Terry Kath
If Hendrix said the Chicago guitarist was the best, who are we to argue?
If Hendrix said the Chicago guitarist was the best, who are we to argue?
Whether, as is often reported, Jimi Hendrix really did call Terry Kath the “best guitarist in the universe” or that he was Jimi’s favourite guitarist, doesn’t really matter. The fact that Kath was good enough for people to say Hendrix said so is praise enough.
A self-taught player among a group of schooled musicians with the collective chops to deliver a jazz-rock landmark with their first album – and the balls and self-confidence to make it a double – in a complimentary way it could be said that Kath was perhaps the ‘loose canon’ who put the rock into his band Chicago’s jazz rock; the tight but loose into the otherwise just tight. On the first couple of Chicago albums in particular there are flashes of his brilliance and playing style, when his aggressive, fluid technique and creative musicality is delivered often via a valve-shaking overdriven sound as big and imposing as Kath himself. Few examples are better than his first solo on the first track on the self-titled first album by Chicago Transit Authority (as they were originally called), a masterful build from a ‘Here we go!’ dragged chord to a sonic wind blowing muscular rock licks, jazzy flurries and controlled feedback. The track is titled Introduction, and for the whole band but especially Kath, it’s a hell of one.
“I spent a lot of time wondering: ‘How in the world does he get a guitar to sound like that?’” said Joe Walsh, adding that Kath was “a brilliant musician. He was a songwriter and a great singer. He was such a monster on guitar… He was just a total experimenter.”
Kath’s tragic death (the consensus is that he playfully put what he thought was an unloaded gun to his head and pulled the trigger) at just 31 robbed the world of a tremendously talented guitarist who didn’t get the opportunity to achieve his full potential. PH
Listen to this: 25 Or 6 To 4 (Chicago, Chicago, 1969)