The jukebox stood in the corner of the bar like a priest waiting for confession. You put a quarter in and you got three songs and for nine minutes the whole room belonged to you. You were the DJ. You were the program director. You decided what everybody in that bar was going to feel for the next nine minutes. That is power. Real power. Not the kind they give you. The kind you buy for twenty-five cents.

Every jukebox was a library. Alphabetical. Little cards behind glass with song titles written in ballpoint pen. You flipped through them like a doctor checking charts. You had three choices and three choices is exactly enough. One for the room. One for yourself. One for the person you were trying to impress. The jukebox was a love letter machine. You did not have to say anything. You pressed B7 and Otis Redding said it for you.

The fights started at the jukebox. Somebody played the same song four times in a row and somebody else had opinions about that. I saw a man get hit with a barstool over a Hank Williams song on East Third Street. The bartender did not call the cops. He unplugged the jukebox. When the music stops the fight stops. That is a fact about human beings that nobody teaches in school.

I never got on a jukebox. My records were on Elektra and Apple and Orange and none of them ended up in a bar on Avenue B. The jukebox was for the real musicians. The ones who made songs that bartenders thought their customers would pay a quarter to hear. That is the highest honor in music. Not a Grammy. Not a gold record. A bartender in the Bronx putting your song in his machine because he knows it will keep people drinking.

They are gone now. The jukeboxes. Replaced by a streaming service that plays through a speaker in the ceiling and nobody chose any of it. An algorithm picks the songs. Nobody put a quarter in. Nobody flipped through the cards. Nobody pressed B7. The whole bar hears the same playlist that every other bar hears and nobody feels anything because nobody chose it. The jukebox was not a music machine. It was a choosing machine. And they took away the choosing.