Dan Fogelberg : 1951 to 2007

It’s New Year’s Eve and I planned to write a short post to commemorate the New Year. The first thing that came to mind was Dan Fogelberg’s song, Same Old Lang Syne. I Googled Dan Fogelberg and was saddened to learn that he passed away on December 16th this year of prostate cancer.

Dan Fogelberg started making records in 1972, but it was in 1981, the year the album, The Innocent Age was released that his music became a part of my life. I got to RAF Bentwaters, my first permanent Air Force assignment, in September of 1981 when I was twenty years old.

Music was everything to us then. Stereo equipment was the one big thing that was cheap for us to buy on base and we all had elaborate multi-component systems. Those of us who were serious audiophiles bought albums and played them only once. We cleaned them, placed them carefully on our turntables and recorded them to high quality cassette tapes, or even better still, to reel-to-reel tapes and then we never played them again.

My friend Dee had a boyfriend named Yogi, who played acoustic guitar and sang. Yogi rented an ancient old English house with four or five other guys and played us Same Old Lang Syne for the first time. One of Yogi’s roommates, Eric also played guitar and they played that album over and over until they learned all of the songs and could play them too.

I spent my first Christmas in England at that house with a half dozen other young airmen, cooking a Christmas dinner that wasn’t ready until close to midnight, drinking and listening to records. It’s hard to imagine now that a song about meeting an old lover in a grocery store, years after the romance was over could have touched us so deeply at the time, but I suppose when you’re that young, all romantic songs seem to be about you. I guess that’s the mark of a great story teller, which is what he was. He makes you relate to experiences you might not even have had, but yearn to someday.

Although I was looking for a video of Same Old Lang Syne, Fogelberg’s song Leader of the Band is a more fitting tribute to him.