Chicago: success came even if the radio didn’t love them

THE Chicago are today known as the historic and legendary “rock and roll band with horns”, but in the beginning they had to face an uphill path and surprisingly, it was not a problem with the critics.

“Chicago Transit Authority” from 1969 is their debut album, a double LP that reaches almost 80 minutes of music, which in the ’60s, even if at the beginning of the ’70s, was excessive, especially considering that it was the band’s debut album. group. But the problem was another: radio programmers didn’t want to broadcast the band’s first singles. “Questions 67 & 68” (5 minutes long) stopped at No. 71 on the Billboard Hot 100, while its follow-up, “Beginnings” (which was almost 8 minutes long), failed to enter the charts.

“They literally said that because we hadn’t had a hit yet, they couldn’t play the song,” the trumpeter recalls now Lee Loughnanea co-founding member of the group, during a conversation on UCR Podcast. “Wait a minute! This is the crux of it. How are we supposed to have a hit if you don’t play us? At first, with the first album, the critics loved us. They were like, ‘These guys are way ahead of their time. What do they have in store for the second record?’. AM radios weren’t playing the singles.”

Frustrated, but not discouraged, the group continued to focus on their work on the road. “We played schools and everywhere. We played everywhere, all over the country,” he recalls. “While we were writing the second album, we were rehearsing the new songs on tour. It’s something you can hear in the “Carnegie Hall” (live album released in 1971 also known as “Chicago IV”). We were going to record the songs for our fourth studio album about a week after we finished that show. We hadn’t yet decided who was going to sing lead vocals and stuff like that. Doing a big concert while we were still rehearsing the songs makes me think, “How did we have the balls to do this?” But it was really the only time we could work on songs, because we were always away. We were always at work.”

Those difficulties and that creative model have been overcome with a long career that still continues but which does not forget that debut album. “Chicago & Friends: Live at 55,” their latest album released at the end of November, was recorded during two concerts in Atlantic City in 2023 and documents the extraordinary performances of stars who took to the stage each night. The group performed 35 songs in both shows, split into two sets, totaling over two and a half hours. Apart from a few covers, which were cut, it is now possible to listen to almost everything that was performed.

Attention is drawn to the troubled songs on “Chicago Transit Authority” referenced by Lee Loughnane. “Beginnings,” “Questions 67 & 68” and “Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is” and other songs from the album remained setlist staples. But the Atlantic City concerts also brought to light some real rarities, like “Listen” and “Poem 58,” which hadn’t been performed live by the group since the 1970s.

Steve Vaiknown fan of the late (in 1978) Chicago guitarist Terry Kathsteps in to perform two songs, including “South California Purples,” which is played for the first time since the early 1980s. Other guests, including Robert Randolph And Christone “Kingfish” Ingramthey try their hand at and bring back to life some material from the band’s now historic debut.

In a way, the Atlantic City performances demonstrate how the songs have continued to evolve. This is in line with how the group itself was changing in the early years leading up to “Chicago Transit Authority,” a time when they had moved from Chicago to California. “We actually had no idea what was going to happen. We started out thinking that hopefully something will happen,” Lougnane says. “We continued to play the songs we knew. We listened to the Vanilla Fudgewho in effect made different and personal arrangements of other people’s already established hits. That’s where we started doing the same thing, and that was our development. Once recorded we would take different aspects of the music and combine them together into a song.”

According to Loughnane, there were no real sonic templates in mind when they went into the studio to record the songs for “Chicago Transit Authority” with the producer James William Guercio. “I don’t know if we intentionally did it this way,” he says. “As we played it, we started thinking about how to progress the song, and then when we got to the studio, we had the song ready. We recorded the brass parts at the same time, knowing full well that we would be recording the brass again, but that they would have been the same notes, so if the parts had been the same, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

Another important moment for the band was in 1969, when the group found themselves opening a series of concerts for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Those lives are an example of how much the band still had to learn, but also some positive signs as he says Lee Loughnane. “We were the first to play, obviously, and the audience were more interested in hearing Jimi, so there were a lot of ‘Put Jimi on stage’ chants, rather than hearing us,” reflects Loughnane. “But I think enough people recognized and appreciated what we did that they thought, ‘These guys aren’t that bad.’ We were in a small group on stage. It was probably a 40 foot stage. We were used to playing in small clubs, and we were already close-knit and used to proximity and so we were also configured on the bigger stages like when we went out for the first time with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. So it must have seemed pretty strange: “Why are these guys standing so close together?” At that time we didn’t know any other way to do it.”