A Cafeteria Out of Time

I went to a rural high school. My graduating class was 86, which was larger than classes before and smaller than classes after. Let’s say that on average there were 350 students in Winnebago High School on any given day.

The building is today the middle school. This is a recent picture, which doesn’t quite reflect exactly how it was, but it’s pretty close. It was off-red brick plus huge windows with black frames, all one story (it only looks otherwise because that’s the gym), kind of a mad architectural amalgam.

The school day was divided into seven classes across seven hours. Fourth hour included a class and also the lunch period. There were three lunch periods, so you either had A, B, or C. The dumbest one was B, because it meant your fourth hour class was split into two halves, but the cafeteria wasn’t large enough, so they had to go with three periods. In the above picture, the cafeteria is on the far left. The cafeteria outer wall you can’t see around the left was all glass, and the inner wall separating the cafeteria from the gym was that same off-red brick.

Across my four years, my fourth hour classes were, respectively: Geometry; English (specifically American Literature that year, I think); Computer Science II; Computer Science III. Sophomore English was the one time I think we had the stupid B period, but somehow friends of mine who were seniors also had that period.

High school lunch was not super interesting, except in the sense that you were perfectly able to get a bag of fries and a shake and call it lunch, because everything was available a la carte. In retrospect this was insane but at the time it felt like some sort of freedom.

At some point, a jukebox was put into the cafeteria. Nobody knew why. I don’t remember when exactly, but my guess is that it showed up the summer between freshman and sophomore years, meaning it showed up in the summer of 1991. It was a very typical jukebox of the era, with those little cards like 3 inches by ¾ inches or whatever saying what the songs were. I really doubt it was a digital machine, but I don’t really know that. I don’t remember if the songs ever changed up or not. And at some point, as out of nowhere as it appeared, it disappeared. It was all very odd.

As best as I can remember it had standard jukebox fare, which meant “current hits” and also… Bob Seger, I assume. Winnebago wasn’t exactly a cutting edge place so I don’t think it had any, um, urban music? Pop and rock only, best as I can remember.

The thing was that at lunchtime, the jukebox was playing even if nobody put money into it, so mostly, nobody put money into it. How did the jukebox “know” what to play? There are two possibilities, thinking back. The first possibility is that it was programmed to play certain songs in a loop if nobody selected anything. The second possibility is that it had some kind of rudimentary algorithm whereby it “knew” to play “popular” songs, i.e. songs that people had previously selected.

So I want you to imagine then a cafeteria with those long school cafeteria tables, a whole lot of glass with a view of a small factory, an interior wall behind which was the kitchen, and an interior brick wall with the gym on the other side, and, for some reason, a jukebox up against the brick wall.

For all of this that I can remember so vividly, I can only remember two songs. Of course there were others. But these two songs, in my mind, were played every single day at lunch, for no apparent reason.

The first one, of course, was Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence”, because how could anyone possibly go to high school in rural America in 1991 without being drenched by the dulcet tones of Violator?

I mean, sure, those guys, that’s what everyone in Winnebago looked like when they drove in on Tractor Day, so of course.

So, um, yes. Violator has sold 7.5 million copies worldwide. It’s certified triple platinum in the U.S. It peaked at #7 on the charts, and “Enjoy the Silence” peaked at #8 on the Billboard Hot 100. This was not some unknown band at the time.

But in Winnebago? In 1991? Synth-pop? I was aware enough at the time to know this was ultra-bizarre.

There were maybe five guys in that school at that time who seemed to have any inkling of anything “alternative” pre-Nevermind. (By Winnebago standards, Depeche Mode certainly would have qualified as “alternative”, nevermind how huge Violator was worldwide.) As it so happened they were the people I had lunch with at that point. This was at a time though when I was really first embracing classic rock. It’s all confounding in retrospect because I’m talking about scenes from roughly 35 years ago, but at that time, Led Zeppelin IV was only 20 years old!

At this point in all of this buildup you’re no doubt wondering what on earth the other song might have been. Some of you have already guessed the answer because of a very big fat clue I put in the subject line, or maybe you also had a jukebox in your high school cafeteria and you know exactly where this is headed.

I’m not really sure I “got” it the first time I heard it or the sixth time I heard it or even the twenty-sixth time I heard it, but it must have gotten to me on a deeper level. This was, maybe, the first time I’d been exposed to a serious song that was also a big current hit and which also caused at least some people around me to talk about it and which came at a time when I might myself have considered buying music. Sure, there had been all kinds of things which had entered the pop zeitgeist at different times (looking at you here, MC Hammer), but this, for me, was fundamentally different.

Back in 2023 I wrote about Murmur and R.E.M. and managed to not really get into the rest of the story… it was a part one that never got a part two, which seems to be a common thing around META-SPIEL. This then is kind of a tease of that part two, I suppose.

I didn’t buy Out of Time back then. And it was a while beyond when I bought anything at all, really. When I got a car at 16 (fall of 1992) I started listening to the local rock station. My birthday was about a month after Automatic for the People came out. (Truly, it is astounding that the two albums are only 19 months apart, given how deep into their careers they were and how Out of Time could have sustained them for a while longer.)

In my memory the first “alternative” album I got my hands on was when I bought a used copy of Automatic for the People on cassette in Atlanta in the summer of 1993. Surely I did this based on the heavy rotation Automatic songs had gotten on rock radio. But also surely it went back to the cafeteria, to the jukebox.

In the jumbled Venn diagram that is my brain, I think that only once in my life was my favorite band also arguably one of the most popular and highest selling bands going, and that was in a weird little window in 1994 before I went full-on indie-rock but had also gotten my hands on Document and was completely enraptured with it.

This whole crazy thought sequence lodged into my mind tonight as I was listening to the live show from the Monster tour that was included in the deluxe 4-CD reissue of Monster a while back. The show in question was from Chicago, 6/3/95. I wasn’t at that one, but I was at the one three nights earlier in Milwaukee. (Fun fact: threthe R.E.M. show was the middle of three consecutive shows I saw that summer were in Milwaukee; more on the third of those in an impending post!) That show then was a crazy thing, a huge crowd for a band at the height of their popularity, and three of us were there in the middle of it, having come from Winnebago.

It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that I still know every word to “Losing My Religion”. The song is still everything it ever was. I mean, who makes a blockbuster single out of a morose pop song with a mandolin solo? What the hell was this song even about? That it was all so cryptic was part of what sucked us all in, wasn’t it?

(I do not know all the words to “Enjoy the Silence”. But that’s okay. Words are very unnecessary. They can only do harm.)

Sometimes it’s amazing to think back and reflect upon what a truly strange and arbitrary world it is. What was that jukebox doing there? Where did it go? Why was it set to play even if nobody put a quarter in? Why did it play what it did? How did a song like “Losing My Religion” ever manage to capture public attention to such an extent? If I had been one year older or younger how would that have changed how I thought about it all?

What I’d tell you right now, tonight, is that I’m pretty sure R.E.M. was the greatest American rock band there ever was, in terms of the expanse and overall quality of their catalog, the total number of albums sold, and how high their popularity peaked. And yet a truly amazing thing at the time of their peak popularity was how obscure their oldest material was to so many people. Out of Time has sold over 18,000,000 copies worldwide. Murmur has to this day never gone platinum in the U.S.!

And absurdly, as big as this band was, as big as that album was, the way I truly discovered them was because somebody put a jukebox in our high school cafeteria in 1991.