But that one huge ballad begat more huge ballads - most of them from Peter Cetera. Guitarist Terry Kath, in particular, was evidently not too happy that producer Guercio played guitar on the song Kath would always refuse to play the song during Chicago shows. Over the years, a bunch of them have made passive-aggressive statements about the track, and about how Columbia immediately demanded a whole lot more ballads after its success. The other members of Chicago all seemed to be pretty pissed off that the song did as well as it did. Indeed, “If You Leave Me Now” resonated in ways that no other Chicago song has ever done it is, for instance, Chicago’s sole UK #1. It probably served that function just fine in its day. Instead, it comes off as a simple love song, a prom slow-dance kind of thing. The song is soft and gooey enough that it never even sounds like a possible-breakup song. Underneath him, the music - a slow horn riff, some acoustic-guitar flourishes, a sad-bastard string section - blurs into an indistinct soft drone, a puddle of feelings.Ĭetera sells the wounded sadness of the song’s sentiment, but he never finds room for urgency or need. His best hook on the song is wordless it’s a climbing “ooh-ooh- ooh” moan-sob. He sings the hell out of the song, hitting inverted-eyebrow blue-eyed-soul sincerity notes all over the places. There are horns on the song, but they’re buried in the mix, and the various Chicago guys don’t really get too many chances to show off.Ĭetera shows off, though. Bassist and singer Peter Cetera wrote the song, and it’s a breezy ballad about attempting to stave off a breakup: “How could we end it all this way/ When tomorrow comes and we’ll both regret/ The things we said today?” Cetera sings the song in a high, feathery tenor, and there’s not really a chorus the whole thing is basically one extended soft-focus hook. “If You Leave Me Now,” on the other hand, is memorable, though that doesn’t necessarily make it good. But it also breezes by without leaving much of an impression. “Saturday In The Park” has a lot of tempo switch-ups and tricky backup harmonies the musicians in Chicago were clearly eager to show off their chops.
It’s a song that manages to be both upbeat and mellow, folding in a slight patina of Latin influence and a gritty-ish vocal from pianist and songwriter Robert Lamm about spending a pleasant afternoon in a park. 1972’s “ Saturday In The Park,” the band’s highest-charting single to that point, basically summed up the kind of thing they did. The different members of the band all wrote songs, and most of them sang, too. We have chill-vibes playlists that serve the same utilitarian needs today.īefore “If You Leave Me Now,” Chicago didn’t have a clear frontman. They’d play for long enough that you wouldn’t have to worry about what music was on, and you could go about your life. If you were throwing a dinner party and wanted to put on some music that was unobtrusive but also nebulously sophisticated, you might reach for one of those bigass Chicago double albums. But as far as I can tell, the appeal of those Chicago records was something like this: Those records were what we’d call lifestyle music today. I did not grow up with Chicago records in the house, and I am not a fan, so there’s a chance I’m getting this whole phenomenon all wrong. Chicago didn’t improvise, and their records were largely sterile background music, but they had a lot of horns and clearly weren’t funk, so the jazz label stuck. (Place-name bands, for whatever reason, were huge in the ’70s: America, Kansas, Boston.) Early on, Chicago were part of a wave of bands - like Electric Flag and fellow Guercio collaborators Blood, Sweat & Tears - who played diffuse and vaguely jazz-inflected rock. They changed their name to just plain Chicago a year later. That Chicago Transit Authority debut came out in 1969, and a whole lot more albums, most of them doubles, followed.
The group - now renamed the Chicago Transit Authority - became the house band at the Whiskey A Go Go and attracted enough record-label interest that Columbia Records, the label that signed them, let them release a double album as their debut. Eventually, their college producer James William Guercio convinced them to move out to Los Angeles, where he became their manager and producer.
The group came together in the city of Chicago in 1967, calling themselves the Big Thing and playing top-40 covers in local nightclubs. Chicago had a context when they first started.
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