Chicago

I have an interesting history with Chicago. My wife and I went and saw them in concert at the Toledo Zoo, of all places, where they have an amphitheater, and it was a pretty good concert. I can't remember when that was, but I think it was one of the early public events after all the covid lockdown nonsense finally ended. Being that I'm a pretty average (in terms of age) Gen-X, according to the older reckoning before they decided to eliminate generations like Gen-Y and Generation Jones and consolidate them (unfairly and to great confusion, in my opinion), naturally I'm familiar with Chicago from their string of hits in the 80s, mostly (but not solely) torch songs that I slow danced to as a teenager all through the 80s. Songs like "You're the Inspiration", "It's Hard to Say I'm Sorry", "Hard Habit to Break," "Look Away", "If She Would Have Been Faithful" etc. At some point in the early 90s, I picked up Chicago 20, also known as Greatest Hits 1982-1989. At the concert, about half of what they played was familiar to me and my wife from this era. Good stuff, if you like that kind of thing. I always did, but I rarely loved it, and I can't say that I've played that 20 CD all that often, honestly, or given the band a ton of thought. I liked Chicago because, as I said, they made competent pop hits during the years I was a teenager, that were very popular to play as slow songs at the many dances that I went to, so I got to dance to a lot of girls while listening to Chicago in the background. I never felt the kind of pretentious contempt that guys my age often felt for bands like New Kids on the Block or anything, but I never really took Chicago super seriously as a fan either. They were an important part of the "background noise" of my youth, and my appreciation for them is as much about the nostalgia of remembering that era of my life as it is for the music itself. But don't get me wrong; the music is quite good, and as I've occasionally listened to it in the years since, I've appreciated it more than I did then. (I've even come to appreciate New Kids as pretty good musicians, who know their audience quite well in the years since. Of course, my wife was a fan as a teenager, so otherwise I doubt I'd even have gotten that exposure.) 

Actually, it probably took that concert in Toledo for me to kind of remember Chicago, honestly, and recognize that my music collection on my phone didn't actually have a lot of the Chicago songs that I remembered on it, so I re-burned some of them and beefed up my collection.

What my phone did not have at all was the other ~50% or so of what they played, most of which would have been from the track-list of Chicago IX. My wife didn't recognize any of these songs at all, but I did. My dad was a reasonably big fan of Chicago from this era, and I know that he played Chicago IX quite a bit when I was growing up. One of the things that my dad used to do quite frequently when we were all younger and he was at home and in a good mood was throw on one of his vinyls, crank up the volume, and fill the whole house with whatever he was in the mood to listen to like some kind of family party or something. Some of that music me and my brothers and sister grew to dislike tremendously (Joe and Eddie immediately springs to mind, but I wasn't much of a fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival or Three Dog Night and certainly have mixed feelings about Little River Band and Bachman-Turner Overdrive too) but I always kind of liked this Chicago stuff. Chicago IX was also a compilation, and its subtitle is Chicago's Greatest Hits. In the same format as the later one, it could be called Greatest Hits 1969-1975. (There was also a second greatest hits in between these two that was the second half of the 70s and the earliest 80s, but I'm not familiar with it really.) Like I said, my wife didn't know any of these songs, but I did, although I hadn't heard them in years, if not decades when I heard them at this concert, so I went out and got them.

All of this comes up because I just added a bunch of Chicago songs to my playlist on my phone for the commute home (I listen to other stuff on the morning commute) and I've mostly heard some of these earlier songs so far. These include well-known (at least they used to be) songs like "Just You'n'Me", "Make Me Smile", "Feelin' Stronger Everyday" (a particular favorite of mine) the cozy "Saturday In the Park" and the enigmatic "25 or 6 to 4". In fact, that last one I heard both last night as I pulled up at the house, and because I wasn't quite done with it, I put it on for the last few minutes as I was pulling up to the office this morning too. (There are two versions of the song that are commonly available; a short one that's just under three minutes and a longer one that's right about at five. Other than the length, they both sound very similar; I recommend the longer one as the one I grew up with, among other things.)

Sadly, while the title and lyrics are quite enigmatic and have apparently been the subject of a lot of fan theories (and even a ban in Singapore due to supposed veiled references to drugs or something), the reality isn't nearly as interesting according to the songwriter  Robert Lamm; it's really just a song about sitting up in the middle of the night trying to write a song and struggling with the lyrics, and feeling exhausted and stressed out, etc., and looking at the clock and seeing that it's "twenty-five or (twenty)-six to four (AM)". If there's some kind of double entendre meaning or code, it hasn't been confirmed by the band, who are all in their 80s now and are unlikely to tell us before they die. (They're all a year or two older than my parents. My mom will probably live for another ten plus years, well into her 90s, but my dad died earlier this year. It's what happens to people that age, unfortunately.) The opening guitar riff of "25 or 6 to 4" is also quite distinctive. It's quite an interesting song, actually. If you don't know this early 70s Chicago, you should pull up YouTube or Spotify and listen to Chicago IX, the greatest hits stuff and get to know it a bit. As they themselves are fond of saying, they're just about the only rock and roll band to have a full horn section as a integral part of their sound—something that they'd largely lost by the 80s when they came back into prominence in the wake of their hit album Chicago 17 for a number of years. They really are kind of a unique band, and while I don't know that they've entered the halls of "pop music canon" that will be remembered for decades, they were a big deal for many years, had a string of hits lasting decades, their sound was quite unique, and musically they're pretty cool. 

"Chicago 27", The Very Best of Chicago: Only the Beginning with remastered songs (2002) is probably the one to get if you just want a collection of everything; a two-disc 39-track retrospective of their entire career. I mean, any band that can put out six greatest hits albums and not have it seem like they're really reaching, has got something going on. I'm a huge Duran Duran fan for instance, and they were a huge band for many years too (decades, really) and they've only done two; one at the end of the 80s and a better one at the end of the 90s, as a point of reference.