March 27, 2003
3:05 PM

Chicago (The Band)


Once again, I've gotten into a "new" band that's been around for years, and started buying their CDs. In recent years it was Van Halen, Judas Priest, Can, The Residents, and King Crimson. This time it's Chicago.

They're a band I did know about by the time I was about 8, mainly because of my father. He'd been a long-time fan. Around this time the "Chicago 17" album was new and getting decent airplay on Mtv, giving the band a boost of hits again (Stay The Night, Along Comes a Woman, Hard Habit To Break, You're The Inspiration). Some time that year I was vacationing down in Tampa FL with my parents and my brother. We were sitting in the rented car, about to drive out of a parking garage. Suddenly we heard on the radio that Chicago was playing a concert in Tampa that week. My dad turned to everybody in excitement. He got tickets later and we all went to the concert.

That was the band I ever saw in concert, and I still remember much of the night vividly. Never the less, here is my oldest recollected concert review possible. Our seats were off to the side of the stage and on one of the balconies, and we had a great view of the stage. A stand-up comedian opened up the show. My brother and I still remember some of the jokes he was doing (Morris the 9-lives cat, John Couger Melloncamp). He broke out a pack of lifesavers and threw a few other packs out to the front rows. He explained how to do certain celebrity impressions by putting so many lifesavers in your mouth in certain ways. Later he spit out the lifesavers on to the floor in front of the stage. Some roadies sneaked by to pour sand on them, for whatever precautionary reasons.

At some point when there wasn't an act on stage, some guy down on the floor was turning his head and glaring at me. Actually, he very well may not have been; it's hard to tell at such a distance if somebody's actually staring right at you, or somebody else around you, or something else entirely. I couldn't think of why, out of all the thousands of people at this place, he was staring at me. But it was still kind of freaking me out. I eventually mentioned it to my mom, but I forget what she said.

Anyway...yeah, the band! It started off with some instrumental piece, and the lights flashed around until the focused on something on the stage. I think it was a "Chicago" logo, no longer than 2 feet. In any case, it was hard to see what the focus was all about. And of course, the band came on. I think what I found most fascinating at the time was looking at the guys in the band, especially the more obscure members like the keyboard player or drummer, and realizing that they were those same exact people, in the flesh, that I saw in those videos countless times on Mtv. At some point the roadies snuck pieces of a large synthesizer to a dark part of the stage, then somebody on the band went over to play on it for a few songs.

Peter Cetera was of course taking most of the lead vocals. (At some point they had a hit where he took the lead on a power ballad, so those are the kinds of songs the record company kept demanding. And now I can see why he left the band before the next album -- he thought he was better than rest of the band.) When the newer songs like "Hard Habit To Break" came on, a bunch of teeny boppers rushed to the front of the stage. They all screamed when the band got to that pre-chorus hook. I doubt any of them had a clue that the band had actually been together since 1967. At some point somebody threw some kind of yellow neon clothing (very big at the time) up on stage. I think it was a sock or something. Peter kept running up to it and kicking it during a song, eventually kicking it off stage. No sense in having something to potentially trip on, I guess.

My dad bought these brown and white "Chicago" logo pins for my brother and I. I know I still have mine somewhere. We got back to the hotel room that night and there were a bunch of college kids next door, still making noise into the night. My dad still remembers all this too. He asked them to quiet down the first time, but they got loud again. I think he eventually called the front desk and they dispersed.

Fast forward to Xmas 2002. The new Chicago remasters are out, so I buy the first 3 albums for my dad. He's gotten so many tapes and CDs from them over the years, but most of them were compilations. I had a feeling that he'd really want to hear those original albums in their entirety, the same ones that he had in college. He was playing them on the stereo that Xmas, and really enjoyed them. But they really caught MY ear too.

Wow. This was the same band that did all those power ballads in the 80s and 90s? Or even comparing to earlier material, the same band who did "Color My World" and "Saturday In The Park"? What came out of the speakers was a series of real powerful rock songs, with long jams and plenty of dark and avant-garde moments. The horns were there, but were right up front, and just accented the power of the music.

I mean when you get right down to it, "25 or 6 to 4" is a heavy metal song with an added horn section. There's a myth that the song is about an acid trip, but the song is actually about the song writing process itself (the title refers to the time, about 25 or 26 minutes to 4:00AM). Likewise there are people who still believe The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is about LSD. It's not. Believe me, if somebody wanted to explicitly write a rock song about acid in the late 1960s, they'd have no reservations.

Some interesting trivia I picked up about Chicago: their plan from the beginning was to be a rock band with a fully integrated (not just background for a few songs) horn section. And they certainly were the first to do that. They're also the 2nd most over-all successful band from the US (1st is the Beach Boys), and certainly the US's longest running band (36 years and counting...the only band in the world that has them beat is Rolling Stones).

I could go on about Chicago, but I have to cut this short. All this biannual review bullshit at work is taking its toll.

"Instead of reaching into the second album for a third single, Columbia [Records] and Chicago decided to try to re-stimulate interest in the first album, and succeeded. [...] Ironically, Chicago's belated singles success cost the group its 'underground' imprimatur. 'All of a sudden,' Loughnane recalls, 'people started saying we sold out. The same music! Exactly the same songs!' - Chicagotheband.com

"Nowadays the music business doesn't focus on music for the sake of music. Nowadays the music business focuses on music for the sake of dollars. And that is pretty much across the board. It's become a lot of suits with a certain idea, a certain artist, a certain sound in mind, and you're competing with a style. You're not really free to do, for instance, double discs, like we used to do. You can put more than 10 songs on a CD, but whether or not that music is going to go on that CD with the same fulfillment to the artist or the same recognition is questionable. Nowadays formats are the thing on radio. Nowadays radio grabs so many songs that they play those songs for so many months, and that's the only songs they will play.

"And not only that but we became successful to the point of being recognized solely on the basis of one type of song, and that's the power ballad. With the enormous success of 'If You Leave Me Now,' radio decided that that was Chicago's sound. And I can't tell you how many attempts we made at pushing up-tempo songs to get on records. Fans would come up to us and go, 'What happened to you guys? You've been eating too much pabulum. What happened to the guts and soul and funk that you guys had back when? Now you guys have sold out.' We heard that so many times. And our answer to that was, well, we actually became victims of the success of one type of song was embraced by mass media as our sound. And no matter how hard we tried to knock that door down and get to another, like a 'Make Me Smile' or a 'Beginnings' or a '25 or 6 to 4' we've been one up-tempo song short for 30 years. You know, '25 or 6 to 4' is the encore song every night. I don't care where we are, when it is � that song has to be the closer of the show because that rock 'n' roll anthem from this band. There ain't any others.

"But I'm not here to look a gift horse in the mouth. Perhaps one of the reasons we're still sitting here talking to you or rehearsing for another tour... is because of the success of that ballad song. And perhaps this continued success and longevity will get us finally to the point over that hump where we can start sneaking in some more daring compositions."

- Goldmine interview

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