The Ninth House

It was probably 1980. Although it could have been 1979. The album, Bombs Away Dream Babies, was released in 1979, and I was a college freshman in the fall of 1979, and that’s when I first remember hearing it. So it was probably around then.

I could have heard it on any number of radio stations, but I probably heard it first on WQDR Raleigh, back when it was one of the Southeast’s pioneering album rock FMs, the first station Lee Abrams consulted, the one that put the Superstars album rock format on the national map. ‘QDR was a glorious cliché, staffed by laid-back jocks who sounded stoned and probably were. When I think of it, I invariably envision Q-SKY, the fictional West Coast album rocker from the 1978 radio fairy tale FM. ‘QDR might have been nothing like that in reality, but who cares about reality?

I visited ‘QDR once, before the owners flipped it to country in 1984 while it was still at the top of its game. I don’t remember why or how I got in there, but there I was. Just a couple of years a jock myself then, and there I was, standing in WQD-F-ing-R.

All I remember is, the lights were low and the hallway walls were carpeted and hung with gold records – Clapton, Tom Petty, Heart, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Eagles, The Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan…

I swear you could smell the pot smoke soaked into the shag. It was exactly what I wanted it to be. It was cool as hell.

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I’ve been meaning to write this for a while now. The holidays got in the way, but maybe that was for the best. It gave me time to really think about what I wanted to say.

And here it is.

It is okay to like Dan Fogelberg.

Go ahead. You can say it. Here, watch me:

I like Dan Fogelberg. Some of Dan Fogelberg’s music, I loved. And still do.

Dan Fogelberg died of prostate cancer on December 16th, 2007. He was 56. His most recent publicity photos show a good-looking guy, clean-shaven and smiling, the kind of guy who makes middle-aged moms blush and their daughters giggle.

Unfortunately, his reputation didn’t weather the years as well as he. For some folks of a certain age, Fogelberg’s name has become the go-to punch line for jokes about 1970s-era granola-munching, Chukka boot-wearing Sensitive Guys. Many critics loathed him. Rolling Stone’s review of 1979’s Phoenix is so contemptuous, you can damn near picture the author spitting on the album cover.

It’s less troublesome to dismiss Dan Fogelberg, as have most eulogists I’ve read, as that “1970’s soft rock singer-songwriter” who scored a few hits than it is to set aside that fashionable prejudice and honestly consider his work. Or, more telling, his work’s popularity.

The fact that so many people evidently aren’t willing to do that – and worse, are dismissing Fogelberg as little more than a footnote to 1970s and early 80s pop – is really getting under my skin.

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