CHICAGO

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[email protected] (Bob)

Chicago, the greatest rock band. Glad to see they are still making great music!

[email protected]

Enjoy your site, would love to see some more Chicago albums reviewed sometime. Oh, and I must correct you on one point - Blood, Sweat and Tears may have had an album out first, but Chicago were actually formed before them, in 1967.

Take care and God bless,

Daniel Bosch

CHICAGO TRANSIT AUTHORITY (1969)

(reviewed by Casey Brennan)

Chicago (then known as Chicago Transit Authority) which were formed just slightly after Blood, Sweat, And Tears was, are another big band styled rock band. They were even more successful than their peers though, as they still make albums every now and then, and also tour. Later on in the 1970's Chicago would turn into a soft rock band stuck making slick pop ballads, but here in late 1968 they had a dynamic sound. In their big band horn-driven rock sound, they embrace blues and venture off into extended improvised jams.

This was originally a double album, and starts off with the great "Introduction" song, which contains some excellent horn playing, and goes off into into a little jam in the middle. Next is their first hit, the classic "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?", which has a nice piano introduction before the breathtaking horns come in and turn the song into a melodic tune. "Beginnings" is a hit too, and is a good song although it runs a little long (almost eight minutes), but since many of the songs on the second half of the album run way too long, this is only a little flaw.

Following that is the inspired "Questions 67 & 68", and the good soulful rocking song "Listen". After that though comes all the long jamming songs, the first being "Poem 58" which has some raucous bluesy guitar soloing, that halfway through turns into a groovy tune with some call and response vocals (and another guitar solo afterwards). "Poem 58" is the most successful, but things get deathly boring during "Free Form Guitar" (which is just a whole bunch of feedback guitar noise), and "South California Purples". Long jam after long jam!

"I'm A Man" is decent though, and then comes the haunting medley of "Prologue, August 29, 1968" and "Someday" which are a relief after four songs that all run over six minutes long. Last of all is the ok 14 minute "Liberation", which is the only live song on the whole set. A neat debut from this band, in the near future they would turn away from this long bluesy jamming and start pumping out one hit after another.

OVERALL RATING: 7

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CHICAGO II (1970)

(reviewed by Casey Brennan)

Often regarded as Chicago's career high, this is not only the band's second release, but their second double album as well. It wasn't the last either as they would become notoriously known for releasing double albums throughout the first half of the decade. Like Blood, Sweat, & Tears, who initially started the Big Band Rock sound, Chicago helped in leading the small genre. While the former band broke up after several years, Chicago became the main-stayers of this genre, releasing over twenty albums' and knocking this limited formula down to the ground. Unfortunately, from almost the very beginning, this band never even really had a single great songwriter, nor did they have much in the way of good melodic sense or song arrangement, which we all know is a big part in making successful Big Band music.

Every now and then they could come up with a real solid song (usually one of their hits), but for the most part you have to wade through a lot of pointless material. It wasn't as apparent on the first album, which contained a couple hits of great quality ("Beginnings", "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?"), a few decent album cuts, and several extended bluesy freeform jams that captivated me to a certain point. However, it is already apparent on this second release that the band was running out of steam and had a major weakness when it came to making cohesive and solidly enjoyable tunes. A good deal of the blame must heartily go to Terry Kath, who is obviously the single weakest link in the band as I look down at the songwriting credits; contributing about one-third of the material,most of it is among the crappiest of the whole album.

This easily makes Chicago II a hit-or-miss set, as with every good James Pankow or Robert Lamm credit ("Movin' In" and "Poem For The People"), you get a messy, poorly arranged, and rambling Terry Kath cut ("The Road" and "In The Country"). The former two cuts have a bunch of exciting Big Band horns and trombones (used in a good way of course), energetic playing, and very cohesive structures, while the latter two are only kept partially interesting by the tons of horns, or in the case of "In The Country", the nice opening and closing blues riff. That's only side one.

Side two is a bit better and easily the most entertaining side, though it starts off a bit iffy with the ballad "Wake Up Sunshine". It's the seven-song suite that follows it which is among the finest chunk off of the album. The first of two true classics to be found on here "Make Me Smile", starts off the suite as a poppy number with an uncharacteristically outstanding arrangement and exciting vibe (courtesy of the horns of course), before going into a loungey instrumental section with shaking congas and nice guitar solo. That connects right into a segue of short tunes beginning with the slower tempo found on "So Much To Say, So Much To Give", and into "Anxiety's Moment", which has a clanking piano intro and a cute horn solo, before getting a little faster and adding bass, tambourine, and eventually low-key keyboard for "West Virginia Fantasies".

This leads into a pretty and very simple piano ballad called "Colour My World" (they may spell the word 'color' like that but they aren't British), which then brings us to the final conclusion of this interesting piece on side two with "To Be Free" and "Now More Than Ever" (this one repeats the main melody from "Make Me Smile"). Things are still very much alive on the start of side three with the infectious and catchy "Fancy Colours", a wah-wah jazzy tune with good flute-playing - the only defect is the somewhat awkward minute-and-a-half that opens up the tune. And also the heavy rocking "25 Or 6 To 4", which follows as the second ultimate highlight here; this classic-rock staple is a tour-de-force with its' two minutes of magnificent wah-wah electric guitar soloing and incredible drive.

If the album ended right after this fantastic hit (the 14th song out of 23) we would have a pretty good Chicago album on our hands. But no, there is still a twenty-two minute chunk of material (that's a big chunk, you see) left, and its' basically all filler. Terry Kath comes to haunt us again with the pointless orchestrated instrumental suite "Prelude/A.M. Mourning/P.M. Mourning", which is completely devoid of any melody or anything really, and "Memories of Love", an over-simplified and banal piano ballad that almost seems to stop the world to a halt and suck the living energy out of me with its' unbearably slow tempo.

The next suite, "It Better End Soon/2nd Movement/3rd Movement/4th Movement" starts off good enough as a bluesy rock jam driven by organ, but by the 3rd Movement it becomes a stupid Terry Kath peace rant with lyrics like '"Let's just love one another/Let's show peace for each other/we can make it happen/we can change the world". Yuck. Finally, Chicago II ends on an average note with "Where Do We Go From Here". Two of Chicago's best-ever songs may be featured here, but much of the rest of the material is a letdown when compared to them, giving one a false impression of how good the album might be. A major factor is that they were simply releasing too much material at one time (the next one is a double album too!); still though, the band did have a lack of talented songwriters/arrangers and so forth.

OVERALL RATING: 6

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CHICAGO III (1971)

(reviewed by Casey Brennan)

Chicago's third double album in a row is what I like to call the band's official jam record. The three extended suites, all of which contain five or more individual tunes each, consist more of all-out bluesy horn-laden Rock jamming than actual songs. Even so, Chicago III is immediately seen as a carbon copy of Chicago II, as the structure of the album is almost identical, and the music is trying to be just as ambitious in most respects. As you probably have already guessed, it's a weaker rendition of that former album too. While there isn't really any offensive material (Chicago jams are usually very listenable at worst), there is also not one single outstanding track throughout the entire seventy-one minutes. Having nothing to look forward to over the course of a double album is a bad and very rare thing indeed folks.

Unfortunately, that's exactly the case on here. The record contains the two least memorable Chicago hits ever with "Mother" (a moderately enjoyable tune with stiff keyboard playing) and "Lowdown", both of which are middle-of-the road pop-rockers that you'll never hear on classic Rock radio (unlike the rest which are played 24/7 on the station around here). Elsewhere, as I previously mentioned, the band is interested in playing extended jams of varying lengths. The jamming is highly competent through-out, with the lively horns obviously giving them a certain strength, but there is simply too much of it and too little diversion on each one. The Terry Kath "An Hour In The Shower" five-part suite is an average and dry-sounding bluesy jam with Kath singing about his 'hung-over can't eat breakfast blues' over top of it; though satisfactory at times, it is unoriginal and rambling (most Kath numbers tend to ramble though).

Meanwhile, the "Elegy" suite that closes the album has a long jam in its' fourth part called "The Approaching Storm", which sounds very decent when on, but in the end is nothing to write home about. The rest of that suite is given over to a banal poem called "When all the Laughter Dies In Sorrow", and a fewinstrumental sections leading up to the seven-minute jam - one of them ("Progress?") contains industrial noises underneath the brass instruments to warn us that maybe we aren't making progress towards a better future for humanity (genius stuff eh?). The six-part "Travel Suite" on side two ends similarly with a repetitive seven-minute jam, albeit a bit more lounge-like and mellow (and with flute accompaniment) one. All I can say is that there aren't many surprises on this one either.

An incredible lack of creativity and focus permeates the whole suite though, which starts off with the pretty country-tinged "Flight 602", a track that sounds a bit derivative of Grahm Nash's pop style, and then goes into a pointless drum solo, a 'we want freedom' chant-jam called "Free" (some more dated crap) , and an avant-grade piece called "Free Country". Utterly forgettable. The only places where the band doesn't seem to waste pointless space is on "Loneliness Is Just a Word", "What Else Can I Say" (a crisp guitar-line on this one), and the nine minute opener "Sing A Mean Tune Kid", which is built on one good solid funky blues riff (with lively brass complimenting it). It's not particularly great, but at least it's more invigorating than most anything else on this unmemorable affair.

OVERALL RATING: 5

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