{"id":3608,"date":"2010-12-02T07:22:38","date_gmt":"2010-12-02T15:22:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=3608"},"modified":"2010-12-02T07:27:35","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T15:27:35","slug":"radioactive-toy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2010\/12\/02\/radioactive-toy\/","title":{"rendered":"Radioactive Toy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Radioactive toy<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Turn it up!<\/p>\n

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Lou.\u00c2\u00a0 Was I the same Bob Lefsetz who worked at Camp Tohkomeupog in the summer of ’71?<\/p>\n

I went to Jewish camp growing up.\u00c2\u00a0 Where the focus is more on the social than the physical.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’m not gonna complain much about that, everything I know about sex I learned at Camp Laurelwood.\u00c2\u00a0 I may not have touched any boobies, intentionally anyway, but that’s where I learned what "stacked" meant, it’s where I had my first two girlfriends.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’ve been looking them up on the Internet since 1995. And I finally found one.\u00c2\u00a0 I know it’s her because I found a picture.\u00c2\u00a0 She’s living in a different state, she’s standing by a horse, but it’s her. As for the other..?\u00c2\u00a0 It’s hard to look up women online, because they’ve gotten married and changed their last names.<\/p>\n

Not that I’d e-mail either one of them.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s kind of a private fantasy, a link to the past, evidencing that it truly exists, that I’m linked to who I once was.<\/p>\n

I only worked at Tohkomeupog for one summer, but like Jill and Betsy, it’s indelible in my brain, even though I’ve never been back, even though I have no contact with anyone I knew there.<\/p>\n

Until yesterday.<\/p>\n

I know, I know, Facebook.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t play on Facebook for this very reason, I don’t want to hear from everyone I ever knew.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, I want to hear from some of them, but open the floodgates and you never know what will float through amongst the flotsam and the jetsam.\u00c2\u00a0 Or, as Fran Lebowitz said on HBO, we move to the city to leave our past behind, to gain anonymity.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what I love about the city, no one knows who I am, no one’s talking behind my back, I don’t have a pre-established identity, forged years ago that those in my town won’t let go.<\/p>\n

Or those in college.<\/p>\n

I went to a small school.\u00c2\u00a0 1800 students.\u00c2\u00a0 Everyone had a label.\u00c2\u00a0 And it was at Middlebury that I met Bob Mauro, who offered up this summer job.\u00c2\u00a0 I needed to do something, I had to earn money, my parents weren’t going to let me skate, so I said yes, even though I was anxious I might have a bad experience, like the one the summer before at that camp in the Catskills.\u00c2\u00a0 But Bob testified.<\/p>\n

Actually, I heard from Bob a few months back.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s got a kid who’s a musician.\u00c2\u00a0 He told tales from Middlebury about me that were completely different from my perspective, and insightful.\u00c2\u00a0 Now that we’re grown up, we can reveal our truth.<\/p>\n

Anyway, yesterday, deep inside my inbox, I found an e-mail from Lou.\u00c2\u00a0 He discovered me on the Rhinocast.\u00c2\u00a0 Am I the same Bob Lefsetz who was a counselor at Tohkomeupog?<\/p>\n

OF COURSE!<\/p>\n

And then it was like "Same Old Lang Syne".\u00c2\u00a0 Catching up, comparing notes.<\/p>\n

Was he the same guy with the gold bike, had we ridden up to North Conway together?<\/p>\n

YES, HE GOT THAT CRAMP ON THE ROAD TO ATTITASH!<\/p>\n

I remember it like yesterday.\u00c2\u00a0 And Lou does too.<\/p>\n

How did I get from there to here?<\/p>\n

I told him.<\/p>\n

And then asked him the same question.<\/p>\n

There was a degree at Villanova.\u00c2\u00a0 A masters in biology.\u00c2\u00a0 And then an unexpected turn into medical publishing.\u00c2\u00a0 He’d gotten married, he had two children, one with a job of his own.<\/p>\n

My story is different.\u00c2\u00a0 I always knew what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be.\u00c2\u00a0 I wanted to write for "Rolling Stone", but a creative writing teacher at Middlebury was so discouraging, failed to get me to such an extent, that I gave up.\u00c2\u00a0 I moved to Utah and became a freestyle skier.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 A starving freestyle skier.\u00c2\u00a0 Who eventually escaped to L.A. and law school.\u00c2\u00a0 I felt I’d get a good job and go skiing two months a year, thirty days in the winter, thirty days in the summer.\u00c2\u00a0 I thought it would take ten years.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m finally getting close to that goal, decades later.\u00c2\u00a0 As for writing?\u00c2\u00a0 I practiced law for ten minutes, as Jackie Mason says, "Not for me.", had a movie business gig, then a big time music gig and then I was on my ass and starting over.\u00c2\u00a0 In the movie business, and then with this newsletter, in print, when the only people who knew about the Internet were those who invented it.<\/p>\n

Anyway, with hindsight Lou regretted that he hadn’t made a career in music.\u00c2\u00a0 But he was still a fan.\u00c2\u00a0 He dropped some names of bands. And said he was into prog rock.\u00c2\u00a0 And in a follow-up e-mail today, he attached a picture, of himself at ProgDay, a prog rock festival in North Carolina.<\/p>\n

It was still him.\u00c2\u00a0 I could see through the years.\u00c2\u00a0 But what truly stunned me was I was unfamiliar with this festival that Lou had traveled over numerous states to attend.<\/p>\n

Google is my friend, it wasn’t hard to be informed about ProgDay, I started a response, saying I knew Derek Shulman of Gentle Giant and when Jason ran Lava at Atlantic he signed this band…<\/p>\n

You get old and it takes a while for your brain to cycle through your mental rolodex.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s see, the lead singer was Steve Wilson…PORCUPINE TREE!<\/p>\n

And that’s when I remembered "Radioactive Toy".<\/p>\n

This was not on either of the Lava albums.\u00c2\u00a0 It was the opening track on a boxed set that the manager sent.\u00c2\u00a0 But it was this track I could not stop playing.\u00c2\u00a0 I pulled it up in iTunes.\u00c2\u00a0 It sounded so GOOD!<\/p>\n

Prog rock has a bad name.\u00c2\u00a0 The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame just about ignores it.\u00c2\u00a0 But for a time in the early seventies, ethereal music by skilled players constituted a giant niche.\u00c2\u00a0 But unlike metal, prog rock has never really come back.<\/p>\n

But Roger Waters can tour "The Wall" and "Radioactive Toy" is cut from the same cloth.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s different.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s fantastic.<\/p>\n

We never forget who we are, where we come from.\u00c2\u00a0 And this bag of memories on our back gets ever more heavy.\u00c2\u00a0 Some try to jettison it. Create a new face, forget their old friends.\u00c2\u00a0 But that ex-spouse is still out there, as are your other mistakes as well as your joys.\u00c2\u00a0 And your knees start to buckle under the weight, it’s hard to slog forward.\u00c2\u00a0 But we do.\u00c2\u00a0 In a world where it’s all about the shiny, fresh and new. What to do?\u00c2\u00a0 Play a record.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s how the people of my generation cope, when they’ve got more questions than answers.\u00c2\u00a0 We put on music and let our minds drift…<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Radioactive toy Turn it up! Yesterday I got an e-mail from Lou.\u00c2\u00a0 Was I the same Bob Lefsetz who worked at Camp Tohkomeupog in the summer of ’71? I went to Jewish camp growing up.\u00c2\u00a0 Where the focus is more on the social than the physical.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’m not gonna complain much about that, everything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-Wc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3608"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3610,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608\/revisions\/3610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}