Ravinia 2019, Issue 5, Week 9

“We have probably almost broken up as many times as years as we have been together. Many times we’ve thought, ‘This might be end.’ But it never has been. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to be anytime soon, either.” – Lee Loughnane tunes and putting them in a blender and just twisted them out of shape, doing a kind-of Edgard Varèse thing to them.” HAVING JOINED THE BAND with a few originals already in hand, Lamm admits he was “hearing musical voic- es” in his head as far back as he can remember, and that he has always been writing “compositions,” as he calls them, “not really songs.” “I still wake up and hear music in my head. I still hear music when I’m sleeping. at’s my ‘always’ condition. I remember being a teenager walking down the street and hum- ming to myself with what I was hear- ing.” Ironically, “ or to ,” perhaps Lamm’s best-known song, recounts the experience of a pre-dawn composer’s block: “waiting for the break of day” while “searching for something to say.” Lamm composed most of the material on the group’s double debut album and is responsible for writing and singing such signature Chicago hits as “Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?,” “Be- ginnings,” and “Saturday in the Park.” For Pankow, his starting point as a composer came from a di erent place. “As a player, my ears were going to what the cats were doing behind the vocals,” he said. “I wasn’t a singer, I was an instrumentalist; that’s where my heart was. But when I came into this thing, my ears opened up. All of the sudden, I am hearing the advantage of the spoken word. Not only can I express my musical ideas, I can express my per- sonal thoughts in the musical ideas if I write lyrics and create a complete song in the story. at opened up a whole new world to me, learning the cra of making words work economically and poetically. Robert had that gi and had been doing that for a long time and was kind of a mentor to me in that regard because I paid attention to what he was doing. I think we mentored each other because through working with me, he began to allow himself to experiment with writing brass.” Pankow would be responsible for hits such as “Make Me Smile” and “Colour My World” early on, which were orig- inally part of a -minute suite that the band still performs complete in concert. “ e label edited it,” Loughnane recalls, “and that was our rst foray into ‘Oh my God, they’re going to cut up our art.’ And that’s when we realized that singles were advertisements for the band albums.” Another early composer of band material was guitarist and vocalist Terry Kath, who would be killed in a gun accident in . “Very early on,” said Lamm, “I remember playing ‘Listen’ for an audience in Santa Barbara. We were the opening act, and that was the rst song of our -minute set. We nished the song with a bang, and there was absolutely no applause. en Terry said, ‘We need to write a song to start the show. We need an opener.’ So then he wrote ‘Introduction.’ By that time, we were comfortable with this being a septet and the idea that you could write something that had movements and sec- tions and solos and ensemble playing. at was something we could do and could do well. He really wanted that rst song to show o what the band could do, put you through some changes and turnaround. I had been wanting to open the act with that piece again for a couple of decades, and we have been doing it complete as an opener to honor Terry. It is the rst song of the rst side of the rst album that anybody ever heard of this band. When anybody rst dropped the needle on that rst track, they heard Terry singing.” THAT GROUNDBREAKING rst double album, Chicago Transit Authority , was released years ago and is being rere- leased later in August for the anniversa- ry. “We have just remixed and remas- tered the rst album for Rhino,” says Loughnane. “I remember Terry’s ‘Free Form Guitar’ being played on a classi- cal station in Chicago back in the day. People were like, ‘Oh my God! Listen to these guys! is is so underground and cool.’ But some of the same people later thought we had sold out when pieces on that album became hits, but we didn’t change a note—not one note! So we just kept going. And that’s what we’ve done since then.” Might there be performances of the complete Chicago Transit Authority album, as happened with ’s Chicago II during – ? “Well, we play a lot of it anyway,” says Loughnane. “But I’m not sure how some of that would hold up. I think Chicago II held up more cohesive- ly than some of the stu from Chicago JULY 29 – AUGUST 11, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 15