The Donut Shop & The Purple Box

Okay, so back in early January, I found two jukeboxes on craigslist for $100 total. Not each. Total. That's $50 each. Not total. Each. Anyway, I bought them for myself as a bit of a project that I'll be working on for what will likely be the next year of my life. I'm excited. Before buying, I had the boxes assessed by a box-builder who told me that I'd be nuts not to purchase the pair. They came with enough spare parts to build two more boxes as well. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited. The plan is to work with the box-builder to get them fully-functioning. He thinks it'll take an afternoon or two to knock it all out.

After that, I'm going to fix both boxes cosmetically, customizing them both, thematically, to reflect their future contents. We'll have to see how successful I can become at finding the needed records, but my intentions are to make one of the boxes a Prince collection. 45s from Prince, The Time, Apollonia 6, Vanity 6, and all of the other Paisley, Minneapolis-based groups and solo acts that the purple one penned.

The second box is going to be a hard but rewarding project that I like to call the Donut Shop. It'll include 45s from the belated J Dilla as well as 45s that he's sampled over the years. I've got about 25 so far including Jerry Butler's "Just Because I Really Love You", The Trammps' "Rubber Band", Luther Ingram's "To The Other Man", and L.V. Johnson's "I Don't Really Care" among others. I have found it far more difficult than I'd hoped to find 45s from DONUTS, so the new plan is to open it up to other songs that Dilla had used for the likes of Slum Village, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest, and the other numerous artists that he'd produced for since the mid-1990s.

I feel as though I should be able to get through at least half of the box's slots. Each box holds 50 45s if I'm not mistaken. There are 80 slots for tags but only 50 slots for 45s. The boxes are not here with me. I need to go back and check them at, but I think that's right. I'm going to take off all of the removable panels - the square sides, the frames for the tag displays, and will also customize the wooden sides and speaker-clad fronts. It'll be a whole new box. I can't wait. I've started to put some art together for the Dilla box. It looks like this:

Other portions of the art will include other releases, of course. This is what I've got so far. Thoughts? Oh, and if you've got any applicable donuts to share for the greater good of the box, you can send them to:

Donut Boy Recordings c/o Dominic
1130 3rd Ave. #306
Oakland, CA 94606

All donations are charitable gifts and are not tax-deductible.