Woooo Hoooo! Christmas Songs!

There was a time, and Plotnik can remember this well, when the only way you could listen to music was to turn on the radio or play it on a juke box. This meant there was a specific time and place when music was to be a part of your life, if you chose it, and that was pretty much when you were near a radio or at a cafe.

Lunch counters where they served you cherry cokes in huge parfait glasses with skinny red straws often had a little miniature juke box in front of each counter seat. You put in a dime, or three plays for a quarter, and selected your favorite song out of maybe fifty choices. When the music came on you could barely hear it, but it was there, along with your cherry coke and your imaginary girl friend and the childhood you didn't know was disappearing faster than that coke and that lunch counter and that jukebox.

(Sigh)

Because now everybody plays music ALL the time, only you can't hear it. Everyone who walks by you or stares at you on BART is lost in his or her own little world, either listening to an ear bud or fiddling with an I-phone, texting? Reading e-mail? Sending e-mail? Ordering phone sex? Pizza? Or both? On BART?

(sigh)

The thing is, every time you listened to a tune on the jukebox at Thrifty's the songwriter and the singer made a penny or two. Every time a song played on the radio they did too. We still do -- except there are no more jukeboxes and radio plays are strictly segmented along cultural lines. Hip hop? One radio station. Pop? Another? Country? Another. Nobody crosses the lines.

EXCEPT AT CHRISTMAS HEE HEE HEE HEE.

Plotnik got two royalty checks in the mail this week. As his long-ago lyric workshop instructor Buddy Kaye told him: "There is nothing in the world better than Money in the Mail."

Both of these were largely for last year's Christmas air play and record sales. It takes that long to collect.

The first was from ASCAP -- radio play for the last quarter. It was small, but not invisible.

The second was BMG/Chrysalis, the company in Nashville who bought the other company in Nashville who bought the other company in Nashville who sold out after buying the first company in Nashville who collects Plotnik's Mechanical Royalties.

Mechanical Royalties are those that accrue from record sales. Thanks mostly to "It Must Have Been The Mistletoe," and most of that these days from Barbra Streisand (Bless Her Heart and Remember All You Guys In The Castro Babs Needs Your Support At Christmas), Plot still gets nice money in the mail every year from mechanical royalties. This check was not huge but it was larger than invisible -- let's say you wouldn't be able to spot it from outer space but if you saw it on Plotnik's desk you'd say, "Hmmm, maybe you can even buy something for Isabella with that."

Money in the Mail, before Thanksgiving and Christmas, is the jolliest way to start the season.

So all you iPod and iPhone music listeners, know this: you will hear "It Must Have Been The Mistletoe" at some point this holiday season, and maybe even "Happy Hanukkah My Friend" or one or two other Plotnik songs. It won't cost you a penny and Plottie won't make one either, but he is very happy to bring you some uplifting family entertainment, as you sit in your insulated little hidey-holes avoiding eye contact and all human interaction.

(SWAP!)

(Sealed With A Plotnik)