Chicago (pt. 4)

After their ninth album (IX, Greatest Hits), which gave them a break for the first time since their founding, Chicago found themselves in a strange position. They had just had four #1 top-selling albums in a row (V, VI, VII, VIII), were monstrously successful as a live band, and there was suddenly no place for them on the radio.

Because in the mid-1970s, the whole free-form hit-based formats which dominated AM radio were being stratified into subgenres: R&B (disco), MOR ("middle of the road", or "adult contemporary"), AOR ("album-oriented rock", most of which is now "classic rock"), and Top 40. Many of these formats were shifting over to the FM band, which had been the province of Easy Listening, Classical, and the few college radio stations which parked on the left side of the dial. (Yes, "dial".)

Chicago responded with Chicago X:


This contained Peter Cetera's execrable song "If You Leave Me Now", which was sung by the Pets.com sock puppet dog on a Super-Bowl commercial right before the great e-commerce implosion of Y2K. I liked the sock-puppet version better, mostly because it was shorter.

But this is when the Industry sat up and took notice of the band that had sold more albums than any of their peers on release, even the double-albums. They gave Chicago a Grammy for the album, and a "best package" Grammy for the album cover.

Nothing was going to go right after that.

As I mentioned in part 3, Terry Kath accidentally killed himself after Chicago XI was released. The group hired blond heart-throb Donnie Dacus to succeed him, and they broke from their numbering scheme to release "Hot Streets" as their 12th album. It was okay, the tunes were catchy, but they were definitely foreshadowing the Great Yuppie Generational Shift in their sound. (Also in their lyrics; the title track described the "Hot Streets down below me".)

With the lackluster sales, they returned to numbering:

This was the last Chicago album I bought. I found it very disappointing. The horns were relegated to the back seat, where they provided flourishes that the new synthesizers could easily have replaced (and sometimes did).


Ironically, the album with the fingerprint showed none of the group's original identity. The songs were now all schmaltz ballads and power ballads, and the horns are hard to pick out. Dacus is gone, replaced by someone with no personality at all. And Cetera is basically just framing what his solo career will sound like.

And that's the basic progression:
Chicago Transit Authority (1969) to Chicago V (1972): rocking horn band with long jams
Chicago VI to Chicago VIII: massive mainstream rock band with great radio hits
Chicago X and Chicago XI: coasting mainstream rock band
Hot Streets to Chicago XIV: embarrassing band with rare flashes of who they used to be
Chicago 16 to Chicago 21: utterly irrelevant mish-mash

Chicago 22 was supposed to be a new start: they got Peter Wolf to produce, but after a few tracks were recorded, the label dropped support, and it was never released.

With the advent of the "Adult Alternative" radio format, there is still an opportunity for the band to make something of themselves. They need Lamm on keyboards, Pankow (trombonist and horn arranger) to beef up a real horn section, and they can hire a guitarist and bassist and perhaps some vocalists. They could get some blues-based jams going, and cut a single or two for the radio which highlights the horns. And they need to leave Cetera out.

But I fear that the opportunity is passed.