SON RISE

A soap opera set is not the typical launching pad for a rock ’n’ roll band, but it worked for Senses Fail.

“It was my mother’s idea,” said Buddy Nielsen, the band’s founder and lead vocalist. “She had played the role of Nola Chamberlain on ‘Guiding Light’ and thought it would be a great place to shoot the video of a single from our debut album, ‘Let It Enfold You.’

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Buddy's father is actor Tom Nielsen, who played Floyd on Guiding Light from 1979 to 1985.

Floyd was the father of Nola's first child, Stacey (the baby she tried to pass off as Kelly's to keep him from marrying Morgan). Nola's second child, a son, was fathered by her husband, Quint Chamberlain. But Nola and Quint's baby was conceived on the air due to Brown's real-life, off-screen pregnancy by Nielsen. Got that?

Young Buddy played the role of the Chamberlain heir, and was at the center of one of soaps' earliest attempt at viewer-interaction. In 1984, viewers were asked to vote by phone over what the new parents should name their son. The choices included Quinton Jr. (after Nola's husband), Thomas Henry (after her father and Quint's; she probably could have reversed the order, but then he'd be the kid from E.T.) and Anthony James (after two of Nola's brothers).

Anthony James was the viewers' choice, but the tot was mostly called AJ and, when he returned briefly to Springfield in 1996 in the form of actor Ethan Erickson, it had been shortened just to J.

To make matters even more confusing, while Quint and Nola named their son Anthony James, Lisa Brown and Tom Nielsen named their son James Anthony. But called him Buddy.

Tom Nielsen left GL in 1985 when mild-mannered Floyd was revealed to have killed Andy Ferris, a villain who'd planted a bomb that injured Beth Raines -- the woman Floyd admitted he loved from afar. Floyd was sent to prison and never heard from again.

Nielsen and Brown divorced in 1985.