By Lisa Hix — These days, music lovers are spoiled. With one small handheld device, you can flick your thumb and hear anything you want—from Jay-Z or Lady Gaga to a postwar blues rag or a Bach concerto. Some of us remember when you had to get up and turn over the vinyl record to hear the "B side" of an album, or when you'd put foil on your antenna to pick up the best radio station from a sea of static. Yet we were spoiled then, too—back in the Dark Ages, you had to actually make the music you wanted to...

Scopitone: '60s Music Videos You've Never Seen

By Ben Marks — Before MTV, and long before we could stream music videos on our cell phones, mid-1960s American hepcats gathered around 500-pound, 7-foot-high contraptions to watch 16-millimeter Technicolor films of B-list pop stars gyrating to their latest hits. The contraption in question was usually a Scopitone, one of several audio-visual jukeboxes found primarily in bars. Their reign, if you can even call it that, was brief, and by the end of the decade, the novelty of these then-high-tech devices had...

Why People Flip Over Vintage Pinball Machines

By Maribeth Keane and Ben Marks — I didn’t really get into to pinball machine collecting until maybe 15 years ago, but when I was a freshman in college, video games were really big. I went to Purdue University. They had a huge arcade there. I always said that Space Invaders and Pac-Man took so much of my money—money that I really didn’t have—that it would have been cheaper to just buy one of those machines. So one day I went to an auction of coin-operated video games. They had pinball machines there, too, including a 1980...