Let Chicago Work on You

The auspicious introduction to horn-rock's ultimate band

There was a time when I was a teen that I was obsessed with Chicago. It was just as I was getting into jazz. The idea that rock music could be played with horns and occasionally dip into jazz too, was profoundly exciting. As these things usually go, the obsession waned but I remain a fan of Chicago, especially their first album, released in 1969 and when they were still able to call themselves Chicago Transit Authority.

I re-listened to the album for the below essay and loved every minute of it. As the needle reached the end of side four, I felt revived and transformed. It’s that good an album and I hope that what I have written makes the music as exciting as it is to hear.

Please let me know your thoughts and until the next time I am in touch, may good listening be with you all!

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Let Chicago Work on You
By: Robert C. Gilbert

Some of my favourite music is based on the short moment. A few seconds—maybe more—of concentrated, sudden inspiration.

There’s the interlude on Rita Coolidge’s recording of Steve Cropper and Otis Redding’s ‘The Happy Song,’ where Booker T. Jones takes a riff from Redding’s original recording and pours all of his heart out to play it. Jim Keltner layers on a backbeat, thick on the bass and heavy on the snare. They repeat it. Jones pumps the organ harder and Keltner matches him. Twenty seconds of ecstasy.

How about Bill Withers’ ‘Harlem’ where Jones and Al Jackson, Jr. lock in on a thundering triplet while Withers warns of a “crooked delegation, wants a donation to send the preacher to the Holy Land” and to not “give your money to that lyin’, cheatin’ man.” It’s power is in the sudden breaking of the groove and the shudder of Jones and Jackson, Jr. meeting on the downbeat. Sixteen seconds of righteous fury.

That’s two Booker T. Jones references in a row? You may think that’s the lead in to an essay about him and the MGs. It’s not—that will come someday. But, here’s another moment.

It comes after two verses and choruses of what would one day be labelled a power ballad. A horn section of trumpet, trombone and tenor saxophone play a declarative set of figures and the music shifts. The tempo goes up, the beat breaks into a dance and the horns comment on this most sunny of turns. And then the exaltation really starts.

Maracas are added as the horns play a three-note motif and repeat it. It’s admittedly a throwaway thing, less interesting musically that what both precedes and proceeds it but not emotionally. This moment—all of 11 seconds—sounds like being on a date with your first crush or in New York for the first time or just a time where no care, no worry, no deadline dare intrude on one’s joy.

It occurs at the three minute, eight second mark of ‘Questions 67 and 68,’ the numbers relating to the years in the 20th century of the relationship that is the subject of the song, written by Robert Lamm and one of three hits, none of them right away, from the debut album by Chicago, then still called Chicago Transit Authority although not for much longer.

‘Questions 67 and 68,’ with its big, ballad sound and a lead vocal by the group’s bassist Peter Cetera, doesn’t sound too far removed from ‘Hard Habit to Break,’ ‘You’re the Inspiration’ or ‘Baby, What a Big Surprise,’ recordings that can inspire a wince or a shrug as if it’s the only way to excuse oneself for having a penchant for such emotive, power balladry.

That’s what Chicago became. That’s not what Chicago initially was. Chicago was loud. Chicago was brash. Chicago was outspoken, political and the leading practitioner of horn-rock, one of the ways in which the sound palette of rock broadened in the late sixties. Horn sections were, of course, nothing new. They were commonplace in blues, soul and jazz but not so much in rock except, perhaps, as a novelty such as on the Outsiders’ ‘Time Won’t Let Me’ or the Beatles’ ‘Got to Get You Into My Life.’ But then came the Electric Flag, the Buckinghams, Blood, Sweat & Tears and arguably even Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and rock with horns became a stylistic device, part of what signified rock and pop’s maturation.

Chicago, first known as the Big Thing and then Chicago Transit Authority, came to prominence after these groups did and endured long after all of them. Their ubiquity was important. Hearing those horns: Lee Loughnane on trumpet, James Pankow on trombone and Walter Parazaider on reeds, offered confirmation that rock, or really, music in general, need not be limited to guitar and drums and three-minute songs. I know that, for me, discovering Chicago was a big part of the broadening of my musical outlook and they became, for a time, an obsession with me as I stayed glued to the radio to hear them, whether well-known numbers like ‘Make Me Smile,’ ‘Saturday in the Park’ or ‘25 or 6 to 4’ or something deeper in the catalogue like ‘In the Country’ or ‘Fancy Colours’ or to be truly shaken when hearing ‘Make Me Smile’ shift to ‘So Much to Say, So Much to Give’ as part of Ballet for a Girl in Buchanan which also included ‘Colour My World,’ sung by guitarist Terry Kath. The suite was also a showcase for drummer Danny Seraphine. It was they, even more than the horns, that gave Chicago in its early days an edge.

And yet, even by their second album, on which Ballet for a Girl in Buchanan is the centrepiece, first titled Chicago and then re-named Chicago II and thus initiating a tradition, broken only once, of numbering each album, there was a nagging tension over whether the band was a crafter of songs or a crafter of albums. It didn’t help that the two other suites on Chicago II were alternatively earnest and syrupy (Memories of Love) or abrasive if still thrilling as an experience of pure, wide sound (It Better End Soon).

And while I am generally leery of anyone ever saying that an artist’s early work is the only worthy portion of their career with the rest being a steady decline, from Elvis Presley on down, as if it’s not even worth checking out what came afterwards, I might cut anyone some slack if he or she is making this argument about Chicago. Just listen to their first album, Chicago Transit Authority, and not be grabbed by the feeling of paradise soon to be progressively lost.

It may seem ominous that they start the album with the quite literal ‘Introduction.’ It’s not as on the nose as ‘(Theme from) the Monkees’ but more like a preview of the 70 minutes to follow and a statement of artistic purpose as Kath sings, “so forget all about your troubles / as we search for something new / and we play for you.”

That “something new” is illustrated in the song’s lengthy interlude: Loughnane, Pankow and Parazaider are featured in a staccato dance with Seraphine, a smoky, romantic sequence with Pankow on top, a ballad feature for Loughnane and, after a blistering solo by Kath—the first of many on the album—a triumphant volley of brass and reed. It is all played with assuredness, making for a collective, audacious hello.

What follows are those three hits from the album I mentioned earlier. The last is ‘Questions 67 & 68.’ The first is ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?’ After an improvised introduction by Lamm on piano, the horn section enters. Like the thrill of moving from a straightforward opening credit sequence of a movie—white type against a black background, say—to an establishing first shot (I see, incongruously, Manhattan from Brooklyn Bridge Park), their emphatic lines announce something momentous and indeed, what follows is that and more.

It resolves into an addictive shuffle. I would call it the classic Laura Nyro shuffle; hence, my association of the song with New York. Lamm wrote and sung ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?’ It’s a good feature for his classic, versatile pop voice. Not as keening as Cetera’s or as soulful as Kath’s but direct, conservational and observational. He captures the rush of modern life, of “being pushed and shoved by people / trying to beat the clock.” Sound familiar?

‘Beginnings’ follows, also written and sung by Lamm. It’s also about the anxiety of life but here focusing on the timidity of taking the leap to start a new relationship but then considering the ecstasy once it has begun and pondering if it could be, as Steve Allen once put it, “the start of something big.” That emotion is the beating heart of ‘Beginnings.’ It’s in the sudden rush of the horn section as Lamm sings the start of the second verse, “when I kiss you / I feel a thousand different feelings,” the wordless refrain that appears throughout and the extended coda that keeps building and building and then decays into a percussive jam, everything picking up whatever is at hand to join in.

After ‘Questions 67 and 68’ comes the compact ‘Listen,’ another Lamm song and another that is a statement of purpose for the group. “Listen,” it starts, “if you think that we’re here for the money / you couldn’t be right” and eventually, implores to the listener that “it could be so nice, you know / if only you would listen.” It’s all a little too earnest, especially as it is tough to envision anyone who has made it up to this point—a side and a half of music—and not be at rapt attention, so compelling has been the 27-and-a-half minutes of music that have transpired.

To my ears, ‘Listen’ can be seen as the conclusion of a kind of unintended suite where Chicago both explain themselves and explore their expansive take on the pop song. The rest of side two and all of side three form an unintended counter-suite to all this sweet accessibility.

It begins with ‘Poem 58,’ again written by Lamm and with a lengthy solo by Kath that shifts from working out a riff to improvising on a groove anchored by Cetera and Seraphine to him building to a climax that stops on a dime. Out of the silence, Cetera plays a bass line that is echoed by the horn section, first Pankow then Loughnane and finally Parazaider, ushering in a teasing vocal by Lamm and another Kath solo. The table is being turned here.

It is then flipped over completely in a shroud of feedback and noise. It is, as its title states, ‘Free Form Guitar,’ six-and-a-half minutes of Kath creating a maelstrom of sound. With the hindsight of 57 years now, it is the most un-Chicago-like Chicago recording. Ditching the present and situating one’s mind and ears in the spring of 1969, when Chicago Transit Authority was released, the provocation of a group issuing a double album out of the gate with a guitarist, of whom Jimi Hendrix was an ardent admirer and who was among the most prodigious and fluent of his generation—save for Hendrix, Duane Allman and Michael Bloomfield, no one could play at length and maintain interest as Terry Kath—‘Free Form Guitar’ feels inevitable.

A gutsy blues then emerges, ‘South Californian Purples,’ with meaty horn lines and more of that Kath prowess. The energy that has been steadily built crests on a lengthy cover of ‘I’m a Man,’ a maniacally propulsive hit by the Spencer Davis Group from 1967. Whereas that version rests on unrelenting rhythm, Chicago’s rests on power and its explosion halfway through in an extended solo by Seraphine, an indulgence that works majestically.

Yes, Kath, Cetera and Lamm often sing lyrics that are nowhere near what Steve Winwood sang—admittedly, his blues- and jazz-inflected phrasing makes it hard to know what the lyrics are at all—and it’s hard for me to get past their innanity (take for example when Lamm sings “I’ve got to keep my image, while I’m standing on the floor / if I drop upon my knees, it’s just to keep them on a my nose”). When hearing it, however, as part of listening to the album in full, ‘I’m a Man’ comes off as another brazen announcement of something very special happening in music.

The final side of Chicago Transit Authority is, in a sense, a recapitulation of the first five cuts. ‘Someday (August 29, 1968),’ which includes a prelude taped during the imbroglio of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in the Windy City where, to paraphrase the chant included, the whole world was watching, heralds the political turn Chicago’s music would take, only occasionally interesting, over the next three studio albums.

The grand conclusion of ‘Liberation,’ begins with a Herculean Kath solo and a brief collective improvised freak out before a slow, burning horn line written by Pankow and then one last explosion by Kath and then Seraphine. The only words sung on ‘Liberation’ are very apt: “ohhh, thank you people.”