Chicago threw a 55th anniversary party a year ago in Atlantic City, with a little help from some friends. And the new Live at 55 gives fans a chance to be part of the celebration.
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Billed to Chicago & Friends, Live at 55 (out Friday, Nov. 22 via Mercury Studios) captures the epic 31-song performance — filmed over two nights before 10,000 fans at Ocean Casino Resort — on a variety of video and audio formats. At both shows the current incarnation of the band was joined by guest vocalists (Chris Daughtry, Robin Thicke, Judith Hill, VoicePlay) and guitarists (Steve Vai, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram) as well as pedal steel virtuoso Robert Randolph. The brassy group’s five and a half decades of hits are well-represented, and there’s no question the additional personnel injected a little more octane into the shows.
“It was interesting because we usually don’t have guest artists, much less seven of them,” trumpeter Lee Loughnane, one of three founding members (along with keyboardist Robert Lamm and trombonist James Pankow) still active in Chicago, tells Billboard. “The variety and the different flavors of their styles was quite different than what we’ve done before; it was very interesting to see and hear how they blended their expertise with what we’ve done for decades, so it was pretty cool that it all came together.
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“It took a lot of work to put it all together, but we were gonna do whatever it took to make the show as good as it can be.”
Loughnane is hard-pressed to identify specific favorite moments, but he notes that Vai, who’s currently touring with the King Crimson tribute band Beat, “was really well-prepared,” while Daughtry “was so good it was like a shoe-in, ‘This is gonna work great!’ kind of thing.”
Vai, who played on the rarely performed “South California Purples” and “Poem 58” as well as the all-cast finale “25 or 6 to 4,” adds that, “The songs gave me a nostalgic hernia. I was a teenager in the 70s and their music was all over the radio. I loved it, and it introduced me to the insanely great guitar playing of Terry Kath…I approached the songs with the idea of honoring his powerful energy, explorative nature and visceral approach.
“What was most surprising for me about the gig was how well it sounded in my inner ear monitors. Those horns were bright, stunningly in tune and tight. It was an honor and a real pleasure.”
Kingfish, who joined Chicago for parts of the “Ballet For a Girl in Buchannon” suite (including “Make Me Smile” and “Colour My World”), was not particularly familiar with Chicago before the concerts but says he was still “well aware of their catalog and the way they melded rock and jazz” and welcomed the opportunity to immerse himself a bit.
“It was a really cool time,” he recalls. “The band was so easy to work with. I not only met, but got to spend time with a lot of great musicians whose music I enjoy.”
Live at 55 was directed by Brian Lockwood and produced by Academy Award winner Barry Summers. It was screened in North American movie theaters during April.
The shows celebrated the anniversary of Chicago’s debut Chicago Transit Authority album (the group changed its name shortly thereafter), which turned 55 on April 28 of this year. The two-LP set was on the Billboard 200 for 171 weeks, setting a new record at the time, was certified double-platinum and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014, for its 45th anniversary. Chicago also won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in its wake.
“It feels like one long tour — that’s pretty much it,” Loughnane says of the passage of time. “You and I talking now, you mention when it started, the first album, and it’s like ‘Sssssssssshop!, here we are!’ Almost instantaneous. A lot of the stuff could not possibly have happened the way it did — but it did. We’re living it, y’know?”
Since then Chicago has released 25 more studio albums and scored 29 Top 20 hits. It was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. It’s survived through commercial ebbs and flows, while guitarist Terry Kath accidentally shot himself in 1978 and bassist Peter Cetera left, acrimoniously, in 1985. Saxophonist Walt Parazaider, meanwhile, retired in 2017 due to health reasons.
“The faces have changed; that’s to be expected after this much time,” Lamm notes. “This is our life’s work, and we still love doing it. Every time somebody leaves we find somebody new and it keeps going…because we still want to play this (music).”
Loughnane adds that, “It’s a testimony to the music, and the players that come in are not only great players unto themselves but it’s obvious that they have listened to our music and enjoyed it as they were growing up. And as we have brought people in they’ve brought their own conception of how they want it to sound. I’ve just enjoyed each guy who has come in and helped us further career.
“The big bands, the Count Basies and Duke Ellingtons, they went until they dropped,” Loughnane explains. “They kept working until they couldn’t and passed on to the next life, if there is such a thing, and there are still versions of those bands out there playing their music. They never stopped. That definitely made an impression on us.”
Chicago toured during the summer with Earth, Wind & Fire and also played at the Venetian Resort Las Vegas, where it’s been the longest-running residency in the venue’s history, selling more than 80,000 tickets during the past seven years. Chicago will be back there for another nine dates starting Feb. 28. During September it dipped into its archives for the live set Chicago at John F. Kennedy Center For the Performing Arts, Washington D.C. (9/16/1971).
And new music may be coming soon according to Loughnane, following up 2022’s Chicago XXXVIII: Born For This Moment.
“Right now music’s just being written,” the trumpeter says. “There aren’t any plans for anything brand new at this point, but I’ve got stuff I’ve been working on, and I’m gonna go home and go into the studio and see what I’ve come up with. There’s always music going on. We all write. We’re all still creative. We can always do an album; it’s just a matter of the circumstance and the timing and all the other aspects of putting an album together. But the ability is always there.”
