Juke Box Heroes

What was it about the Waffle House that drew us in? It’s tough to put my finger on what exactly the special ingredient was, but you can bet that the line cook would scatter, smother, and cover it on that flat grill they all had.

For one thing, there was the trolling-to-tradition idea, where you start out by making fun of something until you slowly realize you actually enjoy that thing. As elder teenagers (16 through 18), we made good use of that last gasp of air before the universe sucks you into the world of business or college, or some other supposedly adult convention.

That meant making fun of lots and lots of things, and being ever bolder in our actions so that we could entertain ourselves and one another. This tendency manifested in lots of ways—punk rock shows were the very best outlet we had, but those were few and far between, and it was only my senior year that we really discovered them—so we sought out plenty of other spots to release our tension and express ourselves… loudly.

One place this sort of behavior was really on display was the Waffle House. By this point, we (my friends and I) regarded our place in society as outsiders. That is to say, we didn’t have a ton in common with the people dining at the Waffle House, so we regarded them as part of the scaffolding in a way—something to be messed with. This wasn’t entirely fair, since we thought most of them were racist, sexist, and homophobic—and our experience almost always confirmed this—but we also didn’t always bother to find out first.

This was the same crew I’d play D&D with, so everyone had a powerful and unique imagination. I don’t know if it was ultimately Tim’s or Jay’s idea, or maybe even mine, but one of us decided to play songs on the jukebox in order to get a bit of a reaction from the audience, as we saw it.

Was this performance art? I’m not sure how far you can stretch that definition, but it was something.

Jukebox songs were a quarter apiece. There were popular hits from the early 90s on there, like the sort you’d expect at a southern institution like the Waffle House: Achy Breaky Heart, Everything I Do (I Do It for You), and REM’s Losing My Religion. You couldn’t escape those mega-hits, no matter where you went in South Carolina in the early 90s.

Besides the hits, there were Waffle House classics—songs specifically written about the culture at the Waffle House, and you can really get a sense of the cultlike atmosphere inside, simply by examining a few of the more popular song titles. There was Special Lady at the Waffle House (all about a waitress), Waffle House Home, and Waffle House Family. We would often put one of these songs on, just to see everyone’s reaction in the restaurant.

I mentioned REM’s ultra-smash Losing My Religion, which is undeniably a well-written song, even if it’s not my personal preference for music. The next biggest hit on that album, by contrast, seems to be considerably more controversial, at least in terms of whether people think it’s any good. That song, Shiny Happy People, stayed on the billboard charts for far too long for my own personal taste, although it did have amazing vocals from Kate Pierson from the B-52s.

This song was all saccharine—by design, it was supposed to draw your attention to superficiality, so a superficial melody was selected. After hearing it two or three times, everyone I knew rolled their eyes and started complaining about how awful it was as compared to nearly everything else on that album. In fact, it became more annoying to hear than almost any other pop song.

One day, one of us put a five dollar bill into the jukebox. If you put a dollar in, you’d get an extra song—five for the price of four—and it was even better if you put a five in. Instead of a bunch of Waffle House songs that would get side-eyes from the staff and customers, we picked Shiny Happy People, repeated 30 times.

This was almost as a joke to play on ourselves. After all, we’d have to listen to this song on repeat ourselves, but the one really big benefit would be that we were in on the joke, while everyone else wasn’t.

I’m not sure any heads even perked up the first time the song played. After all, it was still on the radio, and many folks probably just heard it as background music. The second time, though, things shifted a bit inside the diner—but there was almost certainly the benefit of the doubt given, for a song can easily be inadvertently played twice in a row.

That third time, though? It was clear that this was no coincidence—some a-hole had probably put a full dollar’s worth of this one song on, so everyone would just have to wait for five of the same song to play. What jerks.

Of course, the song played more than five times.

By the mid-teens, I think (not sure) one of the waitresses was in tears. Now, I have to say two things about this: first, I’m not a total monster and wasn’t even back then, and this wasn’t what we were after. Second, memory is malleable, and my own memory is far more semantic than episodic.

At some point, people inside began figuring out that we were the ones playing this prank. I mean, of course we were. Nobody approached us with pitchforks, though, and nobody asked us to step outside for a fistfight. I’m not sure anyone at all said anything, but there was serious discomfort in the air of the place until we left.

The radio edit of Shiny Happy People is 3 minutes and 12 seconds long. If I assume we got 30 songs for that five dollar bill, this lasted an hour and thirty-six minutes.

It felt like an eternity.