Featured Essay: Jukebox Harrow

by Jim Parisi

It all started with a Facebook post. Because I am an old who knows where the other olds congregate online. I could have ventured out alone. I knew enough to cobble together the rudiments of what I was looking for. A few texts to friends could help fill in some of the gaps. That would have been more than enough for an assignment that would never achieve a perfect result. `

But a request this specific, this personal, required the input of the people who had shared the experience with me. And my state of mind at the time demanded that I go against my usual nature and seek a communal answer.  

With no knowledge of how this endeavor would turn my life asunder for the next week, with implications that resonate to this day, I posted, on January 8, 2024, the following message to my paltry assemblage of Facebook friends:

“Calling all DC old-timers: I need help with a matter of national security (i.e., if I get answers, I won’t nag Beth about it, which, since she works for the [REDACTED] and needs to be unencumbered by my petty concerns, makes this a matter of vital national importance). I need as many song titles as I can get from the old jukebox at Fox and Hounds from the early 90s. I have some names, but I need more. All contributions are welcome. You will receive nothing in return but thanks from me and a grateful nation."

I considered abridging that announcement for the purposes of this story, but all the details play some role, either tiny or significant, in the bigger picture. (To clarify one potential point of confusion, the original post had the name of the agency for which Beth, my wife, is employed. She balked at having that posted on social media. I complied, but I also warned her that anyone seeing it who didn’t know her would think she was with the CIA or NSA. Oh, I also failed miserably in my efforts not to encumber her with my petty concerns, as will become crystal clear later in the story.)

Before diving into the aftermath of that post, I should take a moment to extol the virtues of the jukebox in question. It resided in the main room of Fox and Hounds, a no-frills bar on 17th St. in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. I prefer to call it no-frills rather than a dive, because its dive-ness depended on where you ended up finding yourself. The outside tables, always packed in nicer weather, betrayed no signs of the less-than-fresh milieu a few feet away, inside the doors. 

A small room with a bar had a cast of regulars taking up stools. But the real draw for my friends and I was the main room, where we could hang out all night long at one of the tables. The beer was cheap, the food from neighboring Trio’s restaurant was diner fare a step above the usual bar offerings, and the service was friendly, as long as you managed not to act like a drunken idiot. The carpeting was worn, the decor unremarkable. The bathrooms were worthy of Superfund designation; many a night I would make the risky decision to hold it in for the mile walk home, rather than take my chances amidst the squalor.

But none of that mattered because, as I mentioned, the beer was cheap and the jukebox was a revelation.

Singles, not CDs, thank God. Handwritten song listings. A wide range of genres. But what mattered most to me was the heavy dose of punk, post-punk, New Wave, and what used to be called—before “alternative rock" hijacked the music industry—college radio tunes. My wheelhouse in a jukebox, something I had never before experienced. It also had a good mix of older rock, country, soul, and Motown.

We would always try to get a table inside, no matter how nice the weather. Al fresco Fox and Hounds was fun, but that fun came at a cost: no access to the tunes. And the tunes were everything to me.

The jukebox was such a draw that the chances of hearing the songs you picked were almost nonexistent unless you arrived early and stayed for most of the night. You could also never tell if your four songs—or eight, if you were feeling lucky and plunked down another dollar—were playing until the second song came on. A song such as “Blank Generation" by Richard Hell & the Voidoids would play a few times in a night, as would many of the more popular songs on the jukebox. You couldn’t assume that it was one of yours until you heard the next song in the queue. 

A recurring memory of the many nights I spent at the bar involves my friend Liam asking me if the song playing was one of mine. I’d shrug and tell him that I had picked this one but didn’t know if this was my batch. If the next one was mine, I’d excitedly tell Liam and everyone else at our table, then pay half-assed attention to the conversation around me while I listened to the rest of my songs. 

It didn’t matter how many times I had already heard those songs that night. Those were my songs. Attention must be paid. Many a night passed when that moment did not happen. I’d leave before the queue made its way to my picks, or, and this was the cruelest blow, last call would sound while I was holding out hope that even one or two of my songs would play.

Obviously, that jukebox was an important part of my mid-twenties. But why did I become obsessed about it almost thirty years later? Streaming gives me on-demand access to all of the songs I remembered.  If I want to hear “Ever Fallen in Love”  by Buzzcocks, I can pull it up on Spotify. I know “It’s Different for Girls” by Joe Jackson so well that my heartbeat syncs with Graham Maby’s thumping bassline. Why the need to validate my memory of these and other favorites? Why the need to figure out other songs on the jukebox, to know every last song, even the ones I never selected? Why the need to enlist the help of my community of Facebook friends, something I had never resorted to for any other purpose?

The easy answer is nostalgia. I longed to reminisce about a significant artifact of an important period in my life.  Soliciting the contributions of those with whom I had shared those good times—along with any others who could help us solve the riddle—would scratch that particular itch, even if we came up short of fulfilling the entire brief. 

I am not normally a nostalgic person. I have a very good memory, a memory that allows me to recall verbatim the most mundane conversations from thirty, forty, fifty years in the past. But most of those memories fill me with dread or regret—about missed opportunities, chances not taken, stupid statements, irresponsible actions, and whatever else is sure to torment me at the witching hour of three in the morning. Not that I don’t also remember good times; that’s part of remembering everything. But I am more inclined to lament, rather than celebrate.  This jukebox obsession did not fit that pattern.

To deny the role of nostalgia in an undertaking of this nature would be foolish. But what took it from a throw-away question to an all-consuming quest had more to do with my mental state at that time, and how that mirrored my experiences during the dark days of the Covid pandemic.

The day before the Facebook post, Beth and I hosted a party for our friend Deirdre, who was making an extended trip to the D.C. area with kids in tow (but sans wife).  The last time I had seen Deirdre was in August 2020, for the first time in close to a decade and just before her big move to the Land Down Under. 

Deirdre is one of my oldest friends. I’ve known her for more than thirty years. She has the superpower of being able to maintain friendships over time, which contrasts starkly with my fear that any significant gap in contact—rather than being overcome easily by a simple phone call, text, or email—must be a sign that I had fallen in disfavor with the other person. 

I was pleased to see that Deirdre’s small list of invitees included several friends and acquaintances whom I hadn’t seen in more than twenty years. Seeing those friends, and hearing about others who could not make it to the party, certainly ticked the nostalgia box.  

At some point in the afternoon, the talk turned, as it had so often in the past, to music. I don’t remember if the Fox and Hounds jukebox came up in a conversation, or if something I heard planted the seed in my head. But a light bulb went off, sparks flew, worlds collided. I had the idea that I had been looking for; an idea that would help solve a problem with a story I was trying to write. But I needed some backup if I was going to do the story justice.

Sometime after the Sunday night of the party had crept into early Monday morning—the inability to sleep being an expected feature of my life, not the debilitating bug it would soon become—I hit upon the idea of making the Fox and Hounds jukebox the focal point of a flashback scene (the details don’t matter).

The excitement about coming up with what I knew was a winning idea left me too keyed up to get to sleep right away. I lay in bed trying to conjure songs from the jukebox that would fit the tone I was trying to set for the pivotal scene. The names of songs and bands flooded my head. Pretty soon, I found myself trying to create a mental image of the jukebox’s layout, in the mistaken belief that if I could picture it, the songs would miraculously appear in their rightful places across the entire board. When I finally got to sleep, I had a firm sense of my go-to tunes and an inkling about a few others that I remembered hearing during my many hours in the bar, but not much else.

I woke up that morning determined to come up with more songs. How could I be drawing a blank about something that meant so much to me? Something that I had spent countless hours hunched over, scanning the song titles for any new additions to my usual repertoire. I was the guy who remembered things people told me about themselves that they would later claim to have forgotten until I had reminded them. Why this memory gap for something that meant so much to me?

Upon the realization that I could either try to go it alone and drive myself crazy, or could enlist the help of others and, let’s be honest, still drive myself crazy, I chose the communal option. From desperation was born a Facebook thread for the ages.

It didn’t take long for responses to start rolling in. My friend Curt, the OG among my Fox and Hounds cohort, posted about how great the jukebox was and came up with a list of songs that all seemed like good candidates. Other friends popped up in my timeline with their own stories and song suggestions. Several people tagged their friends to see if they had anything to contribute. My Monday evening had suddenly become much more interesting.

Very early in the process, I decided that we needed a system for determining which songs to include in the definitive list. I was willing to entertain reasonable ideas, but I didn’t want to wade through a bunch of songs that had no plausible chance of having been on the jukebox in 1990–91. 

Sure things could go through without discussion or verification. If someone remembered without a doubt that a song was on the jukebox, I would add it to the list. My locks—“A Million Miles Away, “Blank Generation, “Ever Fallen in Love,” and a couple others—would make the cut without debate.

I took the Woodward and Bernstein approach for the rest of the songs. Two sources would need to verify the legitimacy of the song before we could add it. This would encourage people to throw out ideas without having to worry about polluting the list with incorrect selections. All songs would be considered, but only those that received a second vote would make the cut. (But in the spirit of the generosity that pervaded the Facebook thread, all songs nominated would be included in the playlist I created to memorialize the jukebox.)

As the week wore on, a third method would emerge, one that contradicted my assertion in my opening salvo about not wanting to burden Beth with endless questions.

We were both working from home full-time—my permanent arrangement but a pandemic-mandated change for Beth. That meant I had constant access to her. Did I ever take advantage of that access! 

When I could not reach a decision about a song by means of the Facebook feed—or through text discussions with interested parties who did not have access to Facebook—I would blast the song on my boombox and ask Beth if she remembered. A no vote meant that I would leave the matter unresolved until someone else approved the song. I put her through that several times a day for the entire week. She was a trouper and helped me out every time.  

We had the method. Now cue the madness. Once the response came rolling in that Monday night, my mind started ping-ponging. I was buzzing with ideas about songs.  I responded at length to each post in the Facebook thread. I texted like a schoolgirl with Liam. The remembrances and the back-and-forth carried on well into that night and continued for the rest of the week. I couldn’t shut myself down. I had to figure out this puzzle, and I had to respond immediately to every notification that pinged on my iPhone—be it a new response on Facebook or a text from Liam.

That first night, I wasn’t all that concerned about my inability to get to sleep at a decent hour. Nor did I see cause for alarm when the same thing happened the following night. Bad sleeping patterns have been a part of who I am my entire life. But I think I hit rock bottom when, after Wednesday night turned to Thursday morning, I bolted up in bed to post, “Anyone else suddenly get a jolt of ‘Left of Center’ by Suzanne Vega as the clock approaches 1 a.m.? I’m feeling it pretty strongly but need some backup. Insomnia’s a bitch, man.”

“Left of Center” is a fine song from the ‘80s. I enjoy it, as I do several of Suzanne Vega’s songs. But even in my sleep-addled state, I could see that getting a jolt of Suzanne Vega at one in the morning is not a prescription for positive mental health. Acknowledging my bout of insomnia, for all my friends to see, showed how fearful I was that I was spiraling out of control, even if my admission was flippant. I knew something troubling was starting to happen.

I had reasons to be concerned. Reasons that arose from fear of a replay of the crushing sleeplessness that had struck me during the pandemic summer. The pandemic and the lockdowns played a not-insignificant role in setting the table for that plunge into despair. But what pushed me off the cliff was my old pal, nostalgia–specifically nostalgia brought on by the discovery of a trove of photos, dating from the early ‘90s, during an ill-advised attempt to clean up our attic as a way to keep busy under lockdown.

The details of that harrowing episode are not important for this narrative. But they weighed heavily on my mind as I lay awake at night during the jukebox obsession, terrified at the thought of another month–or more–of sleepless nights brought on by the relentless nocturnal onslaught of thoughts and images from the same time period that had been the cause of my woes four years earlier. When the sleeplessness persisted in the weeks after the buzz around the jukebox had died down, I knew I had to take a drastic step. 

For the first time in my life, I came to the realization that I would need to seek the help of a mental health professional to deal with my troubles. (I write that with the full knowledge that those who have had to put up with me for years will wonder what took me so long.) After some internet sleuthing,  I decided to cast my lot with an office in Maryland that specializes in insomnia therapy and offers telehealth sessions. I could exorcise my sleep demons without having to leave my house? Deal.

I became immersed in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-i), which would require me to follow a rigid protocol to rewire my brain and address the behaviors that had contributed to my poor sleep history. The early weeks of sleep restriction and compression were particularly hellish, but I got through that and soon found myself on a regular sleep schedule for the first time in my life. 

An important component of CBT-i involves working to eliminate the negative thoughts that lead to sleep problems. Once they’ve got the hood open, they might as well poke around and try to fix all the crazy. Ethel, my therapist, would never phrase it that way, but I knew what was up.  

Most of the focus in the early part of my therapy centered on issues that might make me feel anxious—writing being at the top of the list. We focused on my lack of self-esteem, shyness, fear of failure, and any practical problems that came up in the week since the last session. The act of talking about all of that was an immediate relief.  I had a ton of work to do, but for the first time in my life, I actively embraced all of the concepts and strategies that Ethel proposed (except for the idea of self-compassion, but I even gave that a whirl before deciding that I just couldn’t make that leap).

By the end of 2024, I could look back on a year that was as momentous as 1991 (which was a significant year in my life, even before late October, when I started dating the woman who would become my wife). I had been through the wringer but managed to come out with a clearer head and a greater sense of purpose. 

I had written scads of words: for the longer, still-uncompleted fiction project that was the impetus for the Fox and Hounds backstory (which is hanging on for dear life after being cut to the bone amid the realization that it might no longer fit the larger story), numerous short fiction pieces, even a detailed account of the trip Beth and I took to Ireland in the spring. I was sleeping through the night (even after knee replacement surgeries) and struggling to come up with problems to discuss in my therapy sessions. I was still me, fraught with any number of ways to sabotage myself. But I had managed to tamp down those tendencies, at least for the time being.

When the Facebook memory popped up on the one-year anniversary of the jukebox post, I reposted it with a reminder that the playlist was a living document. I would always remain open to new suggestions and would be ever-vigilant in my quest to fill out the lineup. 

I have to remind myself that the goal never was to attain perfection but to capture, as faithfully as possible, the spirit of a treasured memory, and to bring no small amount of joy to those of us who made those memories. A photo taken of the jukebox at that time would have given us a perfect representation of the song list; the playlist generated from that would have been a perfect simulation of the experience of listening to those songs in that particular bar at that particular time. 

But it would have been a hollow victory, devoid of the thrill of the shared experience, the flurry of band and song names bandied about, the amusing but earnest quest to validate all suggestions, the embrace of excess over stinginess, and, for one man in particular, the crackling mania that would make him feel too alive, much too alive, and would ultimately spark the crisis that forced him to confront who he really is and who he wants to be. Like that man, the project to crack the code on the Fox and Hounds jukebox could never attain perfection, but it could be the catalyst for joy, and, for at least one of us, no small amount of inner peace. 

It is, and always will be, a work in progress.

[Postscript: The jukebox I hold in such high esteem was replaced sometime in the mid-90s with a CD jukebox. By any unbiased standard, the updated version—a collection curated with as much care as its vinyl predecessor’s—was a worthy successor to the object of my obsession. Did I and my friends embrace this sign of progress with open arms? We did not. Instead, we  spent too many nights lamenting the unfortunate development even as we enjoyed the new selections available to us  (including deep cuts from albums never available on the old juke). To this day I still lament the changing of the guard. 

But a funny thing happened when I was searching in vain for a photo of the original jukebox: I came across an article from 2009 that celebrated the return of the beloved CD jukebox after three years of a failed experiment with an internet-connected replacement.  What was a risible interloper for my generation of Fox and Hounds-goers was treasured by those who followed us. (https://dcist.com/story/09/10/13/fox-hounds-brings-back-its-old-juke/)

I guess nostalgia lies in the eye of the beholder. Embracing it may or may not be a fool’s errand, but either way, it’s certainly not worth losing any sleep over. ] 

Link to the jukebox playlist (in all it’s imperfect glory): https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2wyg1dCRERYxW9qfVb508i?si=4670a8ecfcf04d5f

Jim Parisi lives in Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife, Beth, and Dolce, a spicy mix of boxer, pit bull, and Australian cattle dog. (Their two kids, Aidan and Nora, have flown the coop.) After a long career as an editor of  research products for the academic  market, he is setting out on his own as a freelance editor.  He is a writer of various fictions and the occasional essay (none of which has managed to find its way into print until today). Much of his free time is spent coaching Little League softball. He also plays a mediocre bass and has been known to make sounds that some species might recognize as music on the guitar. He grew up in New Jersey but urges readers not to hold that against him.