Chicago in Seventeen Magazine

This article is from Seventeen Magazine, December, 1973.

From its very beginning in 1967 Chicago, the tightly controlled, hard-driving rock band, was a smash. That's when the group, seven strong, briefly called itself the Chicago Transit Authority after its hometown transportation system. Their first double album was released by Columbia a year later, and they've been smashing records ever since. Surging excitement infuses their big-band rock, an electrifying mix of jazz, blues, pop and symphonic elements that has made SEVENTEEN'S readers vote the group their favorite for several years running.

When Chicago gets it all together onstage, the members of the band work with the good-natured camaraderie of voyagers on a swinging ship. Saxophone, trumpet, and trombone give the looping melodies a sharp profile; keyboard, guitar, bass and drums provide a rhythmic base. Some of the fellows sport dark glasses, and an occasional beard. Wearing multi-colored outfits of sky blue , dark rose, red and black and yellow, they charge the sprawling latticework melodies with cheerful vitality. Sweet vibrations fill the hall to make everyone feel at home.

"Our material is kaleidoscopic," says Robert Lamm, shaggy-haired, bearded keyboard man, featured vocalist and writer, whom the other musicians call Bobby. I'm interested in all musical directions and so is everybody else in the group. We play whatever feels right; it's a musical stream of consciousness. We're highly improvisational. I'll write a tune, arrange it, figure out who needs a solo. The only things structured are some horn riffs and ensembles. The rhythm section just jams."

Trombone man James Pankow, whose affable smile is as characteristic as his handsome mustache and beard, says, "Our music is constantly growing creatively, although not so far that we lose our audience or get lost within ourselves either. We don't write about taking an acid trip, drinking wine, getting chicks and all the superficial stuff. Many of our songs are strictly entertainment, but we also deal with meaningful things happening here and abroad. Communication, political and physical unrest. Love, anger, fear, misery, happiness. The songs lay all that stuff down. Just to hear it from somebody up on that stage releases all this tension in our audience, makes them feel better.

"Like any other art form, music is representative of the time it was created in. Egyptian hieroglyphics tell what went on before 2000 B.C. When you hear our music, you hear what's going on right now. It's a living chronicle," says Lamm.

Bobby points out, "There's a tune in our second album called Better End Soon. It was an improvised sermon, triggered by some of the racist things in the summers of '69 and '70, the invasion of Cambodia. Saturday in the Park is about New York's Central Park really being fun on weekends. I have never felt bad vibes there. There are tourists from all over the world, every kind of person you would want to see. The song expresses the idea that people can get together and love each other in a mass sort of way. It indicates there's hope for us all."

Jim says, "Once we set up a free concert in the ghetto in a city in Rhode Island that was terrific. People walking around, listening to the music, little kids running around with balloons. Dogs, babies. And during the last election we were heavily involved with voter registration. We met with Ralph Nader and Senator Fulbright and others in a free-form meeting of politicians and people from all the arts to see if there was a way to circumvent red tape and apply the talents of artists to solving particular problems. In our four-record Carnegie Hall set, we did an elaborate information insert with an essay about the power of the vote and a chart of the voting law. A lot of kids reacted to that. On our tours we tried to have local organizations register people at the concerts."

Bobby feels the more successful the group gets, the less sophisticated its audience becomes. "They want to hear the hits they know from AM radio," he says, "not new explorations. When we first went on tour, people had never heard of us. They didn't have an album to relate to. now we have enough material to play five hours nonstop. If it's a college audience, we take more chances with stretched-out compositions. Thirteen or fourteen-year-old audiences get impatient; they whistle and yell and scream and clap. It's nice but it's really distracting when you're trying to do someting fresh onstage. We almost have to force-feed them to a certain extent because we want them to grow along with us."

Both musicians have mixed feelings about being booked into large auditoriums like New York's Madison Square Garden. "With fifteen or twenty thousand people under one roof it becomes more than just a musical experience," Jim explains. "A kind of crowd momentum takes over and it becomes a celebration. Some people-'anonymous freaks'even like the largeness of the place!"

Jim finds it awesome to look into the audience at the Garden or the Forum in Los Angeles. "I see an ocean, a moving mass of noise. It's as if you're just one little speck facing some big anthill. To think of that living organism as a bunch of individuals is ludicrous."

Bobby points out that the coliseums all over the country are laid out the same way. "The lights always look the same height. So even though you're in a different place and the people are different, it feels like the same thing."

"But," Jim adds, "every stage sounds different. Sometimes they don't sound right. Those of us in the brass section -Lee Loughnane on trumpet, Walt Parazaider on woodwinds and me - have individual monitors - speakers next to each man - but the rhythm section can't hear itself. You grope in the dark.

Playing his electric piano, Bobby Lamm is clear across the stage from Peter Cetera on bass, but Bobby can hear Terry Kath's guitar and Terry can hear Peter. So Terry, along with Danny Seraphine on drums, holds things together right across the line.

Jim remembers their first concert. "We followed the Chambers Brothers. After we did the opening number, there was dead silence. Our sound was too different. Following a second and a half of instant shock and panic, we played two more numbers, then fled offstage to hide in the dressing room till the people were all gone. That was my most embarrassing moment."

Bobby goes on, "But when we really started doing one-nighters on the road instead of clubs where we played a week or two at a time, that was really a turn-around. Fly into a city, do a concert, get up the next morning, fly to another place. Grab a nap, a snack. Bang bang bang bang, after a while your body feels like a Ping-Pong ball. You don't feel you have a home anymore, no roots. You become disoriented. Very disorganized. It's almost impossible to establish a steady relationship with a girl. If you do, she had better be a very understanding person because you're not going to be there half the time. And it's frustrating to meet more people than you can possibly get to know. It's embarrassing to have somebody come up to you and say, hi, how you doing? And you go, hi, how are you? And you can't remember his name or where you met.

"When you first go on the road, you open yourself up to all these new experiences, new places, new people, but you wind up feeling a little hurt because you can't stay. Then you close yourself up, trying not to be open, not to be hurt, so you wind up lonely. The only alternative is to accept being a nomad," says Lamm.

When we started," Bobby muses, "we had no idea we'd come this far. Some of us were going to DePaul University, we just wanted to get a group together that would really cook - play and have fun, perhaps get some gigs. I'll never forget the first day. Everybody had their own ideas, all their aspirations up front; we really didn't know each other but we got together in the basement, of Walt's mom's house, and set up and played for hours. We were all there except Peter, the bass player, who came in nine or ten months later."

"The most meaningful thing for me," Jim says, "is our longevity. Some performers saturate the media and wear out their public. Because of that, we've consistently declined to do TV variety shows. And because we don't usually give interviews, our listeners don't know too much about us, apart from the fact that we continue to keep the music happening."

"Creativity," Bobby declares, "that's what holds the group together more than anything, and total respect for one another. But we don't want Chicago to become a group with an identifiable personality ! We don't have gimmicks or routines. The music is the most important thing, not to know who's playing. Just listen. We'd rather not have someone be able to say, That's the sound of Chicago, but be pleasantly surprised that Chicago can do all these things. And we can do almost anything. We really can."

Born in Brooklyn, Bobby is the only member of the group not born in Chicago. Before moving there at fifteen, he was a choirboy for eight years. "Brooklyn isn't the most sophisticated place in the world," he recalls, "but going from there to Chicago is like going from Paris, France to Des Moines, Iowa. As bad as racial problems were in New York, I wasn't aware of them, but in Chicago it was very tense. On the south side where I lived, there were invisible barbed wire fences. West of my street, the people were all black. East it was all white. I lived right on the border. The Chicago dudes I went with in high school wanted to form a rock and roll band to play at some YMCA dances. Someone said, can you play piano ? I could - by ear. I said, well, I'd like to try. So I got some bread together and bought a used electric piano. I just fell into it."

"The first big single Chicago had," Jim recalls, "was Make Me Smile. What a thrill it was to turn on the radio in Los Angeles and hear it ! I remember feeling, wow ! I wrote that thing ! After you get used to hearing your records played, the fascination wears off a little, but still it's always a thrill to hear your song on the radio or somebody humming one of your tunes. It's exciting to know that the music has gone somewhere beyond the paper you wrote it on, especially when you go to another country like Japan and people want to shake your hand. That's very touching, to go so far and yet feel at home because people know you through your music.

"Chicago's main problem," Jim feels, "is to let go between engagements. It just falls apart without constant rehearsal. The edge comes right off, you lose your finesse. Like once after we were off a couple of weeks, we forgot a song. The brass section went ....and that was it. The audience cracked up. Some guy called out, well, they're only human, and it was great. The rest of the evening was easy."

James William Guercio is the way the producer's name reads in small print on Chicago's clutch of smash rock albums, but he's much more recognizable as a rock musician everybody calls Jim, a slim figure with a diffident smile. Chicago born and bred, he studied at De Paul University (where some of his schoolmates were to form Chicago). He quit to go on the road, backing groups on guitar, before turning producer. At his vast ranch in the Rocky mountains, the pride of the spread is a newly built recording studio, new home base for his group, Chicago. The outside door, massive and soundproof, is so ruggedly styled in Colorado mountain decor that you can pick up a splinter by pushing it shut. The studio's baffled walls are covered with burlap, and its intricate control room comes complete with a 35mm projector so it can double as the neighborhood movie house after recording sessions are over.

Jim thinks rock was more meaningful several years ago than it is today. "It was a whole new form of expression. It was a terribly important form of protest. Maybe it still is, but it's become big business too. Eight years ago, pop records was a seven million dollar business; today it is well over three billion. But because of the enormous profits, the record industry is destroying itself. Albums that used to sell three or four million sell half a million copies instead. The drive for profit has fractionalized the audience, broken the artist's integrity.

"My touch with reality when I was growing up was the record collection in my room. How many records can you own now ? They should cost $3.98 instead of $6.98. The price hasn't gone down but the quantity has quadrupled. You need a hundred dollars a week to buy concert tickets and records. You can fly to Europe for little over a hundred dollars. From a social point of view, there are so many things competing for your dollar that records have become less meaningful. There will always be a need for a good song, attention for a good film, but the structures that control the distribution and sales of these products have to be reorganized on a new basis. I wish I managed five groups like Chicago because then I'd be Columbia Records and I'd be able to do it myself."

The head of United Artists, David Picker, was struck by Jim's success with Chicago. "He came to me," Jim says. "and asked if I'd like to make a movie. I ended up directing Electra Glide In Blue. The thing that interested me was that the key figure in the movie, the motorcycle policeman played by Robert Blake, is very similar to a cowboy. It's the American dream of the West, the individual who struggles to determine his own fate. Every day on the way to the set I used to play a cassette with a different tune. Slow tune, fast tune - slow scene, funny scene. The movie was like an album. Until I directed the movie I didn't realize that I hadn't been producing records so much as directing them. You keep making choices. That's what determines the final result. I've always seen my records in visual terms. Listen to the Chicago albums. I pace them like a film. I pace a film like a concert. It's the same thing. What we should do with people who are doing meaningful things in rock music is move them into film, which is an even greater medium because it encompasses all forms of expression in dealing with today's problems.

"Artists have to present the human condition. They have to talk about the nobility in man. They ought to talk about what's good in the human race, and highlight what is inequitable, deal with the problems of today, the times in which we live. That's the responsibility of everybody that's making a record or writing a song: to elevate the human condition by entertaining somebody," he concludes, "making them think of something good. Or showing them something that's bad so it doesn't happen again. That's what I think it's all about. I think that's what Chicago is all about."

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