kill the fire and turn to the sun

now playing: dan fogelberg, "face the fire"



one of my absolute favorite guitar solos, the end of that song...builds perfectly to the end of the song.


at some point, though, i gotta turn this off and brush up on my nik everett a little bit...first full band rehearsal tonight.


anyway, a couple of things today - last night, my buddy blake sent me a link to a blog article that quoted dan's mother in the peoria journal star, saying that the cancer had spread to his bones, and that he was undergoing experimental treatment at Harvard Medical Center...first with hormone therapy and a nutrition program, then a new form of chemotherapy ("not the kind that tears you up", his mother said). today, though, dan's official site refuted much of the article, saying that "the quotes attributed to my elderly mother not only misrepresent the extent of my illness, but also the treatment involved". (you can read the original peoria journal star article here and another news article referring to it here.)

i wonder how much of this is typical celebrity posturing posing as rumor control, personally...it's certainly hard, from the outside, to separate truth from fiction, and i find myself torn between wanting to know everything that's going on out of my own sense of concern for one of my heroes...and maintaining a distance and taking in the news as it becomes available and quelling my curiosity out of respect for his always-guarded privacy. that idiotic "inquiring minds want to know" phrase seems to come to mind...

this whole thing just sucks.

i googled the 'net looking for a picture that i know to exist of dan playing the gretsch guitar that's at the reykjavik hard rock cafe (the one identical to the one i own), but i couldn't find a copy of the one i have...but this one is from the 1982 solo acoustic tour - the first time i saw him:

yesterday, to keep myself distracted and disengaged from the perpetual sameness that's settling over the post-UNIX-outage work environment, i went to brian andreas' storypeople website and collected a long webpages' worth of my favorite andreas quotes and put them up on my webspace for future referral. i ordered one of his prints to give to my daughter a little over a week ago, which should be arriving today, according to the good prophets at ups.com.


i'm a huge fan of david corn. he's the washington editor of the nation, and i link to both his nation column and his blog in my right-hand column...but this week, he has a great article on steve earle in mother jones about his new record, called the revolution starts...now (read it here). i thought it was a stretch for him, originally, until i read the article and learned that earle's new record will have a pretty blatant political undertone...which, of course, is just fine with me. david is a great writer, though...i've been a fan for some time now.


my buddy mitch is clamoring for poco stories...which i'll probably oblige later today. i need to get out of this room for a while first.