Life Magazine Article from 1971

'Chicago' and the Great Dream Machine

ROCK IN THE HEARTLAND

Published May 28, 1971

By Albert Goldman

The next time Vice- President Agnew or the commissioners of the FCC start grousing about the immoral influence of rock music on the nation's youth, somebody should buy them a ticket to "Chicago" - not Mayor Daley's town but the enormously successful rock band of the same name and provenance.

Not even Norman Rockwell in his most avuncular humor could have painted a more wholesome and inspiriting picture of the "Boys Next Door" than that offered by these seven simple, cheerful, hard-working lads, whose names - Kath, Parazaider, Loughnane, Cetera, Pankow, Lamm, Seraphine - recall Knute Rockne's Seven Mules (football), whose logo looks like it was snipped off Luke Appling's baseball uniform, whose dressing rooms are filled with neat wives and children (instead of slatternly groupies), and whose idea of after-the-show relaxation is not a bag of heroin or a snort of coke but a bottle of brew and a shot of Southern Comfort.

An ethnomusicologist could, to be sure, trace half the boys' words and licks back to the steamiest, seamiest dives of Liverpool, Manchester, Memphis, Macon and Venice West; but when this hairy, horny music goes down and round "Chicago's" 22 mikes, 14 amps, mixing console and huge multicellular p.a. system, it comes out sounding as clean and pure as a freshly laundered American flag.

What "Chicago" actually sounds like is Muzak: a latter-day, switched-on Muzak minus the astro-strings but voiced up high with proclamatory brass and mindlessly milling rhythms and electric guitars and voices keen as Steve Winwood, gravelly as Joe Cocker, all cooking along an endless ribbon of 16-track stereo tape that becomes a powerful conveyor belt trundling you along past fun-house windows in which you glimpse strangely lit effigies of the Beatles, Traffic, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Herb Alpert, Kurt Weill, Stan Kenton and even Charles Griffes.

"Chicago" has heard a lot of music - like most Americans - and doesn't do as it progenitors, the old-time bandmasters who played Sunday concerts in the park, and give its listeners in a single performance (or generous two-record album) a taste of every style which it relishes.

It takes a certain naivete` to tackle world music that way; but that's precisely the attitude that Charles Ives, our greatest composer, took toward the universe of sounds. Really, when you come right down to it, there isn't an American artist worth his salt who wouldn't say: "Boys, go ahead and play anything you hear and to hell with them dang critics!"

So "Chicago," a popular success but not a reviewer's delight, goes right on playing 22 dates a year from coast to coast and border to border. The millions roll in and the records roll out and the stadiums and football arenas and concert and sports halls of America resound to the fast, hard, tight, get-it-off sound pouring out of those big, black horns.

The audience seems to dig what "Chicago" is putting down - and it ain't sex, Baby, uh-uh ! That's straight honkie millhand sweat comin' off those horns, off that fat Andy Devine guitar player treadin' that wah-wah pedal and runnin' that ax and turnin' aroun' into that mike to bawl like a young college fullback about his "Hour in the Shower." Now, how American can you get, Mabel?

The only feature that is "Chicago" is, you bet, that big-biceped American-athletic-industrial-hard-hat right arm which these kids lay like a half nelson around the neck of the rock tradition. When you sit back there in the dark listening to these boys charging through their tunes like Massillon High on a Saturday afternoon, you start to get a little video going in your head.

What you see is old documentary footage about Steel and Blast Furnaces and Open Hearths and Coke Ovens and Skip Hoists and Carborundum Saws slicing through Pig Iron and Cold Rolled Steel and all the Tough Stuff we Americans have bent to our imperious and Vulcanic wills. You see trains highballing along the shores of Lake Michigan at night with Cyclops' eyes scanning the sky and deadhead locomotives butting the freight into marshalling yards at the Hub, the Loop, the Center, where all that immoral, excuse me, amoral American energy comes to focus on the killing floor of the Big Hog Butcher.

What to make of this relentless New World Energy, this eternal vying of man with machine, man blurring into whirring machine he masters only by sacrificing his humanity ? Once glorified in WPA murals of heroic overalled figures striding past streaking trains, streamlined planes and smoking factories, it is no longer a spirit we can contemplate with unqualified enthusiasm. Only in the pop culture does the worship of Energy Per Se continue unabated; and even in this shrine, inviolate against reality, the service of the god is slackening.

Far from representing some future impulse in the culture, "Chicago" is in every sense a reverberation of the past. It echoes the rave-ups of hard rock, the rhetoric of the big bands, the Leonard Bernstein discovery of serious music by the masses and, above all, the Andrew Carnegie ethic of tend-thy-machine-and-thou-shalt-be-saved. Yet in a country and a civilization where so many despair of the future - or simply refuse to believe it - the final flexing of the national muscle strikes a deeply respondent note. When you get right down to it we're still living in the same old America - and "Chicago" is close to its heart.

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