DOUBLING DOWN
Chicago concert to include band’s entire two-record second album
Chicago, the famous rock ’n’ roll band with horns, had to do some research for its current tour.
This tour, the 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is playing a two-set concert with a short intermission. In the first set, the band will play its second studio album and second double album, “Chicago,” also known as “Chicago II,” in its entirety. The multiplatinum album was released in 1970.
“That has been a very exhilarating and interesting experience revisiting music that we composed and recorded very much in the beginning of our careers, and a lot of it we hadn’t played in a long time,” said Robert Lamm, Chicago founding member, keyboardist, singer and songwriter. “Of course on that album there are great songs like ‘Make Me Smile,’ and ‘25 or 6 to 4’ and a few others that people love and we do play those every night, but the rest of the album, we haven’t played it for a long, long time.”
Lamm, who composed a lot of the music on the album, said he had to research his manuscripts to see exactly what he was playing on keyboard and make copies of the horn charts for the band’s horn section.
“We started from scratch,” Lamm said. “We’re going to take the first song on this album and learn how to play it. So a lot of it was really sort of, it was surprising how adventurous it was. We were young. We were starting out. We had no rules, and the music was really kind of our manifesto as a young rock band. … It was really a treat for us to dig back into it and really kind of analyze it from a more mature standpoint and realize what it was and a lot of it is very surprisingly unique.”
It did not occur to Lamm when writing some of Chicago’s signature songs, such as “25 or 6 to 4,” “Saturday in the Park” or “Beginnings,” what would come of them.
“I do think that the most meaningful aspect of writing those songs were we were all learning how to do that,” Lamm said. “We were all learning how to compose and write the music that was in our brains and in our souls and in our hearts. That was really all we were going for. When we recorded the first album — it was, like, “Chicago Transit Authority” — that was all the music that we had written and recorded. … So now we have the second album being added to that, and back at that time, we can’t think any further than that. We can’t even assume that there will be another album. … We didn’t have any long-range plans. Most rock bands don’t.”
It might seem after so many decades that Chicago has done it all. But the band’s not done yet.
“I would like to, as a band, find a movie project or be invited to write a movie score of just Chicago stuff,” Lamm said. “For a movie, I think that would be a fun project, something we definitely could do. Certainly we’ve had tons of movies and television use our songs from various albums as part of the movie score, but I hope I can do an alloriginal score. I think it would be really fun if it’s the right project.”