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Thank you for the link. I am not a big Tom Jones fan, just “Green Green Grass of Home” was one that work with him very well.

Regarding restaurant jukeboxes, I am mainly familiar with the old style playing 45s, and if you punched in the same number more than once, you still got only one play.

As a Pizza Hut cook, there was sometimes reason for strategic use of the jukebox to elicit specific customer behavior. Yoko Ono’s “Kiss Kiss Kiss” (B Side of “Starting Over”) was useful for driving out the middle-aged man who was hanging out past closing time, and the nine Barry Manilow’s in a row (9 plays for a dollar in 1981) was good for getting teens hanging out to unplug the jukebox, and make them pay and kick them out. If I could have put it on repeat, nine in a row of “I Made it through the Rain” or “Even Now” might have driven me crazy, too.

For a Tom Jones bonus, here is an amusing portion of an interview with “Thunderball” composer John Barry:

GROSS: There’s one more James Bond song that I have to get in here, and that’s “Thunderball,” the theme from “Thunderball,” sung by Tom Jones. I think this is just a particularly fun one, also.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BARRY: Well, there’s a kind of fascinating story behind that, because that is probably the worst title for a song you can imagine.

GROSS: Oh, exactly.

Mr. BARRY: You know, and I spoke to Tony Newley about it, actually, and he says: What do we do? (Singing) Thunderball, marvelous, you should care for me...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BARRY: I said that’s not going to work. I think somebody already did that. So it was such an abstract title. So they were shooting down in Nassau, not Nassau County, you know, the island. They were doing all that stuff down there. And I flew down there, and on the way down I was reading a magazine, and it said that the Italians had a name for James Bond now, which was Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which I thought was really terrific.

So I thought, instead of using the word Thunderball, why don’t we write a song called Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Cubby absolutely loved it. Harry loved it. Everybody fell in love with it. So I recorded it. I recorded it with Dionne Warwick. We recorded it with Shirley.

And then the powers-that-be at United Artists in New York, literally two weeks before the movie opened, phoned up and said: You know, we need that “Goldfinger” thing. We need that title over the radio, and Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang isn’t doing it. We need “Thunderball.”

So I called up Don Black, and I said: Look, we’ve got to do this in, like, no time whatsoever. So I said: What does it mean? And he said: I don’t know what the hell it means. I really don’t know what it means.

So I wrote a theme that facilitated the word. Don then wrote the lyric. He then called Tom Jones. And now the whole Bond thing was being a big success. You know, you could have called anybody, you know, everybody now wanted to do Bond songs because of the success that Shirley had had and the whole aura that was hanging around the movie was...

So Tom came, and then he said, the first thing when he heard it, said: What the hell is it about? In his Welsh accent: What the hell is it about? I said: Tom, don’t ask. Just take a leaf out of Shirley’s book, get in the studio, sing the hell out of it and leave.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BARRY: Please don’t get into it. Just do that. He said: Oh, all right, okay, I’ll do. (Unintelligible), and it was the same move. Just convince everybody. And he was so convincing. I don’t think anybody really analyzed what the hell he was singing about. And I still don’t know what the song is about to this day. But we were given that problem, and we have to live with it.

GROSS: The lyricist came up with good ideas for Thunderball: They call him the winner who takes all, and he strikes like Thunderball.

Mr. BARRY: Yes, Don did, absolutely.

GROSS: A decent solution to the problem.

Mr. BARRY: Yeah, he did actually, in the nick of time, come out with that line which made it slightly credible, you know.

GROSS: I love these lyrics, they’re so funny: His days of asking are all gone. His fight goes on and on and on.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BARRY: Right, right, right.

GROSS: So you must have had fun doing this. I mean, this is just really - it’s very silly and very fun.

Mr. BARRY: Yeah, talk about a license to kill, it’s a license to write silly and just have great fun, you know. I mean, that was the whole joy of these movies, that this was not “Citizen Kane,” you know.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BARRY: It was just this fun comic strip. So you could just - you could get away with murder. If this had been a one-off, some guy made a movie called “Thunderball,” and it hadn’t had the cache that was growing up around the whole thing, we’d have been thrown out of the studio. It was the whole thing just - we were launched. And we could do - you could do anything really silly, and that was the freedom of it.

And why I left ultimately was because it stopped being wonderful and silly. It started to be formula, and that’s when the fun went out of it, and once the fun goes out of it, well, there’s really no point.

GROSS: Well, it’s time to hear “Thunderball,” sung by Tom Jones, music by my guest, John Barry.

(Soundbite of song, “Thunderball”)

Mr. TOM JONES (Singer): (Singing) He always runs while others walk. He acts while other men just talk. He looks at this world, and wants it all. So he strikes like Thunderball.

He knows the meaning of success. His needs are more, so he gives less. They call him the winner who takes all. And he strikes like Thunderball.

GROSS: Talk about big arrangements. That is really great. I like the way you manage to work in the James Bond theme underneath it. It’s very nice.

Mr. BARRY: Yeah, oh, every trick in the book we used, believe me. We didn’t leave anything out.