Drop a dime in the Jukebox and Let It Play.

Tonight on my drive home from work in cold, rainy Atlanta traffic, I was able to keep sane by the music I could play on my radio.  Because my car is still fairly new and SiriusXM has real competition now from companies like Pandora and other free streaming sources, I still have an extended offer through them that probably would have ended a year ago if not for all that.  So I flipped around on their offerings.

I do use their service: it's coming into the car afterall.  But with my local morning station (that I actually like!), my iPod jack and CD player, it's not necessarily a...er, necessity.  I usually flip back and forth with a push of a dashboard button and when it's not on a talk radio or  a sports station, it's on an 80s channel. Sometimes 90s. Sometimes more recent mixes.  But every now and again I drop back to my love of the old 70s songs: some America singing about a California highway and deserts with their lives underground. Or S&G telling me we're all our own island.  But I haven't done that recently until today.

Today, in the crazy Atlanta rain and traffic and trying to find peace, I had to skip the happy slappy 80s. Angst of the 90s was so not an option either. So I ventured back and realized though I missKodachrome (I'm pretty sure I was the last class in my high school they actually taught us how to develop our own 33mm film), I already knew how to leave my lover in more than 50 ways. Skip the 70s for once, too. I went back one more click on the dial to the 60s.

And there I got engrossed in Turtles. And California Dream[ed]. But that's not the point of this blog. In listening to these songs, I started thinking about what it would be like to own a bar in a college town.  To have lived in that town, established a good life and business there and because of it, have seen many generations of college students come through, stay for a few years and then leave again. What must that be like?

I remember the first time I found some of my favorite "classic groups" back in my formative years in college.  Pink Floyd. Grateful Dead. Old school Nitty Gritty Dirt Band recording "Mr. Bo Jangles" in 1970.  The soundtrack to the movie "1969." Any and every song written in the 60s or on an early 70s Eagles' album. I felt like I was so cool, so unique, not the typical girl who listened to The Smashing Pumpkins or Nirvana or whatever was coming out at the time.  Of course I listened to those too: I just didn't play them on the jukebox.  Because I was the girl who didn't do that.  I thought I was cool, right?

No.  Gosh no! :-)

Because those proprietors had seen it before, time after time. And will. Time after time.

They see students like me come in, come back out (rarely any intention of staying forever. At least not at my school), always being the constant but with their clientele feeling they're unique and special and being the firsts to experience things that they had already seen generations experience before me and my friends.  In my day, "Come on Eileen" was new. Today, it's on the jukebox for the kids there now to feel they're being cool to know it!  Just like I did when I would push a button on the machine to play "Fishing in the Dark" or "December 1963 (Oh What a Night!)".

I wonder how it is for those local establishments sometimes.  To see the same crowd for a couple of years, knowing they're going to move on somewhere else and another crowd will take that place.  Is it sad for them? To see these generations come in, grow up, move on? Or does it make them smile instead, confident in their own selves and their own lives and giggling at us behind closed doors perhaps?

Before today, I never really thought about it: the difference between being a local in a college town or being a short-time member. I went there knowing I would leave. How does it feel for folks who are there, always there, see all that and probably --most likely--are happy they aren't their clientele and actually know who they are?  And know that some of those punks coming in and out in a handful of years know absolutely nothing about Real Life like they did....and we thought we did?

But still treated us well. Dang, we were obnoxious.  Looking back? We really were.

It kind of makes me want to move to a small town, po-dunk college town and open a bar, it does.  And send all the establishments I frequented when I was a silly college girl a Thank You Card for putting up with me and my friends when we were there. :)