If there was ever a fellow who ought to have a song written about him, it`s Jim McLellan.
We should say the former Jim McLellan because after he fell in love with those doggone music machines he went out and had his name legally changed.
You could call the song ”The Ballad of Jukebox Jim.”
That`s right. That`s what he had his name changed to–Jukebox Jim.
What follows is the former Jim McLellan`s account of how all this came about–how his life changed because of jukeboxes and how he started collecting and restoring all those old models and how he moved around the country, looking for the right location for his dream.
With this information, someone should be able to write something.
It shouldn`t be a sad song. Nothing bad has happened to him. Jukebox Jim hasn`t lost his family or anything like that. Quite the contrary. They`re behind him 100 percent; in fact, they`ve been helping him with the opening of a museum for his beloved jukeboxes in Franklin, Tenn., which is a small town 15 miles south of Nashville.
The place is called–surprise–The World Famous Jukebox Jim`s Museum and Gifts.
Jukebox Jim gets rhapsodic when he describes it:
”Everything outside is blacked out, and when you walk in and shut the door, 1986 is no longer in existence.
”This is like entering a time machine. You`re going back into a simpler, better time.
”On one side of the door there`s a classic `40s jukebox, with the colored bubbles going, and on the other side is a classic `50s model, silvery and beautiful.
”There`re 30 jukeboxes in the museum–a representation of every time period, from the `30s through the `50s. And this is no stand-behind-the-chain museum; this is a hands-on, petting zoo of a museum.
”You put your nickel in, and you get music from whatever time period the machine was made in. Six plays for a quarter.
”We`ve also got `30s and `40s Coke machines, and an old gas pump from the days when gas sold for 20 cents a gallon.
”There`s just the light from the jukeboxes. It`s really more like a forest of jukeboxes.”
He stops for a minute to let you picture it. Then he says, very softly and sincerely, ”I`ve never seen a Christmas tree display that`s nearly as pretty.”
”The Ballad of Jukebox Jim” should mostly be the story of how an interest turned into an obsession, which makes it very close to being a love song.
But it can also be sung as a tribute to those people who aren`t afraid to take a gamble on something they believe in, no matter how odd or risky their dream may seem to the rest of us.
Jukebox Jim certainly isn`t your average, play-it-safe, run-of-the-mill kind of guy who settles for the security of a 9-to-5, safe-and-easy company job. He`s also at least a little eccentric, and our country has always had a warm spot in its heart for people like this.
The former Jim McLellan is the first one to admit that he has probably always had a predilection for passion; he admits he has a tendency to get carried away.
”I`m 45, and I haven`t had a completely dull life,” he says. ”I went to Arizona State University on a golf scholarship, and I was a professional golfer for a while.
”I`ve also been a professional musician. I played a four-string banjo in a band that played `20s and `30s songs–`Yessir, That`s My Baby,` things like that.
”Actually, I have a tremendous amount of interests. I`m a half-assed inventor. I invented this thing that would let you start your car from your house, but I never made any money on any of my inventions.
”Mainly, I guess you could say I`m a professional dreamer.”
In 1981, he was starting a restaurant–talk about your high-risk business –in Denver. He named it Elaine`s, and he put in a `40s and `50s theme.
(It`s obvious by now that the Ol` Jukebox has a weakness for those days.)
”I covered the walls and the ceilings with 50 or 60 old neon signs–beer signs and things I`d found here and there. I`m a scavenger, too, and I`d nosed around and found a lot of these old signs. They looked great hanging everywhere. The ceilings and walls were black, and it looked like those signs were hanging there in space.”
One problem: The jukebox. ”It was totally modern,” he recalls.
Naturally, this wouldn`t do.
”Very innocently, I began looking for an old jukebox,” he says. ”I had no idea what was about to happen to me.”
He stops for effect.
”Well, I located this jukebox,” Jim says, resuming his story.
It was a 1952 Seeburg, and the fellow who owned it had been keeping it in his basement. It was in terrible shape, falling apart, practically junk.
”I got back to the house,” Jim says, ”and it looked so bad my wife almost fainted when I told her I was going to restore it.”
He did, too, almost perfectly, and Jim says that when people came in and saw it sitting there in Elaine`s, they went nuts over it. ”Guys my age would come up with tears in their eyes–I`m not kidding–they were so happy to remember those times.”
This is because Jukebox Jim had filled the jukebox with `50s songs.
The middle-aged kids were getting wet-eyed from Les Paul and Mary Ford doing ”How High the Moon,” from the Crew Cuts singing ”Sh-Boom Sh-Boom,”
from the Chordettes harmonizing on ”Mister Sandman,” and from the late, great Buddy Holly breaking everyone`s heart with ”Raining in My Heart.”
The story, of course, doesn`t end here. Since Jim had advertised in a newspaper for an old jukebox, other calls began to come in.
”My first reaction was that I didn`t need two jukeboxes,” Jim says.
Oh, sure.
”But I also felt it wouldn`t hurt to go out and look at it.”
In no time at all, he had accumulated a dozen, then two dozen. Soon everything was out of control. ”Now I own 50 or 60 of them,” he confesses.
(Aficionado or fanatic, Jukebox Jim is not alone. Rick Botts of Des Moines, editor-publisher of the Jukebox Collector Newsletter, says his publication has 2,500 subscribers–”maybe 10 percent” of those who, he believes, have an avid interest in these machines.)
At first, Jukebox Jim kept his growing collection in the Victorian house he owned in Denver–Jim was restoring old houses as a sideline.
”But people began to tell me that I ought to put them in a museum,” he says. ”I began to think about this. As cornball as it sounds, all of us have problems in life, but maybe, I was thinking, a museum would take our minds off our problems by giving us those good memories of when we were kids. After all, our generation doesn`t have any MTV or videos. We`ve only got jukeboxes.”
And, he says, it`s working out just the way he saw it. ”Every day I see people in their late 30s and 40s and 50s come into my museum and I hear them say, `My gosh! This is wonderful!` ”
With tears in their eyes.
Along the way, Jukebox Jim has become something of a historian.
”The Golden Age of Jukeboxes was from 1938 to 1948, which was the period when they lighted up and changed colors,” he says.
”The jukebox was king then. There were no hi-fi`s, no stereos, no TVs. The jukebox was the entertainment center. And they were gorgeous things–Art Deco designs that pumped bubbles and enticed you to put a quarter in and get six plays.
”Jukeboxes could make or break an artist. They made Bing Crosby. In the early days, Billboard magazine, which is the bible of the record industry, would count jukebox plays as well as radio plays and record sales to determine what songs and what singers were the biggest.
”If someone was well received on jukeboxes, he was an overnight sensation. It gave the people more of a say in what was a hit.”
But a new form of entertainment was about to change everything, including jukeboxes.
”Around 1948, television came in,” Jim says. ”This was the beginning of the decline of jukeboxes, and it`s been downhill ever since.”
Even as TV began its domination and people were able to buy top-of-the-line phonographs and sound systems for their homes, the jukebox had some nice moments as it fought to keep apace of the times.
”From 1948 to `58 was the Silver Age–jukeboxes with 100 selections in big silvery machines,” Jim says. ”After 1954, they were dominated by rock and roll. That`s when Bill Haley and the Comets recorded `Rock Around the Clock.` Things were never really the same after that either.”
Ed Blankenbeckler, board chairman of the Seeburg Phonograph Co. of suburban Addison, says the number of jukeboxes has declined from 500,000 to 300,000 since the `50s. ”One of the problems,” he says, ”is that jukeboxes still use 45 r.p.m. records. They`ve been dead for over 10 years, although nobody`s buried them.”
Blankenbeckler says Seeburg will introduce a new compact disc jukebox this spring at the American Coin Machine Exposition in Chicago, an innovation he believes will rejuvenate a stagnant industry.
The present is certainly dreary, to hear Jukebox Jim describe it.
”Nowadays, a jukebox is relegated to the corner of a tavern, and people sit at the bar watching Jim McKay on `Wide World of Sports.` When somebody tries to play a song on the jukebox, people will yell, `Turn off that music!
We`re trying to watch TV!` ”
Not in Franklin; not in The World Famous Jukebox Jim`s Museum and Gifts.
”My museum is dedicated to the preservation of jukeboxes,” Jim says.
”I have them from 1930 to 1958, almost every kind you can think of.”
He also sells some. ”I`m more of a collector, but I do sell my duplicates.” (The price begins at $1,500.)
All this nostalgia from a man who still insists: ”I was not a jukebox freak when I started. I was a great fan of Les Paul and Mary Ford, but that`s about it. I think part of the mystique for me at the beginning was to be able to buy something I couldn`t have when I was a boy.”
He checked out Santa Fe and El Paso as possible museum sites before deciding on Franklin. He liked it because it`s near the music center of Nashville and because it`s ”like a Norman Rockwell town.”
Just right for a remembrance of things past.
Jim sums up: ”The hunt`s been interesting, the restoration`s been interesting but the main satisfaction I get is to see the faces of people light up when they walk into my museum. That`s my reward.”(
Jukebox Jim`s museum is at 343 Main St., Franklin, Tenn. 37064. The Jukebox Collector Newsletter, $24 a year, can be obtained by writing 2545 S.E. 60th Ct., Des Moines, Ia. 50317.
