Touring with Fogelberg was his old friend and manager Azoff, now a management legend with a client base that has included the Eagles, Journey and Christina Aguilera. Ricardo Baca: or rbaca denverpost. By Ricardo Baca rbaca denverpost. He was 56, and his death came three years after being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.
More in News. Part of the Plan. Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Jayme Lake. Best Lighting Design. Jason Kantrowitz. Best Musical Direction. Stephen Kummer. Best Set Design. Jason Sherwood.
Best Sound Design. Josh Liebert. Best Younger Actor. Had he been living in California, in Los Angeles or San Francisco, it might've been different, but in the absence of a highly receptive audience, or a surrounding coterie of serious musician friends, or much encouragement anywhere in Peoria to pursue music, he ended up embracing other goals.
After finishing high school, it was on to the University of Illinois at Champaign as a drama major, in hopes of an acting career, and then a switch to painting. This was all going on amid the political agonies of the Vietnam War, which was still going on full-tilt at the time, and Fogelberg wasn't isolated from the tensions over the war as they manifested themselves. He fell back into music through one of the relatively few public centers for what passed for a counterculture in central Illinois, a club called The Red Herring, owned by a friend named Peter Berkow.
The latter invited Fogelberg to play, and soon he was building a local audience with his sound and his songs, and it was from that beginning that Fogelberg came to the attention of a University of Illinois alumnus named Irving Azoff , who at the time was managing REO Speedwagon and was thinking that it was time for him to move up to the next level in the music business.
One performance by Fogelberg , accompanied by his solo acoustic guitar at an otherwise drunken fraternity event in front of a singularly oblivious audience, sold Azoff on his prospects and the idea that his own future might well be quite favorable if tied to Fogelberg.
He moved to Los Angeles and Azoff began the task of getting him signed. Fogelberg 's debut album, Home Free , recorded in Nashville, with Norbert Putnam producing, was an embarrassment of riches, musically speaking. A few years later, after the success of acts such as the Eagles , such distinctions would matter less, but in , the music marketplace was that segregated stylistically.
He also managed to continue with Columbia with help from his manager. Fogelberg quickly discovered that he had a sympathetic and enthusiastic partner in Walsh , and everything literally fell into place, even Graham Nash 's presence at Walsh 's request singing harmonies on the resulting album, Souvenirs , which featured a range of renowned Los Angeles-based musicians.
The results were more than golden -- they ended up double platinum, as "Part of the Plan" reached the Top 20 in and Souvenirs rode those charts for six months and sold steadily for years after. The album had mostly the same mix of elements as its predecessor, but this time it was widely heard and accepted.
Now Fogelberg was a star, leading an Illinois-spawned band called Fool's Gold and touring almost constantly for the next two years. In the midst of it all, he completed a third album, Captured Angel -- which he produced himself this time -- which showed him extending his sound in more ambitious directions, and in surprising circumstances. It was during that he'd returned home to spend time with his father, who had been hospitalized, and afterward, while staying in Peoria, cut what were supposed to be demos of the songs he wanted to use on his new album, with Fogelberg playing every instrument and doing all the vocals.
Instead, when Azoff and Davis heard the demos, they insisted that this was the album, and that he could never recapture the feel he'd gotten on songs like "Comes and Goes" working with other musicians. He eventually came to an agreement with the label that the percussion parts would be redone by Russ Kunkel , and the final version of Captured Angel included Norbert Putnam on bass on certain tracks, and Al Perkins on pedal steel guitar and David Lindley on fiddle, plus some string arrangements by Glen Spreen , but otherwise it was truly a Fogelberg solo effort.
That album only solidified his fame, as well as making him a special favorite of college students especially coeds across the country, and a tour with the Eagles in -- who, by then, were being managed by Azoff -- only enhanced his profile. Fogelberg moved to Colorado in the mid-'70s, and his initial time there resulted in the songs that became the basis for his next album, Nether Lands Ironically, the songs came at the end of an extended dry spell as a songwriter, the first of his adult life.
He found himself unable to compose for months, and then, suddenly, he started writing again, but in a much more ornate, elaborately conceived, classically influenced idiom. The album was a hit, and he was still riding that initial wave of recognition and the concertizing that went with it, even if he was now taking the audience in some unexpected directions.
Fogelberg decided at this point to step back a bit -- get off that wave -- and do something purely for his own satisfaction musically. In , he began work on a record that was to be more of a personal indulgence than anything else, the non-commercial side of Dan Fogelberg , sort of his equivalent to those instrumental albums that Frank Sinatra had issued as a conductor a couple of times in his career, or Neil Young 's later Everybody's Rockin'. He teamed up on what became a duo album with jazz flutist Tim Weisberg for the album Twin Sons of Different Mothers -- but instead of being a curio or a footnote in his output, it ended up charting high and generating a huge hit single in the guise of "The Power of Gold" which, ironically, had been added to the LP at the last minute.
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