June 25 – Second City Band’s Sixth Shifted Direction

One of the most iconic American bands of the ’70s continued producing and morphing on this day in 1973, with their sixth album coming out. Fittingly it was called Chicago VI. It continued to ease Chicago from their jazz-rock, horn-bedazzled beginnings to a smooth, easy-listening pop outfit tailor-made for AM Radio of the day. Much of that may have stemmed from an apparent power shift in the band from some form of even democracy and perhaps viewing guitarist Terry Kath as a “leader” towards it being steered by the familiar voice of bassist Peter Cetera.

It wasn’t a glaring change mind you; by and large the lineup stayed the same (although they did add in percussionist Laudir De Oliviera on this one), they used their regular producer James Guercio and the horn section was still in place. Something different was that they recorded at Guercio’s own studio, Caribou Ranch in Colorado for the first time. A documentary about Kath showed that the band loved it there…but it may have been the worst thing for them. They ramped up their hard-partying, drugs-aplenty lifestyle at the Ranch and, being that it was a Western ranch, there were guns too which they loved playing around with. That would end up leading to Kath’s demise a few years down the road.

For all that the ten-song album sounded pretty good. Well-written, well-played. While they shared songwriting duties, keyboardist Robert Lamm was arguably still the main writer, coming up with three of them all by himself, but that was a change from their previous one, where he’d come up with eight out of the ten songs, including the hit “Saturday in the Park.” Trombonist James Pankow seemed to be stepping up a bit more and wrote most of the two singles off this album, “Feeling Stronger Every Day” ( a bit of a throwback to their early sound) and the romantic “Just You and Me.” Perhaps those were indicative of the album, which seemed a mixture of songs about the state of the world (“Something in this City Changes People”, “What’s the World Coming To?”) and love songs (“Darlin Dear”, “In Terms of Two”). Interestingly, future star-producer Phil Ramone helped Geurcio and did the final mix. A shift towards radio-friendly tunes was evident in that the long, meandering pieces that marked their first couple of records were gone and nothing on this one ran over five minutes.

At the time, critics seemed lukewarm towards it, and the band. The fact that there was a scolding song called “Critic’s Choice” on it didn’t win the band any extra favors in the press; it had lyrics like “you parasite, you’re dynamite, an oversight – misunderstanding what you hear!”. Rolling Stone suggested “it should now be clear that Chicago has become the prisoner of its own image” a band with “overbearing allegiance to the freak flag of hippiedom”. However, they did approve of the singles (“more or less outstanding commercial ditties”) and admitting Terry Kath’s “’Jenny’ is a real treat…an ethereal ballad about the love between a man and a dog.” Years later, allmusic gave it a solid 4-stars, about normal for the band’s ’70s output, pointing out it had a “decidedly more middle-of-the-road sound” than previous Chicago works but that worked well in its “succinct pop and light rock efforts.” It compared “Darlin’ Dear” to one of Little Feat’s better efforts.

The album was released in both stereo and quadrophonic editions, and if you get a later CD reissue, it contains a nice bonus track of them doing “Tired of Being Alone” with the one and only Al Green.

They might not have been the critics’ choice, but they were a lot of the public’s. “Just You and Me” made the top 5 in the U.S. and Canada and earned them their second gold single. “Stronger Every Day” was an American top 10 as well. Outside of North America, the appeal was much more muted – it didn’t even hit the charts in the UK! But at home, it spent five weeks at #1, and went double-platinum.

They called it “Second City”, but at the time 50 years back, Chicago might have been the “First City” of AM radio.