Pushing All the Right Buttons

Like the ’57 Chevy and Elvis Presley, the jukebox is an integral and important part of American pop culture. Ask any record collector: If you want to hear the way blues, R&B; and rock ‘n’ roll singles were meant to sound, it’s hard to beat a vintage jukebox.

It’s even harder to find someone who knows how to fix them. Open up an old Wurlitzer or Seeburg, and you’ll see a strange system of wires, wheels and medieval-looking gizmos that make a car engine look simple by comparison. Like surgery, jukebox repair requires an experienced hand.

Which is why, when their music machines are misbehaving, jukebox owners and collectors throughout Los Angeles call Magdi Hanna. As the proprietor of J&K; Service Co., the jovial Hanna has devoted nearly every day of the past decade to the restoration, repair and sale of vintage jukeboxes and their CD-playing counterparts. At age 46, Hanna may well be the youngest vintage jukebox man in town.

“Most of the people who know how to work with these machines are either retired or dead,” he says.

Trained in his native Egypt as a mechanical engineer, Hanna had never even seen a jukebox before immigrating to the United States in the ‘70s. When he finally encountered one in a local bowling alley, it was love at first sight.

“We don’t have these things where I come from,” he says. “I was so excited about it--you know, how you put the money in and the music comes out.”

Hanna bought his first jukebox a few years later and immediately took it apart to see how it worked. Putting it back together proved a little more difficult.

“I got in trouble,” he says, laughing. “I had to get the service manual from Wurlitzer to do the rest of it. But I liked it, so everywhere I’d go, every restaurant and bar, the first thing I’d do is check the jukebox to find out what kind it was. Like you study history, I studied the history of the jukebox.”

Hanna threw himself head first into his new hobby, buying up as many old jukeboxes as he could find--even paying a professional repairman to let him hang around on service calls. He finally went professional in 1988 after meeting the woman who is now his wife.

Her first husband started J&K; in 1973, but the business on L.A.’s Pico Boulevard had been closed for several years following his death. Hanna moved his collection of jukeboxes into the storefront office and proceeded to slowly rebuild the company. Though J&K; makes most of its money from the sale of new and vintage machines, Hanna says he still considers repair work to be the most satisfying part of his job.

“When I go on a service call, I’m not thinking about how much I make,” he says. “I think about how I can fix the machines. When you take the machine apart, put it back together and hear the sound, that’s your payment.”