We were space-crazy.

Sure, JFK promised we’d go to the moon, but no one really took this seriously until Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth.

This was the era of the cold war. There was supposedly nothing worse than living in the U.S.S.R. They oppressed people, their economy was challenged…so how in the hell did they beat us, not only going into space first, but completing an orbit and landing on…LAND?

This was positively scary. Kinda like today, but totally different. Today we’re worried about nationalism, the division of countries, the disdain for immigrants and science, yesterday we were worried about the Russkis taking over the world.

Now by time the U.S. put a man in space, it was Alan Shepard, and he didn’t even fly around the Earth. Shortly thereafter, the U.S.S.R. put a man in space for an entire day! It wasn’t until almost a year after Gagarin that we had our own astronaut flying around the earth, three times, and that man was John Glenn. The first is always a hero.

And then we were off to the races. We followed space like you follow the internet. Only there was much less information. There was much less information on everything in the sixties, which is why everybody knew about the war, and the protests could get notice.

But then came Gemini! Two men in space at the same time! At this point we knew the routine, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo.

Now I’m not saying every Gemini flight garnered the attention of the first, but it was on TV. The last Apollo flight was not, by then it was de rigueur, after you’ve been to the moon…

But we were still building the blocks.

So we had space food. Not only Tang, but Space Sticks, which were kind of like circular energy bars, which tasted even worse! They came in packets, you had to keep them fresh. And we had space blankets. All innovation seemed to be coming from the space program.

And then, we had the fire.

I remember exactly where I was when the news came over the radio, driving on Route 30, in Vermont, just after Maple Valley, with the river on the right. How could this happen? We were accustomed to winning, it was up, up and up, but now…

And I remember the story being pure oxygen. And I remember the delay in future space flights. But then, we were going to the moon, in July ’69. Kennedy might have been dead, but his promise was going to be fulfilled.

1969. The Miracle Mets. Woodstock. The moon landing. Despite the turmoil, that was the era of can-do. America was indomitable. If we put our minds to something, it happened. And the protests were about equality for African-Americans, and the ending of an unjust, unwinnable war. We wanted a better America, and we got one. Even though the old white men won a lot too. And they were white, and they were men and they were old.

So we knew the date of the moon landing long before. Well, the mission, not the exact dates of the landing and the walk. We were prepared.

At this point, we only watched when it was a breakthrough. The first Gemini. But walking on the moon? That seemed positively unfathomable.

Now I was living in Chicago, in a frat house on the University of Chicago campus. It was a deal I made with my parents, I would go to Mitzvah Corps if I could go to summer ski camp in Squaw Valley first. They agreed, they had to get rid of me, they were going to Europe, it was an annual event since I was in the first grade, when they left us with a woman we didn’t like and my mother came back with my first watch, but even then I knew they’d bought it at the airport. But I did love that Timex.

Mitzvah Corps. Even sounds bad, right?

Summer ski camp was phenomenal. To a great degree unsupervised, which was new to me, at least when it related to camp, but a good chunk of our lives was unsupervised back then. Playdate? We’d never even heard of the term!

But then I had to go to Mitzvah Corps. To hang with nerds, I believed. But it was five girls and five boys and we hung together and it was run by a young rabbi who was in his twenties, as was his wife, and the guy who lived downstairs smoked dope and introduced me to Steve Miller and I don’t remember watching television at all until it came to the moonwalk.

We had a black and white TV. Even back then, it was akin to a CRT versus a flat screen today. Most people had color.

And it was about twenty inches big. With a curved screen, remember that?

And it was in the living room. There was a giant couch, which could sit about eight, and the rest of the group sat on the floor.

And it was interminable waiting. Nothing was happening. The commentator kept telling us they were getting ready, making sure all systems were go. All I knew was I was wearing my penny loafers, and my feet were so hot that I took them off and my feet smelled and I was worried about alienating the girl sitting next to me, who I had a crush on, but that’s another story.

And I didn’t know these people that well at this point. You see we all had different jobs, and were separated all day. Mine was to be a counselor on a schoolyard in south Chicago. I wouldn’t do that today! I’d walk with this woman… She was a nerd, and sensitive to seemingly everything, they paired her up with me when no one else wanted to go with her, and we walked to the train station, got on, long before the days of A/C, and then walked to the schoolyard. I remember walking to lunch at Burger King. There wasn’t another white person for miles, other than this girl. What was I thinking? Yes, today kids go on do-gooder trips for their college resumes, but they’re never at risk.

Another two guys were building inspectors. They took us to meet community organizers, not that they had that title, they knew Jesse Jackson and they wanted change and I felt like I was at the center of something. Could have been the first time I heard the word “rap,” or heard it used so much. This guy was talking about rapping to this person and that person.

But that was only one day. Normally I worked at the playground, on the asphalt, next to the school building. We played softball with a soft ball that required no gloves. And one day there was a rape on the fourth floor of the school, but once again, I was too young and inexperienced to recognize the consequences of that. And the big hit was James Brown’s “Popcorn,” which I’d never heard before, they even had a “Popcorn” dancing contest.

But now I was sitting on the couch waiting and waiting for Neil and Buzz to get out of that damn module.

And let’s be clear, we expected it all to go down smoothly, then again… They were leaving the module, they were on the moon, I’d seen enough “Twilight Zone” to know that things could go wrong.

And then Neil descends the ladder and steps on the moon and utters those fateful words. At the time, we didn’t know they were scripted. But thinking about it now, who would come up with “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind.” Of course I remember it, it was indelibly burned into my brain.

And then I remember Neil bouncing. We’d read for years about the lack of air, the difference in gravity, it was like a school experiment come alive. That was cool. But after watching them walk around a bit, it got boring. But you had to watch, because you knew this was an historical moment. We had a lot of those in the sixties, and not all bad.

And then it was over.

I remember being anxious about the module blasting off from the moon, worried they might get marooned there, but it went up no problem. But I’m not sure I watched that on TV. Back then there were no 24/7 news channels, nowhere to catch something if you missed it, you just read the newspaper, and the headlines were glorious, like this was the beginning of a new world.

And then days passed, the story fell off the front page, and we rarely talked about it, but we knew about it, even if I did see it in black and white. I was stunned, you mean you could really broadcast from the moon in color? Hell, just a few years earlier the big story was Telstar, and we watched a live TV show from Europe. Now we can Facetime with anybody around the world and don’t think much about it.

But after you go to the moon, then what?

1970 was a year of wound-licking, at least after Kent State. The seventies were about going back to the land. Spaceshots continued, but they were no longer the focus.

And then we had the O-ring disaster. Suddenly, Americans, our scientists, were fallible. The expert said not to go, but they did anyway. That’s men for you, expressing no caution, wanting the glory.

And then Christa McAuliffe burned up in that space shuttle fire. Just a school teacher, we thought space travel was as safe as car travel, probably more, the odds of a problem were nonexistent in our minds.

And then we stopped paying attention.

Hell, the space station was built by Russia. We were suddenly weak, and there was no money for NASA. It had achieved its mission and the mantra of the Republican Party was that taxes were bad and the government inefficient and wasteful and…

The computer revolution was quite something. Mostly made by kids inspired by the space program. But they were uncontrollable renegades. To both our benefit and our loss.

And now government can’t even understand science, at least not those in Congress.

And politics is tribal.

The greater good? We can’t even agree on that.

But despite all the dissension, we all marveled at the moonwalk back in ’69.

What did Don Henley sing?

Your experience meeting a famous musician.

“Lefsetz Live,” Tuesday July23rd, on Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Phone #: 844-6-VOLUME, 844-686-5863

Twitter: @lefsetz

Hear the episode live on SiriusXM VOLUME: HearLefsetzLive

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app: LefsetzLive

I’m shocked, positively shocked I tell you, that Metallica was caught scalping its own tickets. What kind of bizarre business do we have where ticketing is opaque and every customer can’t sit in the front row for fifty bucks?

Come on kids, not only does scalping your own tickets go back generations, it’s been proven ever since the digital era that the concert ticket industry doesn’t want to explain itself to the hoi polloi, never mind a government that can’t understand it and is always one step behind, like Ticketmaster is with the bots.

The truth is scalpers provide a service.

And in this case, the scalper LOST MONEY!

Sure, the scalper got good tickets, but he also had to take bad ones. Kinda like the days of cut-outs, when retailers had to take the bad with the good, hoping the good would sell enough to cover the cost.

But the real truth is customers no longer care. They understand the game. And it’s only the once a year people and the nitwits complaining. And once you pay attention to the nitwits, the one percent that is vocal, the tail is wagging the dog and you’ve lost control of your business.

Unless you’re a pop star, probably with an evanescent fan base, depending upon whether you have a hit, there’s this belief that the acts and its fans are in it for the long term and must respect each other. Ergo, fan club ticketing. You want your fans to be taken care of. And if you don’t…there is blowback. However no one has been able to quantify that blowback, because certain individuals complain so loudly and others don’t at all.

And speaking of the blowback, not only are we not living in the twentieth century, we’re not even living in the aughts, and if no one amplifies a story, it doesn’t spread and it dies. You may not know what I’m talking about right now. And I won’t even bother to include a link, let’s see how interested you are in Googling and reading a couple of thousand words… I doubt it, you just don’t care enough, you’re paying attention to much more important issues, those that interest you and those relating to the nation at large.

Furthermore, understanding the modern paradigm, no one is blowing this story up. Everybody is remaining silent. Live Nation, Metallica, the individuals involved. Unless you pour gasoline on the fire, it dies out. And people move on. The story is lost in the endless river of information that overwhelms everybody on earth.

Meanwhile, the guy who released the taped phone call, Vaughn Millette, broke the code, and only for his own purposes. He will be shunned for it, the same way Kirsten Gillibrand has been for kicking Al Franken out of the Senate. It’s a club I tell you, and you don’t want to break the norms unless you’re willing to be frozen out.

And how do you think Live Nation pays so much money, and beats other promoters for the tour? This is how that additional money is made! It’s a negotiation between the promoter and the act. Someone’s got to pay the freight.

And the act is in control. This is one of the greatest subterfuges of all time. Everybody believes it’s Ticketmaster, acting independently, when the truth is Ticketmaster just does what the act wants, Ticketmaster takes the heat for the act. Fans just cannot believe their favorites are about the money when they’re about the music. But we’re not living in 1969 anymore folks, no one is saying music should be free. As for the Napster era, that was a result of a technological change that caught the purveyors off guard. They kicked and screamed and then changed their business model.

Now if concert tickets weren’t moving, this wouldn’t be happening. But demand is insane.

And the truth is everybody wants an inside connection, everybody wants to buy tickets on THEIR terms. Who knows what you’ll be doing in six months when the date plays? Better to buy from StubHub or a scalper just before the date. And the price can go down, as it did for some seats in this transaction.

You want to take risk off the table, especially with stadium dates. You want guaranteed money in the bank.

And the media has demonized paperless and the fans hate it because they can’t scalp the tickets themselves and…oftentimes it turns out there isn’t such hot demand anyway, that the on sale, where the bots go crazy, heats up the market beyond reality.

And you like that Amex or Citi gives you advance chance.

And no one is publicizing the number of tickets actually available on the on sale date, often de minimis.

And now we’ve got platinum if you really want to sit in the front row, or close thereto. Superfans can pay.

I’m not telling you all of the above is good, I’m just telling you it’s the way that it now is. And both bands and fans have adjusted to it.

You’re always gonna get people complaining. But the truth is if this was really news, it would go viral. But it hasn’t, not yet.

As for the agitators… Do you think you’re entitled to a BMW at KIA prices?

Furthermore, the people buying from the scalper are willing to pay the freight, they’re not complaining. One can even argue they’re doing the fans a favor, making the rest of the seats cheaper. And the truth is acts never scalp the very best tickets, because they want their fans up close and personal.

Will there ever be sunshine in the ticketing business?

When acts are not worried about appearing greedy and every show is a guaranteed sell-out with no transferability and no uplift.

And if you think that’s gonna happen…

You’re dreaming.

Feelin’ Alright

“Feelin’ Alright” is the song FM radio played first, this is the track that broke Joe Cocker in the U.S. “With A Little Help From My Friends” really didn’t supersede “Feelin’ Alright” until the release of the Woodstock movie, and its subsequent use on “The Wonder Years.” And Cocker’s iteration became so famous, it completely replaced the Traffic original.

Traffic really didn’t gain mainstream success in the U.S. until the band broke up, Stevie Winwood went to work in the supergroup Blind Faith, and then reformed with “John Barleycorn Must Die.”

“John Barleycorn”‘s release was perfectly timed. The late spring of 1970, when the Beatles had their last hurrah with “Let It Be” and FM had finally ascended to domination. Everybody was aware of album rock, singles were for sissies.

But there were three LPs before “John Barleycorn Must Die.” Ironically, the last, the worst, a mash-up of studio and live tracks, got the most traction, or as Joni Mitchell sang at the same time, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. “Shanghai Noodle Factory” was all over the airwaves, and “Medicated Goo” too. And they were a pretty good distillation of the Traffic sound, which was thought to have expired.

But the two LPs that came before, they were the essence of Traffic, then and now.

The first had the most impact. Musos cherry-picked it for covers. You know “Heaven Is In Your Mind” by Three Dog Night, not Traffic, and I hate to say it, Three Dog Night’s version is better, Traffic got the chorus right, but the verses? And Al Kooper made “Dear Mr. Fantasy” ubiquitous with its inclusion on the double album “The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper,” remember the mic cutting out midstream? And Kooper covered “Coloured Rain” on his initial solo LP, “I Stand Alone,” and I must admit I prefer the over-produced Kooper iteration, but no one could exceed the original version of “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” a classic rock track if there ever was one, which Winwood still performs just as well, his electric guitar picking in the outro will blow your mind, have you nodding your noggin, getting into the groove.

But I didn’t get on board until the second Traffic album, when Dave Mason was ensconced in the band once again. Actually, it was two Mason tracks that originally entranced me, the opening “You Can All Join In” and the second side’s “Cryin’ To Be Heard.”

“You Can All Join In” was especially noteworthy because of the lead vocal being in one channel and the supporting/backup vocals being in the other. And we all know the jaunty tracks reach us first.

As for “Cryin’ To Be Heard,” it was exactly the opposite, quiet and dreamy, as if cut in Morocco, this was not made for the radio so much as your bedroom, it still stands up today.

But this is about “Feelin’ Alright,” the first side closer.

Now some people might be aware of Three Dog Night’s 1969 cover of the track, but that never was a hit single, and nobody with cred was buying their albums.

But Three Dog Night’s version was like Joe Cocker’s version, it was UPBEAT! You listen to them and think everything is ALL RIGHT, when the truth is it’s not.

Now at this point, Dave Mason is most remembered for his soft rock hit on Columbia, “We Just Disagree.” But before that he was momentarily legendary for his Blue Thumb solo debut “Alone Together,” which not only came on multicolored pizza vinyl, but featured a triple-panel cover.

At the time the most noteworthy cut was his version of the Delaney & Bonnie cover of “Only You Know And I Know,” but every cut on “Alone Together” is genius, I don’t think younger generations have picked up on it.

But before Traffic splintered, there was that rendition of his song “Feelin’ Alright?”

Now I won’t say I never think of it, that it never crosses my mind, as a matter of fact, I sing it in my head on a regular basis, it’s Dave’s vocal so world-weary, almost understated. But still, at this point, I always think of “Feelin’ Alright” as an upbeat song, hell, the Cocker version is a tear. But last night, “Feelin’ Alright” revealed itself to me.

Of course I got it back in ’68, reading the lyrics, but I was inexperienced then.

You see “Feelin’ Alright” is a breakup song, one not of exuberance, I’M FINALLY FREE, but lamenting what once was, with the singer licking his wounds.

Seems I’ve got to have a change of scene
‘Cause every night I have the strangest dreams

Yup, he’s moved on, physically, leaving the bad memories and mood behind. BUT THAT’S NOT TRUE!

Imprisoned by the way it could have been

The average person is not a celebrity, they don’t crawl from the wreckage into a brand new car. No, they break up and…they’re left alone, contemplating what’s been lost, what’s been left behind.

Left here on my own or so it seems
I’ve got to leave before I start to scream
But someone’s locked the door and took the key

Wow, it’s like solitary confinement. But that’s the way it is when you break up. You can walk outside the house, go to the city center and be around people, but you can’t get the other person out of your head, they don’t leave your mind for a minute.

You feelin’ alright?
I’m not feelin’ too good myself
Well, you feelin’ alright?
I’m not feelin’ too good myself

Honesty. He’s in a bad space, he’s wondering if she is too, you always believe your ex is living it up, are they?

But boy you sure took me for one big ride
And even now I sit and wonder why

Hindsight is 20/20. How did you get wrapped up in their web? You compromise, buy into one thing, and then it’s a slippery slope, you’ve lost your perspective, you’re in a cult of two, and you’re not the leader.

And when I think of you I start to cry
‘Cause I just can’t waste my time, I must keep dry

You’re stuck. You can’t move forward, you can’t live. The world progresses around you, and you’re chained to the past.

Gotta stop believin’ in all your lies
‘Cause there’s too much to do before I die

He went through the meat grinder. He knows there’s a better future out there, he’s got to put one foot in front of another, but right now that’s impossible.

Don’t get too lost in all I say
Though at the time I really felt that way

He’s drunk-dialing, through a song. This is the worst, when you profess your undying love and get no response at all, or the brush-off.

But that was then and now it’s today

He’s apologizing, the tears have stopped, but she’s gotten the message, he’s desperate.

Can’t get off yet, so I’m here to stay
Till someone comes along and takes my place
With a different name yes, and a different face

He truly can’t get off. The merry-go-round of his mind and sexually. And he knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s replaced. But when that happens it will be a bitter pill to swallow, but it will allow him to go on, however haltingly.

You feelin’ alright?
I’m not feelin too good myself
Well, you feelin’ alright?
I’m not feelin’ too good myself

He wants to get his message across, he wants acknowledgement, of his bad space, of how she manipulated and hurt him. But still, he wants to believe she feels what he does and there’s a chance…guys always think there’s a chance.

And even the title is important. The Cocker cover is entitled “Feeling Alright.” It’s clear, he’s fine. But the Traffic original is called “Feelin’ Alright?,” with a question mark, it’s not about him, but her.

I guess that’s something amazing about music, how it constantly reveals itself to you over time, as you gain experience and perspective.

But “Feelin’ Alight” is another reason classic rock is classic. Sure, there’s bombastic stuff like “Smoke On The Water,” and then there’s more subtle stuff like “Feelin’ Alright,” which encapsulates the human condition in sound and lyric.

This is why we keep listening to this music.