In the process of commending the Chicago video below to our attention, Lakeside Joe notes:
FYI: Jimi Hendrix thought Terry Kath of the band Chicago was a better guitarist than he was after seeing them perform at Whisky A Go Go in 1968.
Far be it from me to gainsay Jimi’s own considered opinion on the matter; I’ll content myself with saying it’s a tough call between two of the verymost badass guitarists of all time, and just leave it at that.
As is easy to tell from the vid, Kath, like all of the true greats, was an absolute tone MONSTER: knew all about what good tone was, where it came from, how to dial it up at will, and how to keep himself and his audiences luxuriating in it. Such a damnable shame that he, like so many others, had to leave us so soon.
- Entries
When I thing of Chicago, i think of horns not guitars. Time to pull out the old vinyl and listen again.
I love Chicago. Probably because it’s not just guitar and drums, plus they are from my youthful days.
I remember in Jr High I’d write favorite band names on my notebooks.
At one point my favorite bands were Chicago, Kansas, Boston and Foreigner.
The place name motif was purely accidental though.
Good list.
IIRC Chicago conceptually was the brainchild of a guy named Guernico who managed a band called The Buckinghams earlier. The idea being to fuse a rock band into a horn based r’n’b outfit and meld some jazz into the progressive mix.
I forget why the Buckinghams folded, but if you pull out a greatest hits you can certainly hear proto-Chicago in them. I guess it came down to the case where the individual members didn’t have the musical chops that the members of Chicago had.
BTW Chicago’s first few years were marked by a series of double and TRIPLE LP releases. I think it took until Chicago V before they put out a single LP album.
Any younguns here that are perplexed by terms like double, triple, LP or album are just going to have to look it up!
“Any younguns here that are perplexed by terms like double, triple, LP or album are just going to have to look it up!”
Ahh, the good old days, eh, Kenneth? 😉
Heck they are probably perplexed by the term “8 track tape”. Speaking of which, I had one in the ’69 Z-28 loaded with Chicago pretty often.
I missed out on the 8 Track Era, but a friend who was only a year older had a 1970 Pontiac Lemans he “hopped up” and he would take me to school when he was a Senior. Around 1979 or so I guess. That had an 8 track in it. The damn thing kept bleeding tracks into each other though…
BTW that car had a “three on the tree” and if you understand that you know about LPs.
Bonus for “three on the tree”. Haven’t heard that one in a while. I also never owned a car with that. It was always “Four on the floor”…
I do kinda like CDs though.
Definitely better than cassette tapes, which were the worst.
How many here know about the “pencil trick” for a cassette tape? That’ll show your bona fides…
LOL, yea I know the pencil trick, and I hated tapes. CD was a huge improvement in the handling at least. My ears are not able to discern the quality of sound from vinyl Vs CD, or Tubes Vs Chips for amplifiers.
Nowadays the vinyl they use is much heavier and stronger for these retro packagings, if they’re the costlier type. You can just pick up a vinyl album today and feel the weight.
Back in the day unless you handled your vinyl discs just right you got warps and pops and crackles and frankly I don’t think they sounded any better than CDs. Especially if you didn’t have the high end sound systems. Worse case was if you got a scratch and/or a skip that kept it in permanent repeat. The record’s stuck The record’s stuck The record’s stuck The record’s stuck…
Believe it or not – I personally never purchased a record nor ever owned a record player. My parents had a nice stereo system (the console type) that my electrical engineer father (he of the extraordinary skill with tubes) modified to produce even better sound than it had originally. They had a lot of albums, the classics, big band stuff, etc. My sisters (both younger) would buy albums. I bought two 8 track tape players that I can recall, put one in the Camaro and the other in an MG with it’s positive ground system (The damn British do everything wrong) by isolating the whole thing in a rubber sheet with rubber bushings. I probably bought 10-15 8 track tapes from 1969 to 1975 or so.
And to think, now Pandora can pick the music for me, and do a damn fine job of it. Plus it’s always with me and never a commercial or worse, some insidious mixture including rap shit. I sometimes still listen WDAV (Davidson College) for the classical, but that is pretty infrequent now.