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Chicago Biography

Last updated: 05/30/2012 11:00:00 AM


Perhaps more than any other city in the United States, Chicago, located at the center of the nation, has reflected the cultural diversity that has served as both a nurturer of significant musical talent and a magnet that drew the best from other areas. Jazzman Lionel Hampton arrived in Chicago when he was 11 years old in 1919? bluesman Muddy Waters got there in 1943, when be was 28. But Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, didn't have to travel; he was born in Chicago in 1909.


Most pop stars who emerged in the 1960s will tell you that they got their inspiration by seeing Elvis Presley perform on TV in the '50's. But Walter Parazaider born in Chicago on March 14, 1945, had a slightly different experience. I started playing when I was nine years old because I saw Benny Goodman on The Ed Sullivan Show, "he says. I was a clarinetist to start with. Parazaider came by his interest in music naturally. His father was a musician who had turned from full-time to part-time work when he started a family. "I can't think of a time growing up when there wasn't music in the house, " Parazaider says, "whether it was my dad practicing by himself or playing in a band that was rehearsing at the house, or my mother listening to records, and that's from my earliest recollection." As a result, when he began to take an interest in playing music himself, "the support that I had from my mother and father over the years was phenomenal."

Parazaider studied and practiced the clarinet for the next several years, and by his teens had displayed so much proficiency that he became the protege' of the E-flat clarinetist in the Chicago symphony.

But even for a classical music prodigy, the late '50's were a time when other forms of music exerted an influence. "I picked up the saxophone along the way," Parazaider recalls, "and discovered that you could make a buck and get some girls playing a saxophone in a rock 'n roll band. So, I enjoyed a schizoid musical existence, so to speak, from about the age of 13 on, playing in anything from an octet playing all the standard big band tunes, any rock 'n roll from Tequila to any of the Ventures stuff that they'd use a saxophone on, and did that along with pursuing the classical career, because my idea at that time was to take my teachers place in the Chicago symphony."

Pursuant to that goal, Parazaider enrolled at Chicago's DePaul University, where his teacher taught, all the while still playing "Many gigs and smoke-filled rooms and dance halls, and also some orchestra balls." It was at DePaul that he met another young Chicago musician, Jimmy Guercio, who years later would become Chicago's producer. "We started playing in different rock 'n roll bands in the area,"

Parazaider recalls, "played a lot of the beer bashes at Northwestern University and the surrounding colleges in the area, and we became quite friendly." Meanwhile, Parazaider was maintaining his "schizoid musical existence at DePaul, though with increasing difficulty. He recalls, "After about a year and a half of realizing I didn't want to study trigonometry and how to teach health class in school, and also realizing with the help of some of my professors that, because I wasn't a patient person, I wasn't cut out to be a teacher. I changed my major. I prepared for about a year and a half and played a degree recital for the principal members of the Chicago symphony and an audience. I passed with flying colors and received a playing degree in orchestral clarinet. In the meantime, I had taken all my masters credits in English Lit."


In the summer of l966, the Beatles turned around and brought horns back. Their Revolver album featured songs such as "Got To Get You Into My Life," which included two trumpets and two tenor saxophones.


Loughnane, born in Chicago on October 21, 1946, was the son of a former trumpet player. "My dad was a product of the Swing Era," he recalls. "He was a bandleader in the Army Air Force in World War I." In that capacity, Chief Warrant Officer Loughnane worked with some of the top players from the big bands of the era, who had been drafted. But he also came in contact with their lifestyles. "My dad knew that they were only going to be with him for a certain amount of time, and then they were going to get shipped out to the front lines," says Loughnane. "So, he was a little more lax in his discipline than he might have been under other circumstances. Some of the guys would go AWOL on weekends to play gigs in town and then come back drunk or high on something, and my dad would cover for them. As a result, he gained a dislike for drugs and alcohol, and when he left the army, he left the music behind. The only thing he brought home was his trumpet, which was the first one that I used. I had never heard him play."

Loughnane began trying to play that trumpet at the age of 11. When he was 11, in the summer of 1959, between seventh and eighth grades, he met with the band director, Ralph Meltzer. "He wanted me to show him my teeth," Loughnane recalls. "If you have any crooked teeth, you start messing up your lip because of the pressure. My teeth were okay. He gave me some "Mary Had A Little Lamb" books, and I couldn't wait to go home and play the songs. My dad then found me a private teacher by the name of John Nuzzo. He started giving me some lessons, and my playing improved immensely."

When Loughnane went to high school, be enrolled at St. Mel's High School rather than St. Patrick's, which was much closer to his home, because St. Mel's had a concert band, a jazz band, and a marching band. Also, the band director, Tom Fabish, had taught Loughnane's father when he was in high school. "Tom was a major influence on my playing, and he and my dad wanted me to go to a school where l could play music," he says. "I didn't like the marching part of it too much, however. They could never get me to lift any legs up and look good as a marcher. "You want to hear the parts or you want me to march?" I was always into making the music sound good, and that still lives within my thinking on-stage. But now I have learned how to be more of a performer and still play as good as I can rather than trying to jump around and miss a lot of notes. I've always thought it was very important to be true to the music."

By the time he graduated from high school in 1964, Loughnane knew that he wanted to be a professional musician. "There was nothing else that I wanted to do," he recalls. "I had no other calling."

"Tom Fabish was also the band director at DePaul University, so when I got ready to enroll in college, it was the perfect school. Tom, my dad, and I decided that if I was intent upon a career in music, I should get a teaching degree for insurance, just in case my lofty plans at success as a professional musician didn't pan out." But, as with Parazaider, it didn't work out that way. "I loved the music classes, but I didn't so much love the general education classes that I had to take in order to get that kind of degree," Loughnane says, "and I would get to the point where I just wouldn't go to those classes."


Loughnane's other band in this period was Ross and the Majestics,who earned a residency one summer in a bar in the basement of the Palmer House, a ritzy Chicago hotel. To take the gig, Loughnane was forced to leave a summer job his father had arranged for him on the graveyard shift at Revere Copper and Brass Company. "Dad and I disagreed on my decision to take the job with Ross, but that was the band at the time, and I couldn't let them down."

Another summer job at the Chicago State Hospital only confirmed Loughnane's dislike of manual labor. "I knew that playing the trumpet was a lot more fun and definitely easier on the back," he says. Later that summer, be decided it was time to spread his wings. "I went out and got an apartment, and then I met Terry."



Pankow, born in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 20, 1947, had certainly spent enough time with his instrument by then to have gotten something. "I was in fifth grade, and my folks realized that I was a human beat box," he says. "I was kicking to records in the crib before I could walk, and I was snapping my fingers and tapping on walls and making all kinds of gestures in tempo with whatever music they were listening to. They figured they better channel this nervous energy, so they took me to an audition at the local elementary school, and I of course wanted to play drums or guitar or sax. Nobody wanted to play trombone. It wasn't cool."

But a conference took place between Pankow's parents and the band director (who happened to be a trombone player), and, as Pankow notes, "might makes right, and between my parents and the band director, they persuaded me to try something that was less competitive. So, bottom line, I wound up with the trombone, and for the first three years it was sheer hell."

One reason for this was the difficulty for a ten year-old in maneuvering such a large instrument. "It was like putting a dwarf in a semi and telling him to drive to New York," says Pankow. But by his mid-teens, with the encouragement of a father with an enormous record collection who took him out to local nightspots, Pankow began to enjoy the horn, so such so that he even persevered with it during three bruised and bloody years spent with races on his teeth.

Pankow's musical aspirations were encouraged at Notre Dame High School by Father George Wiskirchen, who, he remembers, "wrote the book on high school jazz lab and big bands," and who took the young trombone player under his wing. "I played in concert band and marching band," Pankow says, "but the high school jazz band was my saving grace and my real love."



Lamm, born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 13, 1944, like Pankow seemed to be rocking in the cradle. "I was interested in music from the time I was a toddler," he says. "Both my mother and father were collectors of jazz records, and there always seemed to be music playing at our house."


When Lamm was 15, his mother remarried and moved the family to Chicago, where he met other aspiring high school musicians and they put a band together. He also studied with the prominent jazz teacher Millie Collins. His idol became Ray Charles, who both wrote and played, and Lamm named himself after his hero. "I was writing songs in a band or two before Chicago," he recalls, "the dubious quality of which is another discussion. Writing songs wasn't yet the all-consuming passion it is now."








If the Big Thing had stayed late to see the Exceptions, one of the Exceptions had come early to see the Big Things. "I had heard a lot about these guys," says Peter Cetera, then bass player for the Exceptions. "I was just floored 'cause they were doing songs that nobody else was doing, and in different ways. They were doing the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour" and "Got To Get You Into My Life" and different versions of rock songs with horns." After the gig, says Pankow, he approached us and said, "I don't know what you guys are doing, but I like it. It's really refreshing. It's cool." "At the end of the two-week stint, " says Cetera, "I was out of the Exceptions and into the Big Thing."


His more serious musical career commenced a little later. "I started listening to music," he recalls, "and when I was a sophomore in high school, l bought a little guitar from Sears and started singing at the school functions. I met a senior who played guitar, and we started singing together." He said, "Let's start a group," and I went, "Fine, I'll buy a bass." We played all the Homecoming dances and all the weekend dances, doing Top 40 material. My senior year, I got together with the Exceptions. I stuck with them for five or six years."






But in addition to the money, they were earning new fans, one of whom was Tris Imboden, a 16 year-old surfer and aspiring drummer. "I remember going to the Shrine Auditorium," he says. "I had gone to see Procol Harum, and Arthur Lee and Love were playing, too. I walked in, and on another stage was this band with horns, and, man, it just stopped me cold in my tracks. I just went, "Good God! This is the best thing I've ever heard," because it was a blend of so many things that I loved, R&B and jazz and rock 'n roll, and the vocals were so strong, between Robert and Terry and of course Peter. Danny Seraphine was just on fire that night, too, so he really grabbed my attention. I was asking everybody, "Who is this?" and it's CTA, Chicago Transit Authority. If somebody had told me, "Tris, one day you're going to be the drummer of that band," I would have said, "Yeah, right. And I'm Napoleon." I wouldn't have believed it." It would take 22 years, but eventually, Tris Imboden did become Chicago's drummer.



"Jimmy called me up, and be asked me to ask the other guys, would it be okay if he did the Blood, Sweat & Tears second album," Parazaider recalls. "At first I was going, Well, jeez, man, that's horns, and what's going on?" and I voiced that opinion to him. He says, "To tell you the truth, I really haven't recorded horns as a whole band situation. I've recorded horns that did sort of blaps here and there or little parts here and there. This would be a good way for me to learn how to record horns." I don't think it was lip service, because hereally hadn't recorded horns per se. We were basically a band with integrated horns in the band, not as backup horns. I hate to believe him on this because, if you think about it, what the horn section did, from the start, was a lot different from Blood, Sweat & Tears, and the sound was copied many times over after we got the Chicago horn sound." So, I think with Blood, Sweat & Tears the horns were recorded in a much different way than Chicago's horns were. Of course, if yo

u look at the two bands, you would say that they were really a jazz-rock 'n roll band, where we were different. They called us a jazz-rock band after Blood, Sweat and Tears faded away, but we were basically a rock 'n roll band with horns."








Chicago Transit Authority is a time capsule of the popular musical styles of the late '60's, with CTA's own unique flavor on top. One can pick out the group's classical, jazz, R&B, and pop influences, bearing references to Beatles as well as Jimi Hendrix. One can hear the band's own history: Kath's "Introduction," which does in fact introduce the band in confessional form ("We're a little nervous"), is CTA's own version of the kind of funky bar band rave-up of Sly and the Family Stone's "Dance To The Music" or Archie Bell and the Drells' "Tighten Up." Midsong, one moves from the bar to the lounge for some lovely horn playing, and moments later one is in a concert hall listening to a screaming rock guitar solo by Kath.

And so it goes, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" starts with an acoustic piano hat is equal parts Erik Satie and Art Tatum, while the song itself is a bright, pop melody contrasted with a typically anti-establishment lyric. "Questions 67 And 68" combines a stately horn chart with some hot guitar and a musical cadence reminiscent of pop songs such as Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park." All through, there are the inventive horn charts, the sophisticated rhythm changes and startling musical juxtapositions, the alternating smooth (Lamm), soaring (Cetera), and soulful (Kath) singing that would become hallmarks of the classic Chicago sound.


The album broke into Billboard magazine's Top LP's chart for the week ending May 17, 1969, and eventually peaked at Number 17. By the end of 1972, it had amassed 148 weeks on the chart (and that wasn't the end of its total run), making it the longest running album by a rock group up to that time.

By December, Chicago Transit Authority, still without benefit of a hit single, was a old-selling album, and Chicago was a famous band. It changed their lives. "Your life dream is to have a hit record," Says Parazaider. "It was amazing because we were close friends, we had gone through all of this upheaval of leaving Chicago, moving to L.A. at a young age, leaving our families, just rolling the dice. We stuck real close together, kept everybody's ego in check. I think for some guys in the group it was harder to cope with the success than others. I don't think there were any of us that sat down around my kitchen table that day in February of '67 and said, "Hey, out goal is to be famous." The one good thing that seemed to help us is, we were the faceless band behind that logo."

Indeed, though critics would always misinterpret their intentions, Chicago's logo and its facelessness were very much in keeping with the style of the late '60's that valued group effort over individual ego. (To the delight of the poor folks who have to put up the letters on theater marquees , the group shortened its name simply to Chicago during its first year as a national act.)


"Even we were not aware of how edgy and different the first album was," he says. "We were just doing what we were doing, and we were hoping that it was different enough for people to notice it was different. But when international audiences heard the album, it just really stopped them cold. We played in clubs all over Europe, and the audience took to it much more readily than we had experienced anywhere in the States. When we came back, the album had gone gold, and we began headlining a little bit, but still the feeling was that American audiences didn't really get it. They got that the band was becoming popular, but we didn't have the sense that they were hearing the music for that it was. "



Perhaps the album's most ambitious piece was Pankow's "Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon," which affected the tone of the whole LP. "The second record had more of a classical approach to it," says Parazaider, "whereas the first one was really a raw thing. The second one seemed a little more polished."

"I had been inspired by classics," says Pankow of the Ballet. I had bought the Brandenburg concertos, and I was listening to them one night, thinking, man, how cool! Bach 200 years ago, wrote this stuff, and it cooks. If we put a rock 'n' roll rhythm section to something like this, that could be really cool. I was also a big Stravinsky fan. His stuff is classical, yet it's got a great passion to it. We were on the road, and I had a Fender Rhodes piano between Holiday Inn beds. I found myself going back to some arpeggios, a la Bach, and along came "Colour My World." It's just a simple 12-bar pattern, but it just flowed. Then I called Walt into the room, and I said, "Hey, Walt, you got your flute? Why don't you try a few lines?," and one thing led to another. These things were disjointed, but yet I liked it all, and ultimately it was a matter of just sewing these things together, creating segues and interludes."



The second effect of the incident was Cetera's first foray into compositions. With a broken jaw, the singer had some silent time on his hands. "I was lying in my bed convalescing when they landed on the moon, and I grabbed my bass guitar and started this little progression on the bass, and started writing "Where Do We Go From Here." I think Walter Cronkite actually had said that, and I thought, "Wow, where do we go from here?" So, l wrote it about that and about myself and about the world and about everything in general, and that was my first writing credit."

The second album also took a more direct look at the political situation. Chicago had included chants from the Yippie demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic Convention on its first album. The second album's liner notes (penned by Robert Lamm) dedicated the record, the band members, their futures, and their energies "to the people of the revolution and the revolution in all of its forms."

The development of Lamm's political consciousness dated back to the band's last months in their hometown in the spring of 1968. "Chicago actually was rather like a pressure cooker," Lamm recalls. "During the last couple of months that we were there, there was a lot of unrest and there were National Guard troops in the streets. Now, this is before the Democratic convention, and the city was gearing up and already had a built-in fear of, if not Yippies, at least hippies, and we actually experienced it because we were playing clubs. You know, in Chicago you played pretty late, and a couple of us had run into situations where, leaving the club and having to walk through especially the Rush Street area when the bar's were emptying out, there was a lot of angst directed toward longhairs."


When the band moved to California and continued working up original songs, Lamm's awareness of the world around him affected his lyric writing. In songs like "It Better End Soon" and "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?", he reflected on the kinds of questions: political, social, and philosophical that young people around the country were starting to ask. "I'm not sure exactly what led me to the realization that I could write about things other than romantic topics," Lamm says, "but l think just being alive in those times and watching that conflict in Asia unfold on television daily because Lord knows we all sat around and watched a lot of television then the culture shock of moving from Chicago to California.


At the same time, a confluence of the music business and the political movements was occurring. "We had begun in 1969 to play universities and colleges, Lamm recalls, "and very often those concerts were used as a springboard for political gatherings". In other words, everybody would show up at the show, and then they would go and talk about either the antiwar effort or the more abstract concept of actual revolution. Then we played the pop festivals, which were a melting pot of everything, everything from free love to drug use to information dissemination about the anti-war movement, political climate, and social issues. So, it was really heavy stuff for everybody because nobody knew what was going on, but we all had a sense that there was some power available, just by the sheer numbers of us."

Looking back, Lamm says, "I think there has been a revolution. You may argue with the term 'revolution,' but I think for those of us in our late teens or early 20's, that sure was a sexy word." Of course, the political activists at the time sought an idealistic and disruptive revolution that would replace "the system." Lamm feels the actual revolution was less concrete, but perhaps ultimately more persuasive.

"In my view, the promise of paradise and peace on earth, that was something we all fervently believed was possible," he says, "and what occurred was something more subtle I believe that there was a revolution, and I believe that it happened so gradually that we didn't realize what was going on. Even if you take something as mundane as music (be laughs), there's a whole young generation of rap artists who are saying everything they want and actually expressing themselves politically and socially, and people of all cultures are hearing it, and that form of protest has flourished within the system, and it's accepted, and for the most part it's okay, except to extreme right wingers."

The most obvious example of the social/philosophical revolution Lamm perceives are the changes brought about by the civil rights and anti-war movements so prevalent at the time. "I hate to harp on the whole racial thing, but I think that's probably the easiest way to spot that things have changed immensely since the '60's," he says. "Obviously, they're not perfect for people of color in this country, but they are a lot different. We don't think of black men the same way that we did in 1969. We just don't. The stereotype has changed 180 degrees. Then, certainly a lot of the people who were on the front lines, whether civil rights movement, student revolt,or the anti-war movement, now are in the government. You could say they were absorbed by the system, but I think that looking back now, it was fantasy to think that you could replace the system. You couldn't replace the system, but you could change the system." So, perhaps the revolution, in at least some of its forms, has come to pass.





The single reached the Top 10, while Chicago II immediately went gold and got to Number 4 on the LP's chart, joining the first album,which was still selling well. A second single, Lamm's "25 Or 6 To 4," was an even bigger bit in the summer of 1970, peaking at Number 4.

But instead of reaching into the second album for a third single, Columbia and Chicago decided to try to re-stimulate interest in the first album, and succeeded. The group's next single was "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" which became their third Top 10 hit in a row by the start of 1971. "Up to that time, to be very honest, I don't think people were really ready to hear horns the way we were using them," says Parazaider. "But after we established something with horns '25 Or 6 To 4,' but actually 'Make Me Smile,' which was our first bona fide hit it seemed like it broke the ice and it became easier, and they accepted stuff that was recorded easily a year before."

Ironically, Chicago's belated singles success cost the group its "underground" imprimatur. "All of a sudden," Loughnane recalls,"people started saying we sold out. The same music! Exactly the same songs!"

As January 1971 rolled around, once again Chicago had found time to record a new double album. "That third album scared us,' says Parazaider, "because we basically had run out of the surplus of material that we had, and we were still working a lot on the road. We were afraid that we were getting ready to record a little under the gun. But I don't think it shows." "That whole album was more adventurous in terms of instrumental exploration than the first two albums," says Pankow. "Robert wrote a lot of in-depth stuff."

Cetera also was flexing his muscles as a writer again. "Danny and I had got together one night, and I said, 'I got this little thing that I've been working on," he recalls. The result as "Lowdown," which became the second single from Chicago III. (The first was Lamm's "Free.") "I'm still proud of it," Cetera says.



Chicago At Carnegie Hall holds fixed memories for the band members. Cetera feels that all the extra sound equipment inhibited the band's performance. "Within the first two or three songs of the opening night, I'm singing and playing, and all of & sudden the level on my bass drops considerably," Cetera remembers. "I turn around, and there's a roadie out there messing with my knobs. I'm wondering, 'What the hell are you doing?' He goes, "Well, the sound truck told me to tell you to turn down, and since I couldn't tell you, they told me to go out here and turn you down. That's kind of what happened all the way along with everybody."

"I hate it," Pankow says. "The acoustics of Carnegie Hall were never meant for amplified music, and the sound of the brass after being miked came out sounding like kazoos." Parazaider, however, notes with pride that the album marks a milestone for the group, that they were the first rock group to sell out Carnegie Hall for a week. "That was an exciting week," adds Lamm, "to actually play in Carnegie Hall."

Lamm got the chance to premiere "A Song For Richard And His Friends," which was to have appeared on Chicago V. April 1971 was a long time before Watergate, and the resignation of a U.S. president was inconceivable, but that didn't stop Lamm from offering a helpful suggestion to Richard M. Nixon. "I love that song," Lamm says, "and later on I did a version of it for my first solo album, Skinny Boy though I didn't end up including it where, in the tag chorus I add the line, 'Thank you, John Dean.' (Dean was the presidential assistant who blew the whistle on Nixon.) I've been told by one of the foremost psychics in Los Angeles that I'm psychic, I just don't know it."


"When I listen to some of the Carnegie Hall album, it is really good," says Loughnane. "There's a lot of good material but there's a lot of stuff that I was unhappy with and I didn't think should be released, but that's what it was. There was a history behind that record. The story, the marketing, all of that stuff went into it. The program, the pictures of the building, the diagrams, all of that was part of the charisma, and it worked. But I think we could do great live albums today. I would love to do that"

Though Chicago had made previous visits to Europe and the Far East, it embarked on its first full-scale world tour in February 1972. "We played 16 countries in 20 days," recalls Walt Parazaider. "It's that old movie: If it's Tuesday, it's Belgium. People said, "You went around the world, you played in all those countries." I said, 'Yeah, I remember some of the ceilings in some of the nicest hotels in Europe." But we became an international success, and that was great, because people all over the world really enjoyed our music. And there's nothing more flattering to people who create music than to have somebody singing your song when you're in Germany or Australia or Japan. We marveled at it. We had to pinch ourselves that we were having all the success we were having."

The high point of the tour was in Japan, where Chicago recorded other live album that was so superior to the Carnegie Hall album, here's really no comparison. "The Japanese hooked up two eight-track machines together to make 16 tracks," notes Parazaider. "The uality of the sound was excellent. "The LP was released only in Japan at the time, but it is now available soon on Chicago Records."


James Pankow offers an explanation for the change in the band's pproach. "About the time of that release, radio had started changing," he notes. "FM radio became more commercial, and it started to deal with formats. This band has never said, 'Let's sit down and write an album of hit singles.' That's just not the way we do things." But they knew things were changing.

Lee Loughnane suggests a little-known business reason why, with the exception of Chicago VII, the group stopped making double albums containing many compositions. "One thing that really changed music in a major way is the way that we were paid on song copyrights," he says. "When we released all those double records, there wasn,t a limit on how many songs you could have on a record and how many copyrights you could get off of thatrecord. Then the companies decided that they were only going to pay on ten copyrights per record no matter how many songs there were."


Chicago V is perhaps best remembered for Lamm's "Saturday In The Park." "I was rooming with him, and we were in Manhattan on the Fourth of July," recalls Parazaider. "Robert came back to the hotel from Central Park very excited after seeing the steel drum players, singers, dancers, and jugglers. I said, 'Man, it's time to put music to this."! Lamb had films of his adventures in the park and later edited the film and wrote "Saturday In The Park" as a kind of score. The album sold very well, topping the charts for nine weeks, the first of five straight Chicago Albums to reach Number 1. "Saturday In The Park" became the group's first gold single, hitting Number 3.





When Chicago gathered at the Caribou Ranch to record its seventh album in the fall of 1973, the initial intention was to do a jazz album, with the resulting "Italian From New York," "Aire," and "Devil's Sweet" contributed by Lamm, Seraphine, Parazaider, and Pankow. On his own, Pankow brought in another gorgeous ballad, though this time his subject matter went beyond romance. " "'(I've Been) Searchin 'So Long' was a song about finding myself," he says. "I just had to talk about who I was and what I was feeling at the time. The '70's was a time for soulsearching."

Cetera, who never claimed to be a Jazz musician, was discouraged about the original concept of the album, and also at his lack of participation as songwriter. He showed Guercio the lilting, Latin-tinged ballad "Happy Man." "You know when people talk about these flashes of something coming?" Cetera asks. "They do, in fact. Every once in a while, a song will just come out of your mouth, the words and everything. It's remembering it or having a tape player around when that happens that's the important part. I wrote "Happy Man" about midnight driving down the San Diego Freeway on my motorcycle. It was the one and only song that I ever remembered, words and music, and I went home and sang it into a tape a day later."

Cetera's second last-minute contribution to Chicago VII is one of the Album's best-remembered songs, "Wishing You Were Here." "There's two people that I always wanted to be," Cetera confesses, "and that was a Beatle or a Beach Boy. I got to meet the Beach Boys at various times and got to be good friends with Carl Wilson."



Trumpeter Lee Loughnane was the next band member to write for the group. "Terry, Jimmy and Robert were the writers in the beginning, and then Peter and Danny started breaking into it," he notes, "and then, by the seventh album, I started coming into it. I had just divorced and decided to write a song, and I presented 'Call On Me.' " It was, he recalls, daunting company to try to break into: "These guys were very good at what they did, and I didn't think they were going to like it." Understandably, his bandmates, also had been writing hit singles for five years, were more concerned with their own efforts. "Everyone went, 'Yeah, that's a good song, but listen to this,' and listen to this,' and 'Yeah, check this out." But Peter Cetera, who had had his own trouble breaking into the group's songwriting fraternity, worked with Loughnane on "Call On Me," which he ended up singing on the record. "He changed a couple of the words and the way he sang the melody in order for him to be able to play the bass and sing the

melody at the same time because that's the way he felt it," Loughnane notes. "I appreciate his efforts, and we did make the song a hit."

Chicago VII was preceded by the February 1974 single release of "(I've Been) Searchin' So Long," which become the band's eighth Top 10 hit. "Call On Me" became their ninth, and "Wishing You Were Here" became their tenth, peaking at Number 9 in Cash Box, Number 11 in Billboard. The album was another chart topper. The year 1974 also marked the addition of an eighth member of Chicago, Brazilian percussionist Laudir De Oliveira, a former member of Sergio Mendez's Brazil '66. De Oliveira had first appeared on Chicago VI as a sideman. And in 1974, Robert Lamm released a solo album, Skinny Boy. Lamm wrote all the songs except "Temporary Jones," which he co-wrote with Bob Russell, a celebrated lyricist who had worked with Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Terry Kath played bass on the album, also contributing acoustic guitar on two songs. The Pointer Sisters sang on the title track, which also appeared on Chicago VII with horns added.

Chicago began work on its next album August 1, 1974, at Caribou Ranch, and the results started to emerge in February 1975, with the release of the single "Harry Truman," Lamm's tribute to a president America could trust and a reference to the recently concluded Watergate scandal. Pankow wrote the sentimental "Old Days." "It 's a memorabilia song, it's about my childhood," he says. "It touches on key phrases that, although they date me, are pretty right-on in terms of images of my childhood. 'The Howdy Doody Show' on television and collecting baseball cards and comic books." "Old Days" was a Top 5 hit when it was released as the second single from Chicago VIII, which appeared in March 1975.

The year 1975 marked an early commercial peak in Chicago's career, a year during which the band scored its fourth straight Number 1 album, a year when all its previous albums were back in the charts. Chicago's worldwide record sales for this single year were a taggering 20 million copies. The group returned with an all-new album in June 1976, when it released Chicago X. (Chicago IX had been a greatest hits collection.) The big hit from the album was a song that just barely made the inal cut, Peter Cetera's "If You Leave Me Now." "That was one of those magical 'We need one more song (situations)," Cetera recalls.

Three months later, Parazaider remembers, "I'm sitting around a pool, and a song comes on, I'm going, 'That's a catchy tune. Where have I heard this before?' The next thing, they go, 'That's Chicago's latest release, "If You Leave Me Now." The main point of the story, outside of me being a dummy, is that often songs that just made the album end up being some of the biggest hits."



In September, Chicago XI was released, its most notable song being "Take Me Back To Chicago," written by drummer Danny Seraphine and David "Hawk" Wolinski. It has a darker theme than may be immediately apparent. "'Take Me Back To Chicago' is about Freddy Page, the drummer in the Illinois Speed Press who died tragically," Says Guercio. Like Chicago , the Speed Press had been brought to L.A.from the Midwest by Guercio in 1968. "Illinois Speed Press had the best shot, had the biggest budget, had the first record, and totally could not get along," he recalls.

The mounting tensions between Chicago and Guercio finally erupted. The split between group and manager had been a long time coming. Guercio had exerted a powerful control over the members of Chicago, especially in the early days, and as they became stars, it probably was inevitable that they would begin to chafe under his harsh leadership. "It started happening with the tenth record," says Parazaider. "He didn't want us to learn any of the production techniques. He'd go to sleep at nine o'clock, and we'd start producing the records ourselves. Or trying to. I think if you're the producer of your album, you have a fool for a client. You can't be that objective about what you're doing on both sides of the glass."



Kath's death devastated Chicago, and the band considered breaking up. "Right about there was probably what I felt was the end of the group," says Peter Cetera. "I think we were a bit scared about going our separate ways, and we decided to give it a go again." A short time after Kath's death, "Take Me Back To Chicago," which by now seemed as much about Kath as about Freddy Page, was released as a single.






Responding to pressure to change the sound, Chicago 13 , which was released in August 1979, contained the song "Street Player," which has a disco flavor. According to Parazaider, the album "hit the wall at 700,000 copies, a good sale for some, but very disappointing by Chicago's standards.



In the fall of 1981, Chicago asked Bill Champlin, a noted Los Angeles session singer and musician, to join them. "They needed a little bit of guitar work," says Champlin, "and they needed somebody to sing Terry's stuff." "Bill might come the closest to Terry's gutsy lead vocals," says Parazaider.

Champlin had had a long career already. Born on May 21, 1947, in Oakland, he grew up in various California cities, settling in Marin County north of San Francisco when he was l2. Champlin's mother played the piano and wrote songs, and he took piano lessons between the ages of three and five. "I was reading music before I was reading English," he recalls. But it wasn't until the advent of Elvis Presley and early rock 'n' roll that he took up the guitar and began to think of music as a future profession. "I'd had enough early training with piano that it wasn't really hard for me to get back into it," he notes, "and then I took a million music classes in high school. I was trying to learn as many instruments as I could because I wanted to get a masters in music."

While in high school, Champlin was part of the Opposite Six, a band with two horns that played James Brown-style R&B. "We were the house band at this one community center," be says, "so we backed up a lot of the acts that they brought in, like Jan and Dean and the Righteous Brothers."

The Opposite Six evolved into the Sons of Champlin, which released a single on Verve in 1965. Champlin was attending the College of Marin in pursuit of a music degree at the same time, when be got some good advice. "My theory teacher, Larry Snyder, suggested that I drop out because be said I was doing better music with my band than I was ever going to do in school," Champlin recalls.






The next Chicago-Foster project, Chicago 17, released in May 1984, became the band's greatest seller. Such hits as "Stay The Night," "Hard Habit To Break," "You're The Inspiration," and "Along Comes A Woman" propelled the album past the six million mark and reaffirmed Chicago's status as one of America's top bands. They once again played sold-out concerts in North America and Asia. "We had a great time playing the big time again," says Loughnane. "It was the second big wave. People would give their eye teeth for the first amount of success that we had in the '70s, and to be able to do it for the second time is a major milestone in the history of rock 'n' roll as well as our history. Not too many people have had this opportunity, and we had a lot of fun with it."



Scheff was being asked to join the band on the basis of his tenor singing voice. Though he is the son of the legendary bass player Jerry Scheff, who backed Elvis Presley and has played with countless other musicians, nobody seems to have made the connection to the instrumental hole that tera's departure also left. Howard Kaufman, the manager, asked me, 'What instrument do you play?' I said, 'I'm a bass player,' and be freaked out," Scheff recalls. "He said, 'Oh, my God! This sounds like a match made in heaven."

Growing up in San Diego, Scheff didn't see much of his father, since his parents had divorced when he was young. But when he picked up an instrument, he could feel the connection. "Playing the base was very natural for me, so I knew that it was a gift that he had given me genetically, " he says. Scheff's mother is also a musician, and the two had a bond together when he was 14. As he went through his teens, Scheff played in local Top 40 bands, and his first break came when he was 19 and Peter Wolf (the record producer, not the ex-J. Geils Band singer), who would later produce Chicago, hired him for his band, which opened for the Rolling Stones in Vienna in 1982. Back in L.A., he continued to write songs and perform on recording session.

But being asked to join Chicago was the biggest break of his short career. It was also, he says, "the last thing that I would have imagined." With Scheff in place, Chicago went into the studio with David Foster to make Chicago 18. The album emerged at the end of September 1986 as the band took to the road for a fall tour to introduce the new member.



"We had come to the tail end of this long great run that was really dominated by pop ballad songs," notes Scheff, "and coupled with that was the fact that two of the singles on l9 ("Look Away" and "I Don't Wanna Live Without Your Love") were not even written by us . "The songs were written by Diane Warren, perhaps the most successful pop songwriter of the day. "Granted, we had two big hit singles that were really good for us because they helped give us a platinum album again and establish Bill Champlin more as a focal point. That was very good for us," Scheff acknowledges, but he notes that the songs did not have Chicago's individual signature.


The group faced another personnel change in 199O, when they parted ways with drummer Danny Seraphine. To replace him, they turned to that surfing drummer who had become a fan of theirs 22 years earlier at the Shrine Auditorium. "I was really taken by surprise when I got the phone call, and they said, 'Would you like to join Chicago?" says Tris Imboden. I said, 'Letmethinkaboutit..Yes!."









of Fame.








hat was one of the reasons that we warmed up to the idea of it."






"They had a pretty firm list of guys that they were going to listen to," recalls Keith Howland. "l actually heard that Chicago was looking for a guitar player on the first day of the auditions through a friend of mine who happened to be working in the building where they were being held." Howland contacted the band's management only to be told that the audition was closed. "As a last ditch effort, I just went ahead and drove down there, and I sat in the parking lot and waited for the band to show up," he says. Howland had had a brief contact with Jason Scheff, who had once stopped in to listen to a band he'd been in, and when Scheff drove up, he reintroduced himself to the bass player. "I said, 'Any chance I could get an audition?,' and he told me to go on home because they were full that day, but that he' d talk to the guys," Howland says .


Howland's persistence is explained by his longtime interest in Chicago. Born on August 14, 1964, in Silver Spring, Maryland, Howland and his whole family have been Chicago fans since the group's first national success. "My older brother was the first one that turned me on to the band, actually," he noted. Howland began playing guitar at the age of seven, and Terry Kath was one of his earliest influences. Howland headed for Los Angeles after graduating from college in 1988. He found gigs with Patty Smyth and Rick Springfield, but landing a place in Chicago, one he says he will keep "for the duration, as long as they'll have me," is the biggest break in his career.

What gave Howland the edge over the other guitarists the band listened to? It was a sound the members of Chicago had not heard in a long time. "When Keith made the audition, be played so much of the inside stuff and the rhythm stuff like Terry did that he was the guy," says Parazaider. "You just knew he was the guy to do this."

Howland's return to Terry Kath's rhythmic style of playing could not be more deliberate, and it has contributed to his fast acceptance from Chicago's fans. "The reason I did it was because I grew up listening to the music," he says. "It didn't seem right for me to come in and play it any other way because that was the way I had always heard it." Using Kath's work as a basis, Howland has developed his own guitar sound within Chicago.

In 1995, Chicago secured rights to its catalog of recordings originally made for Columbia between 1969 and 1980. That catalog has now been reissued on the group's Chicago Records label, which also has released sole efforts by the band members as well as other projects. "We are Chicago Records, which means we can look for talent, we can look for other catalogs to put out on our record company," says Parazaider. "We've got some interesting things coming up."

Among the other interesting things coming up for Chicago are a new approach to concerts and a new record. On July 7, 1996, the band played at the Hollywood Bowl backed by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. The show featured newly written orchestral charts, including the complete "Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon" from Chicago II. "When I saw the score that Dwight Mikkelson wrote for the orchestra for 'Ballet For A Girl In Bachannon,' I just got goosebumps," Parazaider says. "'Labor of love' isn't even the right words. I was just ecstatic."

Parazaider credits the Moody Blues, with whom Chicago toured, for inspiring the idea. "Then we started thinking that a lot of our music would really be suited to an orchestra," says the man who gave up a seat in the Chicago Symphony to play rock 'n' roll. "We've done little things, bits and pieces of stuff like that here and there. But this is a major undertaking. We were investing quite a bit of time, talent, and money to this thing to get all of these things written up, but if it does go over, this might be something we could sit in and do with different orchestras. Maybe, we'll just say maybe, it'll be shades of things to come. If I sound excited about it, I am!"

The likely next Chicago recording to be released will be its Ultimate Greatest Hits. Over the years, various hits compilations have come out, but none of the American ones has contained the band's hits from the '60's to the '90's. The Ultimate Greatest Hits will rectify that and also bring Chicago's story up to date. "It's something that I think we'll start working on come the fall after we get done with our summer touring," says Parazaider. "We're excited to put a greatest hits compilation together that's never been done before and also to go in and put a couple of new tunes down, which will be a statement of where we are now. We're talking about a Christmas release, or maybe the beginning of next year."

Today, decades after they gathered at Parazaider's apartment, the members of Chicago continue the legacy of music they inherited from their parents and their teachers and that they have brought to millions of fans. Recently, the band returned to their hometown to appear on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, and Walt Parazaider came into town a day early to visit his widowed father, now in his 80's.

"My dad, he must be playing now 65 years professionally, something like that, off and on," Parazaider notes. "I sat down with him, and he was practicing. He looked at me, and he held the trumpet in his hand, and he said, 'You know, Walt, one day I'm going to learn this thing.' That's when I had a moment of clarity, and I realized that what we've been doing all these years is not measured in a time limit, that it's a way of life, the way my father has pursued it and enjoyed it his whole life. So, later on in life, I learned what I want to be when I grow up. I'm in the pursuit of my life's work, and I finally realized it."

