Beloved Central Illinois Son Dan Fogelberg Passes Away

I read at the DU that Dan Fogelberg passed away this afternoon at age 56. He died of prostate cancer or complications thereof. He had been diagnosed 3 years ago. And with his diagnosis, he encouraged all men over 50 to get seek tests or preventive measures.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUKN1633342120071216

Dan Fogelberg was from Peoria, IL, about a 90 minutes from where I live. From his website:

Daniel Grayling Fogelberg was born in Peoria on August 13, 1951. His father taught music in local high schools and colleges, gave private lessons, and conducted

school bands. Dan's early creativity surfaced in imaginative ways to avoid piano practice. " I used to fake injuries," he said proudly, "even taping up my finger and saying I jammed it playing baseball. But it wasn't a trick you could use a lot." Though he didn't like lessons, he loved the instrument itself, and would spend endless happy hours at the keys, sounding out the hits of the day.

In church, he loved the music but grew restless during the sermons. To keep him occupied, his folks provided pen and paper, thus fueling his love for drawing and painting that has extended throughout his life. He was a constructive kid quick to create his own fun -- At a cub scout jamboree where boys hurled baseballs at old records as a kind of carnival sport, he collected all the unbroken ones, a great bounty of old obscure fifties pop and college fight songs.

His grandfather was a steelworker.

His maternal grandfather, a steelworker from Scotland who worked at a foundry in Peoria, gave him an old Hawaiian slide guitar. It had pictures of dancing hula girls engraved on it, as well as steel strings about a half-inch from the neck, tough for anyone, but nearly impossible for an eleven year old beginner. Yet he took to it naturally, forcing him to acquire a strong left hand as he taught himself chords from his Mel Bay guitar book.

Amazing, taught himself how to play a guitar. Natural gift.

I skip to when he was a student at the University of Illinois, an institution in the town I live in:

After[high school] graduation, he felt he could have gone in many directions, and eventually decided to pursue acting at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Finding the college acting scene to be more political than theatrical, he switched majors to study art, with aspirations of becoming a serious painter.

Yet music kept calling, this time in the form of a kindred soul, musician Peter Berkow, who ran a little folk music club called The Red Herring. Berkow invited him to perform, and before long Fogelberg was a cherished part of the burgeoning coffee house scene. "I started meeting like-minded people, musicians who were bright and well read, and I realized that I was finally free of the provincialism of high school." He started playing his own songs, and the spirit of the scene shifted from politics to music: "The Red Herring went from being a hide-out for pinko leftists who were plotting the overthrow of the government to a really creative musical scene. And it started packing people in."

He eventually dropped out of UIUC, went on to California, stopping in Colorado for awhile when he ran out of money, and happily worked on his music while taking a temporary job. Song from Half Mountain was among the tunes that arose out of that respite.

He went to Los Angeles, made some good albums. The one I was introduced to at age 15 was Souvenirs. I loved it. He had some great musicians working for him.


Pass on to 1979. Remember Three Mile Island in PA and the risk of a nuclear holocast? Fogelberg released the following year on his Phoenix CD, "Face the Fire". Here are the lyrics:

I hear the thunder
Three miles away
The island's leaking
Into the bay
The poison is spreading
The demon is free
And people are running from
What they can't even see.

Face the fire
You can't turn away
The risk grows greater
With each passing day
The waiting's over
The moment has come
To kill the fire
And turn to the sun.

They'll take your money
And then take your health
To line their pockets with
Unequaled wealth
These men are under
The power of gold
We won't be safe until we
Shut them down cold.

Face the fire
You can't turn away
The risk grows greater
With each passing day
The waiting's over
The moment has come
To kill the fire
And turn to the sun.

The people came to the capitol town
One hundred thousand of them
Laid their hearts down
They screamed in anger
And broadcast their fears
Just to have them
Fall on deaf ears.

face the fire
you cant turn away
the risk grows greater
with each passing day
the waitings over
the moment has come
to kill the fire
and turn to the sun
to kill the fire
and turn to the sun

Very progressive and persuasive. Forever then I was against Nuclear facilities since they were costly to maintain and the waste was unaccountable.

But I loved his next album/CD Collection, "The Innocent Age". On it was the Same Ol Lang Syne piece I was always think of when I was last with my college sweetheart in 1984.

I loved Dan Fogelberg, and passed by his house in CO twice, albeit I was told by the Pagosa Springs librarians he had been away for a couple of years before we started visiting in 2004. And the cancer was one of the reasons. Pagosa Springs hasn't a big facility to treat cancer.

RIP to one of my favorite composers/singers, Dan Fogelberg, the Leader of my band.