Problems for Chicago as they were doing over-seas concerts after their third album release.
Read on!
3000 to be turned away but Chicago defend London concert cancellation
By Alan Smith
“UNDERGROUND is now Overground,” said Chicago’s Terry Kath… “and Overground is commercial.” We were on a trans-atlantic phone line at the weekend and he was having a quiet sneer at those few critics who’ve accused Chicago of perhaps becoming too much a band of the Establishment.
But Chicago remain philosophical about such minor and largely unjustified knocks and Kath hardly raised his voice as he told me: “I hate this whole underground thing, this whole business of trying to categorise and contain.
“The truth is, there’s a lot of people getting work by calling themselves Underground! And you know, to be Underground in America is to be really cool — and really commercial!”
With this swipe at the cultists, the posers and the pretentionists among us, we moved on to talk about Chicago´s concert visit to London next month and the news that 3,000 ticket holders for the first of the two shows were about to be slightly aggravated – the early show had been abandoned.
Apparently promoter Robert Paterson had gone ahead and made the arrangements – for two performances – with the band´s management.
Everything was fine. A 6 p.m. performance was arranged and the tickets were a sell-out, many of them to postal bookers from out of town.
Then Chicago heard about it and refused to do the other show on the grounds that their act lasts more than two hours and that asking them to give of their best twice in one night was just about asking too much.
Shouldn’t they just stretch the point this time? I asked. Wouldn’t that be a better deal than messing up the arrangements of 3,000 Chicago-ees who’d simply been caught up in a business hassle?
Said Kath: “The question is that if we do two shows in one night, then one suffers, and we don’t want to do that in London. We just couldn’t do two long shows and be good.
Impossible
“We’re playing like two and a half, three hours, man, and we’re really jacked up for it. It’s physically and mentally impossible.
“I’ll admit there ARE lots of places we do work longer. That’s because our manager has an arrangement that if things go well and there’s a lot of people who’d like to see us, we do a second show. But this is different.
“It’s sort of a shame because, sure, we could go on twice and reach more people. But the people who’re gonna be there for this later show, this one show… they’ll benefit.
“We tried to find out if it was possible to get the Hall for two nights instead of the one, but it wasn’t.
“Is there some other place available? We don’t mind doing the other concert, maybe the night before. It would have to be worked out.”
We touched on the question of recording, and Kath – Chicago guitarist who once played with an outfit called Jimmy and the Gentlemen — confirmed that the band has not now recorded for almost a year.
“The exception is some live scenes we taped when we worked at Carnegie Hall every night for a week. There’ll be a live album sometime… Columbia have plans.
“Right now I’d personally rather not release it for a couple of years. This is just personal to me. If we released it right now… well, you know. Give it time.
“There’s only one song in it that’s a new song, one that nobody ever heard. All the rest is off the other albums.
“It’s a time thing. We’re on the road a lot. I get a real kick from seeing these places, and maybe that’s a good thing, because we’re really the kind of group who really work a lot. All through High School I was working in bands. I just dig playing.
“You know something — if you get too much time off, it’s constricting. I get restless. That’s why we dig being on the road.”
I asked Kath about his early days with the aforementioned Jimmy and the Gentlemen and found him happy to talk about this phase in his life and its effect on him.
“Well,” he said, “this Jimmy and the Gentlemen was some band and I guess we were fairly bad. But the lead singer, he really was a good singer. The only thing was he dug Elvis, and the whole time we were doing Elvis tunes.
“I guess I was about 16 at the time, and maybe we were a year together, maybe longer. We only worked about three, four gigs!
“With Chicago, we’re mainly into the college circuit and we spread out the concerts to once in a while. The colleges are more receptive… but you know, there’s a whole lot of bands who don’t play the colleges for some reason.
No singles
“Another thing about it is we really dig the smaller audiences. It’s closer. There’s more feeling. Making it to a big audience is harder and you don’t see half of them anyhow.”
With the memory of NME Chart singles like “I’m A Man” and “25 or 6 to 4” still in my mind, I wondered if Chicago would release another single within the foreseeable future.
The answer: “I hope we never release another single as long as I live. They’re all bull–.
“A single never changed us, but it changed some of our audiences.
“Sometimes we get some really weird audiences. They think they can rip our shirts off.”
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