John Mabee attended Glen Oak grade school with the star and played drums alongside him in his first band, The Clan. The band practiced in Mabee’s parents’ basement on Kinsey Street, near OSF Saint Francis Medical Center. Even back then, Mabee knew he was in the presence of a talented musician. “It was very apparent that he was an artist, I guess, is a good way to put it,” Mabee said of the performer, who was born Aug.

13, 1951, in Peoria to Margaret Irvine and Lawrence Fogelberg, a band director at Woodruff High School. “He could play the guitar by ear, he could play the saxophone, the piano. Heck, he could play the drums better than I could.” The Clan started getting gigs at area high schools and Expo Gardens and were regulars at the VFW hall in Eureka. “If we had a good stretch, we’d make enough to buy another amplifier,” Mabee said.

“We never made any money at it, but it kept us out of trouble, and it was a lot of fun.” Fogelberg went on to attend the University of Illinois and then to bigger and better things. Mabee said they lost touch over the years, but he always followed Fogelberg’s career. So did Mike Roeder, who attended Woodruff High School and served on the student council with Fogelberg. “I remember him as a really outgoing, kind of vivacious guy that everybody liked,” said Roeder, who now lives in Madison, Wis.

“He was so clean cut. . . . When he actually went into music on his own, it surprised people that he took the initiative to go ahead and do that.” Fogelberg probably is best known for songs like “Same Old Lang Syne,” which was inspired by a chance encounter with a past lover who is now married. The story goes that they bumped into each other at a convenience store at the corner of Frye and Prospect in the mid-1970s. It was Christmas Eve and the snow was falling.