Chapter VI: Revolution

By December 1969, Chicago Transit Authority, still without benefit of a hit single, was a gold-selling album, and Chicago was a famous band. It changed their lives. "Your life dream is to have a hit record," says Parazaider. "It was amazing because we were close friends, we had gone through all of this upheaval of leaving Chicago, moving to L.A. at a young age, leaving our families, just rolling the dice. We stuck real close together, kept everybody's ego in check. I think for some guys in the group it was harder to cope with the success than others. I don't think there were any of us that sat down around my kitchen table that day in February of '67 and said, "Hey, our goal is to be famous." The one good thing that seemed to help us is, we were the faceless band behind that logo."

Indeed, though critics would always misinterpret their intentions, Chicago's logo and its facelessness were very much in keeping with the style of the late '60's that valued group effort over individual ego. (To the delight of the poor folks who have to put up the letters on theater marquees , the group shortened its name simply to Chicago during its first year as a national act.)

In early December, Chicago flew to London to begin a 14-date European tour. Robert Lamm remembers it as a tour during which the band played for audiences that understood them and took them seriously for the first time. "Even we were not aware of how edgy and different the first album was," he says. "We were just doing what we were doing, and we were hoping that it was different enough for people to notice it was different. But when international audiences heard the album, it just really stopped them cold. We played in clubs all over Europe, and the audience took to it much more readily than we had experienced anywhere in the States. When we came back, the album had gone gold, and we began headlining a little bit, but still the feeling was that American audiences didn't really get it. They got that the band was becoming popular, but we didn't have the sense that they were hearing the music for what it was. So, I think laying in Europe and being treated to a certain musical and artistic respect was eye-opening and really encouraging to the band. It made us realize that what we were doing was substantial, was artistic, and was respectable rather than just this pop commodity that we always felt like in the States, because of the audience, the press, and the way the record company regarded us. That success in Europe and the feeling that we got from the regard we were given as artists really told us in a way that has lasted to this day that this is more than just kid stuff."

In between tour dates in August 1969, Chicago had found the time to record its second album. One of the first songs Lamm brought in for the album was "25 Or 6 To 4," a song with a lyric Chicago fans have pondered ever since. What does that title mean? "It's just a reference to the time of day," says Lamm. As for the lyric: "The song is about writing a song. It's not mystical."

Perhaps the album's most ambitious piece was Pankow's "Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon," which affected the tone of the whole LP. "The second record had more of a classical approach to it," says Parazaider, "whereas the first one was really a raw thing. The second one seemed a little more polished."

"I had been inspired by classics," says Pankow of the Ballet. I had bought the Brandenburg concertos, and I was listening to them one night, thinking, man, how cool! Bach 200 years ago, wrote this stuff, and it cooks. If we put a rock 'n' roll rhythm section to something like this, that could be really cool. I was also a big Stravinsky fan. His stuff is classical, yet it's got a great passion to it. We were on the road, and I had a Fender Rhodes piano between Holiday Inn beds. I found myself going back to some arpeggios, a la Bach, and along came "Colour My World." It's just a simple 12-bar pattern, but it just flowed. Then I called Walt into the room, and I said, "Hey, Walt, you got your flute? Why don't you try a few lines?," and one thing led to another. These things were disjointed, but yet I liked it all, and ultimately it was a matter of just sewing these things together, creating segues and interludes."

The second album also saw the debut of a new songwriter in the band, although the circumstances under which be became a writer are unfortunate. During a break in the touring in the summer of 1969, Peter Cetera was set upon at a baseball game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. "Four marines didn't like a long-haired rock 'n' roller in a baseball park," Cetera recounts, "and of course I was a Cub fan, and I was in Dodger Stadium, and that didn't do so well. I got in a fight and got a broken jaw in three places, and I was in intensive care for a couple of days."

The incident had two separate effects on Cetera's career. The first was an impact on his singing style. "The only funny thing I can think about the whole incident," he says, "is that, with my jaw wired together, I actually went on the road, and I was actually singing through my clenched jaw, which, to this day, is still the way I sing."

The second effect of the incident was Cetera's first foray into compositions. With a broken jaw, the singer had some silent time on his hands. "I was lying in my bed convalescing when they landed on the moon, and I grabbed my bass guitar and started this little progression on the bass, and started writing "Where Do We Go From Here." I think Walter Cronkite actually had said that, and I thought, "Wow, where do we go from here?" So, l wrote it about that and about myself and about the world and about everything in general, and that was my first writing credit."

The second album also took a more direct look at the political situation. Chicago had included chants from the Yippie demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic Convention on its first album. The second album's liner notes (penned by Robert Lamm) dedicated the record, the band members, their futures, and their energies "to the people of the revolution and the revolution in all of its forms."

The development of Lamm's political consciousness dated back to the band's last months in their hometown in the spring of 1968. "Chicago actually was rather like a pressure cooker," Lamm recalls. "During the last couple of months that we were there, there was a lot of unrest and there were National Guard troops in the streets. Now, this is before the Democratic convention, and the city was gearing up and already had a built-in fear of, if not Yippies, at least hippies, and we actually experienced it because we were playing clubs. You know, in Chicago you played pretty late, and a couple of us had run into situations where, leaving the club and having to walk through especially the Rush Street area when the bar's were emptying out, there was a lot of angst directed toward longhairs. That was the first inkling that I had that something as simple as growing your hair long could be construed as a political statement. l think I really started paying attention then to the anti-Vietnam War protests, a lot of the rhetoric that was flying back and forth between members of our government and people who were well-known in show business and the media, talking about whether they were against the war or for the war. There was a lot of that kind of thing every day."

When the band moved to California and continued working up original songs, Lamm's awareness of the world around him affected his lyric writing. In songs like "It Better End Soon" and "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?", he reflected on the kinds of questions: political, social, and philosophical that young people around the country were starting to ask. "I'm not sure exactly what led me to the realization that I could write about things other than romantic topics," Lamm says, "but I think just being alive in those times and watching that conflict in Asia unfold on television daily because Lord knows we all sat around and watched a lot of television, then the culture shock of moving from Chicago to California. And then the alternative press, the L.A. Free Press, was very much into the hot topic of revolution. It seemed that the generation of which I was a member and the generation which was peopling the new bands had a connection, and so it seemed natural to give voice to some of the thinking. As pinheaded (he laughs) as some of my opinions and those of some of my contemporaries may have been at the time, it felt really real, and also it felt like it was right, it was right that a lot of bands at the time were giving voice to the idea of the average person having a certain amount of power, and power maybe enough to stand up to the policies of the government and protest the war."

At the same time, a confluence of the music business and the political movements was occurring. "We had begun in 1969 to play universities and colleges, Lamm recalls, "and very often those concerts were used as a springboard for political gatherings". In other words, everybody would show up at the show, and then they would go and talk about either the anti-war effort or the more abstract concept of actual revolution. Then we played the pop festivals, which were a melting pot of everything, everything from free love to drug use to information dissemination about the anti-war movement, political climate, and social issues. So, it was really heavy stuff for everybody because nobody knew what was going on, but we all had a sense that there was some power available, just by the sheer numbers of us."

Looking back, Lamm says, "I think there has been a revolution. You may argue with the term 'revolution,' but I think for those of us in our late teens or early 20's, that sure was a sexy word." Of course, the political activists at the time sought an idealistic and disruptive revolution that would replace "the system." Lamm feels the actual revolution was less concrete, but perhaps ultimately more persuasive.

"In my view, the promise of paradise and peace on earth, that was something we all fervently believed was possible," he says, "and what occurred was something more subtle. I believe that there was a revolution, and I believe that it happened so gradually that we didn't realize what was going on. Even if you take something as mundane as music (he laughs), there's a whole young generation of rap artists who are saying everything they want and actually expressing themselves politically and socially, and people of all cultures are hearing it, and that form of protest has flourished within the system, and it's accepted, and for the most part it's okay, except to extreme right wingers."

The most obvious example of the social/philosophical revolution Lamm perceives are the changes brought about by the civil rights and anti-war movements so prevalent at the time. "I hate to harp on the whole racial thing, but I think that's probably the easiest way to spot that things have changed immensely since the '60's," he says. "Obviously, they're not perfect for people of color in this country, but they are a lot different. We don't think of black men the same way that we did in 1969. We just don't. The stereotype has changed 180 degrees. Then, certainly a lot of the people who were on the front lines, whether civil rights movement, student revolt, or the anti-war movement, now are in the government. You could say they were absorbed by the system, but I think that looking back now, it was fantasy to think that you could replace the system. You couldn't replace the system, but you could change the system." So, perhaps the revolution, in at least some of its forms, has come to pass.

Chapter VII: Success

When it was released in January 1970, the second album, instead of featuring a picture of the band on the cover and a title drawn from one of the songs, had the band's distinctive logo on the cover and was called Chicago II. From the start, Chicago took a conceptual approach to the way it was presented to the public. The album covers were overseen by John Berg, the head of the art department at Columbia Records, and Nick Fasciano designed the logo, which has adorned every album cover in the group catalog. "Guercio was insistent upon the logo being the dominant factor in the artwork," says Pankow, even though the artwork varied greatly from cover to cover. Thus, the logo might appear carved into a rough wooden panel, as on Chicago V, or tooled into an elaborate leatherwork design, like Chicago VII, or become a mouth-watering chocolate bar, for the Chicago X cover, which was a Grammy Award winner.

And then there were those sequential album titles. "People always asked why we were numbering our albums," jokes Cetera, "and the reason is, because we always argued about what to call it. 'All right, III, all right, IV!", Actually, the band never attempted to title the albums, feeling that the music spoke for itself.

In commercial terms, the major change that came with Chicago II was that it opened the floodgates on Chicago as a singles band. In October 1969, Columbia had re-tested the waters by releasing "Beginnings" as a single, but AM radio still wasn't interested, and the record failed to chart. All of this changed, however, when the label excerpted two songs, "Make Me Smile" and "Colour My World," from Pankow's ballet and released them as the two sides of a single in March 1970.

"I was driving in my car down Santa Monica Boulevard in L.A.," Pankow remembers, "and I turned the radio on KHJ and 'Make Me Smile' came on. I almost hit the car in front of me, 'cause it's my song, and I'm hearing it on the biggest station in L.A. At that point, I realized, hey, we have a hit single. They don't play you in L.A. unless you're hit-bound. So, that was one of the more exciting moments in my early career."

The single reached the Top 10, while Chicago II immediately went gold and got to Number 4 on the LP's chart, joining the first album, which was still selling well. A second single, Lamm's "25 Or 6 To 4," was an even bigger hit in the summer of '70, peaking at Number 4.

But instead of reaching into the second album for a third single, Columbia and Chicago decided to try to re-stimulate interest in the first album, and succeeded. The group's next single was "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" which became their third Top 10 hit in a row by the start of 1971. "Up to that time, to be very honest, I don't think people were really ready to hear horns the way we were using them," says Parazaider. "But after we established something with horns '25 Or 6 To 4,' but actually 'Make Me Smile,' which was our first bona fide hit it seemed like it broke the ice and it became easier, and they accepted stuff that was recorded easily a year before."

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!"

As January 1971 rolled around, once again Chicago had found time to record a new double album. "That third album scared us," says Parazaider, "because we basically had run out of the surplus of material that we had, and we were still working a lot on the road. We were afraid that we were getting ready to record a little under the gun. But I don't think it shows." "That whole album was more adventurous in terms of instrumental exploration than the first two albums," says Pankow. "Robert wrote a lot of in-depth stuff."

Cetera also was flexing his muscles as a writer again. "Danny and I had got together one night, and I said, 'I got this little thing that I've been working on,'" he recalls. The result was "Lowdown," which became the second single from Chicago III. (The first was Lamm's "Free.") "I'm still proud of it," Cetera says.

After the singles from Chicago III had run their course, helping the album to its chart peak at Number 2 and its gold record award, Columbia turned back to the first and second albums which were still in the charts, re-releasing as a single "Beginnings" backed by "Colour My World," and then "Questions 67 and 68." "They all become hits," notes Loughnane, "to the point where radio said, 'If you release something off that first album again, we'll never play another one of your records.'"

All of this meant that, with its first three albums, Chicago had reached astonishing popular success. All three double albums were still on the charts throughout 1971, and hits came from each one. But how to top that? In October, Columbia released a lavish four-record box set chronicling the group's week-long stand at Carnegie Hall, the previous April 5-10.

Chicago At Carnegie Hall holds mixed memories for the band members. Cetera feels that all the extra sound equipment inhibited the band's performance. "Within the first two or three songs of the opening night, I'm singing and playing, and all of a sudden the level on my bass drops considerably," Cetera remembers. "I turn around, and there's a roadie out there messing with my knobs. I'm wondering, 'What the hell are you doing?' He goes, 'Well, the sound truck told me to tell you to turn down, and since I couldn't tell you, they told me to go out here and turn you down.' That's kind of what happened all the way along with everybody."

"I hate it," Pankow says. "The acoustics of Carnegie Hall were never meant for amplified music, and the sound of the brass after being miked came out sounding like kazoos." Parazaider, however, notes with pride that the album marks a milestone for the group, that they were the first rock group to sell out Carnegie Hall for a week. "That was an exciting week," adds Lamm, "to actually play in Carnegie Hall."

Lamm got the chance to premiere "A Song For Richard And His Friends," which was to have appeared on Chicago V. April 1971 was a long time before Watergate, and the resignation of a U.S. president was inconceivable, but that didn't stop Lamm from offering a helpful suggestion to Richard M. Nixon. "I love that song," Lamm says, "and later on I did a version of it for my first solo album, Skinny Boy though I didn't end up including it where, in the tag chorus I add the line, 'Thank you, John Dean.' (Dean was the presidential assistant who blew the whistle on Nixon.) I've been told by one of the foremost psychics in Los Angeles that I'm psychic, I just don't know it."

Manager/producer Guercio had to fight Columbia to get the label to release the album, due to its manufacturing cost. He agreed to assume the extra expense if the album didn't sell a million units. The bill never arrived. Chicago At Carnegie Hall went gold out of the box and has since been certified for sales of two million copies. (In fact, according to the current policy of the Record Industry Association of America, that each in a multi-disk set is counted individually, the three-CD album ought to be certified at six million copies.)

"When I listen to some of the Carnegie Hall album, it is really good," says Loughnane. "There's a lot of good material but there's a lot of stuff that I was unhappy with and I didn't think should be released, but that's what it was. There was a history behind that record. The story, the marketing, all of that stuff went into it. The program, the pictures of the building, the diagrams, all of that was part of the charisma, and it worked. But I think we could do great live albums today. I would love to do that"

Though Chicago had made previous visits to Europe and the Far East, it embarked on its first full-scale world tour in February 1972. "We played 16 countries in 20 days," recalls Walt Parazaider. "It's that old movie: If it's Tuesday, it's Belgium. People said, "You went around the world, you played in all those countries." I said, 'Yeah, I remember some of the ceilings in some of the nicest hotels in Europe." But we became an international success, and that was great, because people all over the world really enjoyed our music. And there's nothing more flattering to people who create music than to have somebody singing your song when you're in Germany or Australia or Japan. We marveled at it. We had to pinch ourselves that we were having all the success we were having."

The high point of the tour was in Japan, where Chicago recorded another live album that was so superior to the Carnegie Hall album, there's really no comparison. "The Japanese hooked up two eight-track machines together to make 16 tracks," notes Parazaider. "The quality of the sound was excellent. "The LP was released only in Japan at the time, but it is now available soon on Chicago Records."

Chapter VIII: Caribou Ranch

Chicago's next studio album marked a change from its first three studio works in a number of respects. For one thing, Chicago V, released in July 1972, was only a single album. For another, the lengthy instrumental excursions of past records had been cut down, leaving nine relatively tightly arranged songs.

James Pankow offers an explanation for the change in the band's approach. "About the time of that release, radio had started changing," he notes. "FM radio became more commercial, and it started to deal with formats. This band has never said, 'Let's sit down and write an album of hit singles.' That's just not the way we do things." But they knew things were changing.

Lee Loughnane suggests a little-known business reason why, with the exception of Chicago VII, the group stopped making double albums containing many compositions. "One thing that really changed music in a major way is the way that we were paid on song copyrights," he says. "When we released all those double records, there wasn't a limit on how many songs you could have on a record and how many copyrights you could get off of that record. Then the companies decided that they were only going to pay on ten copyrights per record no matter how many songs there were."

The new copyright rule benefited some recording artists at a time when performers were recording extended compositions, sometimes fitting only one per side of a record. But Chicago, which previously had given its fans extra value for their money on double-record sets, suffered. "We wanted to be able to write songs that stretched and said everything we wanted to say," Loughnane notes. "VII was the last double record, I don't think you ever saw another double record, from anybody, as a matter of fact, because there was no reason. Monetarily, everybody lost from that."

Chicago V is perhaps best remembered for Lamm's "Saturday In The Park." "I was rooming with him, and we were in Manhattan on the Fourth of July," recalls Parazaider. "Robert came back to the hotel from Central Park very excited after seeing the steel drum players, singers, dancers, and jugglers. I said, 'Man, it's time to put music to this!'" Lamm had films of his adventures in the park and later edited the film and wrote "Saturday In The Park" as a kind of score. The album sold very well, topping the charts for nine weeks, the first of five straight Chicago Albums to reach Number 1. "Saturday In The Park" became the group's first gold single, hitting Number 3.

As Chicago V was streaking up the charts, the band and its producer were taking a break from touring and recording by working on the film Elector Glide in Blue which was produced and directed by Guercio. The film was shot in Arizona and starred Robert Blake as well as Chicago members Terry Kath, Lee Loughnane, Walt Parazaider, and Peter Cetera. Guercio also wrote most of the music on the soundtrack, which was played by Kath, Parazaider, Loughnane, Pankow, and some of L.A.'s top studio musicians.

In October 1972, a second single from Chicago V, Lamm's "Dialogue (Part I & II)" with vocals by Kath and Cetera, was released. "Dialogue" became an instant favorite with fans. Guercio, meanwhile, bought a ranch in Colorado and built a recording studio there that he dubbed "Caribou." He was seeking to avoid the expense and restrictions of the New York studios and what he considered their outdated equipment. "We got a little tired of recording in New York, with maids beating on hotel room doors," says Parazaider. "The sixth, seventh, eighth, tenth and eleventh albums were done up at Caribou Ranch, 8,500 feet up in the Rockies, about an hour's drive outside of Boulder."

The ranch was intended to facilitate uninterrupted work, but after two or three weeks holed up there, the city-bred guys would start to go stir-crazy. They couldn't take all the nature and quiet. But the ranch did help focus the group, and the sound and the overall quality of the work improved. The first fruits of the new studio were released in June 1973, in the form of the single "Feelin' Stronger Every Day" and the album Chicago VI. "Feeling Stronger Every Day" was about a relationship, Pankow says, but "underlying that relationship it's almost like the band is feeling stronger than ever."

Pankow's "Just You 'N' Me," which would be released as the album's second single, and which would go gold and hit Number 1 in the Cash Box chart (Number 4 in Billboard), was one of Chicago's most memorable ballads and very much a harbinger of the future. "'Just You 'N' Me' was the result of a lovers' quarrel," Pankow recalls. "I was in the process of becoming engaged to a woman who became my wife for over 20 years. We had a disagreement, and rather than put my fist through the wall or get crazy or get nuclear, I went out to the piano, and this song just kind of poured out. We wound up getting married shortly thereafter, and the lead sheet of that song was the announcement for the wedding, with our picture embossed on it."

When Chicago gathered at the Caribou Ranch to record its seventh album in the fall of 1973, the initial intention was to do a jazz album, with the resulting "Italian From New York," "Aire," and "Devil's Sweet" contributed by Lamm, Seraphine, Parazaider, and Pankow. On his own, Pankow brought in another gorgeous ballad, though this time his subject matter went beyond romance. " "'(I've Been) Searchin' So Long' was a song about finding myself," he says. "I just had to talk about who I was and what I was feeling at the time. The '70's was a time for soul-searching."

Cetera, who never claimed to be a Jazz musician, was discouraged about the original concept of the album, and also at his lack of participation as songwriter. He showed Guercio the lilting, Latin-tinged ballad "Happy Man." "You know when people talk about these flashes of something coming?" Cetera asks. "They do, in fact. Every once in a while, a song will just come out of your mouth, the words and everything. It's remembering it or having a tape player around when that happens that's the important part. I wrote "Happy Man" about midnight driving down the San Diego Freeway on my motorcycle. It was the one and only song that I ever remembered, words and music, and I went home and sang it into a tape a day later."

Cetera's second last-minute contribution to Chicago VII is one of the Album's best-remembered songs, "Wishing You Were Here." "There's two people that I always wanted to be," Cetera confesses, "and that was a Beatle or a Beach Boy. I got to meet the Beach Boys at various times and got to be good friends with Carl Wilson."

Cetera wrote the song in the style of the Beach Boys, who were at Caribou when it was to be recorded. Guercio, who had known the group since his backup days in the mid '60's, had recently taken over their management. Cetera asked the Beach Boys to sing on the bridge and chorus of "Wishing You Were Here." "They said, 'Yeah, we'd love to,'" he recalls. "So, I got to do the background harmonies with Carl and Dennis (Wilson) and Alan Jardine. For a night, I was a Beach Boy."

As a result of the good vibrations between the members of both bands, it was agreed that a national tour would be fun and exciting for the bands and the audiences. The following summer, the Chicago-Beach Boys tour filled stadiums from coast to coast, nearly eclipsing the Rolling Stones, who were touring simultaneously.

Trumpeter Lee Loughnane was the next band member to write for the group. "Terry, Jimmy and Robert were the writers in the beginning, and then Peter and Danny started breaking into it," he notes, "and then, by the seventh album, I started coming into it. I had just divorced and decided to write a song, and I presented 'Call On Me.'" It was, he recalls, daunting company to try to break into: "These guys were very good at what they did, and I didn't think they were going to like it." Understandably, his band mates, also had been writing hit singles for five years, were more concerned with their own efforts. "Everyone went, 'Yeah, that's a good song, but listen to this,' and listen to this,' and 'Yeah, check this out." But Peter Cetera, who had had his own trouble breaking into the group's songwriting fraternity, worked with Loughnane on "Call On Me," which he ended up singing on the record. "He changed a couple of the words and the way he sang the melody in order for him to be able to play the bass and sing the melody at the same time because that's the way he felt it," Loughnane notes. "I appreciate his efforts, and we did make the song a hit."

Chicago VII was preceded by the February 1974 single release of "(I've Been) Searchin' So Long," which become the band's eighth Top 10 hit. "Call On Me" became their ninth, and "Wishing You Were Here" became their tenth, peaking at Number 9 in Cash Box, Number 11 in Billboard. The album was another chart topper. The year 1974 also marked the addition of an eighth member of Chicago, Brazilian percussionist Laudir De Oliveira, a former member of Sergio Mendez's Brazil '66. De Oliveira had first appeared on Chicago VI as a sideman. And in 1974, Robert Lamm released a solo album, Skinny Boy. Lamm wrote all the songs except "Temporary Jones," which he co-wrote with Bob Russell, a celebrated lyricist who had worked with Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Terry Kath played bass on the album, also contributing acoustic guitar on two songs. The Pointer Sisters sang on the title track, which also appeared on Chicago VII with horns added.  (go to next chapter)