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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Chicago

  • Sunday Seven: Loving The Aliens

    Here’s a dirty little secret about what’s on my iPod:  I, almost exclusively, put singles on it.  It’s probably not the most appropriately music-snobby approach, but it serves a couple of purposes.  One:  it gives me a strict, easy-to-adhere-to criterion for editing down a library of more than 20,000 mp3s (3200 CDs, 400 LPs) to fit onto an 80 gig iPod.  The other purpose is that at the times when I’m listening to the iPod – at work, on walks, at the gym – I want some easy – meaning familar – listening.  Now, just because something was a single doesn’t mean it was popular (or if it was, that it still is today), and just because it’s familiar – easy – listening for me, doesn’t mean it is for a whole lot of others, so there’s still plenty of obscure shit to be heard.  And, of course, every rule was made to be broken.  Or bent.  For instance:
    1.  “It’s Alright” by Chicago (1986)
    Never released as an A-side in its own right, this lively Bill Champlin song about a consolatory one-nighter, which originally appeared on Chicago 18 was certainly worthy.   My first concert (actually my first three) was Chicago touring behind Chicago 18 and I remember this as one of the few new songs the band trotted out between classics like “Saturday in the Park” and “25 or 6 to 4” (which they’d recently re-recorded as 18‘s introductory single).  The song was an instant sing-along, even with the older audience, and I always felt it deserved to be a single.   Alas, it merely turned up as the b-side to Chicago 19‘s third single “You’re Not Alone”.  As further proof that this song might have been a contender for single consideration, check out this (obviously lip-synced) television performance of the song.

    2.  “Abracadabra” by The Steve Miller Band (1982)
    This was the song that introduced me to the Steve Miller Band.  It also came out right around the time that I was really starting to pay attention to the radio (as opposed to playing the hell out of my parent’s records and having my older sister make mix tapes for me from hers).  I think it was the number one song the first time I ever listened to Casey Kasem’s weekly Top 40 broadcast.  (Incidentally, Chicago was near the top at the same time with their comeback single “Hard to Say I’m Sorry”, the song that introduced me to them.)
    3. “Everlasting Love” by Robert Knight (1967)
    Not as popular as the early-disco-era version recorded by Carl Carlton (it was also covered by Gloria Estefan in the 90s), Robert Knight’s “Everlasting Love”  – a Top 20 hit in its own right – boasts punchier, more accented vocals and a fatter horn arrangement.  Otherwise, the two versions are so similar that at a quieter volume, their indistinguishable.
    4.  “I Saw the Light” by Todd Rundgren (1972)
    I like a lot of Todd Rundgren’s work as a performer, as a producer, and as the leader of the band Utopia, but I love very little of it.  I like this song.  That is all.
    5.  “No Other Love” by John Legend (2008)
    A nice reggae-tinged song from his fine third album Evolver.  Nothing mindblowing here, but the fact that John Legend not only exists, but thrives in today’s AutoTuned pop and R&B marketplace is cause for hope.  He did a bit of campaigning for Barack Obama this fall.  Maybe the President-elect could invent a cabinet post to appoint John Legend to.  Secretary of Soul?
    6.  “Another World” by Hoodoo Gurus (1989)
    One of the great, unsung bands to come out of Australia in the 80s, the Hoodoo Gurus released this adorable, and oh-so-catchy love-song to an extra-terrestrial as the second single of their fabulous 1989 album Magnum Cum Louder.  Awesome stuff.

    7.  “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar (1980)
    Last week, I picked up a new compilation from the Numero Group called It’s All Pop, chronicling the brief and disheartening history of a Kansas City indie label called Titan Records.  Formed by a couple of friends in the mid-70s, Titan’s complete discography amounted to six (beautifully packaged) 7″ singles, and a label sampler LP.   It’s a fascinating story, with some pretty good music to go with it, but one thing I noticed was that there were no women!  Where are all the girls in power-pop (besides in the song titles)?  (Actually, one of Titan’s most notable acts was a quartet from Nebraska who called themselves The Boys and dressed themselves in a – err, gender-ambiguous manner.  Courage, my friends, courage.)  But, oh yeah, Pat Benatar.  “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”.  You could never fit Pat Benatar’s work into a subgenre as narrowly defined as power-pop, but “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” is the quintessential (girl-)power pop song.
    And thank you, Paul, for taking us on a trip through your iPod! I’m jealous because you have more music than me, though. Join us next Sunday when (hopefully) we’ll have another guest take us through their music collection on the Sunday Seven!!!

  • The Best You’ve Never Heard: Must Have Been Crazy by Chicago

    I was a teenage fanatic for the band Chicago in the late 80s, just as they were reaching the end of their second commercial heyday – a near-decade-long reign on the charts fueled by David Foster (and David Foster surrogate) produced power ballads – and were on the cusp of becoming crusty fixtures of summertime state fairs. The first three concerts I attended were all Chicago concerts (though, tellingly, the last of those concerts found them co-headlining with the Beach Boys – the reigning kings of the oldies circuit), and somewhere between the release of Chicago 18 in 1986 and Chicago 19 two years later, I’d acquired on either cassette or CD (or in some cases, both) every single Chicago album released since the band’s 1969 debut Chicago Transit Authority, on which they presented themselves as an idealistic jazzy-art-prog-rock band with horns and a social conscience that ran counter to the distasteful Nixon connections of Blood, Sweat & Tears, their chief competitors in the idealistic jazzy-art-prog-rock sweepstakes.

    While my junior high and high school peers were busy carefully carving Metallica and Megadeth logos into their study hall desks, I would proudly sport my Chicago “Victorious Tour 1989” t-shirt; and where the unwashed masses on my school sang the praises of Jimi Hendrix, I defiantly extolled the virtues of Terry Kath whose distinctively rhythmic wah-wah-isms (best exemplified by the extended solo on the group’s iconic 1971 single “25 or 6 to 4”) were much admired by The Hendrix himself. It may not have been the most socially advantageous band to fall in love with – by that time, Chicago was an unabashedly corporate entity headed up by a cabal of wealthy, middle-aged ex-hippies. Nevertheless Chicago 19 proved to be arguably the best, and certainly the most successful album of their second act, earning multiple platinum certifications and yielding no fewer than five hit singles including “Look Away” which Billboard magazine eventually anointed the #1 single of 1989.

    It’s a far cry from where the band had been ten years earlier when they released Chicago 13. This was a band adrift both artistically and commercially – a band still reeling from the sudden, tragic loss of their visionary singer and guitarist Terry Kath (who’d accidentally shot and killed himself at a party in 1978), and struggling with some newfound autonomy following the firing of their longtime manager-producer-svengali James William Guercio.

    Heralded by the nine minute disco opus “Street Player”, the band’s last truly horn-driven single which, despite the band’s appearance on an SNL episode, didn’t really do much chart-wise, but gained notoriety in the 90s when it was liberally sampled by the Bucketheads for their club hit “The Bomb”, Chicago 13 – “The Highrise Album” – was the second in a trio of transitional, wildly unfocused, and mostly hitless late 70s albums which found the group experimenting with, among other things, actual album titles (the band’s 12th album was called Hot Streets), and ill-advised (and, indeed, sort of racially insensitive) studio gimmickry like P.C. Moblee, a manipulation of Peter Cetera’s otherwise clenched-cheeks, clenched-jaw white-boy whine made to sound like a wax-museum version of a vintage Chess Records bluesman.

    Also unique to these “lost years” for the band was the voice of singer-guitarist Donnie Dacus who’d been recruited to replace Kath despite having virtually nothing in common with Kath stylistically. As a singer, Kath’s soulful howl was often compared to Ray Charles (best exemplified on Chicago’s neglected 1975 single “Brand New Love Affair”), his guitar playing was funkified and percussive with an innate sense for scale and detail. Donnie Dacus, on the other hand, was merely a serviceable, unsubtle country-rock guitarist (his resume included work with Stephen Stills), an adequate studio musician who, with his flowy, Frampton-esque blond locks and wistful tenor projected a youthful naivete completely antithetical to Kath’s lusty spirituals. As mismatched with the band as he was, he was actually central to a couple of the best moments on Chicago 13, including the record’s second single, a hard-driving, southern-rock flavored stomper called “Must Have Been Crazy” (which nicked the Billboard Hot 100 peaking at No. 83) and the upbeat album-closing pep-talk “Run Away” in which Dacus and Cetera tag-team the verses before rallying together in harmony on a triumphant chorus.

    Dacus, who, in 1979 appeared as Woof in Milos Forman’s film adaptation of the musical Hair, was fired from the band after Chicago 13, and though he joined an 80s-era incarnation of the power-pop institution Badfinger, he has been virtually absent from music ever since. Time has been unkind to Dacus’s contributions to Chicago, and he is, to my mind, unfairly maligned by many of my other fellow Chicago fanatics. The major problem is that Dacus’s tenure fell squarely in between the band’s two heydays, and, only appearing on a couple of decidedly unsuccessful singles, his voice, unlike Kath’s or Cetera’s or, later, Bill Champlin’s (who sang lead on three of Chicago 19’s singles including “Look Away”) never had a chance to become one of the recognizable voices of the Chicago. Hearing Dacus singing “Must Have Been Crazy” – really one of the strongest singles Chicago released in the 70s, despite the fact that the band’s signature horn section had gone suddenly M.I.A. – you’d never mistake this Chicago for the band that recorded either early hits like “Saturday in the Park” and “If You Leave Me Now” or latter-day power-ballads like “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” and “Hard Habit To Break”.

    Fortunately – or unfortunately – another of the band’s “lost years” experiments was their somewhat prescient (though, in hindsight, probably misguided) decision to film an extended promotional video for Chicago 13 which included clips for “Street Player”, “Must Have Been Crazy” and “Run Away”, featuring groaningly cheesy footage of the band hanging out and performing in a secluded mansion – watch as trombonist James Pankow hunts down a fugitive cat and drummer Danny Seraphine gets stranded in a tree, and oh yes, that’s a shirtless Peter Cetera sunning himself on a raft in the swimming pool… ewww – with saxophonist Walt Parazaider providing a Dan Ackroyd-noir voice-over narration. Tellingly, most of the band’s 80s videos would be bland performance clips, although they were much more successful with the comparatively high-budget, three-minute action-flick in song they put out for “Stay the Night” in 1984.

    More On “The Best You’ve Never Heard” week
    The Best You’ve Never Heard – Introduction
    The Best You’ve Never Heard: Wheel by John Mayer