Chicago Transit Authority

Here's the scene. I'm 8 or 9-years-old, so it's got to be 1975 or '76, and my mother and sisters have dragged me to a sidewalk sale on the square in Crown Point, Indiana. I am bored.

Let this play as you read. It was stuck in my head when I wrote this.

There's a record store close enough that I'm able to stray from the discounted bell bottoms and clogs without needing an escort. This record store was selling used records on the sidewalk. I still remember the price -- $0.15 for a used LP, $0.25 for a two-record set. I distinctly remember calculating that the the double-LP was a better buy -- if you could find a band you liked.

I have always loved music. From singing the hymns too loud and off key in church to endlessly replaying my box of 45s that were mostly hand-me-downs from my older brother and sisters to being naively frightened that I was somehow breaking the law when I stumbled across a jazz band broadcast from Cuba one night on my clock radio, music was a central part of my childhood.

And so, with twenty-five cents burning a hole in my pocket ($1.02 adjusted for inflation), I purchased my first record album. And oh, what a bargain!

The record was The Chicago Transit Authority, and it warped my 9-year-old brain. Mice had eaten away at least one corner of the dust jacket, and my (quite) used record had seen much better days. Still, the vinyl was pristine. As if someone had purchased the record, treated it badly, but never played it.

I knew the band Chicago well from the AM radio hits like "Saturday in the Park" and "Old Days." And while this album was titled Chicago Transit Authority, it had the unmistakable Chicago logo on the cover. So I gambled my two-bits. To this day I cannot believe how unbelievably lucky I was that there weren't any used Styx records in that rack.

Now, while I was quite excited by my first real record purchase, in no way did this strike me as an act of rebellion. I bought a Chicago album, for Christ's sake. I wanted to hear catchy tunes. But it took about thirty seconds of listening to the first song, "Introduction" by Terry Kath, before I realized that I wasn't going to hear "Saturday in the Park" on this record. This band was powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline, and I'm quite frankly amazed that my parents ever let me listen to it.

Imagine me sitting there in the living room of our house on our slip-covered couch, listening to live recordings of chants from streets during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. A black preacher yells through a megaphone, "If they lock us up, they lock us up. And God give us the blood to keep going!" Seemingly thousands of people are chanting, "The whole world's watching!" And then the music starts up again, in time to the chants. This was defiant and rebellious. It wasn't what I'd signed up for, but I liked it.

And in the bizarre time-warp that is middle America, my parents conveniently kept the actual issue of Life magazine documenting the "police riot" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention filed among the two dozen or so Herb Alpert (and such) records stacked in the built-in LP storage area of our console stereo in the living room.

There in front of me was blood, guts, hippies and gore. And music the likes of which I'd never heard before. I wish I could say that I was instantly enamored with this 7-piece band that mixed equal parts of rock, blues and jazz. But that wouldn't be true. Intrigued is probably a better word. There was certainly a lot of great music here. But there was a lot of other stuff that just didn't happen in conservative Northwest Indiana.

At first I listened to the two tracks I knew, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" and "Beginnings" endlessly. Each track, however, brought along something extra on the record. "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" has an improvised piano introduction by Robert Lamm that today I would say could stand with Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert. At the time, however, I probably just concluded that this is how you play the piano while on drugs."Beginnings" ends with several joyful minutes of percussion with the odd band member yelling, "Yeah!"

I'd never heard either the piano or percussion on WLS.

So it's taken 30+ years or so for me to grow into this record. There is so much music here -- it's bursting at the seams with ideas. A couple months ago I bought the album in MP3 format, and I've been absolutely amazed by how much of the music has stuck with me all these years. I'm also knocked out by how tight these guys are. Sure, it's a 1969 release, and has two scoops of the over indulgence of the time. But I don't mind the drum solos or overlong jams on side four, even today.

So check it out. But check your preconception of Chicago at the door. Don't think of this record as Chicago the band, but Chicago the city. They had to move to L.A. to make it in show business, and you can definitely hear that growing influence on subsequent albums. Then Terry Kath, a guitarist that even Jimi Hendrix was in awe of, would die in such a profoundly stupid way as to virtually inspire the Darwin Awards. But forget all that. This record smokes.

Oh, the song at the top is Southern California Purples. James William Guercio moved the band to L.A. after he discovered them, and this is clearly a reaction to their new location. The "purples" is a silly wordplay on "the blues," but at the time I first heard it I'm sure I thought it was a codeword for "drugs."

The gatefold album jacket includes this manifesto from James William Guercio:

The purpose of this commentary, however, is an attempt at documenting the complete rejection of any name label, title or verbal reference relative to the performance contained herein. Corporately as well as individually, this artist endeavors to be judged in terms of contribution alone rather than through the tag affixed upon it. The printed word can never aspire to document a truly musical experience, so if you must call them something, speak of the city where all save one were born; where all of them were schooled and bred, and where all of this incredible music went down barely noticed; call them CHICAGO.

Poem 58 by The Chicago Transit Authority