Blinding demise of a superstar

By Bill Bonvie

On Dec. 6, I e-mailed a little quiz to a number of friends, more than half of whom are my contemporaries - that is, over 60. Admonishing them not to cheat with Google, I asked if they could name the "legendary songwriter, recording artist, guitarist, and Grammy winner whose premature death occurred 20 years ago today."

Although a few predictably guessed John Lennon - who was shot to death on Dec. 8, 1980 - none got the right answer: Roy Orbison. But what really knocked me for a loop was the response from a former classmate, now an award-winning novelist, who, upon being told the correct answer, replied, "That figures. I love Roy Orbison but unfortunately didn't know he was dead."

It figures indeed. When the tragedy-plagued creator of such timeless tunes as "Blue Bayou," "Crying," "Oh, Pretty Woman," and "Only the Lonely" died of a massive heart attack at 52, he got a respectable amount of recognition, but nothing that couldn't have been easily missed.

If you did happen to catch his obituary in the New York Times, however, you would have read this comment from Bruce Springsteen: "His arrangements were complex and operatic. They had rhythm and movement, and they addressed the underside of pop romance. They were scary. His voice was unearthly."

A similar eulogy might have characterized the work of Dan Fogelberg, an incredibly gifted singer-songwriter who, over three decades, created some of the most exquisite melodies and poetic lyrics in the annals of pop music. Fogelberg's discography includes not only a number of double-platinum albums (and one triple-platinum), but, in my estimation, two of the finest collections ever produced by a recording artist: The Innocent Age (1981) and Full Circle (2003), which was the last he would record.

Fogelberg died of prostate cancer at the age of 56 in December 2007, leaving many of his fans (myself included) with a profound sense of personal loss. Yet most newspapers carried just a modest wire story on his passing, and the evening news mentioned it only briefly.

The relatively reserved respects and trivial tributes the media accorded such prodigious talents become that much harder to swallow given the hype and histrionics that surrounded the recent death of Michael Jackson.

It wasn't just the wall-to-wall news coverage, of a sort ordinarily reserved for a president or pontiff. There were also the excessive exaltations emanating from various public figures, to the effect that Jackson was no less than the greatest genius ever known to the world of contemporary music.

A cultural icon he may well have been, and there's no denying that his records outsold everyone else's. But to imply that Jackson's legacy to our musical culture outshined the contributions of all other artists, or that his talent was on a scale that somehow eclipsed theirs, is gratuitous and offensive to many of us (however out of the mainstream we might be) who may have found other music far more beguiling or aesthetically pleasing.

It's bad enough that some of our most gifted performers have gotten relatively little attention upon departing this mortal coil. But when the death of a superstar pulls in such an untoward amount of acclaim, it's almost as if some kind of massive artistic vacuum consumes all of our collective appreciation, leaving our society even more oblivious than usual to the brilliance of so many other stars in our firmament.