OUR LOSS OF BLESSED QUIET

There was a time easily within the fond memories of millions of us when there was no ceiling
music in restaurants. Until the 1950s, while having a meal in any restaurant in the world you
could be sure that no music would be sprayed down on you from ceiling speakers. There was
blessed quiet. Without having to raise your voice over irritating, interfering music you could easily
carry on a relaxed, amiable conversation with your dinner partners or chat with your waiter. While
eating alone, you could relax and gather your thoughts or enjoy reading a book or magazine in
quiet repose. Critics rated restaurants for excellence on how quiet they were. Everywhere it was a
sensible, traditional premise of restaurant management that patrons wanted a peaceful, relaxing,
quiet environment for their meals. No one wanted unceasing music of any kind!

Quiet was found not only in restaurants in those sensible, rational times. On the telephone we
did not have to endure annoying music when we were put on hold; instead there was glorious si-
lence, during which we could think without interference. In waiting rooms, elevators, and lobbies
and on trains, busses, and streetcars, there was blessed quiet; no irritating blare of music spewed
from the ceilings. Never did we have to endure insufferable, absurd, repetitious lyrics—”Baybi,
baybi, baybi, baybi, baybi, baybi, baybi, baybi, gimmi lovin’, gimmi lovin’, gimmi lovin’ evah
naht”—wailed in great emotional frenzy to the violent crashes of drums and guitars.

Years ago we all liked music and enjoyed hearing it frequently. There was an abundance of mu-
sic in enormous variety, all that we could possibly want. We all had our own radios and phono-
graphs. We played our own selections of music at times when we wished to hear them, at a
volume and tone that pleased us, on equipment that measured up to our standards of fidelity. And
of course we enjoyed good music at movies and live-music performances that we chose to attend.

There was no “public” music, by which I mean music chosen by someone else and played at a
time of their choosing, at their choice of volume, through their shoddy sound systems, and forced
upon us as a captive audience. That offensive fouling of the air and assaulting of our peace of
mind had not yet begun in America.

In those lovely, quiet times no sane person wanted continuous, public music. None of us in his
worst nightmare had ever imagined so grotesque an idea! Who in his right mind would have re-
quested non-stop, public music to be played during every restaurant meal he would eat for the rest
of his life? Who in full possession of his mental faculties would have desired to have someone
else’s music be continually sprayed down on him, without let-up, whenever he rode an elevator,
bus, or streetcar or waited for his dentist or doctor?
What rational person would have requested that for the rest of his life an uninterrupted blast
of loud, public music fill the air in every clothing store, shoe store, bookstore, drugstore, bakery,
and supermarket, in every bowling alley, Laundromat, gymnasium, and swimming pool, in every
gas station and car wash, in every barber shop and beauty salon, in every bar, liquor store, fast-
food stand, at every wedding reception and cocktail party, at every picnic, sidewalk sale, street
fair, or public outing he ever attends, and in every lobby and waiting room he ever occupies.
That is exactly the situation today. Non-stop music drowns us in public places. Everywhere it
is continuous music, with never a let up, not even a half-minute break. If criminal executions were
once again made public, some idiot would surely arrange to have loud, non-stop rock music
sprayed continually on all in attendance!

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 How did our beloved quiet disappear? Why? Who among us really wants all this never-ending
noise pollution? How did we get here in the first place? Let me tell you.

America’s much appreciated silence first fell under attack in the 1940s when some ambitious
folks at a company whose name isn’t important—so I’ll call it “M”—saw a fast buck to be made.
First they dug up some extremely spotty, highly questionable experimental data that somebody
was willing to interpret as suggesting that perhaps ten or fifteen minutes of music each hour in a
factory might improve the workers’ productivity. Using that suspect data, M’s aggressive sales-
men were able to convince a few factory managers to install overhead speakers to provide occa-
sional music for their production-line workers.

The idea of factory music caught on, and in a few years it became standard on all American
production lines. In the half-century since then, two generations of factory workers have never
thought to ask why music sprays down over their heads all day. They’ve never known any other
way! Many experts now conclude that the continuous music in the factory actually degrades
workers’ attentiveness and causes them to make serious, even dangerous assembly errors, while
making no improvement whatever in productivity. But the music stays on, mainly because em-
ployee unions won’t let management shut it off. But that is beside the point here.

What is important is that M’s aggressive salesmen next targeted the nation’s restaurants. M re-
cognized that most people working in restaurants are bored most of the time and that many of
them, particularly the younger ones, yearn for something to relieve their tedium. They would like
to turn their thoughts away from slinging hash and hustling drinks to more exhilarating activities
like dancing, drinking, doping, and sex. M recognized that ceiling music could very effectively
serve that role.

So how did they sell ceiling music to restaurant managers? They deceptively alleged that res-
taurant customers would enjoy M’s so-called “background” music. It didn’t take much high-
pressure selling to get ceiling speakers installed in thousands of restaurants to play M’s “piped-in”
music for a few dollars a month—all done officially for the restaurant patrons’ comfort and en-
joyment. It did not matter that at the time, no restaurant patrons wanted continuous ceiling music
during their meals and that none, except a few on-the-make teen-agers, had ever suggested it!

In the beginning, even M never envisaged non-stop restaurant music. Its original restaurant
schedules called for a quarter hour of mellow, tasteful, low-volume music played on a high-fidel-
ity, single-speaker sound system, followed by 30 minutes of silence. I well remember enjoying that
intelligent, entertaining, on-off arrangement while eating in first-class restaurants in New York and
Washington, D.C. in the early 1950s. But in just a few years that nicety was abandoned in favor of
non-stop music spewing from wall-to-wall speakers from opening time until closing, with the
volume set high. What had begun as part-time, low-level, unobtrusive, background music quickly
evolved into full-time, loud, interfering, foreground music.

Eventually not only every restaurant but every other public room and auditorium nationwide
was wired for ceiling speakers and public music, either piped-in or locally generated. Today there
are extremely few public places you can visit and not have to endure non-stop public music, the
bulk of it loud, frantic rock music. Just as cigarettes are to chain-smokers, loud, non-stop rock
music has become an addiction for many people. Millions of them apparently need desperately to

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hear that constant music beat in their ears, without respite, from the moment they wake up until
they switch off at bedtime or fall asleep with it left on. That addictive madness is beyond my un-
derstanding, so let me return to restaurant music.

By the mid 1960s M and its several competitors had turned ceiling music into a multi-million-
dollar business, and all the nation’s architects had gotten into line. Without exception the blue-
prints for every new restaurant provided for ceiling music. Today all but a few of the very oldest
restaurants have a dozen or more ceiling speakers strategically placed so there is absolutely
nowhere you can sit to be more than a few feet from one of those noise boxes. You have to search
hard to find any eatery in America without non-stop ceiling music. Not one in a thousand is
without it! Your only hope of having a pleasant, peaceful, quiet meal is to find a very old restaur-
ant or, with exceptional luck, one whose noise box is temporarily out of order. When you travel in
Europe and eat in some of the lovely, quiet, old restaurants there you can appreciate the utter ab-
surdity of non-stop ceiling music.

To avoid paying for piped-in music while at the same time adding to customer discomfort,
many American restaurants connect up their own radio to the ceiling speakers and tune to a com-
mercial station to get continuous rock music. (Non-commercial stations do not play continuous
rock.) Often the cook or the manager or one of their girlfriends decides which rock station to tune
in and how high to crank up the volume. Between blasts of tooth-jarring rock music we are as-
sailed by sickening commercial announcements while we eat. Blaring sales pitches, shouted slo-
gans, and ear-grating jingles graphically describe for us the nauseating details of under-arm de-
odorants, women’s sanitary napkins, throw-away diapers, bad-breath gargles, denture glues, laxat-
ives, diarrhea cures, anti-gas pills, itching creams, incontinence pads, and the ever popular Prepar-
ation H hemorrhoidal suppositories. These juicy announcements are all served up, hour after hour,
right along with those tasty burgers and fries, folks!

If you politely ask a restaurant manager to turn off his radio—even for just a few minutes while
you finish your meal—he will very likely refuse, saying that to please you he would have to de-
prive all his other customers of their joy of music listening. Ask him how he thinks his customers
are enjoying the Kotex, Feenamint, and Preparation H commercials while they’re eating, and he is
likely to take personal offense. In any event you can be sure he will not turn the music off. If he
did, his employees would give him holy hell; some would threaten to quit.

Instead of the radio, some restaurants play the piped-in music from M or one of its competit-
ors. Without the radio commercials the noise pollution is a little easier for us to endure, but, like
the restaurant radios, it is invariably played at a volume level that is too high for pleasant conver-
sation and enjoyable, relaxed eating. Typically the volume level to please the deafest of the res-
taurant employees, many of whom have permanently impaired hearing from attending live, pound-
ing, kilowatt-level, rock-music concerts.
Ask a waitress or the hostess or the manager in any restaurant to please turn the music volume
down so you can have a pleasant conversation with your companions, and you will likely be told
(each of these is from my personal experience):
- “We can’t get to the volume control. It’s locked up.”
- “The volume is not adjustable. It’s set by M.”
- “None of us is allowed to change it; only the boss can adjust it, and he’s not here now.”
- “That’s as low as we can set the volume.”

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 There may be some truth in some of those responses, but overall they reflect the restaurant em-
ployees’ unwillingness to lower the music volume for fear they will miss hearing it, even tempor-
arily. The concept of not hearing it, even for just a few minutes, is alien to them. For them that
would be like turning off the air conditioning on a sweltering hot day.

The obvious fact is that in America’s restaurants today most employees—the manager, hostess,
cooks, waiters, bartenders, and busboys—are in an uninterrupted state of musical concert!. Non-
stop music listening is their indispensable continuum. They cannot function without it. It must be
played unceasingly and loud enough for them to hear it clearly over the “interfering” sounds of
their work: sounds such as taking customers’ orders, preparing and serving food and drinks,
stacking dishes, making change, and the other activities that are earning their pay.
When they have to shout to each other and to their customers to be heard over the music, they
shout. When the music is so loud they cannot hear us giving our food orders, they insist that we
speak louder and repeat. All day long they mandatorily require an uninterrupted dose of musical
Pabulum for the brain. Everything else is of secondary importance. When customers are dis-
pleased and made irritable by the music, so be it. Some customers will leave in disgust, never to
return, but the music cannot ever be shut off, even for a moment, under any circumstances. Cus-
tomers be damned, restaurant employees will not interrupt or even lower the volume of their cru-
cially important, non-interruptible, never-ending musical “fix!”

IN AMERICAN RESTAURANTS, ADDICTIVE, NON-STOP, WALL-TO-WALL MU-

SIC LISTENING HAS PRIORITY OVER COMMON-SENSE RESTAURANTING!

Mind you, this pathetic hoax was begun and still continues under the preposterous pretense of
pleasing the customer!

Robert S. Babin 25 July 1996 /var/www/apps/scribd/scribd/tmp/scratch5/8513104.doc

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