Chicago

To learn about the origins of Chicago and the path that led them to record their sixth studio album (seventh, counting the 1971 live album “Chicago At Carnegie Hall”) [note 1], readers are pointed to the accompanying monograph just published on OndaRock. This article is specifically devoted to the album in question and to the reasons that make it the most important work of their career.

During the tour supporting the album “Chicago VI” (1973), the band began working a series of jams and jazz-inflected digressions into their setlist, drawing on jazz in its broadest sense: this was not in itself a new approach, given that they had been playing jazz-rock since their debut album (“Chicago Transit Authority”, 1969, which made room for instrumental excursions that were at times downright abrasive and experimental), but it stood in open contrast with the direction they had since taken.

Indeed, the two most recent albums had, at least in part, abandoned that modus operandi, drastically cutting both overall running time and the length of individual tracks, no longer leaving room for particularly extended pieces.

The sound, too, had become more palatable, leaning heavily on lush, carefully arranged orchestration, to the point of veering, in more than one instance, into what was then labeled Mor (an acronym for “Middle of the road”) — a low-key pop-rock formula that was highly lucrative commercially, though not necessarily lacking in artistic merit (its ranks also included critically acclaimed artists such as Simon & Garfunkel, the Carpenters and James Taylor). But since Chicago had originally set out to do something quite different, critics seemed unwilling to forgive them for that shift. Discontent over the matter was in fact simmering within the band itself, with drummer Danny Seraphine and saxophonist Walter Parazaider pushing hard for a return to jazz-rock and to writing instrumental pieces.

The band thus began recording material centered around its most hardline faction, with the intention of attempting an entirely jazz record, until bassist and singer Peter Cetera and producer James Williams Guercio [note 2] sounded the alarm: Chicago had just come off a long run of successful albums, and such a radical break could risk a dangerous drop in popularity.

The need arose to include songs on the project capable of charting, but without wanting to give up what had already been recorded, the band decided to make room for everything by resorting to a double LP — a format the band had used for its first three albums, but which by then seemed to have been set aside.

The sessions took place at Caribou Ranch in Colorado. The sprawling property, purchased and converted into a recording studio by Guercio, allowed the band an immersive process and a more relaxed schedule. After five months of sessions, beginning in August 1973, the album was finished.

“Chicago VII” was released on March 11, 1974. The title with the roman numeral appears on the spine of the cassette and Stereo8 editions, but is absent from the vinyl, which bears only the band's name. The CD reissues, starting in 1990, have always included it.

The tracklist opens with “Prelude To Aire”, built on the sound of a bongo courtesy of Brazilian percussionist Laudir de Oliveira: a sideman of Sérgio Mendes, through whom Chicago came to know him, de Oliveira had already played on “Chicago VI” and, from the following “Chicago VIII” (1975), would become a full-fledged member of the band. Even though he is still just a session player here, his contribution leaves a deep mark on the record, lending it a character that in several passages veers into latin jazz. “Prelude To Aire” moves over a bed of percussion — de Oliveira's bongo and cuíca, plus Seraphine's tom-tom, credited as the track's author — and hands the melodic lines over to Parazaider's fluttering flute and to string sounds imitated by a mellotron, played by keyboardist Robert Lamm.

“Aire” is credited to Seraphine, Parazaider and James Pankow, the trombonist (who is equally at home contributing to the band's more experimental wing as he is writing lean, radio-friendly songs). It's a six-and-a-half-minute instrumental, opened by a horn theme in 7/8, with the time signature then shifting to 7/4 starting from guitarist Terry Kath's knotty jazz/blues solo (from 2'19" to 4'43").

“Devil's Sweet”, running over ten minutes, is introduced by Parazaider's sax (again credited alongside Seraphine) and by trumpeter Lee Loughnane's flugelhorn. The theme relies on quartal harmony, unusual in rock but more common in jazz and classical music. The arrangement unfolds across multiple sections, with polyrhythmic percussive beds, drum solos, swing grooves driven by bass and Fender Rhodes electric piano, Arp 2600 synthesizer solos (courtesy of session player David "Hawk" Wolinski) and simmering jazz-funk excursions.

The second side opens with “Italian From New York” (Lamm), with the Arp 2600 letting out sci-fi bleeps, the Fender Rhodes seeming to mimic a telephone signal, and an atonal Kath solo drenched in wah-wah.

After the sketch-like "Hanky Panky", it's time for "Life Saver" (Lamm): first a spirited horn-driven rocker, then a march led by piano and Lamm's filtered vocal, offset by his bandmates' unprocessed backing harmonies. It's the first proper song on the tracklist.

"Happy Man" is credited to Cetera, who after this album would gradually take on more and more power within the band, to great commercial success but also with notable side effects in terms of quality (to this day, their three best-known songs – the syrupy ballads "If You Leave Me Now", "Hard To Say I'm Sorry" and "You're The Inspiration" – are all his). You can already sense the excesses that will define his later work, though the bossa nova groove lightens the mood and makes it pleasant enough.

In the original vinyl pressing the track contains a fifteen-second false start, which was later removed from some CD reissues and from official streaming services.

The second LP opens with Pankow's "(I've Been) Searchin' So Long", sung by Cetera and chosen as the lead single: for its first three minutes it's an archetypal MOR ballad, not coincidentally played on constant rotation by radio stations of the time, before giving way to a finale poised between soul and baroque rock, complete with rasped vocals, distorted guitars and orchestral flourishes.

"Mongonucleosis" (Pankow), largely instrumental aside from a few yelps and a brief choral bit at the start, is a pioneering hybrid of salsa and rock (besides playing trombone, its author also tackles the timbales), while "Song Of The Evergreens", written by Kath and Loughnane's debut as lead vocalist, is a midtempo number driven by acoustic piano and a guitar run through a rotary pedal, which turns into a cosmic-scaled ride from 2'13" onward, arriving at the same time as the choral progressive pop of Supertramp's "Crime Of The Century" and a couple of years ahead of the Alan Parsons Project.

"Byblos", written and sung by Kath, is a jazzed-up folk rock number with a lavish array of keyboards – Fender Rhodes and flutes imitated on Mellotron (again courtesy of session player Wolinski), plus crystalline acoustic piano notes mixed up front (Wayne Tarnowski, another session musician) – and percussion: de Oliveira's bongos are joined by Seraphine's bass drum and the congas of guest Guille Garcia, raised in Florida but of Cuban descent.

The final side opens with "Wishing You Were Here", perhaps the only song ever credited solely to Cetera that could be called experimental: even though it was chosen as the third single and the melody is indeed quite catchy, its D minor key, its multi-section structure (the verse sung by Kath, the choral refrain, an interlude with abstract vocalizing and one sung by its author), and its fairy-tale atmosphere, somewhat akin to the Canterbury sound (bringing to mind Caravan), all help make it one of the most original moments on the record. The vocal harmonies feature the valuable contribution of three Beach Boys: Al Jardine, Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson.

"Call On Me", Loughnane's debut as a songwriter, sung by Cetera and released as the second single, could well be the blueprint for all of yacht rock. Its extreme closeness to much of Steely Dan's material shows how often arbitrary the line is between a band frequently maligned by critics, like Chicago, and one instead worshipped, like the authors of "Aja".

Lamm is behind the final two tracks, both tributes to his love of black music: the funk rock of "Woman Don't Want To Love Me", sung by Cetera, and the soul of "Skinny Boy", sung by its author with the Pointer Sisters guesting on backing vocals.

"Chicago VII" hit number 1 on the Billboard chart on April 27, 1974 and stayed on the chart for 69 weeks, essentially earning a clear stamp of approval from the public. As usual, critics were less enthusiastic: particularly memorable is Peter Reilly's review for "Stereo Review", a string of gratuitous insults with no real argument behind them ("I think I'd rather spend time with the Chicago Seven who appeared in court before Judge Hoffman than with this album bearing the same name. Chicago don't really make music, let alone rock music. Instead, they churn out a series of trendy-sounding excesses that feel more like background music for a TV commercial hawking a motorcycle, a new yogurt, or some other must-have product for the fashion-conscious consumer": it's writing like this that explains why rock journalists have never earned much respect in academic circles).

"Chicago VII" is in fact one of the most wide-ranging jazz-rock albums ever made: its grooves range from music that could sit comfortably on an avant-garde jazz record to material fit for a radio-rock compilation, covering every possible shade in between, not to mention more than a glance beyond national borders, all the way to the Caribbean and Brazil.

Even leaving aside its outside impact, its centrality to the band's own career is just as clear: it was their last double album, the only record on which all seven members contributed writing credits, the one with the widest range of instrumentation up to that point and recorded with the greatest freedom, to the point that the members swapped instruments on more than one occasion (something that had never happened before). Finally, song for song, the instrumental digressions come across as more structured and cohesive than those on their earlier work (think of the gratuitous "Free Form Guitar" from "Chicago Transit Authority" or the fragmented suites on "Chicago II").

The dream soon ended: "Chicago VIII" reached number 1 again, but stayed on the chart for only 29 weeks, less than any of their albums up to that point, and at that stage artistic ambition was shelved for good, opening the door to Cetera's saccharine excesses. No great loss: whatever happened afterwards, for at least five years – from 1969 to 1974, a period of rare density in the development of popular music – Chicago were one of the bands around which the American rock scene revolved.

[note 1] In between there would technically also be a "Live In Japan" (Cbs/Sony, 1972), which however is not included in the count, since it was released exclusively for the Japanese market.

[note 2] A producer, among others, of Buckinghams and Blood, Sweat & Tears, he worked with Chicago from their debut until 1977, when the band cut ties with him, suspecting he had skimmed off part of their profits over the years.

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26/07/2024