Chicago Reconsidered

 by whiteray

According to the twelfth edition of Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles – covering the years from 1955 through 2009 – the group Chicago had fifty singles reach the Billboard Hot 100, with thirty-five of those records reaching the Top 40 and twenty of those reaching the Top Ten. The last of those charting records came in 1997. According to that same volume, Chicago was the twentieth most successful act of those years from 1955 through 2009. 

(The top five? Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Elton John, Madonna and Mariah Carey.) 

My shelves are stocked with plenty of the group’s music: I still have LPs of the first three albums – Chicago Transit Authority (1969), Chicago (the 1970 album now called Chicago II), and Chicago III (1971) – as well as a pair of hits LPs. The CD shelves pretty much hold the same. And the digital shelves hold several other albums and a few more single tracks, almost all of them from the 1970s. 

But I listen purposely to very little of all that music these days. If something pops up on random on the RealPlayer, that’s fine. If one of the fifteen Chicago tracks in the iPod comes around, that’s fine, too. On the rare occasion that I pop Chicago Transit Authority or its two follow-ups, Chicago II and Chicago III, into the CD player, I skip a lot of the tracks on those albums. 

But there was a time during the years 1970 to about 1973 when I thought that Chicago’s music was just about the best thing this side of a lobster dinner. I loved Chicago II and played all four sides frequently. A little later on, I bought and liked most of Chicago Transit Authority and played that one a little less often than the follow-up but still with some frequency. I did not own Chicago III, but a college pal did, and I taped his copy and enjoyed it, too. 

The group performed at St. Cloud State in Minnesota during the spring of 1970; I got there late because of an orchestra concert, but my pal Rick had somehow managed to save me a place. I didn’t recognize everything the band played; at the time, I owned Chicago II but I’d heard only portions of Chicago Transit Authority. Even so, it was a great show. Sometime around 10:30 or so, the band started an encore; forty-five minutes later, that encore was still underway when Rick and I had to leave to meet our parental curfews. (I was a high school junior and he was a sophomore; half past eleven was pretty late for a school night in 1970.) 

That show still ranks pretty high on my list of concerts I’ve attended, probably in the top five. 

And then, my fascination with Chicago went away. It took some time, of course, but I think the first blow was the release in 1971 of Chicago IV: Live at Carnegie Hall, a bloated four-record set of what to my ears were ragged and mediocre performances. I didn’t buy it until years later; Rick bought it when it came out and we listened to it at his place, and I remember our looking at each other and shaking our heads as the shabby record played. (A rerelease of the live set more than a decade ago, according to some friends, repaired the album considerably; I remain skeptical.) Chicago V came out in 1972, and then, once a year, the group dropped another album onto the table, VI, VII and VIII and so on, though the frequency diminished during the 1980s and 1990s and into the new century. Sometimes titles replaced Roman numerals, and sometimes Arabic numerals did; sorting through the releases listed in Whitburn’s Top Pop Albums can be confusing. 

Along the way, I heard the hits, of course: “Saturday In The Park,” “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day,” “Just You ’N’ Me,” “(I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long,” “Hard Habit To Break,” and on and on. None of them grabbed me at all. I thought as I heard them that the band had lost any sense of direction beyond the goal of another Top 40 hit. The stuff that had first caught my ear – the inventive arrangements, the interplay of the horns with the other instruments and with each other, the drive and fire I’d heard in the first three albums – all of that was gone. And I gave up on Chicago. I’ve listened to very little of what the group has done in the last forty years. 

(The band is still at it: I saw the guys on TV playing – appropriately – in Chicago on New Year’s Eve. Recent releases include a Christmas album in 2019 and Chicago XXXVI: Now in 2014.) 

Back in the Seventies, as the band – in my eyes, anyway – got fat and happy, I occasionally thought about the pledge that the members of Chicago had made in the notes to their second album: “With this album, we dedicate ourselves, our futures and our energies to the people of the revolution . . . and the revolution in all of its forms.” 

I don’t know if I ever took those words seriously, but I have to assume the band did. Did the members of Chicago keep that promise? I’ve realized over the years that it’s not my place to decide, and I wonder if I would want to be called to account for promises I made when I was in my mid-twenties. But then again, I never put any of those promises on a record jacket almost certain to be seen by millions of people. 

All of this may seem a bit disjointed, but I often use writing to put my thoughts in order, and I’ve done that here. As a result, I’ve begun to think that I may revisit the group’s oeuvre to see if it was better than I think it was. And I realize as well that my early passion for the group might have kept me from making critical judgments: I think now that those first three albums could have used an editor: Chicago Transit Authority, Chicago II and Chicago III would likely have been better as single-record albums than the double albums they were. 

Even with all that, the band in its early years provided some transcendent moments: The first that comes to mind is the nearly side-long “Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon,” from which were pulled the wedding standard “Colour My World” and the group’s first hit single, “Make Me Smile.” Then there’s “Beginnings,” with its glorious horns, great vocals and the long percussion fade out, and the burning “Questions 67 and 68.” 

And finally, there is that first hit single, an edit of “Make Me Smile” that never fails to do just that, no matter where I am when it comes out of the speakers. When I first heard it as it headed to No. 9 during the spring of 1970, I thought to myself that I’d never heard anything like it. And fifty-one years later, with the record as familiar as the grey in my beard, I still feel the same way.