March 11 – Chicago Looked To The Beach, Boys

A big city, a big band. It was a good day for soft rock or easy-listening music 48 years back. Chicago put out their seventh overall album (six studio plus one live album), appropriately enough called Chicago VII on this day in 1974. It continued their path to being one of the biggest pop/rock bands of the decade and to see them evolve in several ways.

As Rolling Stone pointed out, Chicago “derives its sound from Stan Getz, cool jazz, big, brassy dance bands” and was unusual in the rock genre in their early days (of the late-’60s and beginning of the ’70s) for having upbeat numbers with a prominence of horns. Songs like “Beginnings” and “25 or 6 to 4” made them known, but by the mid-’70s they were getting mellow and smoother, with songs like “Just You And Me” from VI. VII managed to look back, and forward simultaneously.

It was a double album, and in effect, two records in one stemming from differing ideas within the then seven-man band. Some felt the group had veered away too far from its roots and wanted to go back and put out a pure, jazz-themed album. Others, like Peter Cetera who was increasingly becoming the dominant member, felt they needed to continue on their arc towards being creators of studio-perfect, pop songs. The result was a compromise – a 15-piece, 72 minute double album. All of side one and much of side two was instrumental and very jazzy, fully utilizing the horns; while the second record contained a variety of more typical pop songs. Little coincidence that all three singles came from the pop tail-end of the record: “Searching So Long”, “Wishing You Were Here” and “Call on Me.” The three sounded both unified but different, with different members writing each of the songs but Cetera doing the bulk of the lead vocals on all. The most upbeat of them, “Call on Me” used a few of the horns the band was known for and also showcased the tropical percussions of Laudir de Oliviera, who’d go on to join the group full-time for their next album. The lush “Wishing You Were Here” had a distinctly Beach Boys vibe to it, in part because Carl and Dennis Wilson and Carl Jardine of that band doing backing vocals. The Beach Boys happened to be at the Caribou Ranch studios Chicago was using (a studio made famous months later by Elton John who recorded there frequently and named one of his albums Caribou for it) at the same time. The two bands hit it off and toured together the following year.

It’s probably fair to say that a number of fans were surprised by the first disc when they got the album home, and may not have listened to it that much. But the singles, and some of the other “pop” album cuts (like keyboardist Robert Lamm’s “Skinny Boy” with the Pointer Sisters doing backing vocals on it) pleased and the album would go to #1 in the U.S., their third in a row, and earn them a gold record after only one week. About a decade later, it would become one of their 18 platinum albums to date. “Call on Me” became their 10th top 10 single at home; they’d have to wait a couple more years before they’d get a #1 song with “If You Leave Me Now.”

An interesting thing about Chicago was that their members names were not well known and their faces anonymous but their albums were among the most-recognizable on the shelves. Typically they all used their Coca-Cola inspired logo prominently displayed on the cover (Rolling Stone were derisive of them but did call that script-written name “perhaps the best artist-marketing device in rock”) , but done in different ways. VII was the “leather” album, with the name looking like it was embossed into leather.