubber.”

We met David Adler, who had taken over the Friends Who Like Devo Facebook group and took that stewardship earnestly. David had driven in from Minnesota to see the “Mutate, Don’t Stagnate” tour in Akron. When I asked him what that phrase meant, he explained:

“It’s kind of like ‘Freedom of Choice.’ You need to be more involved. If you don’t… Devo’s going to be right.”

We met Bea Thurman, who’d driven in from Columbus — younger than most of the crowd, proof of Devo connecting with a whole new generation. She told us why Devo matters now:

“Devo exists as a reaction — to society, to corruption. They’ve always had things to say, and the important ones have been watered down by this image of them as the MTV guys who whipped off the women’s clothes. I think now, more than ever, we need them.”

Bea talked about what the community meant to her and why she had sprung for the VIP pass to be at the meet and greet and why she had brought presents for the band.

“What’s weird is the Devo community is so giving, so I feel like I should give back. They’ve given so much for so long… Akron is a place most people don’t think about. You think rubber, the Goodyear blimp. But having something so different come from here — I think it’s really important that they’ve come back.”

Mark had reciprocated by taking a plastic robot he was playing with and attacking Bea with the playfulness and fun that made her love the band.

Devo Plays the Akron Civic Theatre

The excitement began to build as the crowd headed into the theater, eager to see the band’s opening act, Massive Hot Dog Recall, led by Al Mothersbaugh — Mark and Bob’s cousin, and the first and best trombone-playing punk rocker I’d ever seen.

Entering the theater, it was as beautiful as Noel described. DEVO came out, and the crowd did not sit for the whole two hours. It was not just a concert but a communion — one that blended the visual style Devo had developed and pioneered over 50 years.

Films played behind the band, some old and some new. The satirical video mocking corporate executives talking about DEVO as a brand. The video with the French fry going through the donut intercut with a woman in an ecstatic state that had led to their videos no longer being played on MTV. Visual images that were as precisely choreographed as the band itself with powerful messages punctuating the lyrics: “Don’t Shoot… I’m A Man.” “Freedom Of Choice/Freedom From Choice” and “Mutate, Don’t Stagnate.”

Why Devo Was Right

Watching them tear through "Uncontrollable Urge" — that "yeah yeah yeah yeah" chant — I could totally see why John Lennon, who caught one of their early shows at Max's Kansas City in 1977, came up to Mark Mothersbaugh afterward and barked the refrain right back in his face. He'd clocked it as a deconstructed "She Loves You." Mark says he deserved it — he'd lifted it from "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

And as they performed “Whip It” decades after I and millions of others had seen it on MTV, I realized how without coming to Akron, I would have never understood how Devo was more than just a quirky band. It’s a culture that came out of their hometown. Everything from the yellow uniforms to the mask on their character Booji Boy, who came out for their final song, “Beautiful World.” I caught the quiet gut-punch buried in the lyrics when Jerry sang: “It’s a beautiful world… for you, not me.” Could there be a lyric timelier, when billionaires are about to be trillionaires but the average Ohioan can barely afford gas? No wonder David Bowie called them “the band of the future.”

With a new generation coming up like Noel’s son Fritz’s band Cat Stanley, and a community that begins in Akron and goes around the world, I left with hope that we can mutate, not stagnate, our way into turning our de-evolution around.

There was only one thing left missing as the show ended and we all filtered out. I told Owen, my former student who had flown in from New York to film all this, how I really wanted to have worn one of those red energy domes, just to see what it was like.

Almost on cue, Jim Boyce came out of the theater wearing his dome. I asked if I could try it on. Standing there in the same hat I'd watched light up at Jilly's — "Devo Was Right" wearing a “Mutate, Don’t Stagnate” T-shirt, which is now becoming my mantra, I realized I had become a true DEVO-tee.

Ironically, despite how much this band has influenced music and American culture, they still have not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame an hour from their hometown. Perhaps part of that is to fully appreciate them, you have to come to Akron — and try the cheesy garlic bread at Luigi’s.

Hope this gives you a sense of.our upcoming podcast Jukebox Chronicles: Devo Comes Home, the Band Box Jukebox, and the Akron Sound. Sign up to subscribe so you can be notified when it drops. It’s free so if you have enjoyed this sneak peak, please share with a friend.

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Every jukebox tells a story: of a place, of a community, of the soundtrack of our lives.

When we got back to the hotel, Owen, our cinematographer and Adam our editor, told me to turn on the Food Network and looked at Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives,” and started talking about shows likeAnthony Bourdain’s where you learned as much about a culture as food. They argued Jukebox Chronicles should be more than a podcast, it should be its own TV show, or YouTube series as things go these days.

Of course if we did a show like that, Grover would be our record expert, like the fancy chefs who judge the food on Iron Chef or the experts they bring in on Pawn Stars. Grover and Levi texted me more photos from their road trip as they visited Cincinnati where King Records launched the Godfather of Soul, James Brown; Stax Records in Memphis where Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes came out of; The Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville where everyone from Patsy Cline to Taylor Swift have had hit jukebox records; The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa Oklahoma, right down the street from the Woody Guthrie Center, which features a jukebox experience which has been curated by Elvis Costello.

We hope you have enjoyed this sneak preview. With any luck, we are just getting started.

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Watch Mark Mothersbaugh as he goes through the front row of the concert `

Watch Fred Armisen crash Detention’s performance of “Fist Fight in the Parking Lot” at Devotional.

On June 3rd, Devo returns to their hometown of Akron for their “Mutate, Don’t Stagnate” Tour. For some, the band brings to mind a quirky outfit with that Whip It video on MTV. But to those who know the band (Devotees, as their fans are called), or those who have seen the brilliant DEVO Netflix documentary about them, the band is about so much more. The tour name itself comes from co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh's philosophy that when facing a society trending towards "de-evolution, not evolution," we must choose our mutations carefully — "rather than let other people choose them for you, you choose the ones that are best suited to you."

The group has always carved their own path. They began with art students from Akron, forged out of the tragedy at Kent State, who questioned whether we are moving forward as a species, and examined the cost of conformity and the out-of-control greed that has taken our humanity. That was also informed by their hometown of Akron, once The Rubber Capital of the World, that was losing massive jobs and population as the industry went elsewhere, devastating the town.

When DEVO broke into public consciousness in the late 1970s, David Bowie called them "the band of the future." In the 1990s, Kurt Cobain would add: "Of all the bands who came from the underground and made it in the mainstream, Devo were the most challenging and subversive of all.” This past February, Olive Forman-Sarno, a high school student who had seen them at Jones Beach, wrote in her piece “We are all DEVO-lving”: “DEVO is more than just a group of authentic weirdos, they have a message. Their music is art and protest and prediction, and it turned out they were more right than even they wanted to be.”

For those who have seen Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, their images of a band moving in robotic simulations bring to mind humans reduced to cogs in a machine. Like the jukebox before them, Devo understood that art, technology, and music could either liberate us or reduce us to cogs — and as Jerry Casale, another of the band's co-founders, recently put it: "It used to be a punky, smart-ass theory and kind of funny. Then in the thirty odd years since we hatched it, it's all too true. If someone showed you in a crystal ball the world in 2025, you wouldn't have believed it. You would have thought it was a cheap, B, sci-fi movie. A dystopia."

Devo: The Jukebox Connection

I first became aware of the band’s Akron connection while filming a documentary, Jack and the Jukebox, in Cleveland, when visiting Cadillac Music—the jukebox operators who started in the back of my Grandpa Jack’s J.C. Music building just after World War II. There was a Band Box jukebox where when you dropped a coin in, a curtain opened and the world’s tiniest orchestra came out and played. Our sound man, Noel Dannemiller, started talking fondly about a similar Band Box jukebox at Luigi’s, his favorite Italian restaurant in Akron where he went growing up and where he often took his family. I would soon learn from Noel that Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, Joe Walsh, Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney of The Black Keys, Chris Butler of The Waitresses, and the members of DEVO including Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh and Jerry and Bob Casale were also from his hometown or had gone to nearby Kent State, and listened to that jukebox at Luigi’s which has been there since 1951. That was the same year a former Akron deejay Alan Freed went on the air at WJW in Cleveland, playing records Billboard still called “Race Records” which Freed on his Moondog House Party radio show started calling “Rock and Roll.”

The jukebox in Post-WWII America, for the first time allowed teenagers the freedom to choose this new music that was different than what their parents listened to. Making Jack and the Jukebox, we spoke to Terry Stewart, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s longest serving CEO and an avid jukebox collector, who grew up in rural Alabama. He told us: “When you grew up in a rural part of the South...these jukeboxes were the one place that people could hear these records in the early days. They didn’t have radios, they couldn’t afford them, they didn’t have electricity. So jukeboxes often promoted the sale of these records. This is where they heard them.” Even during The Great Depression, when my Grandpa Jack first got into the business, the jukebox was called “the people’s symphony” because it was democratizing music, giving the power of what to listen to to anyone with a nickel.

Jim Boyce was a ten-year-old boy on a campground in New Jersey when he wandered into an arcade room with a jukebox—a place he knew he shouldn’t be. There were Devo 45s inside. Jim remembers songs like “Gates of Steel,” “Girl U Want,” and “Whip It” being on the machine. There may have been other hits with strips like “Working in a Coal Mine” or the band’s cover of “Satisfaction”. But Jim recalls putting what little money he had into that machine, and pressing the buttons for “Freedom of Choice.” That would become the first album he ever bought—which he put next to his dad’s Beatles records, and led to his life-long devotion to the band.

At the time, he probably did not realize that “Freedom of Choice” was an ironic title. The band, as co-founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale both admit, were in many ways doing performance art. What sticks out vividly in the Netflix documentary is when Jerry talks about how Carl’s Jr. at the time had a billboard showing four succulent hamburgers with the words “Freedom of Choice.” It was a biting irony from a company noted for its backing of organizations who were against women’s right to choose. The idea that we as a people are de-evolving hits even closer to home, as just the other day, a nurse mentioned to me her alarm over North Carolina’s newly proposed House Bill 1232 aimed at not just establishing fetal personhood, but as critics have pointed out, with its definitions regarding the use of deadly force to protect that life could inadvertently open the door to vigilante violence against women seeking abortions or those abetting them.

Devo, Devotees, and Community

I met Jim when discovering Devo’s homecoming concert in Akron was sold out. I saw his post on the Friends Who Like Devo Facebook group announcing he had two extra tickets. The group describes itself simply: “Oh no! It’s another Devo group! Never forget. De-evolution is real.” To say these fans merely “like” the band seems far too understated. Across the Devotee universe—a sample of which you can see on the band’s website—there is a passion that sits somewhere between Springsteen fans and Deadheads. They offer to help each other get to concerts and unabashedly post profile pictures proudly identifying themselves in full regalia. This includes donning Devo’s iconic, bright red Energy Domed hats that could be described by the uninitiated as looking like upside-down, plastic garden pots worn proudly on their heads.

Shockingly, Devo has yet to be admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, despite sparking a New Wave movement that changed music and attitudes in this country and in many ways foresaw our future. But the musical ecosystem Devo set in motion has permeated their hometown. While making Jack and the Jukebox, I met Noel’s son Fritz Dannemiller who grew up going to Luigi's and playing songs on the Band Box jukebox. In high school, Fritz joined a band called Detention that won the Rock Off, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's high school music competition and opened for Kesha and Vampire Weekend. He now works at Jilly's Music Room, next door to Luigi's, in the heart of the Akron music scene that Devo helped put on the map.

When members of Devo were around Fritz's age back in the 1970s, they were experimenting with combining music and film — foreshadowing a world that would become addicted to screens. They made conceptual films incorporating their music long before anyone conceived of a 24-hour cable channel MTV devoted to them.

Modern music historians can rightly claim Devo invented modern day music videos, but I do have this photo of my Grandpa Jack and myself when I was four years old was taken at the Music Operators of America convention in 1963. The caption reads: “two "coin men" strolling through the CINEBOX exhibit.” CINEBOX was a company experimenting back then with video jukeboxes that played soundies — short films trying to fight the rising technology of television pushing the jukebox aside.

Much like alarms are going off today that the new technology of Artificial Intelligence, like TV, is going to ruin the lives of young people. My new friend Jim from the “Friends Who Like Devo” group is also heavily into pinball machines. I smiled when I heard that, and reminded him of how LaGuardia got elected Mayor of New York by taking a sledgehammer to pinball machines and tossing them into the river as they were corrupting the youth of America. First it was pinball machines. Then jukeboxes. Then those vinyl records those kids wouldn’t stop pressing the buttons to hear—all for that rock and roll music that moral guardians claimed would damn them to eternity.

Devo’s debut album Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was directly influenced by the 1932 horror film Island of Lost Souls, where a mad scientist, Dr. Moreau, tries to play G-d by turning half-mutant beasts into human-like slaves who are forced to chant “Are We Not Men?” In 1978, the band was satirizing how modern, industrialized humans blindly conform to corporate conditioning. Today, this metaphor is eerily prophetic. Tech companies act as modern-day Moreaus, using algorithms to create A.I. models to mimic human thought and ethics, while humanity simultaneously risks “de-evolving” by outsourcing its own creativity and critical thinking to these very machines.

“Mutate, Don’t Stagnate” is not just the name of Devo’s latest tour — it seems like a call to action we all should be heeding in a world where what they visualized in their songs and videos — robots, corporate overlords, technology consuming our humanity — suddenly feels like our impending reality. Everything is shifting as massive data centers are erected around the country, draining energy in a world of once-again short supply.

When I told my wife I was heading to Akron to see DEVO she asked me what they had to do with jukeboxes. I was defensive at first, but I’ve come to understand: both the jukebox and Devo believed that art, technology, and music could either liberate us or reduce us to cogs — and that the difference always came down to whether humans were making the choices or having them made for us. The jukebox put that power in the hands of anyone with a nickel. Devo spent fifty years warning us not to give that power away.

I have been personally inspired by Devo fans and the music scene in Akron I’ve written about in these past three Substacks. We are still making our documentary Jack and the Jukebox, but there are so many stories that should be told, we are also mutating our film into a new podcast, The Jukebox Chronicles, chronicling how that unique blend of art and technology, the jukebox, has shaped who we are. We look forward to talking to those who believe passionately in music, community, and the idea that humans connecting over a shared song still matters.

In the end, facing this landscape of potential AI domination and systemic conformity, the warning of de-evolution is more urgent than ever. The machines will keep calculating, and the corporations will keep growing faster and faster, but the ultimate choice rests with us. It is up to us, as humanity, to resist the urge to become passive cogs—to fight the slide into de-evolution, and to reclaim our own minds, our own art, and our own future.

As Mark Mothersbaugh puts it: “Mutate, don’t stagnate means we are what we are. We’re an odd species, but we’re smart enough to recognize how important the planet is — what we want to do is take care of it.”

That is a challenge to us all. But one thing is certain— for heaven’s sake, put DEVO in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame where they belong.

Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (St. Elmo’s Fire), TV writer/producer (Saved by the Bell), and award-winning documentary filmmaker whose films have appeared on the Smithsonian Channel, PBS, and the BBC. His latest film, Jack and the Jukebox, is about how the jukebox, his Grandpa Jack and a group of Cleveland coin men helped give birth to rock and roll and spun America out of control. For more, go to www.jackandthejukebox.com

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To read the other posts about the Akron music scene, click on I Went Back to Ohio or Every Jukebox Tells a Story.

“I Had a Jukebox Graduate for First Mate / She Couldn’t Sail / But She Sure Could Sing”

— “Growing Up,” Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

On Friday May 22nd in Cleveland, Bruce Springsteen stopped his sold-out show at Rocket Mortgage Arena, and sat down on the edge of the stage. Guitar in his lap, he took a moment to thank Kid Leo, The Agora, and Cleveland for supporting him and the band all these years. He was thinking back to his twenties — 27, 28 years old — playing the old Agora.

That Agora on East 24th burned down in 1984, but it was rebuilt on Euclid Avenue where it thrives today, on the same block where my grandfather Jack Cohen, a pioneer in the jukebox business, had his headquarters. In Growing Up, one of my favorite songs from his first album Greetings From Asbury Park, Bruce talked about having “jukebox graduate first mate,” which scholars and A.I interpret as meaning he got less his education from schooling then from three minute records playing on jukeboxes. Bruce’s actual first mate, Stevie Van Zandt, knows the power of rock which is why he started a non-profit Teach Rock with Bruce, Marty Scorsese, Bono, and many others to educate new generations of American history through music. On this Memorial Day, I hope to share stories which remind us of why the jukebox is a great American innovation that democratized music, gave particularly young people the freedom to chose what they listen to, and ultimately was a force for social change.

Some have been criticizing Bruce on his latest Land of Hope and Dreams tour for being too political, but from the start he has always been an artist who doesn’t shy away from issues, taking stances on social injustice, war, racism, and class. (And yes, the price of his tickets has called some to label him a hypocrite these days.). But Debbi Casini Klein, an Emmy winning TV producer I’ve worked with, was in the audience last Friday, and she said it didn’t seem to bother the 20,000 ecstatic fans. Those included a group of four of her friends she has known from grade school with whom she had first see Bruce and the E Street Band fifty years earlier at The Agora.

Deb met them at Sts. Peter and Paul school in Garfield Heights — where she was an Italian in a largely Polish neighborhood on Cleveland’s southeast side. Even after Deb’s family later moved outside of Cleveland to nearby Independence, they remained close and soon-to-be fellow concert goers. Her parents knew Henry LoConti, a former coin man who created The Agora. Hank, as he was called, had gotten his start collecting coins on jukebox routes which he credited with teaching him about the music business. Polish neighborhoods like Garfield Heights and Parma liked polkas from Cleveland’s Polka King Frankie Yankovic. Downtown were the jazz and “Black and Tan” clubs that lit up machines for Billy Holiday. Little Italy wanted records by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, who was Dino Crocetti when he dealt blackjack hands to my grandfather at The Mounds Club, one of Cleveland’s illegal casinos. As my Uncle Louis who took over the business from my grandfather told me, there was no need for algorithms— people told you what they liked by the buttons they pressed.

Debbie’s parents were strict, but even before she was 18, Hank let her and her friends in to see shows which included many of the iconic rockers who were coming up at the time, from David Bowie to Todd Rundgren and The Cars which had their own Cleveland roots. But in 1976, she and her friends got to see Bruce and the E Street Band on his Born To Run tour at the Agora. The Boss was known not just for his three hour concerts, but because he had something to say about our struggling world, and believed with his bandmates in the power of rock and roll to heal it.

Andrew McCarthy, Rob Lowe, The Big Man, and Demi Moore on a Wurlitzer

I was first introduced to this music through my brother Tom who had seen him in concert on The River tour and had moved to New York where he had bootleg cassettes of that famous 1978 radio broadcast on WMMS 101 The Buzzard. Deejay Kid Leo kicks it off by welcoming everyone and announcing “round for round, pound for pound, there ain’t no finer band around— Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” and three hours of driving, heart-stopping, jaw-dropping rock ensues.

But the first time I saw the band live was in 1984 which was a different experience than the raw authentic stage at Cleveland’s Agora. We were making St. Elmo’s Fire at the time, and I went in a limo to the Forum in L.A. with Andrew McCarthy. It was the Born in the U.S.A. tour when Bruce had become as American as apple pie with his album cover with his back to camera in white t-shirt, blue jeans, and a red cap in his back pocket with the American flag behind him. Andrew being from Jersey was Bruce-obsessed as he kept playing him on his Walkman when I first met him driving him around Beverly Hills during his audition. Andrew could be quiet and reserved, but at the concert, we both screamed the lyrics and were transported with the crowd.

After many encores, as we headed out, we ran into Rob Lowe, who told us how he had just been backstage with Clarence Clemons, The Big Man, getting tips for his sax solo for a big scene he had in our movie. Director Joel Schumacher later reprimanded Rob for losing his voice going to every show in L.A. — you can actually hear the hoarseness in his voice in the scene where Billy shows up at Wendy’s office, the social worker played by Mare Winningham

In the scene at the St. Elmo’s bar, Rob’s character Billy is rocking out backed by Mare’s brother, Patrick Winningham and his band, The New Breed. In the middle of the scene, Billy crosses the room and starts making out with Demi Moore’s Jules character — who is dancing on a Wurlitzer jukebox.

Jukeboxes that catalyzed social change

The scene may have been over the top— it was The Eighties— but jukeboxes and bars have a long history from when Bruce and Stevie were playing bars on the Jersey Shore, to when my Grandpa Jack got into the jukebox business during Prohibition when coin operated phonographs were cheap entertainment in speakeasies.

During The Depression, jukebox were called “the poor man symphony” because no one had money for phonographs, but everyone had a nickel to play a song that would give them hope. Jukebox operators were often from minority groups— Italians, Blacks and Jews— who were barred from making a living in more “respectable” professions. These entrepreneurs were able to build their empires a nickel at a time.

When World War II broke out, jukebox operators played their part. In 1941, my grandfather and his fellow coin men from the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association brought Tommy Dorsey and the RCA Victor Dance Caravan to Public Auditorium for a series of performances to raise money for defense bonds that broke attendance records. CPMA President Peter Lukich presided, with my grandfather Jack Cohen as vice-president, and a committee of fellow operators did the organizing. They chose Irving Berlin's "Arms for the Love of America" as the Hit Tune of the Month — dedicated to Cleveland's defense industries — making it the No. 1 coin machine record in the state. (Billboard had credited my grandfather with originating the Hit-Record-of-the-Month idea; the previous month's selection had been "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" — a song still popular today.) They donated machines to the canteens where servicemen gathered before shipping out, and paraded the artists through downtown on a float on Armistice Day, with a police escort and sound trucks — Tommy Dorsey, Barry Wood, Lucy Monroe, Shep Fields and Leo Dixon are all waving from the top. Mayor Edward Blythin gave his blessing, and Mayor Frank Lausche — who succeeded him and would become Governor and famously crack down on Cleveland's illegal gambling operations — also commended the CPMA for boosting morale during the war.

The manufacturers did their part too. Wurlitzer, Rockola, Seeburg, and AMI retooled their factories to make rifles, shell casings, and bombsights for the Air Force After the war, Wurlitzer and Seeburg came back with machines that looked like nothing that had ever existed. Seeburg’s Select-o-matic held 100 records. Wurlitzer’s Bubbler — bubbles rising through the glowing arc deco cathedral of the machine, dancing to whatever was playing — became one of the iconic objects of postwar America.

Meanwhile, on military bases, something else happened. Young men from every part of the country, urban and rural, and every ethnicity, were thrown together, sharing barracks, sharing music. The machines on those bases played everything: big band, gospel, country, jazz. In that mix, something new was finding its shape. Billboard would call it rhythm and blues. The world would call it something else.

All throughout, jukebox operators like my Grandpa Jack crossed racial and cultural barriers, playing Black artists when white radio stations refused to play them.

After World War II, a new group of young people emerged, and jukebox gave them the freedom for the first time to chose music they loved that was different than their parents. We’ve been making a film about all this called“Jack and the Jukebox and there are various versions of what happened next. Terry Stewart, the longest serving CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a collector of jukeboxes told us the version he heard. How Leo Mintz, the owner of Record Rendezvous on Prospect Avenue, a store he started with used jukebox records, noticed teenagers rollin’ into his store, dancing to records with a new rockin’ beat. Doug Trattner, Leo’s grandson says he heard definitely it was his father who came up with the term, but what is fact is when Leo sponsored the radio show of a deejay who had recently been let go from an Akron radio station, Alan freed on the Moondog House Party on WJW stated calling this new music “rock and roll.” As the show got syndicated, the gospel for his new sound spread across the land and would become a new religion for folks like Bruce and Stevie and millions of other young people.

The House That Rock Built

Cut to the 1985, when St. Elmo’s Fire was being released. John Parr’s anthem Man in Motion goes to number one with a bullet. Our soundtrack is on Atlantic Records and Joel introduced me to Ahmet Eretgun, the label’s legendary CEO who signed arttsis like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones. Ahmet along with Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, were on the board of the Rock Hall Foundation tasked with finding a location for the Hall of Fame. NYC Mayor Ed Koch wasn’t cooperating, and a scrappy group of Clevelanders persuaded Ahmet and Jann to consider their city which few people outside of Ohio thought was a possibility. .

As deejay and rock historian Norm Nite chronicles in his book The House That Rock Built, Ahmet and Jann were being wined and dined by city leaders, including the Mayor and the Governor, but they were stll unconvinced. Then the charter bus they were all on went down Prospect Avenue which had fallen on hard times. Ahmet spotted Record Rendezvous and told the bus to stop. He remembered the place from his early days peddling records and knew the history about Leo Mintz and Alan Freed. According to Norm’s book, Ahmet went into the store and found a rare Rolling Stones demo tape that he had heard when signing the band. He got back on that bus and told them Cleveland was now seriously in the running.

Debbi Cassini remembers this time well; the girl who once watched Bruce Springsteen at the Agora was now a producer on Channel 5’s Morning Exchange. She recalls the collective effort of the city pulling together, with everyone realizing that landing the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame could be a massive game-changer. It wasn’t just Alan Freed popularizing the term “rock and roll” that made Cleveland a great town for music.

The very station she worked at had been home to Upbeat, a syndicated powerhouse akin to American Bandstand that showcased up-and-coming acts during the 1960s when the times were rapidly changing. The show featured integrated Black and white dancers on the same floor when that was still far from common on television. Producer Herman Spero brought on iconic acts like Little Stevie Wonder and Simon & Garfunkel, who made their first-ever TV appearance on the program. There are various accounts on whether The Who actually performed on the show, but Pete Townshend would later write a crucial letter of support for the Rock Hall campaign, fiercely arguing that its rightful home was in Cleveland.

The local connection ran deep. Joe Walsh, who went to school at nearby Kent State, played on the show with his early band, The Measles. That group would later be managed by Herman’s teenage son, David Spero, who got his start on the Upbeat set running the cue cards. Furthermore, the show’s original house band was The Grasshoppers, featuring a lead singer named Benjamin Orzechowski. Because of his long name, everyone in town simply called him “Benny 11 Letters.” Debbie would cross paths with him years later after he shortened his name to Benjamin Orr and teamed up with Ric Ocasek. Ocasek had seen “Benny 11 Letters” playing on Upbeat as a teenager in Cleveland, sparking a musical partnership that eventually led them to form The Cars.

The push for the Rock Hall was backed by a local music industry that had long used its power to elevate acts advocating for social and political change. The Belkin brothers, who filled Cleveland Municipal Stadium for their World Series of Rock concerts, weren't just booking entertainment—they were providing a massive, stadium-sized megaphone to the counterculture's most politically conscious voices, from the anti-war harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to the sonic social critiques of Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones. Deb herself remembers playing Floyd’s Comfortably Numb over and over on a jukebox.

Amplifying this movement was WMMS. For nine consecutive years, Rolling Stone readers voted “The Buzzard” the best radio station in America. Powered by the legendary Kid Leo, the station used its fierce independence to break artists who challenged the status quo. Before the rest of the country would touch them, Leo and WMMS championed Bruce Springsteen’s gritty tales of working-class struggle, David Bowie’s norm-shattering fluid identity, and Rush’s fiercely individualistic anthems. In Cleveland, music was never passive; the city’s promoters and DJs ensured that songs of social change became the soundtrack of the mainstream.

But the decision makers of where the Rock Hall was to be located were still not convinced. In January 1986, USA Today conducted a massive national call-in poll. Debbi remembers a meetng of local media folks all trying to do their part. She volunteered to put the 800 number on her show every day and remind viewers to vote at the end of the program. WMMS went into full campaign mode — morning host Ed Ferenc urged listeners to bomb the phone lines every single day. Over 120,000 calls poured in for Cleveland, leaving every other city in the dust. A petition gathered 600,000 physical signatures, exciting the size of the city proper at the time.

On May 5, 1986, Cleveland was officially selected as the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That year, Norm Nite inducted Alan Freed posthumously into the Rock Hall of Fame. As Terry Stewart told us, his ashes for a time were put on public display there. But then they were moved to Lakeview Cemetery in Mayfield Road. It was at the suggestion of Stevie Van Zandt that Alan Freed’s tombstone was in the shape of a jukebox. On the inscription, it calls Cleveland the birthplace of Rock and Roll and credits Freed for championing a new sound that broke the barriers of segregation while providing a joyful sound of hope and change.

As Bruce, Stevie and the E Street Band tour across this country being vocal about what they see as a time when democracy is threatened, it is good to remember the jukebox which did not care what color the person who dropped in the coin was, how much they had in their bank account, or judge the records they played.

Debbie’s daughter Isabel just graduated this past month as a film major. As I teach students myself, I hear their anxiety towards their future about economic concerns and A.I. which may be replacing their jobs, and perhaps threaten all our humanity. It was interesting as graduation speakers have been booed by students when they mention artificial intelligence. Some students even are creating their own protest songs in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. But the jukebox is proof technology does not have to be evil. It was once the Spotify of its Day. But it is always what we human do with technology, that will determine whether the algorithms win or we do.

Happy Memorial Day!

Irving Berlin’s Arms For The Love of America, “The Ordinance Song.”

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We are launching our new Jukebox Stories podcast soon, and Deb Casini-Klein will be one of our first guests. She has more stories than we had room for here. If you are interested, please join our jukebox facebook group by clicking here.

David Spero, who grew up on that Upbeat set running cue cards for Jimi Hendrix and the Temptations, is hosting a special evening at The Music Box Supper Club in Cleveland on June 18th — film clips from Upbeat followed by his own stories. Reserve tickets at https://musicboxcle.com/event/the-upbeat-show/

When Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney of The Black Keys were on The Joe Rogan Experience, they talked about Luigi’s restaurant, where they and many other Akron musicians hung out. But what they noted was on the walls of this late-night pizza joint are rows of black and white autographed photos, not of rockers or movie stars, but professional bowlers.

It was through Noel Dannemiller, our sound guy on Jack and the Jukebox, that I learned about the Band Box jukebox at Luigi’s that has been playing since 1951. When you drop in a coin, the world’s tiniest orchestra plays. Noel told me about the incredible Akron music scene and that jukebox was listened to by Pat and Dan, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale of DEVO, Joe Walsh and Chris Butler, the mastermind behind The Waitresses’ hit “I Know What Boys Like” which I remember watching in heavy rotation on MTV.

A photo Noel sent me of Chrissie Hynde in front Luigi’s wearing an “Enjoy Akron” t-shirt that I included in last week’s Substack went viral with comments in our Jukebox Facebook group about the Akron sound that came out of that city. Pat Carney and Dan Auerbach went to Firestone High School like Chrissie. The band’s name comes from an eccentric local artist named Alfred McMoore, a friend of their fathers, who struggled with schizophrenia and hurled insults on their answering machines at them calling them D-flat or “black keys,” implying there was something off about them. They embraced their outsider status by using it and to honor Alfred, they later started the Alfred McMoore Memorial Fund for Akron mental health services.

The Black Keys celebrated their hometown in their album called The Rubber Factory, recorded in 2003 on the second floor of an actual General Tire factory in East Akron. Chrissie’s song “My City Was Gone” as also inspired by the decline of this once thriving Rust Belt city.

The Akron Thesis

As a kid going between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, we would always see that spinning Firestone tire and look for the Goodyear Blimp as we drove through the tire capital of the world. Chris Butler grew up on the East Side of Cleveland and went to high school at Orange — where George Stephanopoulos went — near the Burger King I once worked at. Chris told me how he was in a band in high school called The Disciples, who had a Black singer, which was unusual for the time. They would play all around Cleveland, in neighborhoods which sheltered kids like me were told to lock their doors driving through. But Chris saw a different community as they celebrated, and by the time he went to Kent State he knew he was on a different path.

Chris described for me the Akron music scene, which was informed by Kent State — which had bars where bands could play one hour sets up to three times a night. A certain edge and anger emerged which came from being around the cultural crashes of the American dream. The closing of the tire plants when unions were broken, leaving many to leave town. And then there were the killing of four Kent State students, including his friend Jeff, on May 4th, 1970. After that, Chris said, you just couldn’t go on like everything was normal.

Chris played in The Numbers Band with Terry Hynde — Chrissie’s brother — and Gerald Casale (also known as Gerry), who would help start a band called Devo, which was also a statement about the “devo-lution” they saw happening around them.

Chris was also in a band called Tin Huey, which was well-respected. But he went to NYC with an acetate of a new song he had written. The record exec was interested and asked if he had a band. He told them sure, back in Ohio. He went back to Walter’s Café in Kent, stood on a chair, and said he had this song and was looking for a female singer. Patty Donahue — whose experience was winning a high school talent contest and who was putting herself through Kent State working as a waitress — raised her hand. Chris knew about her from the drummer of the Numbers Band. The song got play on college stations, and The Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like” really broke on MTV.

Chris told me about how Luigi’s was the place open late where he would run into fellow musicians, factory workers getting off their shifts, college kids, cops, and those on the other side of the law. He knows about the power of the jukebox because he got “mechanical royalties” from them, which he explained began in 1909 when player pianos were the rage so songwriters got a cut when their music was played. He wrote a radio play called “A Certain Kind of Fool” — named after the Eagles song that plays over and over during a conversation he had at Walter’s Café in Kent in 1973. You can hear it at futurefossilmusic.com.

Chris has also been doing his part to keep Akron’s music scene alive, becoming having renovated century-old building that used to be an A&P as a music and art studio on Kenmore Boulevard.

Cleveland’s “Upbeat,” Joe Walsh, and a story about a guitar that changed rock history

In my teenage years in Cleveland, I loved going with my Uncle Louis on his jukebox routes. At his funeral last year, my cousin Jack — named after Grandpa Jack who started jukebox business Louis took over — talked about how whenever his father walked into a bar or restaurant to collect the coins, he was greeted like a rock star. It wasn’t just that he knew all the great songs and gave them free plays while he was there, but really cared about the music and the people. Jack talked about one day going with his dad to a warehouse where operators got their records wholesale. His dad handed him one from a new group and said, “These guys are going to be big.” The band was called The Eagles.

My Uncle Louis lived in South Euclid, one street over from David Spero, who would go on to manage Joe Walsh and produce the Joe Walsh/Glenn Frey tour — the precursor to the Hell Freezes Over reunion. David had met Joe as a teenager when he was holding cue cards on the set of his father Herman’s groundbreaking TV show Upbeat — Cleveland’s version of American Bandstand. It was an early showcase for acts like Stevie Wonder, The Who, Simon and Garfunkel, and Otis Redding, who made his last television appearance on the show — singing “Try a Little Tenderness” — before his plane crashed into a Wisconsin lake the next day. “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” became a number one hit posthumously.

I spoke to David last year who is encyclopedic in his knowledge of music history. He was a big deejay on WMMS the Buzzard, and for a time the educational director at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. David also knew all about the jukebox business and reminded me when his Dad got started, “radio followed the jukeboxes. If Frank had a big hit on the jukeboxes, that’s gonna be a big hit on the radio.”

The house band for Upbeat was The Grasshoppers, featuring a kid from Lakewood named Benjamin Orzechowski — known around Cleveland as “Benny 11 Letters” — who my friend Debbi Casini-Klein described as “Cleveland’s Elvis.” A young Ric Ocasek was sitting at home watching Channel 5 one Saturday, saw Benny perform with The Grasshoppers, and was blown away. Years later they reconnected, moved to Boston together when Benny changed his last name to Orr, and formed The Cars. The entire legacy of The Cars literally started because of Herman Spero’s television show.

Joe Walsh was in The Measles at Kent State when he appeared on Upbeat. He later suggested to the teenage David that he get into artist management — starting with managing the Michael Stanley Band — so he’d be ready to manage Joe later. Which is exactly what happened.

There is this story about a guitar which Joe bought in Akron— a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard When Led Zeppelin’s first album took off, Jimmy Page was still playing the Telecaster he’d used with the Yardbirds. He was looking for a Les Paul and couldn’t find one he liked. Walsh — by then with the James Gang — had another 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard. He flew to New York, laid one on Page and said “Try this out,” and sold it to him for about $1,200 — covering his expenses for the trip. Page used that guitar on Whole Lotta Love and Stairway To Heaven.” He later said: “Neither Joe Walsh nor I realized at the time just what an important thing he had done by coming along with that Les Paul.” That guitar was not the only thing that came out of Akron that changed the course of rock and roll.

From Akron to Cleveland: The Road to the Rock Hall

Tomorrow we record the first episode of our new jukebox podcast with Debbi Cassini who was an Emmy winning television producer in Cleveland during the 1980s when the city was one of many cities vying to be the home of the Rock Hall of Fame. She got to meet many of the musicians coming through town during that lobbying effort.

I will elaborate on this in a special Memorial Day post tomorrow, but on Friday, Debbi went to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Rocket Center in Cleveland who she first saw at the legendary Agora in 1976 as a teenager. The Agora was started by Hank LoConti, who got his start in the jukebox business which he credited for learning the different types of music that played in what neighborhood. The Agora was where many acts played seminal shows including The Cars, David Bowie and Iggy Pop (together), Kiss, The Police, Talking Heads, Todd Rundgren and Cleveland’s own The Raspberries. (I danced my first dance at camp to their song “Go All The Way.” I asked a girl to dance and she said yes, and then immediately asked me why I’d asked her if I couldn’t dance. I did not, as you could imagine, “go all the way” or even get to first base with her.)

Hank also opened an Agora in Akron where Joe Walsh, Chris Butler’s bands The Waitresses and Tin Huey, and DEVO also played along with acts from AC/DC to The B-52s. Hank, David Spero, Milt Maltz who owned WMMS where David was a deejay, and The Belkins who did World Series of Rock were among the behind-the-scenes players who helped lobby to bring the Rock Hall to Cleveland. But what was a key reason that the city can lay claim to calling itself “the birthplace of rock and roll” was a deejay named Alan Freed who was playing at WAKR in Akron. Because of some legal trouble, and a non-compete clause which forbade him from working within 75 miles of the city, Freed move to Cleveland. He started playing classical music on WJW until he met Leo Mintz, owner of the Record Rendezvous. Leo got his start selling used jukebox records, which we think he got from my Grandpa Jack.

As we heard from Leo Mintz’s grandson when we interviewed him for our documentary. Leo had seen teenagers coming into his store and dancing to records with a new upbeat, rhythm and blues sound. He offered to sponsor Freed’s show if he switched the format. “Rock and Roll” had been a term used in blues ballads for years, but Alan Freed popularized it on his Moondog House Party, which became syndicated and spread the gospel of this new music across the land.

This was all in 1951 just as that Band Box jukebox was getting installed at Luigi’s.

Noel’s son Fritz and his high school band won the Rock Off at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His new band is CatStanley and he is now working at a venue on Main Street next to Luigi’s. Jilly’s Music Room is where Chris Butler, members from his former band Tin Huey, and the Numbers Band, led by Robert Kidney with Terry Hynde, Chrissie’s brother, still play as they have for fifty years.

The Jukebox in Vegas at The Sphere

The Akron music scene defines independence and rebellion, and when I took my wife Natalie to see The Eagles at the Sphere in Las Vegas for her birthday and there was no one who personified that more than watching Joe Walsh still rocking that guitar like no one else. Joe and the band closed the show playing “Heartache Tonight” as giant jukeboxes filled the screens. Though they aren’t as central to everyone’s social life as they used to be, jukeboxes still are a big symbol of rock and roll.

And as I am learning more and more, the road to rock and roll runs in so many ways straight through Northeastern Ohio.

The World’s Tiniest Orchestra

The original puppets of the Band Box were damaged years ago and replaced with a Superman action figure, a Barbie, and other band members. But then the machine broke down. The Akron Beacon Journal declared: “The world’s tiniest orchestra is gone!” But Tony Ciriello, the owner of Luigi’s, and grandson of Nick and Rose Cirello who started the place, assured the people of Akron they would be back, saying: “I’ve got to keep that thing going for the next generation.”

Oh, the things that Band Box has seen.

Or to quote My City was Gone: “Oh, Ohio.”

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Tomorrow: Bruce Springsteen stopped his sold-out show last night to thank Kid Leo, the Agora. and Cleveland, recalling how he played there in his twenties. In my twenties, I saw The Boss on his Born in the USA tour, while we were making “St. Elmo’s Fire.” I went with Andrew McCarthy and afterwards we ran into Rob Lowe who was backstage getting saxophone tips from Clarence Clemons for a scene in the movie where he wailed on his horn and kissed Demi Moore while she was dancing on a jukebox. And more on how a group of Cleveland underdogs — Hank LoConti, David Spero, the Belkins, Milt Maltz, Norm Nite — convinced the music world that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame belonged on the shores of Lake Erie. Happy Memorial Day.

“I went back to Ohio, and my city was gone...”

Every time that Pretenders song comes up on my Spotify playlist, I think of Noel Dannemiller, our sound guy who I met last year as we started to make our documentary Jack and the Jukebox.

Noel was and still is from Akron, Ohio. As we filmed in front of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, he was a fountain of information about all the amazing people who came from there — Chrissie Hynde, Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh and Jerry and Bob Casale of Devo, Joe Walsh of The Eagles, Chris Butler of The Waitresses. They all came out of Kent State, shaped in their youth by the four students who were killed there during protests against the war. For them, music and rock and roll were not a career move. It was in their blood.

After the Rock Hall, we paid a visit to Cadillac Music, Cleveland’s largest supplier of Touchtunes Jukeboxes. Coin man Charlie Comella started on Euclid Avenue in the back of my grandfather Jack Cohen’s J.C. Music building, and the business now occupies a full city block. Charlie’s grandson John is also a jukebox aficionado and as we toured his collections of beautiful old machines, we saw The Band Box, where a tiny mechanical band comes out to play when you drop in a coin. Noel recognized it immediately as there was still one at the place he grew up going to, and still takes his kids — Luigi’s. To this day, the place has fifty people outside waiting to get in. It’s not just the jukebox that is the attraction, but a sense of community— a local institution that has survived since 1949, and where people gather together and share music, and still means something.

As The Pretenders captured in three minutes, Akron has gone through some tough times. When I was a kid driving between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, we’d pass Akron with a giant Firestone tire revolving on the horizon, and if we were lucky, caught a glimpse of the Goodyear Blimp. The Blimp is still there, but the tire factories are gone and many buildings are boarded up. The high schools are still named Goodrich and Firestone, where Chrissie and Noel went — and where Noel’s son Fritz went too.

Fritz was in a band called Detention in high school which won the Tri-C High School Rock Off at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They got to open for Ke$ha, Vampire Weekend and Fred Armisen even sat in with them. They even played the Whiskey A Go Go on the Sunset Strip, down the block where we used to live. Between our house above Mel’s Diner and the Whiskey was this spaceship looking building which had a sign “Mutato Muzika.” It turns out that was the studio started by Akron’s Mark Mothersbaugh who, in addition to co-founding DEVO became one of Hollywood’s most prolific composers, giving the world the themes to Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Rugrats, soundtracks for Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, and the mega-hit ‘Everything Is Awesome’ from The LEGO Movie.

Music, movies and technology have long intersected. Noel shot a video for Detention’s song 56 Minutes on his Iphone in a skatepark by the Rubber Bowl. It was featured on Faction Punk on Sirius XM, and all I can tell you is, I am old, but it rocks!

Fritz went to Kent State and now does music mixing in a space right next to Luigi’s. Like many of his generation, Fritz doesn’t love Spotify. Its algorithms don’t play fair, and nobody gets paid unless you’re Taylor Swift. Fritz is in a new band Cat Stanley and they mostly play house parties — very old school — making their money from merch.

Longing For Connection and A Music Born From The Pain of Kent State

Our own 27-year-old recently asked us to send their iPod to listen to music on instead of their Iphone. There is a new group of young people who realize more and more being “connected” leads to disconnection and isolation. Gen Z or Millennials or Gen Alpha— whatever labels we old people give them— don’t want to have to subscribe to make some tech billionaire richer or algorithms suggesting what they listen to. including songs manufactured by AI bands. They want to choose their own music, music that is theirs, that means something to them. They long for physical connection and being with humans which is why Luigi’s is still packed.

What I learned from Noel and from watching the DEVO documentary on Netflix was that much of the Akron music scene was born from the Kent State killings — the anger, the grief, the deep distrust of institutions. That distrust echoes loudly today, as a new generation watches authorities overstep and wonders, as their predecessors did, who exactly the government is protecting and who to trust.

In an interview with Goldmine on the music history of Northeast Ohio, Chris Butler of The Waitresses recalls being a sociology student on the Kent state campus Monday morning May 4th with his friend Jeff Miller. He had stepped away moments earlier to get water when the shots rang out. He heard people yell “They’re blanks, they’re blanks.” He ducked behind a car and watched the glass get shot out. They cleared the campus and Chris ended up in a trailer in Akron. He didn’t know Jeff was dead until he saw it on the 6 o’clock news.

As Jerry Casale of Devo said afterward: “It was the most Devo — de-evolution — day of all. It set us off in weird directions, not wanting to be part of a culture that tried to kill us. What are we going to do with our lives?”

Most of them were creative. They went into art and music. Chris Butler went on to play bass in The Numbers Band with Terry Hynde — Chrissie’s brother — then paid a real waitress from Akron named Patty Donahue his last fifty dollars for a Greyhound bus ticket to New York to record a song called “I Know What Boys Like.” It became a hit on college radio and then on a new thing called MTV, which before it was taken over by the bands the big labels were pushing showcase bands with an independent spirt like The Waitresses, DEVO, and The Pretenders.

Noel was 12 when MTV started to become big and he would watch those videos which played music a lot different from his mother who preferred classical, with the exception of the Carpenter’s version of “Mr. Postman.” One of those videos everyone saw was “Brass in Pocket” where Chrissie Hynde plays a waitress in a backstreet diner, serving her bandmates who pull up in a flashy pink car. The song is all swagger and confidence, but the video has her in a more passive role — something she later said she wasn’t thrilled about, since the director had scrapped her original idea to have her character ride off on a motorcycle at the end. She had her own ideas. She always did.

Chrissie eventually moved back to Akron to care for her aging parents. She even opened a cruelty-free vegan restaurant named VegiTerranean in downtown Akron on the same Howard Street she mentions in “My City Was Gone.” Chris Butler is back in Akron now too, renovating a building on Kenmore Boulevard, trying to help revive the place. Everyone still goes to Luigi’s.

And Luigi’s still has that Band Box jukebox. In an old trade advertisement from 1952, the tagline reads: “Play the Hit Tune of the Week.”

The Hits Break First in Ohio

Ten years before the Band Box came on the scene, Billboard magazine credited my grandfather Jack Cohen and the Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association with inventing the “Hit Tune of the Month” program. They would pick one song, place it in front of 3,500 jukeboxes across Northern Ohio, advertising it on streetcars, on radio, and once, memorably, on the back of an elephant when the circus came to town. The idea Jack said was not to play the surefire hits, but to discover new songs which is why “Jingle Jangle Jingle,” “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree,” “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” and even “Deep in the Heart of Texas” broke out in Cleveland and Akron first before climbing the national charts.

After World War II, jukebox operators were responsible for 80 percent of all records sold in America. Radio needed them more than they needed radio. I have a 1953 program from the association featuring my grandfather, Cleveland DJ Bill Randle — who would famously bring Elvis to play a Cleveland high school two years later — and a young singer named Tony Bennett.

Noel toured with Tony Bennett, running sound for a career that my grandfather’s association helped launch decades earlier. He also toured with Johnny Mathis and Harry Belafonte — Black artists who many white radio stations refused to play when Billboard still classified their music under the category “Race Records.”

Flip through that 1953 industry program and it’s a time capsule of a segregated era — featuring exclusively white faces. But behind the scenes, the reality of the business was far more progressive. Jack ran his regional empire alongside men like Leo Dixon, a prominent Black jukebox operator and fellow officer in the Ohio association. Together, their network of routes dominated the Cleveland-to-Akron industrial corridor, keeping the music playing in local diners and blue-collar bars.

I have a photograph of Jack and Leo Dixon with Duke Ellington who their association brought to The Hotel Cleveland— an example of how these coin men were pushing past color lines.. Dixon’s footprint in the Midwest coin-op scene was so significant that he, alongside Ohio Teamsters boss Bill Presser (also head of the jukebox mechanics union), later became a central figure when Robert F. Kennedy went after the industry’s syndicates during the Senate Rackets Hearings.

In Jack and the Jukebox, we have footage of my mother describing how Jack heard an unknown singer at a lounge near the airport and booked him to play the Beachmont Country Club. There was push back because the singer was Black. My mother recalled some member saying: “Jack, we only have on Schwarze, and he works in the dining room.” So Jack made them an offer they couldn’t refuse— promising to bring in Johnny Ray to headline who had the number one hit in the country with “Cry.”

My mother, my Aunt Barbara and others who were there recall how when Harry Belafonte took the stage, shirt unbuttoned, the women went wild. They demanded so many encores that according to my mother, poor Johnny Ray just got drunk in his dressing room. Afterwards, Harry came over to my grandparents’ table and asked Jack to manage him — he was so grateful to play a place like Beachmont and wanted to play more upscale venues. Jack’s BFF Sanford Levine, VP of the CPMA, talked him out of it, as his son Billy recalls, telling him, “Jack, this guy’s never going to make it— he doesn’t even button his shirt.”

By 1957, Harry Belafonte’s Calypso became the first LP album to sell over a million records. Harry spent the rest of his life as one of the most important voices in the civil rights movement, funding Martin Luther King and speaking out against injustice at every turn. Jack missed his chance to manage him. But he and Cleveland coin men had already done their small part — putting Harry’s records in jukeboxes when radio wouldn’t touch them.

My grandparents and my mother are buried on Mayfield Road near the memorial for Cleveland deejay Alan Freed who popularized the term “Rock and Roll.” On his marker, it calls Cleveland The Birthplace of Rock and Roll, and talks about how Freed promoted a new sound that broke the barriers of segregation and provided a joyful soundtrack for hope and change. At the suggestion of Stevie Van Zandt of the E Street Band and Sopranos, Freed’s tombstone is in the shape of a Jukebox.

A Soundtrack for Hope and Change

Noel has invited me to Luigi’s and he didn’t have to ask twice. Good pizza and a jukebox — what more do you need. But I want to go there with Fritz and ask him directly: what does he think the future of music looks like? Because his generation is the answer to a question every generation asks — how do we make music matter again, how do we share it, how do we make it mean something beyond what an algorithm decides it’s worth?

The technology always changes. The jukebox was the Spotify of its day. But what the jukebox understood — what Luigi’s still understands, what Fritz’s house parties understand — is that music isn’t just something you consume alone. Someone has to press the button. Someone has to choose the song. And when the right song plays in a room full of people who needed to hear it, something happens that no algorithm has ever been able to manufacture.

Well, I went back to Ohio/But my family was gone./My childhood memories slowly swirled past/Like the wind through the trees.

Music has always helped us reinvent ourselves. And while jukeboxes are no longer in every restaurant, bar and drug store like in my Grandpa Jack’s day, jukeboxes are still around. During the pandemic, people from Akron donated to bars to pay the music publishing licenses to keep the music playing. It was still essential.

Meanwhile, I am rooting for Fritz and his new band, CatStanley, and hope their music. But it’s always young people want to say something and want to connect, that make the difference.

Ay, oh, way to go, Ohio.

Welcome to the Jukebox Mob.

The jukebox must still represent something, because when we were looking for a name to call our Youtube Channel, “The Jukebox,” “Jukebox Stories,” “Jack and the Jukebox,” “Stories From the Jukebox” were all taken. So we landed on The Jukebox Mob which works about fandom and well, looking at the photo of my Grandpa Jack and his fellow coin men, it seems to fit. Click here to check out the Jukebox Mob YouTube Channel and learn about how the jukebox spun America out of control. New clip just posted showing how the coin men helped Frank Sinatra break out.

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Above is a jukebox wall-mount my Uncle Louis gave to me with all strips of all Beatles tunes which he had made into a toilet paper dispenser. In some ways, it is a perfect metaphor for this forgotten star that provided the soundtrack to millions of Americans lives.

This being mother’s day, I was thinking about stories my mother told me about my Grandpa Jack and the jukebox which has inspired this substack, a new docuumentary Jack and the Jukebox, and most recently a Facebook group where I have learned just how much those songs from the jukebox have meant to so many.

My mother was a world-class storyteller and though my Grandpa Jack died when I was six, I grew up hearing stories she would tell me abot what a visionary pioneer my grandfather was. She told me how her father bet his and my Grandma Gert’s life savings on a new-fangled machine called the coin-operated phonograph. It was the middle of the Great Depression, but Jack realized how no one had money for records, but everyone had a nickel to play their favorite song. She told me how her father was president of something called the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association, and invented the “Hit-Tune-of-the-Month” program which is why all the biggest stars in the music business came to see Jack when they were in Cleveland. She swore a young Frank Sinatra had sung her and my Aunt Barbara to sleep when she was little.

For the past seven years, I have been working on a documentary about August Wilson, who won two Pulitzer Prizes writing plays drawn from stories his mother Daisy told him. When she won the Academy Award for Fences, Viola Davis said how our best stories are often in the graveyards and she thanked August for exhuming them.

My mother used to take me to her father’s grave on Mayfield Road and tell me all these crazy stories. Then, in December 2017, my mother passed away and Jeanne Cohen Kurlander Wechsler was buried near Jack and my. Grandma Gert. It was my cousin Peter Kusner, who never met Jack but had inherited his gambling spirit, who got this jukebox documentary started, and found us a studio where we talked to people who had known my grandfather, including my Uncle Louis, who had taken over the business after Jack died, and experts from the music world including the longest-serving CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It would turn out that all those crazy stories my mother told me were true — and then some.

There were rumors that in order to be in the jukebox business in Cleveland, you had to be connected to the mob. My mother always denied her father was in the mafia, despite a few photos where he definitely dressed the part. Last year, my wife Natalie wanted to see The Eagles at the Sphere in Vegas, and we stopped by the Mob Museum — and there were all the associates of my Grandpa Jack that my Uncle Louis had told me about. There was an exhibit about the Senate Racket Hearings, o led by was a young Robert. Kennedy, who as Chief Counsel of the Committee. Bobby and his brother Jack, then a Senator from Massachusetts would go after the jukebox industry and the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association my Grandpa Jack started. As I joke in the Jack and the Jukebox trailer below, my mother would just love that she is in a movie with the Kennedys.

A Jukebox Facebook group and the songs that got me through my sad childhood.

When I shared the wall-mount with the Beatles strips with the Jukebox Facebook group, I started hearing from others what songs they remember listening to on the jukebox. They shared their memories about putting a dime or a quarter in and playing songs like Queen’s “Fat Bottom Girls,” “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” and “Seasons in the Sun.” My friend Michael Alteri, who worked at the Listening Post — Pittsburgh’s coolest record store — remembered the mini-jukeboxes at Ritter’s Diner, the little tabletop Seeburg Wallomatics you could flip through right at your booth. My friend Shawn Flaherty reminded me of the jukebox at Uncle Charlie’s, the pizza joint we hung out at, where Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff” seemed to play on a loop.

S

hawn and Michael were cool, and could play football, which in Pittsburgh in the 70s, meant they had girlfriends. I was shy and awkward, and so if I had a dime — which was precious back then — and I was putting it into a jukebox, it was probably some song about a girl I had a crush on. “Amie” by Pure Prairie League, for the girl who lived around the corner, whose house my mother caught me counting the steps to. “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” for a girl who was mostly imaginary. “Mandy” for the girl Barry Manilow apparently longed for. I loved songs about longing and heartbreak. Or The Association’s “Cherish,” which said everything I couldn’t. Or Linda Ronstadt’s cover of “Hurt So Bad” — as who didn’t have a crush on her in the 70s.

I had met Shawn in carpool when I was going to Shady Side Academy. We had moved to Pittsburgh because my mother had divorced my father Don Kurlander, a gastroenterologist and married my step-father Richard Wechsler, a gastroenterologist from Pittsburgh. My first joke was that my mother never gets divorced — she just gets referred to another husband.

In 4th grade, I was struggling attending Wightman Elementary, and I vividly remember being in the Navy blue Cadillac Richard had bought my mother— without air conditioning because he didn’t believe in it- outside the school, and my mother talking to me about a disappointing report card I had gotten. When I was in kindergarten they thought I was slow, but my mother told the teachers that I was a genius because I tied kite string around the apartment which she thought was my way of keeping the family together with my parent’s impending divorce. She told me I may not he as smart as my younger brother Tom, or as good-looking, or as athletic, but I saw the world differently like my Grandpa Jack and that could take me places.

My mother convinced Richard I should go to his alma mater, Shady Side Academy, and he helped get me in. But in addition to air conditioning, Richard also did not believe in marriage, and 18 months after their wedding, we moved out of the castle-like home he had in Squirrel Hill — complete with a turret — and into a townhouse apartment above a preppy men’s clothing store called Kountz & Rider. My second joke was when our bathtub overflowed, the owner Frank would bang on his ceiling/our floor with a broom, yelling that his alligator shirts were getting wet.

Vaudevillians, Mundanes, and Jeanne in George Romero’s “Hungry Wives”

After the divorce, we couldn’t afford Shady Side so my mother cashed in the debentures my grandfather had left for college from the Seaway Acceptance Corporation, a loan company that catered to the jukebox operators and bar owners who couldn’t get financing from traditional sources. But though no longer married, Richard and my mother kept having this on-again.off-again affair so much of my adolescence was spent on the floor of my mother’s bedroom watching TV and doing homework while she smoked Salems and played four-handed bridge by herself on the bed, waiting for Richard to call.

The reason the TV was in her room was because she liked to see the commercials she had auditioned for. My mother had been quite the rising star in Chicago, where I was born — studying with Viola Spolin, the mother of Second City, and co-starring with comedian David Steinberg in a play called The Hamlet of Stepney Green. In Cleveland, she starred in commercials with Tim Conway and Eddie Anderson, who would become the voice of ABC and the father of Oscar-winning director P.T. Anderson. My mother starred in one play where the headline was “Jeanne Kurlander Sparkles” and the critic said: “Few will remember tonight’s play, but the world will soon know about this talented young actress.”

But in Pittsburgh, my mother struggled to make a living, doing dinner theater and commercials. For my middle school birthday party, she invited my whole carpool to see her in a production at the White Barn Theater in Irwin. I thought there was no way anyone would come. But by the end of the first act, I discovered why they were all suddenly very enthusiastic about seeing my mother in a play. There was a strip poker scene, and my mother kept losing. She was down to her slip when the curtain mercifully fell, and I remember Shawn’s brother Peter saying: “Bummer. I thought I was going to see your mother naked.”

My mother did get a part in a George Romero movie called Hungry Wives — and I never saw it for years because I was terrified she was naked in it. It was later retitled Season of the Witch, and when I finally watched it I realized it was actually a thoughtful film about female empowerment. And my mother kept her clothes on. She was, appropriately, a housewife playing cards.

Sometimes, after hours of shuffling her red deck, my mother would look up and share words of wisdom. “Son,” she’d say, “in life there are the vaudevillians and the mundanes. Your father goes to the same office every day — he thinks that makes him a mundane. I’m an actress — he thinks that makes me a vaudevillian. But the truth is, inside every vaudevillian is a mundane, and inside every mundane is a vaudevillian.” Then she’d go back to playing another hand.

Runaway Mom and the Origin Of St. Elmo’s Fire

When my brother and I were in high school, we came home one day to find a yellow moving van in front of our apartment. My mother informed us she was running away from home to pursue her long-postponed dream of becoming an actress on Broadway. Tommy started to cry. My mother told us she couldn’t afford to bring us right then, but had arranged for us to get scholarships to board at Shady Side. The weekends when we couldn’t visit her in New York, I babysat for the Nassif family who owned the St. Elmo Hotel in Chautauqua, New York.

That would lead to me writing a short story called St. Elmo’s Fire while at Duke about a waitress I had become infatuated with. It was all about longing and my friends at Duke started calling me Carl “Hurt-So-Bad” Kurlander. The song I would have played on the jukebox at this time was probably someting by Simon and Garfinkel as in the short story, it mentions their song “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her.” I changed “Emily” to Lynn, as that was the name of the St. Elmo waitress who was then going to Kenyon. I ended up mailing it to her, and I could have been arrested for stalking, but instead Lynn wrote back that she liked my writing style— ignoring that I had written 19 pages about my feelings for her.

My mother’s prediction that thinking differently would pay off came true as that short story ended up winning me a MCA-Universal Studios Scholar Award. Before I left, my Grandma Gert told me to make sure I tell Lew Wasserman, the owner of Universal, that I was Jack Cohen’s grandson. I could never figure out how the most powerful man in show business could know my Grandpa Jack, and only in making Jack and the Jukebox have I learned how they both started off in the music business- MCA stood for Music Corporation of America— and both had Cleveland mobsters as associates.

A few years later, John Parr’s anthem St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion) was the number one hit on Billboard and Demi Moore was dancing on a jukebox in the music video.

A Pittsburgh Comeback Story — and My Mother, the Star

My mother was shocked that I moved back to this city of my mostly unhappy childhood, which she described as her least favorite city on the planet. Oprah Winfrey was also surprised as I ended up on a show she was doing on people who changed their lives and she couldn’t believe I had moved to Pittsburgh!

That led to my first documentary, My Tale of Two Cities, a comeback story about Pittsburgh and my own coming home. For the film, we played football on the North Side with Franco Harris, went shopping in the strip district with Teresa Heinz Kerry, and spokewith Joanne Rogers in her husband Fred’s studio at WQED. When my mother came to visit, we also took my mother back to the apartment in Pittsburgh on Pembroke street which had been converted in a beauty salon. When I asked her about her decision to leave Pittsburgh and Tommy and I, she reminded me how if she had not left, I would have never gotten that summer job at the St. Elmo Hotel and written that movie.

Near the end of her life, I had to drag my mother back to Cleveland from her place in Palm Beach down the road from Mara Lago. She was suffering from dementia, but knew Donald Trump would win the election. Our kid Campbell was visiting her and I told my mother how Campbell was going to New York for a gap year as a manager had offered to help Campbell get some work there in musical theater. My mother told Campbell they shouldn’t go, as New York was vicious and would eat Campbell alive as she was totally scrumptious. She then burst out into a chorus from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang singing “You’re truly truly scrumptious/Scrumptious as a cherry peach parfait/When your near us/It’s so delicious/ Honest Truly, you’re the answer to our wishes…”

My mother did make it to Broadway starring in a play Animals as a half-woman, half-duck who is seduced by a guy who serves her poultry for dinner. Not surprisingly, the play closed opening night. My mother told Campbell she wished she had been a bigger star.

I don’t know where this jukebox project will lead, but when I showed the trailer below to some friends in L.A, there had been talk about a fictional version of the jukebox story, a cross between The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Marvelous Mrs. Masiel. It seems like a long shot, and strange that this all came from my own family history. But like my mother taught me, if you think differently, you never know what places that will take you. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the stories my mother told me about my grandfather and the jukebox business, led to a show where the fictional Jeanne was the star?

We did not have a jukebox in that apartment on Pembroke Place, but I remember my mother playing the “8 Track” of Old Blue Eyes is Back. She also told me how once when Frank was playing this big arena in Cleveland, he stopped the show to thank one man—Jack Cohen—for starting his career. In researching Jack and the Jukebox, I found an article in Billboard talking about how coin man Jack Cohen was visiting the set in L.A. of Tommy Dorsey’s new movie and how on the set was Mickey Rooney playing the drums and writing a song for Tommy’s new vocalist Frank Sinatra. Again, who knew all these crazy stories my mother told me were true.

I just had lunch at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Club with David Ehrenwerth, the attorney who helped me make My Tale of Two Cities who it turns out he has his own Wurlitzer in his home office He told me he had recently spoken with a rabbi who had blessed the ashes of DJ Alan Freed — the man who coined the term “rock and roll” — right here in Cleveland. Thanks to Stevie Van Zandt, Freed’s tombstone on Mayfield Road is in the shape of a jukebox. My mother’s final resting place along with my grandparents is just down the street.

That was the first place we shot when we started our jukebox film last year. This weekend, my former student Owen Gambill who edited the August Wilson documentary and was the cinematographer of Jack and the Jukebox was in town from New York where he is now living. We went to a bar nicknamed the Squirrel Cage and as we sat in a booth, the jukebox was playing Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell. In Demi Moore’s apartment in St. Elmo’s Fire there is a giant portrait of Billy Idol with neon pink har. As Billy sang “more, more more,” I thought, somewhere my mother is smiling.

I always knew my mother was a great character and on this mother’s day, I miss her more than ever. Below is a final clip from the ending of Jack and the Jukebox where my cousin Peter’s son Carter animated my mother and miraculously brought her back to life as she talked about how my Grandpa Jack could alway see the future.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mother.

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The great thing about the jukebox is that it can jump from record to record, cross genres, and yet unite everyone in the place. I thought that was an appropriate caveat for this post which goes from a John Mulaney bit, Mike Myers in the new Michael Jackson movie, my grandfather Jack Cohen — Cleveland’s jukebox king — the birth of rock and roll, and why kids these days want iPods instead of iPhones to disconnect and love vinyl because no one can take that away if they stop subscribing.

Above is a photo of John Mulaney holding a mini-jukebox given to him by a Chicago venue to commemorate one of his most popular bits — about being eleven years old at Chicago’s Salt and Pepper Diner, discovering that the jukebox offered three plays for a dollar, doing the math, and spending seven dollars to play Tom Jones’s “What’s New Pussycat?” twenty-one times in a row. As a bonus, somewhere in the middle, he slipped in one play of “It’s Not Unusual” — giving the other diners a moment of relief — before “What’s New Pussycat?” came back around again. Mulaney described this as the best seven dollars he ever spent.

There is a writer at Vice named Timothy Faust who wrote about being kicked out of a bar when he kept playing Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town.” He describes his heart beating bwaa-da, bwaa-dadada DAAH dah to match the song’s guitar riff. His local bar had no kill switch so the bartender couldn’t cut him off and he stayed until they threw him out.

When I shared all this with my new Jukebox Facebook group and asked what songs they would play over and over, the confessions came out. I heard about songs like “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” “Fat Bottom Girls,” “Seasons in the Sun,” and “Feelings.” I actually fondly remember most of those, though “Feelings” is where I would leave the place myself. Then, there was Michael Jackson, who dominated the jukebox ever since the Jackson 5 arrived on the scene with songs like “ABC” and “I’ll Be There.”

What John Mulaney’s bit captured so well is how the jukebox by its nature is a device through which we all share music. I thought of that again when I saw the new Michael Jackson biopic and the scene where Michael and his lawyer John Branca march into the New York office of CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff — played by Mike Myers— appearing in heavy prosthetics. Myers played a similar record executive in the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, where he told Freddie Mercury that no one would ever listen to a six-minute song called “Bohemian Rhapsody” because no teenagers would ever crank up the volume and bang their heads to that song — which is of course what Mike and Dana Carvey did in Wayne’s World.

In this scene, it is 1983, and Michael Jackson is already one of the biggest artists in the world, and MTV is not playing Black artists — something David Bowie himself pointed out on camera in an interview with VJ Mark Goodman. Only 3 percent of alll videos shown were from artists of color. In Michael, Michael ‘s lawyer played by Miles Teller demands that the CBS President do something. Walter then calls up Bob Pittman, the head of MTV, and says if the “Billie Jean” video is not playing on air in ten minutes, no CBS artists will be either — so he can take those Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Cyndi Lauper records, wrap them up in a plastic bag, cover that plastic bag in Crisco and shove them… well, you get the idea.

That true story about MTV not playing Black artists reminded me of after World War II, when my Grandpa Jack and other jukebox operators would play Black artists like Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, and the Ink Spots at a time when Billboard was still tracking them as “race records.” All of this would lead to a new group of young people called teenagers, dancing to music with a new energetic beat on jukeboxes in every restaurant and diner — and to Jack’s good friend Leo Mintz hiring a disc jockey named Alan Freed to play these records on his radio show and calling it “rock and roll.” It was that music which brought kids together, breaking racial barriers and helping define their identities in the 1950s.

That ability of music to unite the culture was true again when “Billie Jean” became huge on MTV. As the movie makes clear, Michael said he was not singing just for Black people but for everyone and he became the most iconic cultural figure of his time. In fact, his Thriller run in the 1980s was perhaps the last time one artist reigned so supreme on the jukebox with songs like “Billie Jean.” “Beat It.” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” “Human Nature.” “P.Y.T.” “Thriller.” As music critic Nelson George wrote in Musician Magazine in July 1984, right at the peak of it all: “In Michael, all ends meet: Black/White, Male/Female, Adult/Child. One size fits all.”

Cut to me in the 1990s, working on various incarnations of Saved by the Bell as part of NBC’s T-NBC lineup on Saturday mornings. I remember being in the writers room where head writer Bennett Tramer — also from Cleveland, also a huge music fan — would debate with the writers just what group “the kids” would love and want to win tickets to see. In the ‘80s there was no question: everyone loved Michael Jackson. But ten years later the culture was fragmenting — the same kids who loved Boyz II Men were not the kids who loved Pearl Jam or U2.

Bennett and I bonded over The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson, but that era too was long gone — two Cleveland kids who had grown up dreaming of California through a car radio. But the kids we were writing for, well, they were growing up in a fragmented world, and where the jukebox, the shared musical experience was all but replaced by listening to tunes in the isolation of headphones. Music was still everywhere, but less and less shared

Cut to last week, when my kid in their twenties asked if we could locate and send their old iPod. Why? Like so many of the current generations including my students, they don’t want to be constantly connected to this new digital world. “Connected” is an ironic word because the AI and algorithms which increasingly “suggest” what they listen to, makes them feel less connected. The vinyl resurgence among young people today is because they long for something they don’t have to “subscribed to” but physical records that they can hold and own as their own.

Superagent Ari Emanuel was reported to be buying up live venues, recognizing how this generation that came of age during the pandemic longs to be together. See those viral moments at Coachella with Sabrina Carpenter and Madonna and Justin Bieber singing to Billie Eilish — which, okay, made me cry as I watched it on TikTok.

Music at its best is something to be shared and perhaps that is because of a longing in each of us that Michael Jackson tapped in “Human Nature,” with him singing about “reaching out to touch a stranger” and longing to connect with another human being. In person. That is our human nature. That is what at one time the jukebox gave us.

So, thinking back to John Mulaney’s bit and the songs I mght play over and over again, with Michael Jackson, it takes me back to my 11-year-old self and the songs that I loved— “Got to Be There” — which is funny because it was sung by a Michael Jackson around my age singing about wanting to be there with her in the morning to say hello. But the song that really got me was “Ben” the love song he sang to a rat named Ben, the leader of a rat colony who was befriended by a lonely sick boy named Danny in a horror movie that still gives me the creeps. Even stranger, as you see in the Michael movie, Michael Jackson really did have a pet rat. But that song was Jackson’s first solo number one on Billboard and the jukebox charts.

Please share below what song would you play over and over like John Mulaney ‘s “What’s New Pussycat?” or Thin Lizzy’s “Boys are Back in Town” until they kicked you out of the place. And if you want to join The Jukebox Facebook Group, click here. (You don’t need to be an active facebook user.).

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I came of age in the 1970s when Fonzie — played by Henry Winkler — was the coolest person on television and maybe in the world. In his leather jacket, the star of Happy Days walked up to that Seeburg jukebox at Arnold’s, hit it with his fist, and “Aaaay!” the music started. Suddenly every girl in the room turned around.

But the coolest person I knew in real life was my Uncle Louis.

Louis Kusner had the looks of Robert Redford, the swagger of Steve McQueen, and drove like a former racecar driver — which he was — before he married my Aunt Barbara and took over my grandfather’s jukebox business. As a teenager, I would ride with him on his routes as he wove in and out of traffic on Cedar Road, heading downtown on his jukebox routes. As we entered each bar, all eyes fell on my Uncle Louis as he was greeted like a rock star. Waitresses would smile flirtatiously and patrons would chat him up about their favorite songs as he made his way to the jukebox against the wall — this shiny chrome and wood machine with bubbles floating up through colored tubes to its art deco cathedral, from which a record magically arose.

He would open the machine, take out the cash box, and spill an avalanche of nickels, dimes, and quarters onto a nearby table. With lightning-fast fingers, Louis would sort them into stacks, slide them into coin sleeves, and then, after giving the proprietor his cut, toss the rest in a bank bag. Once as we made our escape and headed back to the car, I noticed Louis carried a gun and when I asked, he casually explained this was a "cash business."

I had no idea then that those rides would one day become part of a documentary.

For the past few years I have been making Jack and the Jukebox, which began from stories my late mother told me about my Grandpa Jack — who she described as a visionary who could see the future. In the middle of the Great Depression, her father had bet his and my Grandma Gert’s life savings on a newfangled contraption called the automatic coin-operated phonograph, realizing that while nobody had money for records, everyone had a nickel to play their favorite song. Billboard Magazine credited Jack Cohen as an officer of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association with inventing the Hit Tune of the Month program that broke hits which went up the national charts. That was why all the biggest stars came to pay their respects to Jack Cohen on Dysart Road — where my mother swore a young Frank Sinatra sang her and her sister Barbara to sleep when they were little.

Last year we filmed interviews with my Uncle Louis, Aunt Barbara, and others who knew my grandfather and worked with him in the coin business. Through that I have discovered secrets about a forgotten star — the jukebox — that changed the way we listened to music and the music we listened to. Among them was how a young Robert Kennedy went after my grandfather and the jukebox industry for its mob connections. My mother would have loved that she is now in a movie with The Kennedys.

Riding with my Uncle Lou was as cool as I ever felt as a kid. And below are just some of the reasons the jukebox was — and still is — the coolest. We live in a time when AI and algorithms determine what we hear. But this is a story about a magical machine that merged art and technology, that brought us together and gave us community, that changed the way we listen to music and the music we listened to, and provided a soundtrack for decades of American history.

Ten reasons the jukebox was — and still is — the coolest.

1. The World’s First Jukebox Was a Stethoscope Edison invented the phonograph — or at least inventors in his lab did — but it took two entrepreneurs in San Francisco, Louis Glass and William Arnold, to attach a “nickel-in-the-slot” player to one. In 1889, the world’s first jukebox appeared in a saloon where patrons could drop in a coin, hold a stethoscope to their ear, and listen to one song. Long before airpods, patrons back marvelled at hearing the human voice on wax cylinders. One nickel. One song. The idea of what it could become was already there.

2. The Outlaw Machine. From its beginnings the jukebox was an outlaw machine. The modern form of the coin operated phonograph emerged in the early 1930s during Prohibition in speakeasies as a form of cheap entertainment. Coin operators were often outsiders blocked from more traditional professions — Jews, Italians, and African Americans — who built their empires one nickel at a time. But a Wurlitzer could cost as much as a car, and with banks seeeing this a risky enterprise, coin men sometimes turned to unconventional sources for loans. Those connected to organized crime found jukeboxes attractive being a cash business that made it ideal for money laundering.

3. Even the Word Jukebox Was Scandalous "Juke" comes from Gullah — the language of formerly enslaved people in the Carolina lowlands — meaning wicked or disorderly. As fans of the movie Sinners know, juke joint were often rough roadhouses at the margins of Southern society, playing wild music some parents worried would make their kids want to have sex. After World War II, when teenagers discovered music that had roots in this world on jukeboxes, that was exactly what happened.

4. A Senator Gave Customers the Right to Choose Their Song. Wurlitzer was a struggling company who had made organs to accompany movies in the silent film era when Indiana businessman Homer Capehart sold them his "Simplex system
that let customers choose from a whopping ten selections. It made jukeboxes ubiquitous in every restaurant, bar, and drugstore in America. At their peak, jukebox operators were responsible for over seventy percent of all records sold in the country. Capehart became a VP of Wurlitzer and then a U.S. Senator. In the 1950s he joined the Rackets Committee with Senator John F. Kennedy to investigate the jukebox industry.

5. Songs from Amazon's Hit Fallout First Became Hits Because of Cleveland Coin Men A new generation knows the jukebox from Fallout — the blockbuster video game and now hit Amazon TV show set in a post-apocalyptic world inspired by the 1950s. It features two songs — "Jingle Jangle Jingle" and "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" — which first broke as part of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association's Hit Tune program. In 1941, Billboard credited Jack Cohen with inventing this program where the Association would pick one tune, place it in front of 3,500 jukeboxes, and advertise it on buses, streetcars, and on the back of an elephant when the circus was in town.

6. Jukes Go to War From 1942 to 1945, jukebox manufacturers shut down and became part of the war effort. Wurlitzer made Norden bombsight parts. Rock-Ola manufactured M1 carbine rifle stocks. Seeburg built radar equipment. Coin operators like my grandfather promoted patriotic songs on their machines, and when the government asked for records to be melted down — shellac was needed and Japan had cut off the supply — Jack melted his entire inventory for a scrap drive. The winner got access to an Army jeep for a day. My mother remembered Jack taking everyone in the neighborhood for a ride.

7. Jukeboxes Crossed the Color Line. Radio programmers in the 1940s wouldn't play Black artists. Duke Ellington struggled to get radio sponsorship his entire career because of racial bias. Billboard still tracked this music as "race records." After World War II, jukeboxes gave teenagers the freedom to choose music their parents wouldn't allow in the house. Teenagers in Cleveland like my Uncle Louis went to buy the records he heard on these machines at Record Rendezvous, where my grandfather's friend Leo Mintz noticed kids dancing in his store. He sponsored a deejay named Alan Freed who started calling this music "rock and roll."

8. Jukebox Nickels Helped Finance Vegas Last year, on my way to see the Eagles at The Sphere, I stopped by the Mob Museum in Las Vegas and found many of my grandfather's associates — the same men my Uncle Louis had told me about. Jack used to gamble in Cleveland's illegal casinos, including The Mounds Club, where a blackjack dealer named Dino Crocetti dealt him cards before the world knew him as Dean Martin. The Mounds Club was run by the Mayfield Road Gang, and when Ohio's governor cracked down on the casinos, the Gang's leader Moe Dalitz moved West and financed The Desert Inn where Dean Martin and his pal Frank Sinatra would eventually headline. Some of the resources came from the Ohio Teamsters pension fund, courtesy of Bill Presser — former president of the jukebox mechanics union in Cleveland and another good friend of Jack's.

9. Robert F. Kennedy Put the Jukebox Industry on Trial As parents worried about the rockin’ music coming out of jukeboxes, they became a symbol of the nation's twin evils — juvenile delinquency and organized crime. A young attorney named Robert F. Kennedy joined Senator McClellan's Rackets Committee as chief counsel — sitting alongside Senator Jack Kennedy and Senator Homer Capehart. Bobby went after the coin men for their underworld connections which included characters like Meyer Lanksy and Sam Giacana. A 1959 New York Times quoted a Wurlitzer VP RFK got to testify who said the mob had infiltrated cities like Chicago, New York, and Detroit. The one exception he mentioned that could not penetrate was Cleveland because of the strong association there. My Grandpa Jack was called before the committee twelve times. He got out on a doctor's note.

10. Television Killed the Jukebox — But The Jukebox Didn’t Die, It Just Went Digital. As television became kept people at home, the jukebox started to play less of a central role in American lives. There was some attempts to give these machines a video component, and in this 1963 photo of me with my Grandpa Jack, the article describes us two “coin men” strolling through the CINEBOX exhibit at a Music Operators of America convention. As was often the case, my Grandpa Jack could see the future. Twenty plus years later, Demi Moore would be dancing on a jukebox in the music video for St. Elmo’s Fire. My grandfather passed away in January 1965, the same month as Alan Freed. He is buried in Cleveland on Mayfield Road near Freed’s memorial which at the suggestion of Stevie Van Zandt is in the shape of a jukebox.

Today, there are TouchTunes jukeboxes where with an app, you can play any song in the world. Potential couples still woo each other by paying a bit extra to “jump the line” and have the jukebox play their favorite song.

There are many more than ten reasons the jukebox is cool. We live in a time when artificial intelligence is making us question the line between technology and humanity. We stream music chosen by algorithms that know our habits but not our hearts. The jukebox did it differently — one nickel at a time, powered not by code but by human intuition, human hunger, and human connection.

That’s why we’re making Jack and the Jukebox. And why I keep writing.

Please share any jukebox experiences below and join our The Jukebox Facebook Group to meet fellow travelers. And watch the trailer for Jack and the Jukebox below.

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Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (St. Elmo’s Fire), documentary filmmaker (Jack and the Jukebox), and professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Jack and the Jukebox Trailer

This week the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted a new class and a familiar question will once again be trending: Why the hell is the Rock Hall in Cleveland?

The official answer usually points to deejay Alan Freed popularizing the phrase “rock and roll” or the Moondog Coronation Ball, the world’s first rock concert. But there is another reason we have discovered in making a new documentary, in part thanks to E Street Band member and Sopranos star Stevie Van Zandt. Stevie also is a chronicler of the history of rock and it was he who suggested that Alan Freed’s tombstone be in the shape of a jukebox.

In the 1950s, these marvels of art and technology were ubiquitous across America in every bar, diner, and soda shop. Bubbles flowed through their glowing tubes towards an art deco cathedral where a record magically appeared. And in Cleveland, there was a group of businessmen known as coin men who helped turn the jukebox into the most powerful music distribution system the country had ever seen.

The “Justin Bieber” of 1954 and The Invention of The Teenager

At their peak, jukebox operators controlled up to 80 percent of all records sold in America. To appreciate the influence these Cleveland Coin Men had, one needs to understand the cultural significance of singer Eddie Fisher in 1954.

Long before he was a trivia answer as the father of Carrie Fisher — Princess Leia — Eddie was the Justin Bieber of his day. He was the first true teen idol of the television age, with multiple number one hits, 65,000 fan clubs worldwide and a million dollar Coca-Cola endorsement deal for his twice-weekly NBC television show. Teenage girls mobbed his hotel rooms and screamed at his concerts.

But while the rest of the world was watching him on TV, in 1954, Eddie Fisher was coming to a brick colonial house on Dysart Road in University Heights to pay his respects to my Grandpa Jack. Jack Cohen wasn’t just any jukebox operator, but the President of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchants Association who Billboard magazine credited with inventing the first Hit Tune Program. The Association would pick a song, and placed it in front of 3500 jukeboxes in town, advertising them as the “Number One” Hit Tunes on street cars, in department stores, and on the back of an elephant when the circus was in town. This broke songs like The Andrew Sisters’ “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” The Ink Spots“I Don’t Want to Set The World On Fire,” and Eddie Fisher’s “Oh! My Papa-Papa” not just locally, but through a network of operators, sent them to top of the national charts.

My Aunt Barbara, then a teenager herself, recalls the night her father offered to take her and her girlfriends to the airport to pick Eddie Fisher up. Jack stayed up with them, giving them tips on what to say when they met their idol. But by the time morning came the girls had all passed out— and Jack picked Eddie up himself.

The 3,000 Kids School Holiday and the Rise of the Disc Jockey

In making our documentary, Jack and the Jukebox, I came across another fact that blew me away: until after World War II, there were no teenagers. For the first half of the twentieth century, most young people worked on farms and in factories. But child labor laws and postwar prosperity created something new: millions of young Americans with disposable income, free time, and a desire to hear music that wasn’t what their parents played on the living room console.

Madison Avenue saw this new demographic and began marketing to “teen-agers.” But Jack didn’t need their data reports. He had two teenage daughters — my Aunt Barbara and my mother Jeanne — and knew what the kids were listening to from his route guys who collected coins across Cleveland for his company, J.C. Music.

Jack launched his Hit Tune program in 1941, and for the next five years hosted press luncheons for the biggest stars in American music — big band leaders like Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, crooners like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, singing cowboy Gene Autry, drummer Gene Krupa, and many Black artists who white radio stations often refused to play, including Count Basie, Nat King Cole, and The Ink Spots, whose music were still being segregated as “race records.”

When I was growing up in the 1970s, Cleveland was being called “The Mistake on the Lake” by late night comedians. But as Steve Presser — grandson of Bill Presser, the jukebox mechanics union president who worked alongside my grandfather — puts it, post-WWII Cleveland was “the shit.” The sixth largest city in America, it was an industrial powerhouse with cultural swagger with a world champion baseball team and a place where entertainers came to build their careers.

In 1947, Jack took his Hit Tune program to the next level by throwing Hit Tune Parties where he paired the new phenomenon of the teenager with a new kind of radio personality — the deejay, including Bill Randle, of WERE who Time Magazine would later call the top disc jockey in America. A front page headline in the Cleveland papers read: “3,000 Kids Get School Holiday to Attend Hit Tune Party.”

In what world would three thousand teenagers get let out of school to go to the Cleveland Music Hall to hear music? The demand was so overwhelming that the Cleveland Press and WTAM radio couldn’t fill more than a thousand extra ticket requests. Mitch Miller, a big shot from Columbia Records, walked in and said he was genuinely frightened when he saw all those kids and heard them cheer. Tony Bennett performed. The winner of the teenage vote went on every jukebox in Ohio.

A 1953 program from the Hotel Hollenden gives a sense of what these parties had become: Jack Cohen giving the Welcome. Bill Randle as Master of Ceremonies. Jack had recently introduced Randle publicly at the Ohio State Phonograph Owners’ Association convention, thanking him by name in Billboard for his role in making the Hit Tune Parties a success. The jukebox and the deejay were made for each other — and Cleveland was a testament to the power of that synergy that would change the music industry and soon every fabric of American society.

Today algorithms determine what we listen to. But long before Spotify, the coin men relied on human interactions. As John Comella of Cadillac Music — whose grandfather Charlie started his business in the back of Jack’s own office on Euclid Avenue — explains in our documentary, the jukebox democratized music because you always knew exactly what customers were dropping their nickels for.

Cleveland’s coin men were part of an ecosystem which included a young route man named Hank LoConti, who credited working with jukeboxes as how he learned about the music business before opening The Agora, the Cleveland club where a young Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, David Bowie, The Cars, The Talking Heads, and many others would have some of their seminal shows.

Record Rendezvous, Alan Freed, and the Real Origin Story of “Rock and Roll”

During the war, military jukeboxes had mixed genres that rarely shared the same machine back home — gospel, blues, country, and bebop all playing side by side. That mixing helped catalyze something new. After the war, Black artists began pushing those sounds together in ways nobody had heard before, creating an infectious, rockin' new beat that teenagers couldn't resist.

This was the music that drove teenagers like my Uncle Louis Kusner—a “bad boy” Jewish kid from the working-class Kinsman neighborhood who would one day marry my Aunt Barbara and take over J.C. Music with my Grandma Gert after Jack passed away. Louis was one of those original teenagers who snuck into Cleveland’s Black and Tan clubs to hear the music he loved, then headed downtown to the two record stores on Prospect Avenue to find the records he’d heard the night before.

Some parents wouldn’t allow these records in the house. So teenagers listened in the booths at Record Mart, owned by Jack’s brothers Harry and Ben, and Record Rendezvous—Leo Mintz’s store at 300 Prospect, known to regulars simply as “The Vous.” Terry Stewart, the longest-serving CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, told us he had heard Leo may have even had outdoor speakers, so kids were literally dancing in the street outside. What is documented is what Leo saw inside: Teenagers of all backgrounds rolling in, moving to a beat of “race records” that few on mainstream radio would play at the time.

In 1951, Leo Mintz hired a down-on-his-luck deejay named Alan Freed and sponsored what Freed called his Moondog Rock and Roll House Party on WJW radio. There are various accounts of what happened next and who deserves credit for what. The term “rock and roll” had been used for decades in blues music—often a code word for “sex”—long before anyone put it on the radio. Whether it was Leo or Alan who first applied it to this new sound is disputed.

What we found making our documentary — talking with Leo's son, his grandson Doug Trattner, and Terry Stewart — was confirmed by TeachRock, the nonprofit founded by Stevie Van Zandt that uses the history of rock and roll to teach American history. In its music curriculum, TeachRock calls Leo Mintz one of rock and roll's "unsung founding fathers." Freed acknowledged Leo's role early on. But as Freed's fame grew — first in Cleveland, then in New York — Leo's contribution quietly faded from the official story. At some point, Freed himself admitted: "It was more Leo's idea than mine."

What is not in dispute is what happened on March 21, 1952, at the Cleveland Arena. Leo sponsored the Moondog Coronation Ball. The Arena held ten thousand people. A racially mixed crowd of over 20,000 showed up. They broke down the doors to hear the music that they loved. The police came and shut it down.

The revolution had begun.

Elvis, Springsteen, Trent Reznor, and Teaching Rock as American History

While Freed went to New York where he got his own TV show, The Big Beat, Bill Randle stayed in Cleveland. In the fall of 1955, a recording landed on Randle’s desk from a Colonel Tom Parker, manager of a young singer from Tupelo, Mississippi. On October 29, 1955, Randle produced a show at Brooklyn High School on Cleveland’s west side. On the bill playing for a gymnasium full of Teenagers was Pat Boone, Johnny Ray, The Four Lads, Bill Haley and his Comets—and a young Elvis Presley.

A film crew captured the event—the first footage of Elvis ever recorded. Peter Guralnick, Presley’s biographer, wrote that when Elvis broke a guitar string and smashed the guitar on the floor, it was mass hysteria. Police were needed to get him out of the building, his jacket sleeve ripped from his body. The film disappeared. It has never been found—possibly blocked by Colonel Parker. A plaque now marks the spot at Brooklyn High School.

In November 1956, Elvis would return to play The Cleveland Arena, the venue where the Moondog Coronation Ball was held, as the music ecosystem catalyzed by the city’s Coin Men had come full circle, helping to launch a new type of music that was about to spin America out of control.

That, of course, was only an early chapter of this story. Several decades later, Rolling Stone critic Jon Landau wrote the words: “I have seen the future of rock and roll.” That future was Bruce Springsteen—and he drove to Memphis and climbed the gates of Graceland to be close to where it all started. Security turned him away before he could knock on the door. Something about this music has always done that—pulled the young and the restless toward it because it means something they cannot quite name but feel in their bones.

Trent Reznor—who grew up outside Cleveland, cut his teeth there, and was working in a Cleveland music shop when the first whispers about bringing the Rock Hall to the city began—put it to Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene, himself a Cleveland native who once worked at the Rock Hall: “Rock and roll doesn’t have to be guitar-bass-drums. It’s the spirit of expression and, to me, freedom, and no limits to expression. That’s my version of what rock means.”

All these threads would eventually come together in the mid-1980s when Cleveland won the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One of the first interviews we did for Jack and the Jukebox was with Norm N. Nite—a Cleveland teenager who grew up listening to Alan Freed on WJW radio on Saturday nights. Norm went on to become a deejay in Cleveland and then New York where he interviewed rock legends from Chuck Berry to John Lennon.

Norm would become a driving force helping to convince Atlantic Records CEO Ahmet Ertegun and Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner to consider Cleveland as a home for the Rock Hall. In 1986, when the Hall held its first induction ceremony with Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and Buddy Holly, Norm would induct Alan Freed into the Rock and Roll Hall as part of its inaugural class.

Norm’s book, The House That Rock Built, tells the inside story of how the Rock Hall came to Cleveland, which we will explore in a future episode. It has a foreword by Stevie Van Zandt, whose own memoir Unrequited Infatuations chronicles how rock and roll has the power to change the world. Stevie founded TeachRock because of his belief that you cannot understand American history without understanding the music that soundtracked it. He enlisted a Founders Board of Bono, Jackson Browne, Martin Scorsese, and Springsteen who believe in that mission.

Bruce Springsteen, Stevie and the E Street Band are coming to Cleveland in May and when they do, I will be thinking of all these incredible characters who helped give birth to Rock and Roll in that city, including Alan Freed, Leo Mintz, my Grandpa Jack, and his fellow coin men.

I will also be remembering that forgotten star—the Jukebox—which after WWII allowed, for the first time in history, young people to walk up and drop a coin in the slot of their Cathedral and press buttons which for music that for the first time they had the freedom to choose. Records that in Cleveland first became known as rock and roll.

Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (St. Elmo’s Fire), documentary filmmaker (Jack and the Jukebox), and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. The Jukebox explores the forgotten history of the machine that changed American music. Visit jackandthejukebox.com for more or join our new The Jukebox Facebook Group.

Like tunes on a jukebox, it’s great when you share.

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One more thing…

The 2026 Class of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame includes Phil Collins, Oasis, Sade, Iron Maiden, Joy Division/New Order, Luther Vandross, Wu-Tang Clan, and Billy Idol. That last one sent me back to the 1980s and when I watched Demi Moore dancing on a jukebox in the St. Elmo bar as Rob Lowe wailed on the saxophone and the life-sized Billy Idol painting with neon hair that was in the apartment of Demi Moore’s apartment in “St. Elmo’s Fire.’ Turns out, Billy was a bit scary when he came on the scene as a punker from England, and though some may know him from MTV, the jukebox helped break songs like “White Wedding” and “Dancing With Myself.”

“Music has long been a mob enterprise.”

— Dennis Barrie, Creative Director, Mob Museum Las Vegas

Between the JFK Jr. Love Story everyone's bingeing and RFK Jr. in the headlines every day, the Kennedys are back. Maybe it's because in a time when we long for leadership, people are drawn to a family that once represented it. Today there is a whole generation who only knows Robert F. Kennedy as the father of that guy who eats roadkill and has doubts about vaccines. But when I was growing up, RFK was the political leader I most looked up to — an advocate for peace and the disenfranchised before he, like his brother, was assassinated. I remember blowing up a weather balloon in the backyard of my friend Marc Mendelssohn's house waiting to see if Bobby Kennedy would live or die. I had a poster of him with the quote from his brother Ted Kennedy’s eulogy of him: "Some men see things as they are and say, why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?"

What I never dreamed was that Robert F. Kennedy had gone after The Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association my grandfather created in the late 1950s as part of Senate investigations in the jukebox business. My late mother Jeanne would have been thrilled that she is in a movie with the Kennedys, as Senator John F. Kennedy was also on that Senate Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field otherwise known as The Rackets Committee. Though there were always whispers about you not being able to be in the jukebox industry without being connected in some way, my mother always swore her father was never in the mafia— though based on the pic below, he and his fellow coin men certainly knew how to dress the part.

But last year as part of making our “Jack and the Jukebox” documentary, I visited the Mob Museum in Vegas and ran into a few associates of my grandfather that my Uncle Louis who worked with him had told me about. Louis took over J.C. Music with my Grandma Gert after Jack died, but he knew a lot of the stories and shared with me a secret history and explained “without Cleveland, there would be no Vegas.” Going through the Mob Museum, I recognize many Cleveland connections that overlapped with the city’s notorious Mayfield Road Gang and the jukebox business.

My Uncle Louis told me about Shondor Birns, Cleveland’s Public Enemy Number One, who Jack would always say was a good guy… “Just don’t fuck with him.” Shondor would meet his demise being blown up outside a lounge and the way Louis told it, he was blown in half, and his torso landed next to his body, but Shondor was so tough, even his burnt body was said to have a “mocking smile.”

As I mentioned in my last post, my grandfather often crossed the color line at a time many did not in Cleveland. And a story oft-repeated was how he discovered an unknown singer at a lounge by the airport, and booked him to play Beechmont, the Jewish country club. There was push back because this performer was Black, and my mother recalled someone actually said “we have enough Shvartzes. We have one that works in the dining room and that’s it.” But her father always said “you have to bludgeon people into things.”

Jack arranged to have the number one crooner at the time, Johnny Ray, who had a big hit with the song “Cry” to headline, as long as this singer got his shot. Billy Levine, the son of one of Jack’s BFF, coin man Sanford Levine, recalls how the women went wild when Harry Belafonte took the stage. My mother said they wouldn’t let him off the stage and poor Johnny Ray got drunk in his dressing room. Billy and my mother recall Harry asking Jack and Sanford to manage him, but Sanford didn’t think this kid had a future because he “didn’t even button his shirt.” Five years later Harry Belafonte became the biggest entertainer in the world with his album Calypso (which had the Banana Boat Song everyone knows from Beetlejuice.

In his memoir, Harry doesn’t mention playing Beechmont, but he does recall a time when he was headlining a Vegas casino and being forced to stay in a run-down motel they put up Black entertainers in. Harry complained to some folks he knew, and hours later, he would be whisked back to the casino where he was offered a fancy suite. When asked who he should thank, Harry was told he would have to play Cleveland because Shondor Birns made a phone call.

Harry would be a big backer of both Jack Kennedy and MLK. And the connections between the music, the mob, and the Kennedys only get deeper from here. Because also in the Mob Museum are folks from Cleveland’s Mayfield Road Gang, including Moe Dalitz, called The Godfather of Vegas, who built the Desert Inn where Harry and another of my grandfather’s early discoveries Frank Sinatra would perform. In 1954, for his and my Grandma Gert’s 20th anniversary, my grandfather took the family to Vegas and stayed at the Desert Inn. My Aunt Barbara recalls meeting Frank Sinatra in the bar in a story I will tell in another post. But Frank ended up serenading Jack and Gert personally during his show, sending over champagne and wishing them happy anniversary.

And yes, Frank is in the mob museum because of his alleged ties to gangsters (as hinted at in The Godfather where Moe Greene may have been named after Moe Dalitz, but the Mayfield Road Gang is definitely alluded to as the Lakeview Gang out of Cleveland by the Mayer Lansky character Hymen Roth. For “Jack and the Jukebox” we interviewed Dennis Barrie, the creative director of the Mob Museum, who told us despite people thinking of Italians and the mafia, the original Mayfield Road Gang was Jewish. He also reminded us that music has long been a mob enterprise.

But the person with closest ties to my grandfather was present when unions were brought in, and there were pictures of Robert Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa, and Ohio Teamster boss Jackie Presser. But it was Jackie’s father Bill who was a longtime associate of Jack Cohen’s and in the early meeting minutes of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association. In Bill Flanagan’s article “Teamsters, Thugs & Power,” he refers to Bill Presser as Jimmy Hoffa’s buddy and “Ohio’s Jukebox czar.” But I first saw Bill Presser’s name in the book “Mobbed Up: Jackie Presser’s High Wire Life in the Teamsters, the FBI and the Mafia” which James Neff opens with Bill Presser’s funeral and a letter from President Ronald Reagan to Jackie expressing his condolences and praising his father. Jackie is in the Mob Museum being ushered in to a Teamster’s meeting in a gold throne, but according to his grandson Steve Presser, his Poppi was much less flashy and he didn’t ask for respect, he commanded it.

It would turn out Steve had run my favorite vintage toy store, “Big Fun” on Coventry Road just around the corner from where my grandfather, and Alan Freed, “The Father of Rock and Roll” are buried. And when we met, he talked lovingly of his grandfather, who apparently loved tongue as much as Jack Cohen loved corned beef.

Steve told us how Bill came from humble beginnings and was working in a dry-cleaning store when two thugs came to shake him down. When they demanded money, Bill, a former boxer, beat the shit out of them. The next day four guys came back, and when he asked if he was supposed to take them all on, they explained they actually wanted him to come work for them as a labor organizer. According to Mobbed Up and Michael Newton’s Mr. Mob: The Life and Crimes of Moe Dalitz, both Bill and Moe started with dry cleaning associations where proprietors paid what could be seen as insurance or “protection money.” William Presser is in the 1939 transcripts for the Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association, for around then he had become head of the jukebox mechanics union.

Even when I went on routes with him in the 1970s, my Uncle Louis would talk about how if a location had a union tag, no one would try to steal that stop. A 1939 article from Cleveland’s Call and Post titled “Jumpin’ Jive: Phonograph Men in Slam Session” describes a “near riot” breaking out at the first meeting of the Phonograph Merchant Association as “blows were exchanged by a white and Negro member of The Association, which is composed of owners of hundreds of mechanical phonographs in cafés and bars throughout Cleveland… During the melee, both combatants are reported to have sustained abrasions and bruises.” In the CPMA transcripts, whenever there was a dispute between two locations, the minutes note William Presser would speak to such and such individuals.

Young Robert Kennedy would go after Bill Presser and the African American coin operator and Ohio Association President Leo Dixon who also worked closely with Jack, for anti-competitive practices. Billy Levine recalls Jack and his father being called to Washington, and his father coming back and saying how there was this young prosecutor who knew as much about the jukebox business as he did, and that he should keep an eye out for this Robert F. Kennedy.

According to “Mobbed Up,” Kennedy interrogated Bill Presser about his time as executive secretary for the Phonograph Merchant Association. He brought up what was known as “the courtesy list.” If someone was not on the courtesy list, bar owners testified they could find their beer deliveries not arrive, their windows broken, or their place mysteriously on fire.

I have found numerous transcripts of the McClellan Hearings and the Cleveland Racketeering Hearings in doing research for our documentary. In one my grandfather swears he never saw any violence. But J.C. Music is mentioned, and the reason there is back and forth between Bill Presser and Robert F. Kennedy and not RFK and Jack Cohen. Jack was asked to appear repeatedly, but was got out of appearing by having a doctor’s affidavit saying he was too ill to appear. In the doc, Steve Presser jokes that in some ways, his grandfather took the fall for mine.

I will get into more about all this in future posts, but this chapter in the jukebox industry in the late 1950s may be one of the reasons why my father recalls my grandfather not talking much about jukeboxes by the time I came along. But to give you a sense of how deep this all goes, Robert Kennedy would go after Bill Presser and Lew Wasserman, the owner of MCA/Universal and the man responsible for the internship that took me to Hollywood, in the early 1960s. And Ronald Reagan may not have made it into the White House if it weren’t for those two men.

To tease what is ahead, I found multiple articles from 1959 that talked about jukeboxes’ mob underworld ties. A Time Magazine article from 1959 states that the coin machine business is worth $2 billion annually, $21 billion in today’s dollars. A NY Times article quotes Milton Hammergren, a former executive of the Wurlitzer company, stating that the mob had managed to infiltrate ten major cities. They had worked with Jake (Greasy Thumb) Guzik, a member of Al Capone’s gang in Chicago and Mayer Lansky in New York. But Milton said Cleveland was the only big city they “tried to crack without success. Operators there resisted with violence, and so the effort was abandoned…. The last I heard that hadn’t changed.”

The article then quotes the witness in these McClellan Hearings with Senator John F. Kennedy and Senator Homer Capehart (who my grandfather knew from his days in the jukebox business) as saying that Bill Presser, Ohio chief of International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and Leo Dixon, had quite a bit to do with it..

There are headlines about jukebox operators slain from gang-like executions from Detroit, Chicago, and New York. But Cleveland, the future Home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was different because of the Phonograph Merchant Association.

Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (St. Elmo’s Fire), documentary filmmaker (Jack and the Jukebox), a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and the grandson of Cleveland jukebox pioneer Jack Cohen. Jukebox Stories explores the forgotten history of the machine that changed American music.

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The above photo was given to me by John Comella of Cadillac Music, Cleveland's largest supplier of TouchTune jukeboxes, an eighty year old business started on Euclid Avenue by his grandfather Charlie Comella in the back of the headquarters for J.C. Music, run by my grandfather Jack Cohen.

If you visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the shores of Lake Erie, you'll hear about a DJ named Alan Freed and maybe even learn how Record Rendezvous owner Leo Mintz sponsored Freed’s Moondog Coronation Ball, the world's first rock concert. But there is a forgotten chapter in why the Rock Hall is in Cleveland and not Memphis, New York, or Hollywood. And it features a group of coin operators who promoted the records of Black artists on their jukeboxes at a time when radio stations refused to play them.

I was reminded of this little-known history at a wedding this past weekend for the son of my cousin Jack, named after our grandfather. Several years ago, I was at Jackie's house (only I as the oldest cousin can still call him that) as we combed through ancient scrapbooks from the Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association Jack Cohen founded, meticulously preserved by his faithful secretary Virginia. Jackie and I are both huge Springsteen fans, but at that time, we had no idea that it was Stevie Van Zandt from the E Street Band had decided the design of Alan Freed's tombstone should be in the shape of a jukebox. That marker is near where our grandfather is laid to rest on Mayfield Road, and yet, until I began my latest film, Jack and the Jukebox, I had little appreciation for the role Cleveland coin men played in, as inscribed on Freed’s memorial, “breaking the barriers of segregation” and “provided a joyful soundtrack for hope and change.” I learned a lot about this by talking with Jackie’s father, my Uncle Louis, who in addition to taking over the business after my grandfather died, was one of those original teenagers who listened to Alan Freed on the radio as he preached the gospel of a new sound that in Cleveland first became known as “Rock and Roll.”

But to get the full picture, we need to go back to that photograph at the top — when Jack Cohen brought Duke Ellington to Cleveland in a city that was still largely divided by race.

In 1942, three men sat together at the Hotel Cleveland: my grandfather, a Jewish jukebox operator who controlled what three thousand machines played across the city; Leo Dixon, a Black operator and the president of the Ohio State Automatic Phonograph Owners’ Association; and between them, Duke Ellington — the greatest composer in American music, in town because the coin men had brought him there.

It was wartime. The American Federation of Musicians had launched a recording ban that would last until 1944. No new records were being pressed. And the operators who ran the jukeboxes — who decided which of the existing recordings went into which machines in which neighborhoods — had enormous power over what America heard.

Back then many radio stations rarely played Black artists, but as jukeboxes were becoming ubiquitous in every restaurant, bar, and soda shop, these coin men were using their power to put Black artists in front of white audiences on the 3,500 jukeboxes. Jack and Leo were both part of a trade group, the Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association. The 1939 charter of the Ohio association shows Leo Dixon presiding as president with Jack at his side — a Black man and a Jewish man running the jukebox business together. By 1946, they’d swapped roles: Jack was elected president, Leo became secretary-treasurer. These two men shared power as equals, along with other operators like Jack’s close compatriots and brothers-in-arms— his fellow Jewish operator, Sanford Levine, and the Italian Charlie Comella. The jukebox business transcended color and ethnicity as these entrepreneurs made their fortunes one nickel at a time.

It was not that Jack was such a civil rights pioneer, as much as he was a businessman who did what was right.In 1942, ASCAP, which represented major recording artists, attempted to collect higher royalties. Jack told the papers how the association would “discontinue using the society’s tunes and switch to Broadcast Music Inc.” BMI was the upstart that welcomed the Black songwriters, the rhythm and blues artists, the independent labels that ASCAP had shut out.

Terry Stewart, the longest-serving CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a jukebox collector himself, explains in our documentary how throughout the 1940s, Billboard maintained separate charts for Black artists — first called “race records,” then renamed “rhythm and blues” in 1949 by journalist Jerry Wexler. These were the songs tearing up jukebox play counts but getting little airplay on the radio. The operators could see the numbers. They knew what was being played, and where, and by whom.

Ben Thoburn, who owns a huge warehouse of vintage jukeboxes at Coin Op Amusements in downtown Cleveland, puts it simply: “A lot of times in public, they couldn’t play because they weren’t allowed in the locations. But everybody still liked their music. The jukebox operators knew which songs were good and which were going to make money.”

We met Ben through John Comella who in Jack and the Jukebox describes how his grandfather’s business worked then and how it still works today: “It’s a very democratic process. The most popular song stays on the jukebox longer, and if no one plays it, it drops off.”

In those scrapbooks Jackie and I looked through, Billboard credits our grandfather Jack for creating the innovative “Hit Tune of the Month” program. A 1942 article describes how the operators would put one song at the front of every jukebox in Cleveland, advertising it on streetcars, on the radio, on the back of an elephant when the circus was in town. These songs the CPMA Hit Tune program promoted didn’t just break in Cleveland. They climbed the national charts. A follow-up 1946 article features a long list of the recording artists the association brought to town which included the biggest recording stars of the day — band leaders like Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Guy Lombardo, crooners like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, acts like the Andrew Sisters, and drummer Gene Krupa. But also included are Black artists such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Nat King Cole and his Trio and a group called The Ink Spots.

This is a Hit Tune poster from the CPMA we found in Virginia’s scrapbook for the song "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire." This version features white artists: Horace Heidt, Skinnay Ennis, Mitchell Ayres, Tommy Tucker. But our film’s young editor, Adam Kliburn, and twenty-something graphics artist Carter Kusner, know the song from the Ink Spots’ version, prominently in the hit video game and Amazon Prime TV series Fall Out.

Both versions ended up on the jukeboxes. The machine didn't curate by race. It just played whatever button customers pushed. But it was the Ink Spots' innovative vocal harmonies, signature guitar hooks, and rhythmic basslines on the track that established the direct blueprint for rhythm and blues and doo-wop, which ultimately evolved into rock and roll.

And one of those pressing those jukebox buttons was my Uncle Louis who grew up in Cleveland’s blue-collar Kinsman neighborhood. His parents played Mantovani on the living room console. Louis wanted something else. He told us in the documentary: “I grew up rock and roll crazy. It was my music at the time, and that’s what I wanted to listen to. And the area that I like the best is the Black area, because that music — it was incredible.” My Uncle Louis, who taught himself to play jazz piano, even sang Cleveland’s own Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “I Put a Spell on You” for us.

I did not realize that before World War II, there were no teenagers, as before child labor laws kicked in during the late 1930s, most kids didn't finish high school — they left to work on farms or in factories. What we now think of as a "teenager" only took shape in the postwar boom, when the Mad Men of Madison Avenue realized millions of young Americans suddenly had time, freedom, and money to spend on whatever music they wanted to hear.

Jack and the other operators understood this and went after their nickels by hosting Hit Tune Parties — monthly events where teenagers voted by ballot for their favorite records, and the winners went onto three thousand jukeboxes across the city. The parties drew thousands of kids to the Cleveland Music Hall. It was Spotify before Spotify — and my Uncle Louis was one of those original teenagers.

A teenage Louis would sneak into Cleveland’s Black and Tan clubs to hear the artists he loved. Then he’d take whatever money he had downtown to buy the records at two stores on Prospect Avenue.

At 300 Prospect was Record Rendezvous — known to the regulars as The Vous — owned by Leo Mintz, a good friend of my grandfather’s. According to Billy Levine, whose father Sanford and uncle Rudy owned the Savoy Lounge right next door, Leo liked to have a bourbon there every morning about 9:00 before heading into The Vous where the party was.

Down the street at 814 Prospect was Record Mart, owned by Jack's brothers Harry and Ben Cohen. A 1953 Cleveland Press feature tells how they'd started during the Depression, scraping together $150 to sell used records that came off Jack's jukeboxes. They rented a cubby-hole store on Euclid Avenue near East 105th Street and put up a sign: "Marie — By Tommy Dorsey — 5 Cents." They sold enough records by Count Basie, Harry James, and Ella Fitzgerald to earn back their investment in the first month. The two brothers — who, like Jack, loved food — billed themselves as "the two biggest dealers in Cleveland."

Passed down to the family was this photo of Benny Goodman at Record Mart from 1947, who I always thought of as just another big band leader. But he was one of the first to integrate his band, hiring Lionel Hampton on vibes and Charlie Christian, who would inspire Jimi Hendrix, on electric guitar. In this photo, their store is packed with teenagers waiting to get their records signed, Black and white together, shoulder to shoulder. Well before the civil rights movement took off, the music crossed the racial divide.

Years later, as jukeboxes faded from the scene, Record Mart became Appliance City selling cameras, TV sets, and appliances, where Ben Cohen's sons Alan, Hersh, and Jeffrey would help out. Jeffrey would go on to co-write "Freeway of Love" for Aretha Franklin with Narada Michael Walden — a Grammy-winning R&B hit that featured Clarence Clemons of the E Street Band on saxophone.

As told to us by his grandson, Doug Trattner, it was Leo Mintz who noticed teenagers rolling into Record Rendezvous and dancing at the turntables as they listened to records with a new energetic, rocking beat. In 1951, Mintz hired a down-on-his-luck DJ named Alan Freed to play those records on the radio. Freed's "Moondog Rock and Roll House Party" became syndicated as he preached the gospel of this new music Cleveland jukebox operators had been promoting across the country. (There is still debate about whether it was Freed or Mintz who first called it “rock and roll.”)

One of the few times I felt cool as a teenager was when in the 1970s I went on jukebox routes with my Uncle Louis. While my mother had married a doctor, my Aunt Barbara had broken off an engagement to a wealthy New York jeweler with a house in the Hamptons to marry the “bad boy” who raced cars. My Uncle Louis had the cool of Robert Redford as The Sundance Kid and swagger of Steve McQueen. As Louis entered a bar, the whole place seemed to watch as he headed for that jukebox with the glowing tubes with bubbles flowing up to its art deco cathedral. Louis opened up the machine and spilled an avalanche of nickels, dimes, and quarters onto a table. Then he stacked and counted these rolls of coins with lightning speed and stuffed them in a canvas bank bag. He always carried a gun, which he casually explained was because this was a “cash business.” He once pulled it on two guys who came at him with a knife while he was counting $800 in quarters at a bar on the west side. “It was scary,” Louis says in our documentary, “but it was part of the business.”

Louis had only been at J.C. Music a short time when my grandfather died at just 61. Everyone expected my grandmother Gert to sell the business. Jukeboxes were struggling against the dominance of television. But Gert surprised everyone, deciding to run it herself, and asked Louis to help.

“I took Jack music and introduced it to games and cigarettes,” Louis tells us, “and made it a bigger business than it was and gave us some more routes to go on and more things to do.”

Louis and Gert didn't just keep J.C. Music alive. They expanded it, eventually growing into arcade games that became huge in the 1970s.

We were able to capture the stories my Uncle Louis told me, and that we found in those scrapbooks, thanks to my cousin Peter Kusner, Jack’s younger brother who never met Jack, but has his entrepreneurial spirit. Last year, after Louis had a stroke and a heart attack, Peter arranged for a studio so we could film Louis, my Aunt Barbara, and others who knew Jack Cohen as well as experts who knew about this forgotten chapter of music and American history. One thing we heard over and over again was anyone who ever met my grandfather still remembered him as one of the greatest characters they ever met.

When we finished the interview with my Uncle Louis, I got to tell him:

“You were the original teenager and cool guy, and you’re still the coolest guy I know.”

In true Louis fashion, he flashed that charismatic smile and said suavely: “Somebody take me away.”

He passed away on the last day of October 2025. A week before he died, he was playing rockin’ music on the piano in the lobby of the senior living facility he was in.

As Jordan and his stunning bride Ranee hit the dance floor this past week, the DJ played rockin’ tunes from a playlist that crossed every genre. I wished my Uncle Louis was there to see it, but got a sense that somewhere in this universe he and my Grandpa Jack were smiling. The fact that these kids had dyed hair and tattoos, or that Ranee comes from a family that is half Black and half Italian, did not faze my Aunt Barbara—in fact, she seemed to delight in it. No one at the wedding probably realized that the music they were dancing to was born from a forgotten star — the jukebox — a machine that never asked nor cared about color. Neither, it turns out, did the family it created.

Coming Up: The Hit Tune Parties that packed Music Hall with screaming teenagers that led to the world’s first rock concert, a kid from Tupelo named Elvis visits Cleveland — and why Bobby Kennedy came after the Cleveland coin men.

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Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter, documentary filmmaker and the grandson of Cleveland jukebox pioneer Jack Cohen. Jukebox Stories explores the forgotten history of the machine that spun American our of control. Go to jackandthejukebox.com for more and watch the trailer below.

I grew up hearing from my mother how when she was six, a young Frank Sinatra had sung her and my Aunt Barbara to sleep in their house on Dysart Road in Cleveland.

After Frank died, a Cleveland Jewish News article quoted my Grandma Gert saying how her husband Jack Cohen had suggested to bandleader Tommy Dorsey that he hire a skinny singer named Sinatra away from the Harry James Orchestra. My Aunt Barbara told me how when she was not yet a year old, her parents left her for a month with her Aunt Roz as they left for Los Angeles. Who does that to a baby, she complained. When I asked why they went, she said Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra had been in Cleveland playing a gig and were headed to the West Coast — and asked her parents Jack and Gert to come along. She swore there was film of them all on a train.

Last year, we started making a documentary called Jack and the Jukebox, and while we are still looking for that footage, I did discover a December 20, 1941 article in Billboard in its “Cleveland” section under “Amusement Machines” reporting: “Jack Cohen, head of the J.C. Novelty and Music Company and vice-president of the Phonograph Merchant Association, left Thursday for Los Angeles and other California points. Mrs. Cohen accompanied him. They expect to be gone a month.”

Two weeks before, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. America was at war. And my grandfather, a jukebox operator from Cleveland, was heading to California with Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra.

Then I found a second clipping — from a Cleveland newspaper in January 1942 — and suddenly my mother’s stories didn’t sound so crazy. It reports that “Jack Cohen of the local Phonograph Merchants Association writes from Hollywood where he’s visiting with Tommy Dorsey, that Mickey Rooney played the drums in the band when it staged an impromptu jam session at M-G-M the day it reported for movie work. Mickey is also writing a new tune with Frank Sinatra, the Dorsey vocalist.”

My grandfather is on the MGM lot. He’s watching Mickey Rooney sit in on drums with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. And Mickey Rooney is writing a song with Frank Sinatra. How did a Cleveland coin man end up there with the man who would become the greatest crooner of all time?

If you have never heard of a “phonograph merchant,” you are not alone. But before Spotify playlists and algorithms decided what we hear, a network of outsiders — Jews, Italians, and African Americans — built the most powerful music distribution system in America. Their machine was the jukebox. It cost a nickel to operate, it stood in the corner of every bar, diner, and soda shop in the country, and at its peak it accounted for over eighty percent of all records sold. Not radio. Not record stores. Jukeboxes.

The first coin-operated phonograph appeared in 1889 at a San Francisco saloon, where patrons listened to a wax cylinder through stethoscope-like tubes. In 1932, a salesman named Homer Capehart sold Wurlitzer “The Simplex System” that let customers choose from up to ten selections. But these “nickel-in-a-slot” music boxes really took off with Prohibition, tucked into speakeasies that needed cheap entertainment without hiring a band. After Repeal, the machines stayed and multiplied. They became known as “jukeboxes” — the name borrowed from the juke joints of the Black South, roadhouses where people gathered to drink, dance, and hear music that existed nowhere else. The jukebox was “a poor man’s symphony” — during the Depression, nobody could afford a phonograph or records, but everyone had a nickel for their favorite song.

It was also a dangerous business. In Chicago, the Outfit — Al Capone’s organization — saw the all-cash jukebox trade as a natural extension of Prohibition rackets. Eddie Vogel, a Capone-era gangster, controlled the city’s most extensive jukebox routes. Operators who didn’t cooperate found their machines destroyed, their bar owners threatened. Sam Giancana — the mobster who would later share a mistress with Jack Kennedy — would eventually take over AMI, one of the four major jukebox manufacturers. In New York, Meyer Lansky helped run distribution through a company that at one point controlled every Wurlitzer in the metropolitan area.

There is a scene in The Godfather where Al Pacino’s Michael tells Diane Keaton’s Kay how Johnny Fontane was signed to a bandleader who wouldn’t let him out of his contract until Luca Brasi put a gun to the bandleader’s head and said it would either be his signature or his brains on that contract release. That scene echoed the real-life claim by Dorsey that Willie Moretti, an underboss in the Genovese crime family and godfather to Frank’s daughter Nancy, put a gun in his mouth and “suggested” he sign the paper freeing Sinatra to pursue his solo career. Moretti himself was deeply involved in the jukebox rackets in New Jersey which he found convenient for skimming and money laundering.

Meanwhile, in Cleveland, a twenty-year-old named Lew Wasserman had become Director of Public Relations at the Mayfair Casino, a high-end downtown supper club he described as “the most unique and grand entertainment palace in the world.” The Mayfair featured the best bands of the era, the finest liquor, and a topless Parisian revue — the precursor to Vegas showgirls. Said to have cost a million dollars to build, it was rumored to be financed by the Cleveland Syndicate to persuade city leaders to legalize gambling. The Jewish Navy, who had made their fortunes smuggling booze in speedboats across Lake Erie, had formed an alliance with the Italians, and the Mayfield Road Gang was looking to diversify when Prohibition ended.

Jukeboxes at the time cost as much as a car, and operators who couldn’t get traditional bank loans often turned to alternative sources. The Syndicate loved jukeboxes because they were a cash business. Cleveland was so mobbed up by 1935 that they brought in Eliot Ness, “The Untouchable” who brought down Capone, as their Chief Public Safety Officer. The Mayfair was shut down, but Lew’s press releases about the acts that played there led to a job offer from Dr. Jules Stein, an ophthalmologist with a side gig booking bands through a talent agency called the Music Corporation of America. The Cleveland mob would eventually relocate to Vegas, building The Desert Inn where Wasserman booked his client and Jack Cohen’s good friend Frank Sinatra.

My grandfather’s real name wasn’t even Jack Cohen.

He was born Jack Povelski in 1904 in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants who’d fled persecution in Eastern Europe. His father Sam got a job as a foreman in the garment district, but when workers went on strike, thugs threatened to kill him for crossing the picket line. So Sam moved the family to Cleveland and changed their name to Cohen, because it was common and because in Hebrew it meant “high priest.”

When Jack was a teenager, his father was killed in a car accident, and Jack dropped out of school to support his mother, three brothers, and a sister. He sold newspapers worked in factories, then at a gas station, where he hustled hard enough to eventually buy the place. He fell for a petite redheaded farm girl named Gertrude Bader, who was not immediately impressed — Jack struggled with his weight, and when he first proposed, she turned him down. But Jack was a born salesman: he offered to drive her on her dates with other men. He grew on her.

In 1934, they married in part because Gert’s father Milton convinced her that Jack would give her a secure life. Then one day, in the middle of The Depression, Jack told his new bride he was betting their life savings on a newfangled contraption called the automatic coin-operated phonograph. Depending on who’s telling the story, my Grandma Gert was either completely supportive or threatened to divorce him.

To be successful, coin men like Jack had to persuade bar and restaurant owners that if they had music in their place, customers would stay for an extra beer or malted. By 1937, Jack’s company J.C. Music had grown so fast that he and Gert were invited to the first Wurlitzer Century Club Convention in Buffalo. For three days, Jack and Gert were among 300 top operators enjoying celebrity singers, magicians, wrestling and boxing matches, a three-ring circus, a tour of the Wurlitzer factory, and — most important for my food-loving grandfather — a lobster clambake.

Wurlitzer had nearly gone bankrupt when the organs they made for silent movie theaters became obsolete after talkies arrived. Now the company was booming, celebrating 300 percent increase of profits. But Homer Capehart, who had become Wurlitzer’s vice president, closed out the convention with a warning:

“This is a great business,” he told them, “if we keep it clean.”

Given the headlines in New York, Chicago, and Detroit about jukebox operators slain gangland-style fighting over locations in territory wars, everyone in that room knew what he meant. But in Cleveland, my grandfather and his fellow coin operators took a different path. In 1939, they formed the Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association — deciding as competitors, they would cooperate instead of killing each other, while doing civic good to promote a positive image for the jukebox industry.

As vice president, Jack was in charge of the picnic committee — a responsibility he took very seriously — and head of the advertising committee. In January 1941, he launched an idea that Billboard magazine would credit with changing the music industry: the Hit-Tune-of-the-Month. Operators would pick one record and place it at as “No. 1” in the front slot of every jukebox in town. They advertised it on streetcars, in department stores, even on the back of an elephant when the circus was in town. Jack was quoted as saying “it wasn’t intention of the Association to pick the sure-fire hits, but it has selected some of the biggest hits of the year before they became national prominent.”

Three thousand machines pushing the same record. Songs that broke in Cleveland climbed the national charts including “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and a Tommy Dorsey number “This Love of Mine,” with words written by his new singer: Frank Sinatra.

By 1940, a Billboard article reports that Jack is opening a Los Angeles branch of J.C. Music. A year later, Jack brings Tommy Dorsey and the RCA Victor Dance Caravan to Cleveland — there’s a photograph of Jack with Tommy, Shep Fields, singer Lucy Monroe, and Leo Dixon, a Black phonograph merchant, standing on a float selling war bonds and defense stamps. And another from a Cleveland hotel, captioned: “Tommy is greeted by Jack Cohen, Arline Wapperer (CPMA Secretary), and Mrs. Cohen at his hotel in Cleveland.”

This wasn’t a fan meeting a celebrity. This was a business partnership between a bandleader who needed his records played and a coin man who controlled what three thousand machines played across an entire city. Jack Cohen was deciding what Cleveland, and to some degree, the country heard. In December 1941, as America entered the war, Tommy and Frank invited Jack and Gert to come along to California.

Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra were heading to MGM to film a musical Ship Ahoy. In the picture, Sinatra appears uncredited — a pencil-thin vocalist standing just to the side of Tommy’s trombone, performing a number called “The Last Call for Love.”

To Hollywood, he was just another band singer. But to my grandfather — the man whose Hit Tune program had been promoting Sinatra’s “This Love of Mine” in three thousand jukeboxes across Cleveland — Frank was the future.

According to family members, there was talk of Jack staying in Los Angeles permanently. The musicians all wanted him out there to represent them. But then, as the story goes, Lana Turner sat on Jack’s lap — and Gert announced she missed her six sisters and wanted to go home to Cleveland.

When Frank Sinatra died in 1998, the Cleveland Jewish News ran a story headlined “Discovering Old Blue Eyes” about my grandfather’s role in Frank’s career. In it, my Aunt Barbara recalled: “Sinatra, like my father, never forgot a friend. I remember he told the audience in the middle of a performance at the Coliseum, ‘I want to thank Jack Cohen for helping me get my start.’”

My grandfather had been dead for years by then. But Frank remembered the coin man who believed in him early in his career.

Watch Frank Sinatra in his second film appearance, uncredited, as he performs “The Last Call for Love” with Tommy Dorsey’s band in “Ship Ahoy.”

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How the coin men promoted the Black artists radio refused to play — and how that music led to a new sound that in Cleveland first became known as rock and roll.

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Welcome to Jukebox Stories — a Substack devoted to the jukebox—that marvel of art and technology— exploring how this forgotten star shaped who we are today.

I teach at a university, and while it's sometimes disconcerting that many of my students have never seen The Godfather, The Breakfast Club, or a Spike Lee movie, I was surprised that when I mentioned a new documentary I am working on, many of them know what a jukebox is. Not from any real-life encounter, but from Fallout — the post-apocalyptic video game and now hit streaming series. In that world, after civilization has collapsed, a jukebox still plays songs like "Jingle Jangle Jingle" and "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire." These were Hit Tunes first promoted by my Grandpa Jack and his fellow coin men of the Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association — a fancy name for jukebox operators.

Many of my students also don't know who Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are — though the two of them are back in the news. When I was closer to my students' age, I was on the set of my first film, St. Elmo's Fire, which I co-wrote with director Joel Schumacher, watching their characters Jules and Billy stealing a kiss over a glowing Wurlitzer jukebox. Billy was playing saxophone in the scene — and in an even more 80s moment, I had recently been at a Bruce Springsteen Born in the USA concert with Andrew McCarthy where we ran into Rob, who had just been backstage getting sax tips from The Big Man, Clarence Clemons. As exciting as hanging with "The Brat Pack" was, that jukebox has recently revealed to me a story as compelling as any Hollywood screenplay. One with the swagger of The Sopranos, the cool of Mad Men, and the hottest hits which became the soundtrack to American history.

Here's a sneak preview of Jack and the Jukebox:

In the summer of 1982, I arrived in Los Angeles on a Duke University/MCA-Universal Studio Award, based in part on a short story I had written in college about a waitress I had become infatuated with working as a bellhop at the St. Elmo Hotel. The award included a cash prize and a ten-week internship at Universal, and before I left, my Grandma Gert told me to make sure I told Lew Wasserman — the owner of Universal who had signed my award letter — that I was Jack Cohen’s grandson.

My grandfather passed away when I was six, but I had grown up hearing stories about what a visionary pioneer he was in the jukebox industry. My mother Jeanne told me how he was the President of the Phonograph Merchant Association, and had invented the “Hit Tune of the Month” program, which is why all the biggest stars of the day came over to their house on Dysart Avenue in the University Heights section of Cleveland. She swore a young Frank Sinatra had sung her and my Aunt Barbara to sleep when they were little. Then there the story about how Jack had discovered an unknown singer by the airport and booked him to play the Beechmont Country Club. There was pushback because he was Black, so Jack arranged for Johnny Ray — who had a number one hit “Cry” at the time — to headline. But the minute this singer came out, his shirt unbuttoned, the women went wild and wouldn’t let Harry Belafonte leave the stage.

I would see Lew Wasserman every day in the commissary, holding court — a tall, lanky man in a black suit, a shock of silver hair, with his trademark oversized black glasses. A former agent at MCA (Music Corporation of America) who represented stars like Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, and Alfred Hitchcock, he had become the most powerful man in show business, guiding the career of a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan all the way to the White House. In appearance, Lew was somewhat grandfatherly, but there was something intimidating about him, and I never did have the courage to introduce myself as Jack Cohen’s grandson. I could not understand how outside of he and my grandfather both being from Cleveland, what the connection could be. What I didn’t appreciate was just how central the jukebox once was to the social life of millions of Americans and how it changed not just the way we listened to music, but the music we listened to.

As a teenager, I would go along with my cool Uncle Louis — who looked like Robert Redford as The Sundance Kid — as he collected coins from his jukebox routes. Louis had taken over the business after my grandfather died, along with my grandmother. A former race car driver, he always drove fast cars like an old Triumph Spitfire, and, as he entered one of his stops, the entire bar greeted him like he was a rock star. He would approach the jukebox — with its glowing colored tubes with bubbles floating up to its art deco cathedral where records magically appeared — open it up and spill hundreds of nickels, dimes, and quarters onto a nearby table. He would then count them at lightning speed, stacking them, and sliding them into coin wrappers. Sometimes he’d give me a wrapper to try, and before I could get one filled, he would be tossing his coin rolls into a canvas bank bag. I noticed my Uncle Louis always carried a gun — which he explained was because “this was a cash business.”

A few years ago, I started visiting my Uncle Louis in a senior living facility where he and my Aunt Barbara were living. He was still cool, dealing poker twice a week and playing piano in a jazz style he had taught himself. As a teenager himself, Louis was a bad boy from the Kinsman section of Cleveland where he used to sneak into the “Black and Tan” clubs to hear the music he loved which just happened to be played by African Americans. His parents used to listen to Mantovani easy listening, but Louis went crazy for a new sound that was emerging — one with an exciting energetic beat. Louis would go downtown to two stores on Prospect Avenue to buy these records. Record Mart was owned by Jack Cohen’s two brothers, Harry and Ben. All the Cohens loved food, and there is a photo of my grandfather and his brother Ben looking at steaks like no man ever looked at a woman. When Jack gave Harry and Ben his used records to sell in 1935, they would use their hefty size to advertise themselves as “the biggest dealers in town.” The other record store, Record Rendezvous, was owned by Jack’s good friend Leo Mintz. It was Leo who noticed teenagers like my Uncle Louis dancing in his store to what was still tracked by Billboard as “race music.” To move the inventory, Leo sponsored a down-on-his-luck deejay named Alan Freed, who started calling this music “rock and roll” on his Moondog Radio Show on WJW.

My Uncle Louis also told me about “The Jewish Navy” — a group of Cleveland businessmen including one of its “admirals” Morris Kleinman, who lived down the street from my grandfather. During Prohibition, they smuggled booze across Lake Erie in speedboats. I would find an out-of-print 1966 exposé by Hank Messick called The Silent Syndicate, which began with J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men chasing one of those boats across the lake, and mentioned one of the bootleggers “The Jewish Navy” would get their liquor from was Joe Kennedy. One of his sons would go on to be president. The other, Robert F. Kennedy, would go after the Phonograph Merchant Association my grandfather created as part of Senate Rackets Hearings. Why didn’t I know about any of this until my Uncle Louis started telling me these stories? Because unlike New York or Chicago, the Cleveland mob — also known as the Mayfield Road Gang, an alliance of Jews and Italians — liked to operate under the radar.

After liquor became legal, they diversified their interest, investing in real estate, bars, and jukeboxes which had become a popular form of entertainment in Speakeasies. They also ran illegal casinos like The Mounds Club, where my grandfather loved to gamble. Cleveland was so mobbed up, city leaders brought in “The Untouchable” Eliot Ness to shut down vice in the city. This eventually motivated The Cleveland Syndicate to move West where they opened casinos in a desert town called Las Vegas. Some of the loans they used for places like The Desert Inn were arranged by Bill Presser, the President of the Ohio Teamsters, a close colleague of my grandfather who had started as the head of the jukebox mechanics union and worked as executive secretary for The Phonograph Merchant Association.

My Grandpa Jack was a gambler by nature. Depending on who is telling the story, when he told my Grandma Gert in 1934 that he was betting their life savings on a newfangled device called the automatic coin-operated phonograph, she was either totally supportive or threatened to divorce him. But my mother always said that her father could see the future, and what Jack realized was that while it was the middle of The Great Depression and no one had money for luxuries like phonographs, everyone had a nickel to play their favorite song.

Last year, my Uncle Louis had a stroke and a heart attack, but he recovered. My cousin Peter — who never met his Grandpa Jack but by all accounts has Jack’s spirit — said he knew a guy who had a studio, and we started to film my Uncle Louis and Aunt Barbara and others who knew and worked with my grandfather. It was remarkable to discover through research we did at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Archives and the Mob Museum and talking with people there, just how much of these stories were true— and even more. Despite all the rumors, my mother always swore her father was not in the mafia. But as you can see from the photo at the top of this Substack, he and his fellow coin men certainly dressed the part.

We started filming on March 21st, the anniversary of the Moondog Coronation Ball — the world’s first rock concert— held at The Cleveland Arena. Today there is not even a marker at the site, but it is big part of why Cleveland calls itself the birthplace of Rock and Roll. That night, twenty thousand teenagers showed up when there were only 10,000 seats, and after they broke the doors down to hear the music they loved, the police were called and shut the concert down. Alan Freed was forced to apologize the next day — but it was too late. A musical revolution had just begun.

We also filmed that day on Mayfield Road, where my grandparents and now my mother are buried, not far from the final resting place of Alan Freed. Terry Stewart, the President and CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame from 1999 to 2012, told us about how for a time Freed’s ashes were on display at the Rock Hall.

How the Rock Hall came to Cleveland is its own chapter of this story — one that circles back to St. Elmo’s Fire, as director Joel Schumacher introduced me to his friend Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records who discovered Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and The Rolling Stones. Atlantic produced the St. Elmo’s Fire soundtrack, including John Parr’s anthem “Man in Motion.” A month later, Ahmet would fly with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner to Cleveland, and according to Norm N. Nite’s book The House That Rock Built, after stopping at Record Rendezvous on Prospect Avenue and finding an old Rolling Stones demo tape, told the Clevelanders that Cleveland was now a frontrunner for the Rock Hall. Freed’s ashes were moved, and the legendary Stevie Van Zandt — of The Sopranos and E Street Band fame — suggested Freed’s tombstone be in the shape of a jukebox.

On the marker is an inscription about how Cleveland is the birthplace of rock and roll and how that music, which broke the barriers of segregation, provided a joyful soundtrack of hope and change. Not mentioned are coin men like my Grandpa Jack, who first promoted the music of Black artists that radio stations refused to play.

I have fond memories of the short time I knew my grandfather — of him pulling up in his navy Cadillac with candy for me and all the kids in the neighborhood, of sitting on his lap with my brother Tommy, of him bringing me my first album, The Beatles’ Second Album. But one of my most treasured possessions is a photograph of me and my grandfather at the 1963 Music Operators of America Convention. The caption reads: “Two Generations” and describes how operator Jack Cohen left a hospital bed to take his grandson Carl, age 4, who insisted on seeing how grandpop made a living. It describes us as two coin men strolling through the Cinebox exhibit. Coin men. I love that.

For our documentary, Jack and the Jukebox, we visited Ben Thoburn, who owns Coin-Op Amusements, and he explained how Cinebox was an early form of video jukebox. Even then, my grandfather could see the future — as twenty years later, Demi Moore would be dancing on that jukebox for the MTV video of “Man in Motion,” which became the number one hit of the summer of 1985

The jukebox has played cameo roles in movies and TV shows, and even in the videogames. Last week, my friend Grover Biery, a former Warner Music exec who was an industry leader in re-launching vinyl at that label and early supporter of “Record Store Day,” sat in his living room with his daughter Ilana home from her freshman year in college as they cranked up the volume on Harry Styles’ new record — not streaming, vinyl. She and her generation still long to have music they can hold and touch, and to listen to music together — the way people once walked up to a jukebox in a bar, dropped in a coin, and played a song for everyone in the place. Lady Gaga spent years recording with Tony Bennett near the end of his life, bringing him to a generation that had forgotten him — without knowing that jukebox operators in Cleveland had given Tony one of his first breaks seventy years earlier. Lizzo is about to portray Sister Rosetta Tharpe in a Hollywood biopic, introducing the Godmother of Rock and Roll to millions who have never heard her name. Fewer probably realize that it was coin men like my grandfather who first championed records like hers.

We live in an age when algorithms decide what we hear and we often listen alone — AirPods in, each of us sealed inside our own private soundtrack. But that longing for something more — to share a song, feel it together in a room — never went away. Jukeboxes still exist. TouchTunes lets anyone at a bar tonight play any song ever recorded and share it with everyone in the place. My students know what a jukebox is because even in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the writers of Fallout understood that people will always find a way to gather around music. The jukebox was once as central to American life as the smartphone is today. It’s time to remember why.

That’s what the coin men built. That’s what my Grandpa Jack saw coming in 1934 when he bet everything on a nickel.

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Jukebox Stories is devoted to once again giving jukeboxes the starring role they have long deserved. Have your own jukebox story?

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