Chapter III: The Big Thing

The Big Thing played its first engagement at the GiGi A-Go-Go in Lyons, Illinois, in March 1967. In June, July, and August, the band appeared in Peoria, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Rockford, and Indianapolis. But the most important early gig was a week-long stand at Shula's Club in Niles, Michigan, from August 29 to September 3.

In Niles, they arranged a meeting with Parazaider's old friend Jimmy Guercio, who had become a producer for CBS Records. "He heard us play," Parazaider recalls "He was very impressed." It was the big break they had been looking for. Guercio told the band to hang on, that he would be in touch. Encouraged by this, they began to develop more of their own original material. "I began to write songs," says Pankow. "Robert began to write more songs, and Terry Kath began to contribute material."

Meanwhile, the Big Thing stayed on the Midwest club circuit through the fall, building a following. An engagement during the second week of December proved to be another important gig. "We were an opening act at Barnaby's in Chicago for a band called the Exceptions, which was the biggest club band in the Midwest, and we stuck around and listened to them," says Pankow. "I was just blown away."

If the Big Thing had stayed late to see the Exceptions, one of the Exceptions had come early to see the Big Thing. "I had heard a lot about these guys," says Peter Cetera, then the bass player for the Exceptions. "I was just floored 'cause they were doing songs that nobody else was doing, and in different ways. They were doing the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" and "Got To Get You Into My Life" and different versions of rock songs with horns." After the gig, says Pankow, he approached us and said, "I don't know what you guys are doing, but I like it. It's really refreshing. It's cool." "At the end of the two-week stint, " says Cetera, "I was out of the Exceptions and into the Big Thing."

Peter Cetera was born in Chicago on September 13, 1944, and his first instrument was the accordion, which he took up then he was ten. "That's unfortunately true," he admits, when asked about it. "There was accordion and guitar, and for some reason I chose accordion. I don't know why. I guess because I was half Polish, and we played a lot of polkas. It didn't do me any good for my rock 'n' roll career, but it actually was a lot of fun."

His more serious musical career commenced a little later. "I started listening to music," he recalls, "and when I was a sophomore in high school, I bought a little guitar from Sears and started singing at the school functions. I met a senior who played guitar, and we started singing together." He said, "Let's start a group," and I went, "Fine, I'll buy a bass." We played all the Homecoming dances and all the weekend dances, doing Top 40 material. My senior year, I got together with the Exceptions. I stuck with them for five or six years."

Cetera perfectly fit the musical needs of the Big Thing. "We needed a bass player at the time," notes Loughnane. "Robert was playing the bass pedals on the organ. He did a pretty good job, but there just wasn't enough bottom with the bass pedals. You needed a real bass in the band. And we needed a tenor voice. We had two baritones (Lamm and Kath), so we had midrange and lower notes covered. But we needed a high voice for the same reason that you have three horns. You have trumpet, tenors and trombone. You cover as much range harmonically as you can, and we wanted to do the same thing vocally. When Peter joined the band, that solidified our vocals. You could get more color, musically, and we started building from there."

It was probably at the Big Thing's next appearance at Barnaby's, March 6 - 10, l968, that Guercio came back for a second look. Impressed by the band's improvement, he took action. "He told us to prepare for a move to L.A.," says Pankow, "to keep working on our original material, and he would call us when he was ready for us."

Chapter IV: Chicago Transit Authority

The band, now renamed Chicago Transit Authority by Guercio in honor of the bus line he used to ride to school, was in a creative fervor. Kath, Pankow, and especially Lamm were writing large amounts of original material, with Lamm completing two of the group's most memorable songs, "Questions 67 and 68" and "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" just prior to the departure from Chicago.

Guercio moved quickly. "He got a little two-bedroom house near the Hollywood Freeway, and he told us that he was ready," Pankow recalls. "We made the move in June of 1968. We threw all of our lives in U-haul trailers and drove across the country. The married guys left their wives at home at first because they couldn't afford to bring their families out. We got disturbance calls from the neighbors five times a day because all we did was practice day and night."

The band began to play around the Los Angeles area. "I think we made all of $15, $20 at whatever beer hall we could play in the suburbs of Los Angeles for a while there," says Parazaider.

But in addition to the money, they were earning new fans, one of whom was Tris Imboden, a 16 year-old surfer and aspiring drummer. "I remember going to the Shrine Auditorium," he says. "I had gone to see Procol Harum, and Arthur Lee and Love were playing, too. I walked in, and on another stage was this band with horns, and, man, it just stopped me cold in my tracks. I just went, "Good God! This is the best thing I've ever heard," because it was a blend of so many things that I loved, R&B and jazz and rock 'n roll, and the vocals were so strong, between Robert and Terry and of course Peter. Danny Seraphine was just on fire that night, too, so he really grabbed my attention. I was asking everybody, "Who is this?" and it's CTA, Chicago Transit Authority. If somebody had told me, "Tris, one day you're going to be the drummer of that band," I would have said, "Yeah, right. And I'm Napoleon." I wouldn't have believed it." It would take 22 years, but eventually, Tris Imboden did become Chicago's drummer.

According to the terms of his production deal with CBS, Guercio was given the opportunity to showcase prospective signings for the label three times. He arranged Chicago Transit Authority's first showcase at the Whisky-A-Go-Go in August, but CBS's West coast division turned them down. A month later, CBS turned CTA down again, strike two.

Running short of money, Guercio was asked to produce the second album by Blood, Sweat & Tears, a jazz-rock group on CBS. Intending to use his earnings from the project to continue funding Chicago Transit Authority and to find a way to get them signed to CBS, Guercio sought the band's permission to produce someone else.

"Jimmy called me up, and be asked me to ask the other guys, would it be okay if he did the Blood, Sweat & Tears second album," Parazaider recalls. "At first I was going, Well, jeez, man, that's horns, and what's going on?" and I voiced that opinion to him. He says, "To tell you the truth, I really haven't recorded horns as a whole band situation. I've recorded horns that did sort of blaps here and there or little parts here and there. This would be a good way for me to learn how to record horns." I don't think it was lip service, because he really hadn't recorded horns per se. We were basically a band with integrated horns in the band, not as backup horns. I hate to believe him on this because, if you think about it, what the horn section did, from the start, was a lot different from Blood, Sweat & Tears, and the sound was copied many times over after we got the Chicago horn sound." So, I think with Blood, Sweat & Tears the horns were recorded in a much different way than Chicago's horns were. Of course, if you look at the two bands, you would say that they were really a jazz-rock 'n' roll band, where we were different. They called us a jazz-rock band after Blood, Sweat and Tears faded away, but we were basically a rock 'n' roll band with horns."

Instead of risking another showcase with CBS, Guercio cut a demo of CTA, and when it began to get notice in the industry, CBS president Clive Davis reversed the decision of the West Coast executives and signed the group.

Seven months after arriving in California, almost two years since they had come together in Parazaider's apartment, and after more than a cumulative half century of playing and practicing, the seven members of Chicago Transit Authority finally were given a chance to show the world what they could do.

Chapter V: Making a Statement

In January 1969, when the group flew to New York to begin work on its first album, it faced two problems it knew nothing about. The first was that, because the Guercio-produced Blood, Sweat and Tears LP at first appeared to be a flop (though it later became a spectacular hit), the status of his new project, CTA, suffered: The label curtailed the amount of time the band would have in the CBS studio. The group was allowed only five days of basic tracking and five days of overdubbing. And then there was the second problem. Although they were well rehearsed, the band members had never been in a studio before.

"We actually went in and started making Chicago Transit Authority and found out we knew very little about what we were doing," says Walt Parazaider. "I had done commercial jingles in Chicago, but this was a totally different thing for all of us. The first song was "Does Anybody Really Know What Tine It Is?" We tried to record it as a band, live, all of us in the studio at once. How the hell do you get seven guys playing it right the first time? I just remember standing in the middle of that room. I didn't want to look at anybody else for fear I'd throw them off and myself, too. That's how crazy it got. I think that we actually realized after we didn't get anything going that it had to be rhythm section first, then the horns, and that's basically how we recorded a lot of the albums."

But after they worked out the basic mechanics of recording, the large bulk of material the band had amassed began to be a problem to fit on the then standard 35-minute, one-disc LP. The band had more than enough material for a double album, and they wanted to make a statement.

If they had lot to say, this seemed like the time to say it. Early 1969 was a period when rock was taking on a seriousness undreamed of only a few years before. The Beatles had recently released their two-record "white" album and had also shattered the previously sacrosanct three-minute limit for a single by spending over seven minutes singing "Hey Jude."

When told of the band's intention to make a double album, Columbia's business people informed Guercio that CTA could have a double album only if they agreed to cut their royalties. The band agreed.

Chicago Transit Authority is a time capsule of the popular musical styles of the late '60's, with CTA's own unique flavor on top. One can pick out the group's classical, jazz, R&B, and pop influences, bearing references to Beatles as well as Jimi Hendrix. One can hear the band's own history: Kath's "Introduction," which does in fact introduce the band in confessional form ("We're a little nervous"), is CTA's own version of the kind of funky bar band rave-up of Sly and the Family Stone's "Dance To The Music" or Archie Bell and the Drells' "Tighten Up." Midsong, one moves from the bar to the lounge for some lovely horn playing, and moments later one is in a concert hall listening to a screaming rock guitar solo by Kath.

And so it goes, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" starts with an acoustic piano that is equal parts Erik Satie and Art Tatum, while the song itself is a bright, pop melody contrasted with a typically anti-establishment lyric. "Questions 67 And 68" combines a stately horn chart with some hot guitar and a musical cadence reminiscent of pop songs such as Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park." All through, there are the inventive horn charts, the sophisticated rhythm changes and startling musical juxtapositions, the alternating smooth (Lamm), soaring (Cetera), and soulful (Kath) singing that would become hallmarks of the classic Chicago sound.

Released in April 1969, Chicago Transit Authority was played by the newly powerful FM album rock stations, especially college radio. "AM radio wouldn't touch us because we were unpackageable," says Pankow. "They weren't able to pigeonhole our music. It was too different, and the cuts on the albums were so long that they really weren't tailored for radio play unless they were edited, and we didn't know anything about editing. Actually, we released three singles off the first album. We edited three songs and released them, but AM radio was nowhere near ready for this kind of music, The album was an underground hit, FM radio was embraced by the college audiences in the late '60's. All of a sudden, the college campuses around the country discovered Chicago, and it was over. That was the beginning of the snowball. If you didn't listen to Chicago, you weren't hip. It was the college kids and word of mouth that made that album such an incredible, enormous mainstay on the pop charts."

The album broke into Billboard magazine's Top LP's chart for the week ending May 17, 1969, and eventually peaked at Number 17. By the end of 1972, it had amassed 148 weeks on the chart (and that wasn't the end of its total run), making it the longest running album by a rock group up to that time.  (go to next chapter)