Musical Mulligan No.1: Chicago III

 

     The concept for this sub-theme for this sub-series for the blog - my Musical Mulligans - is outlined here. That will pop out into its own window, so it won't close this one. I want the chance reader to know what I have in mind without having several paragraphs of boilerplate starting each one of these off.

     I wrote the following while listening to the album, making use of my Amazon Music subscription. (It was a 2002 remastered version.) If you have access to the album I'd suggest you play that while reading, or at least listen to it fairly close to when you read it. I'm not necessarily going to go track by track in any detail, but I will be trying to give attention to the complete album. In aiming to best appreciate it for what it originally was, I'll be trying to experience it with the original, physical separations that were part of the format. Maintaining a sense of album sides, from back when we had to get up, carefully lift the tone arm out of the way, and flip or change discs.
     All of that preamble done, here's the first item on this list. Officially released January 11, 1971, it's Chicago III. Total running time for this two-disc project was 71:29.
     As one might guess, this is the third studio album from the band. They'd started out as the "Chicago Transit Authority," which flew threw because the band wasn't known yet, but which they were soon told they didn't have the rights to, so by the second album they had been shortened to simply "Chicago."
     Their second album, released the previous year, had been a huge success and led to them spending most of that year out on tour. The band was happy for the success but weary from the road. They'd already burnt through their inventory of original material in their first two albums, and so needed to start from scratch to come up with new work.
     The recordings took place in two blocks, during breaks in their tour. The first late June/early July, and the second late November/early December, all of 1970.
     My initial and general impression is that they took license to spread out and take as much space as they wished. "Self-indulgent" came to mind several times while listening. That doesn't make it necessarily unpleasant nor even wasteful, it's mostly a case of my needing to be more open and patient in listening, rather than looking for tidy hooks and quick pay-offs. They had the freedom to experiment that came with a first, big flush of success.
     Full disclosure, as Wikipedia is a wonderful resource for fan-curated material, I'll be taking the risk of using them as a primary source, with the expectation that it's less likely to be subject to the severe battles that more political entries are subject to. This novice level of musical appreciation, which is likely even more obvious than I think it is. No one's going to mistake this for a Rolling Stone article. If over the fullness of time, either by my own readings or with the help of the occasional, passing aficionado, I find I've gotten things wrong I'll make the corrections. May as well take advantage of the medium rather than treat it as traditional print.
      I'm told the general genre for the band is a "rock-jazz fusion," and there does seem to much of that in evidence in the ample instrumental jams in this double album.
     The jazz elements remain the toughest sell for me. If I'm unkind to most jazz, well, my perspective most often is that I'm the wronged party. Trustingly, I arrive to hear music - what I think of as music - only to be assaulted by asynchronous bleats, beats and jangles. It's not in the least of interest to me if something is difficult to play - I'm not a musician - I'm neither here to appreciate their technical mastery of their instruments nor to be irritated. I've seen many times over the years that some of the music that musicians whose work I think highly of are they, themselves, great fans of is not something I enjoy. I try to revisit and give myself an opportunity to experience it with fresh ears, but that doesn't change things very often.
     With respect to jazz, I've come to think - in general terms - that it may be an audio equivalent of those "magic eye" graphics, where one's supposed to defocus their eyes and allow an otherwise hidden pattern to emerge. Those don't work for me -- or at least they haven't so far. That may be analogous to my experience with jazz, such that there's a pattern there that's pleasing to some but simply noise to me. If so, I have a sort of blindness.
     I'll try to make that my last, at least big, digression for today.

 Back to the album, the people who played on the album, with some of them composing and/or writing, were:

• Peter Cetera - bass, lead and backing vocals
• Terry Kath - guitar, lead and backing vocals
• Robert Lamm - keyboards, lead and backing vocals, spoken word on "When All the Laughter Dies in Sorrow".
• Lee Loughnane - trumpet
• James Pankow - trombone
• Walter Parazaider - saxophone, flute
• Danny Seraphine - drums, percussion

      The opening cut Sing a Mean Tune Kid has a sound I think of as funk with ample psychedelia. The sense that I should have been handed a kit of mood-altering substances came to mind during that first track. Something to enhance that sense of drifting during the instrumental sections. Did it need to be over nine minutes long? As with anything (presumably) driven by aesthetic choices it's debatable. I've not tried to re-immerse deeply in the period again to get a sense of how much of this was simply in the air at the time.
     Loneliness is Just a Word has more of a scatting song approach, with a jazzier beat, and does what it's going to do in just over 2.5 minutes.
     What Else Can I Say is a Cetera composition and vocals, and strikes yet another style or even mix of styles. Swaying through the first 50 seconds, picking up the pace a little around 30, it shifts a little more and starts to hit the mix of voice, horns, bass and guitar that starts to grab me. It's one of the songs on the LP that quickly started to grow on me. Cetera plays to the band's and his strong points, entertains, takes us through a chorus a couple times, and leaves us while we're still interested in hearing it go 'round one more time. It's not quite at that break-out hit single level, but it's one of the cuts that's made the jump to my huge, eclectic, Amazon playlist.

     Side one closes with Kath and Lamm's "I don't Want Your Money" with a shot at a  raw, electric,

bluesy sound that does nothing for me. That they go on with it for over a minute and a half more than the previous cut did doesn't do anything to improve my time with this one. Half-jokingly, the attitude reminded me of Wilder and Pryor's characters trying to cop a "don't mess with us" profile, and succeeds just about as believably. That was good for the comedy duo, though, because they were supposed to be funny.
     Side two is the 6-track "Travel Suite", presumably reflecting the band's recent, wearing time on the road.
     Flight 602 manages to catch enough of a Crosby, Stills and Nash groove to mostly work, kicking this section off reasonably well. Some parts of it are reminiscent of the Lennon/McCartney travel song Two of Us, which isn't a bad thing to be reminded of, though on the whole it seems much more influenced by CSN.
       Motorboat to Mars is a minute and a half of letting drummer Danny Seraphine go solo. It's 90 seconds, you can find something else to do to kill the time.
     Lamm and Kath's Free doesn't do much for me, but it's just a little over two minutes. The instrumental track Free Country by Lamm, Kath and Parazeider is the type of crap I think of when someone mentions jazz. Discordant, asynchronous, unpleasant, and unwelcome. So, of course, it goes on for close to six minutes.
     Lamm's At the Sunrise gets a nice boost by the vocals with Cetera, and the also welcome horn signature's return.
     The same credits help side two's closing track, Happy 'Cause I'm Going Home. The harmonies are helped along by warmth from the horns, but I'm just not in the same headspace as Lamm and the other band members' (presumed) desires to jam for a while. Two seconds shy of 7 ½ minutes, and I'm not joking when I say that easily half of that could be cut to no damage. Bored, there's a touch of relief in moving on to side three.

     Mother, Lamm's composition and vocals, gets a bouncy keyboard start, but before long wears out its welcome again. As ever, your mileage may vary. If they cut out the bleats and blats and all fingers on deck keyboard mash "instrumental" sections there might be something here. As it is, a chunk of the 4½ minutes for this track is happily put behind me.
    

     Side four begins with the brief poem "When All the Laughter Dies in Sorrow" by Kendrew Lascelles, recited by Robert Lamm, with the remainder of the side being instrumental pieces composed almost entirely by trombonist James Pankow. It struck me as an unfortunate decision, as the final two cuts "The Approaching Storm" and "Man vs Man: The End" (any break between them or real difference in them was lost on me in that first listening, as I'd only realized it had moved into the final track by looking at the display) wore out the album's welcome, making me glad when it was over. While it contained some of the mellow horn that is such a signature of the best for the band, here it was often in sometimes discordant bleats.
     Looking back on the full album, I'm left with the impression that they could have come out of this with a reasonably solid single-disc album by just keeping everything that Cetera had a hand in, adding Kath's Hour In the Shower suite of quick songs (five tracks cleanly through in 5½ minutes), the Lascelles-written and Lamm-spoken poem "When All the Laughter Dies in Sorrow," followed by Pankow's Canon and ending with his Once Upon A Time, with a pleasant fade-out by the recording engineer.

     I've no idea how this has been for you, but I enjoyed going through the album in its entirety, just letting it play. Having initially just looked over the track names (none of which were in the least familiar) and having read about the circumstances surrounding the band at the time, I came in with an unfair expectation that it was going to be a slog through a bunch of material produced mostly just to fill a commitment. Much of that's based on the "I should damn well know better by now" misconception that if I hadn't heard it - especially after all these years - that it couldn't have been all that good. That thus album was a high sales mark at the time, I expected was - much like many film sequels - a case of earlier, better work creating a larger, hungry audience, bringing nostalgic enthusiasm to a newer, lesser work. While it didn't have break-out hits, it was a pleasant, sometimes fun, trip.
     I was unsure about starting with this calendar-drawn starting point, afraid that it would lead to a bad experience and poison the project at the start. To the contrary, I'm much more enthusiastic about this that I was at the outset.
     The turnaround for this first piece was very tight - too tight, really, for someone who is not in the least comfortable writing about music because he knows he knows next to nothing. I offer that as mere explanation rather than excuse. The fluid, easily-revised nature of these blog pieces being what it is, I reserve the right to revisit and revise as time, mood, and hopefully growing knowledge allows. For future pieces in the series I'll aim to give myself more lead time, getting farther away from the mostly first draft effort this launch point was.
     The complete album is currently posted on YouTube, but my YT link-fu is too weak to make that work from here. This will get you other to the right spot - it will pop out on its own screen.  There you can just click "Play All." If you have access to the album itself, or through any dedicated music service, that'll be a better choice.
     Thanks for the time. Any civil comments, personal recollections, reactions and/or reflections on the album itself, will be welcome.  - Mike