How Chicago Continued to Evolve in the ‘70s

Chicago was on a roll in 1971. They’d amassed three albums of studio material released across a two-year timespan. By the time they hit the stage at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in September of that year, they were nearly ready to record their fourth album.

“We were almost never off the road,” trumpet player Lee Loughnane says now, during a new conversation with UCR. “We only knew the road and that was the only time we got to rehearse. So when we came home and went in the studio, the writing was still going on. That’s where we finished songs off.”

The band was one of the first musical acts to perform at the Kennedy Center, helping to christen the now-legendary venue a little more than a week after its opening. For nearly two and a half hours, they played through an expansive set that was markedly different than the week’s worth of concerts they’d recorded earlier that year for the 4 LP Chicago at Carnegie Hall live album. The songs were also different, with a number of shorter and tighter compositions making their debut.

On this particular night, the recording truck was rolling tape as well, though for reasons Loughnane himself is unaware of, the JFK recordings went unreleased. Now, more than 50 years later, fans can finally hear what they missed that night, thanks to Rhino Entertainment, which has made the complete concert available in several different formats.

The band was playing new songs all of the time. It’s really striking to see the difference between the Carnegie Hall shows and this one from just a matter of months later.
Yeah, it actually shocked me as well when we started doing this. Jimmy [Pankow] announced from the stage that we were playing “Saturday in the Park” for the first time, a brand new song. I went, “Really? Okay! I guess that was sort of early on in our career!” I was surprised again to hear Peter Cetera singing the lead vocal. So we obviously hadn’t decided who was going to sing lead. Robert [Lamm], as you know, sings lead on his song, “Saturday in the Park” and it’s been that way forever!

Listen to Chicago Perform ‘Saturday in the Park’

There’s the commentary in the introduction prior to “Saturday in the Park” about how it’s not a political song.
Yes and I think probably by that time, we were being harassed or at least asked, many times, from either young Republicans or young Democrats to join various organizations and be more active. We kept pointing them to Robert, because he was the one who wrote those songs. He was the one who had those ideas and you guys happen to agree with him. Go talk to Robert, because we’re interested in playing music and that’s what we’re focused on and what we’re going to be doing.

It speaks to the free form nature of the band that you were presenting almost rough sketches of some of these songs before they were done. What were the inspirational drivers behind that approach?
I think the record company allowed us to do that. We were surprised that we were able to get away with it, I think. Either that or we weren’t surprised at all and we were just doing what we did organically and naturally. An idea would come up for a song, we’d start rehearsing it and then throw it into the show. As you heard on this album, it was commonplace for us. We were changing the set from night to night, because the production levels weren’t to a point where we had to let the light operator know everything that was going to happen and how it was going to happen. They just sort of flooded the stage with lights. [Laughs] It was the same with the sound guy, he just had all of the microphones on. So if somebody walked up to sing or talk, there was a microphone to accommodate that.

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The difficulties you encountered with the Carnegie Hall recordings are legendary. Was it easier at all working with the tapes for this show?
No, it was very similar to what we did with Chicago at Carnegie Hall. But we were used to the fact that there were going to be problems. We’d just play the tape and [make note] of things we’d have to check out. We went in one problem at a time, solve it to the best of our ability and then move on and make things sound as good as we possibly could. Tim Jessup, the engineer, he took on the drums first. We went through the rhythm section first, so he pretty much got a rhythm section sound together and then we started honing in on various other aspects.

Listen to Chicago Perform ‘It Better End Soon’

One thing that’s common between this new show and the Carnegie Hall performances is the longer pieces like “It Better End Soon” and “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon.” How did you guys approach putting longer pieces like that together in the studio back then?
Jimmy Pankow had the idea for the Ballet while we were on the road. He’d set up a keyboard in the hotel room in between two beds and just start writing what he envisioned as the song. I know the music came first for him, at least that’s what I’m assuming — because that’s the way I’d approach it too being an instrumentalist. That’s the way I approached “Call on Me” and “No Tell Lover,” the lyrics came later, the music came first. So I’m assuming he approached it similarly. By the time we got into the studio, he was still writing parts and connecting things together. So it was all brand new as we were recording it. As we took it out on the road and started performing it in one fell swoop all of the way through, we were improving or screwing it up from night to night. But I think most of the time, we were getting through it well enough for it to pass. Because people didn’t throw things at us. [Laughs] That was commonplace [then] and we were unscathed. The music played well for us.

In that vein, “It Better End Soon,” listening to the Carnegie shows, it expands and contracts and morphs from night to night. The way it’s tracked out as movements, is a very classical kind of presentation.
Yeah and you know, Terry [Kath] had his own preach section, Walt [Parazaider] had his solo section. We had the meat of the song, the verses and it somehow just made sense, especially to us back then and all of the audiences that came to see us. “It Better End Soon” was a good example of that. “Poem for the People” was a well-thought out piece that I’ve always liked, because it starts in one place and then seems to go full circle and end almost like a Yes song. We were in that progressive mode of music.

How did the horn section bond originally? What do you remember about the moment where the three of you really connected?
I don’t know that there was any particular moment. Because after Jimmy wrote the parts, we’d rehearse it by ourselves. Especially some of the more intricate passages. Once we got it under our fingers, we were ready to play it with everybody else in the band. So when the band cranked it up, we were ready for it. As things happen on stage, where you can’t hear as well — because the monitors were…..

Not great.
Not that good and always really loud. They were so close to you that by the time the sound hits you, it’s already passed. There was never a time when somebody said, “Hey, could you turn my monitor down?” It was always up. I got to the point where I stopped using the monitor, even though it was blasting in front of me. I’d put cigarette filters off of my smokes inside my ears, so my monitor was in between my ears. Sound-wise, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but I could tell if I was in tune. I could tell if I was with the rest of the guys are not, so that was my ancient monitor and it worked for me. When things went wrong, we just kept going. We were adamant that once we started the song, we weren’t going to stop until we got to the end, even if we got lost in the process. Sometimes, that actually happened, where all of the sudden, it was a cacophony of sound, because somebody went to the bridge and somebody else went back to another verse. You know, the changes are different. But Terry, out of nowhere, he’d do a whistle and then 2-3-4 and we’d go to a bridge or back to a verse and it would be harmonious again.

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The new songs the band was playing at JFK were shorter and Chicago V ended up being an album of shorter songs. It was a shift away from the double LPs that had come prior to that. What triggered that shift?
I think probably they had fewer songs. “Saturday in the Park” was shorter. [Things like] “It Better End Soon,” the longer songs, were on the double record sets because there was more room to be able to add that stuff. Also, the record companies, this was probably mainly the reason for that type of a shift [with the fifth album], they stopped paying copyrights on unlimited songs. They decided they were only going to pay copyrights on 10 songs. The songwriters, in their infinite wisdom, didn’t want to share. If we had 11 songs, they wanted a full share for all of the songs that they wrote, which makes perfect sense. So the songs got shorter and you had to grab people’s attention in a shorter period of time. The entire industry changed around that time.