“Put a lime in the coconut.”

“Brandy, what a fine wife you would make.”

“Lean on me when you’re not strong.”

My bluetooth is streaming the songs of my youth through the house this morning. The hits of 1972 are taking me back to the year I turned 16. It was a time of acne, algebra and accelerated hormones. It was the year I started 11th grade at Henry County Senior High and took an oath never to get a haircut again.

Music was then and always is the driving force in a teenager’s life. It was the year I earned enough money to make a trip up to South Dekalb Mall to buy my own stereo. I had inherited my sister’s record player, but the old Singer suitcase turntable wasn’t cutting it.

“You go back, Jack, and do it again.”

I had been eyeing the stereo gear for a while. Some of my friends had massive walls full of receivers and turntables and tape decks and speakers with sub-woofers that would rattle your teeth. One friend had a reel-to-reel deck for recording songs off the radio.

My budget was more conservative.

“Doctor, my eyes have seen the years.”

I came home from the mall with an Emerson receiver and turntable with a built in 8-track deck. Clear plastic cover that tilted up and out of the way to put on a record. Nothing fancy, but it was the coolest thing I’d ever owned. It came with a couple of standard speakers, plain black ones. I bought two extra custom speakers, wood cabinets with a tweed fabric cover. Sub-woofers and tweeters. I also splurged on a Fischer dual cassette deck.

That was my set up. It was also the cause of great anxiety for my parents.

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been tied to the whipping post.”

The two regular speakers went on the floor either side of my bed. I mounted the two custom speakers up high on the wall in the opposite corners of my bedroom. This required drilling holes in the plaster and making a little plywood shelf up close to the ceiling.

Mama came to inspect what all the noise was about. “What in the world are you doing?”

“I’m putting up my new speakers.”

“Why can’t you just put them on the floor?”

Mothers know nothing about surround sound and good vibes.

“Did you ask your daddy if you could put holes in the wall?”

I hadn’t, but I figured once it was done what was he going to say.

I could stack several albums on my turntable, kick back on my bed and read the album covers while the music played. I hate that we’ve lost the album covers. They were the story, and the vinyl was the music. Those 14-inch cardboard jackets told you about the bands and the lyrics. Who was on vocals and who played keyboards. Some were single covers. The best ones folded open with photos of your heroes. Some were double albums.

“Nights in white satin, never reaching the end.”

“Hey, hey mama, said the way you move.”

Music, of course, was always better with friends. There were two places I hung out and listened to music more than anywhere else in the early 70s. Robbie and Mitch Chastain had been sent to live in the basement of their home, mostly because of the music I suppose. They had a bedroom upstairs, but when we got serious about music Mr. Bob and Miss Francis somehow magically added a bedroom downstairs in the mostly unfinished basement.

When we started our musical journey, we would listen to Edger Winter, Led Zepplin and Grand Funk Railroad on the console stereo in the den. Black Sabbath and “War Pigs” sent us off to the dungeon where teenagers belonged. I can still see all of us bobbing our heads in rhythm and screaming the lyrics.

“Generals gathered in their masses,
Just like witches at black masses.”

It’s a wonder we didn’t all end up as social deviants.

Music is a stimulant. The right song hits the airwaves and no matter how old you are, you are transported back to another place and time. The smell of fresh cut hay does that to me. The sound of kids at play puts me in a timeless backyard. The taste of lemon meringue pie.

Rare Earth is playing now. I may be on my back porch, but my mind is inside the second music hall of my youth, the club house at Talmadge Lake on a Friday or Saturday night. No fancy stereo here, just a portable high-fi with swing-out speakers and stacks of 45s.

“Well twiddly-dee, twiddly-dum,
Look out baby cause here I come.
Get ready.”

No hard rock, just the best dance music ever written. Black lights and white Converse high-tops that glow in the dark and step to the beat. White Ts and white teeth and peroxide blond hair. Girls dancing some kind of four-corner move and guys too shy to step away from the wall to get into the action.

“She was a long cool woman in a black dress
Just-a 5ft 9, beautiful and tall”

We wasted so much time waiting for the perfect song to come along. I felt like a spastic chicken when I tried to dance. But the slow ones were easy. Just shuffle in a circle.

“The Long and Winding Road”

“Baby I’m-a Want You”

“Oh girl, I’d be in trouble if you left me now.”

I know vinyl is making a comeback, but it won’t ever match what we had in that basement and clubhouse. There won’t ever be any music that good again in my lifetime.

I am told that I used to wake my kids up on Saturday mornings with my music on the stereo, which is why they love it and sometimes I think they know it better than I do.

“Your mama don’t dance and your daddy don’t rock and roll.”

They may love our music, but they’ll never know what it was like to lift that tone arm off the record and play it again. The quiet hiss of the needle floating in that groove. The power of speakers that would shake your innards. Music so moving that it would cause your dad to open the bedroom door and say rude things about putting your music inside unmentionable parts of teenage anatomy unless the volume got turned down.

Digital music is cool. Portable playlists that go anywhere is the bomb. Handy little bluetooth speakers are just crazy good for what they do. I get all that.

But if Badfinger is playing, that little bluetooth ain’t gonna cut it.

“No matter what you are
I will always be with you,
Ooh girl, you girl, want you.”

It has taken me exactly six hours and 14 minutes to write this little column of mine. I can’t really explain why. It could have something to do with the music, I guess. I kept stopping to see if I could get it louder. But I don’t own near enough bluetooth speakers for that.

Where’s a good stereo when I need one?