One Fine Day

I have a theory—any phone call before six o’clock AM can’t possibly be good news. I received such a call on the morning of May 1, 2009. On the other end of the line was Chip Lightman, Danny Gans’ good friend and manager of eighteen years.

Chip said, “RG, I have something to tell you and I didn’t want you to see it on the news.”

Immediately several images and thoughts battled for preeminence in my mind, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

“Danny died in his sleep.”

Suddenly the air had been sucked out of the room and I felt as if my body had been transported onto one of those old Tilt-a-Wheel carnival rides. Vertigo kicked in, a total loss of spatial reference.

To be honest with you, I’m not sure what I said next but I remember very clearly what Chip said.

“Danny really cared about you, RG,” a fact of which I was well aware, but it was good to hear it anyway.

We chatted for a few more minutes before he had to end the call, as there were dozens of people to notify about the death and a limited amount of time in which to beat the news reports. After he hung up I must confess that I fell completely apart. Explaining to my worried spouse what had happened came in short bursts, as I was unable to control the emotion longer than a few seconds at a time.

The whole thing was so surreal we had to turn on the news just to see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears that our dear friend had, indeed, passed away.

Gone.

He was gone.

How was that even possible? We had talked the day before about getting together that very afternoon, and now...

It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can wake up thinking that it’s just another day—just another in a long string of fine days only to learn that it is anything but.

The rest of the morning passed in a blur as we tried vainly to make sense of the tragedy. Details were spotty and mainly speculative.

“What now?” my wife asked, her red-rimmed eyes a mirror of my own.

What now, indeed? It was a question certain to be on the lips of family, friends, band members and crew who were suddenly unemployed, business associates. It would be a long, long while before any of us found a suitable answer.

I had the uncommon privilege of being Danny’s friend for a little over twelve years. During that time we had many, many conversations about his life, his career, his faith, his passions, the joys and pain and his singular focus on being the best entertainer the world had ever known.

Mainly, though, it was just two friends talking over a set of bench presses at the gym, an afternoon coffee at Starbucks or lunch at one of his favorite restaurants.

Given his fondness for interjecting one of his patented vocal impressions into our talks, I used to tease him about it feeling like I was having a conversation with, “two hundred people.”

It has been said that we are born at sunrise and we die at sunset, and in between we spend our days and years chasing daylight. Danny Gans pursued and caught the sun, swallowing it whole and turning it outward to an adoring public who basked in its light for a season...a season foreshortened by his untimely death.

I miss you, my brother, my friend.