Side One 1. Movin' In (00:00) 2. The Road (04:06) 3. Poem for the People (07:16) 4. In the Country (12:51) Side Two 5. Wake Up Sunshine (19:27) 6. Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon 1. Make Me Smile (22:00) 2. So Much to Say, So Much to Give (25:30) 3. Anxiety's Moment (26:30) 4. West Virginia Fantasies (27:28) 5. Colour My World (29:02) 6. To Be Free (32:02) 7. Now More Than Ever (33:33) Side Three 7. Fancy Colours (34:43) 8. 25 or 6 to 4 (39:53) 9. Memories of Love 1. Prelude (44:51) 2. A.M. Mourning (46:02) 3. P.M. Mourning (48:07) 4. Memories of Love (50:05) Side Four 10. It Better End Soon 1. 1st Movement (54:04) 2. 2nd Movement (56:34) 3. 3rd Movement (1:00:18) 4. 4th Movement (1:03:26) 11. Where Do We Go from Here (1:04:32) Singles A. Make Me Smile (1:07:26) B. 25 or 6 to 4 (1:10:26)
All Things Music Plus
ON THIS DATE (46 YEARS AGO)
January 26, 1970 – Chicago: Chicago II is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 4.5/5
# Allmusic 4.5/5
January 26, 1970 – Chicago: Chicago II is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 4.5/5
# Allmusic 4.5/5
Chicago II is the second album by Chicago, released on January 25,
1970. It reached #4 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart, and #6 on the
UK Album chart. While The Chicago Transit Authority was a success,
Chicago is considered by many to be Chicago's breakthrough album,
yielding a number of Top 40 hits, including "Make Me Smile" (#9),
"Colour My World" (#7), and "25 or 6 to 4" (#4).
It was released on this date in 1970 after the band had shortened its name from The Chicago Transit Authority after releasing their same-titled debut album the previous year. Although the official title of the album is Chicago, it came to be retroactively known as Chicago II, keeping it in line with the succession of Roman numeral-titled albums that officially began with Chicago III in 1971.
Chicago II remains a classic album, encapsulating its time (1969) in all its tumult and glory. The Vietnam War (and the civil unrest it inspired) was still raging, the counterculture dream had not yet crashed and burned, and rock music could be taken seriously as an "art form" while still generating radio hits. Chicago, with their then-new fusion of jazz, rock, and pop, rose high on the charts, while taken seriously both in and beyond the rock-critic establishment.
Their approach had a freshness and vibrancy--"25 Or 6 To 4" was surging, dramatic, and slightly ominous; "Fancy Colours" and "Make Me Smile" were full of soulful optimism; a four-movement suite showed the band had ambition beyond the three- or four-minute pop song. The centerpiece of the album was the thirteen-minute song cycle "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon". Guitarist Terry Kath also participated in an extended classically styled cycle of four pieces, three of which were co-written by the well-known, arranger, composer, and pianist Peter Matz. The politically outspoken Robert Lamm also tackles his qualms with "It Better End Soon", another modular piece. Peter Cetera, later to play a crucial role in the band's music, contributed his first song to Chicago and this album, "Where Do We Go From Here".
___________________________________
FROM THE BOX SET “GROUP PORTRAIT”
The second album also saw the debut of a new songwriter in the band, although the circumstances under which he became a writer are unfortunate. During a break in the touring in the summer of 1969, Peter Cetera was set upon at a baseball game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. "Four marines didn't like a long-haired rock 'n' roller in a baseball park," Cetera recounts, "and of course I was a Cub fan, and I was in Dodger Stadium, and that didn't do so well. I got in a fight and got a broken jaw in three places, and I was in intensive care for a couple of days.”
The incident had two separate effects on Cetera's career. The first was an impact on his singing style. "The only funny thing I can think about the whole incident," he says, "is that, with my jaw wired together - and I had a broken front tooth which allowed me to shove little bits and pieces of food in there and drink some liquid - I actually went on the road a lot sooner than I should have, just because of the economics of everything, and I remember, I believe it was the Atlanta Pop Festival, although I'm not sure if it was the Atlanta or the Texas Pop Festival, there were like 300,000 people there, and I was actually singing through my clenched jaw, singing backgrounds, which, to this day, is kind of still the way I sing. I have a fairly closed mouth, just because of that."
The second effect of the incident was Cetera's first foray into composition. "I came from a band that did Top 40," he says, "and as far as I was concerned, especially when the Beatles came along, number one, all melodies had already been taken, and, number two, certain people were songwriters and certain people were singers, and I didn't consider myself to be a songwriter."
But with a broken jaw, the erstwhile singer had some silent time on his hands. "I had just gotten out of the hospital," Cetera recalls, "and was lying in my bed convalescing when they landed on the moon, and I grabbed my bass guitar and started this little progression on the bass, and started writing 'Where Do We Go From Here.' I think Walter Cronkite actually had said that, and I thought, 'Wow, where do we go from here?' So, in a melancholy way, I wrote it about that, and then I wrote it about myself, and about the world, and about everything in general, and that was my first writing credit."
In addition to its expanded musical horizons, the second album also took a more direct look at the political situation. Chicago had included chants from the demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic Convention on its first album, and here one of the LP's extended suites was entitled, "It Better End Soon," a plea for the end of the Vietnam War. Though the lyric cautioned, "We gotta do it right - within the system," the title spoke to the impatience of young people at the start of 1970.
Similarly, the album's liner notes (penned by Robert Lamm) dedicated the record, the band members, their futures, and their energies "to the people of the revolution ... And the revolution in all of its forms." It is difficult more than two decades later to describe the multiplicity of meanings the word "revolution" had for young people at the time, and even harder to determine whether a "revolution" actually took place. Clearly, something changed. "I think there was one," says Lamm today. "You may argue with the term 'revolution,' but I think for those of us who were sweaty kids in our late teens or early 20s, that sure was a sexy word."
At the time, however, the band's political commitment was subject to some misunderstanding. Robert Lamm was actually the chief political exponent of the band, and he just felt the need as a composer, as an American and a human being, to talk about these things because they were major issues in his life, and he felt that we had an incredible platform and a gift, and we could use it for things other than entertaining," explains Pankow. "We were even at the point of putting voter registration information at concerts. Robert figures if 18-year-old kids were old enough to get their brains blown out in Vietnam, they should be old enough to vote. Unfortunately, it was misinterpreted by a lot of the nut cases. The SDS and the Chicago Seven and all kinds of people were approaching us on the basis of rioting, of, "Hey, let's tear the system down.' All of a sudden, we were being enlisted to become politically involved to the hilt. I'm sure that it had a lot to do with our longevity and people taking us seriously, however, it got to the point where it almost became a burden in light of the fact that it started to infringe on the musical goals. We started thinking about this, and we started realizing, hey, man, people come to a concert or put a record on to forget about that shit. So, we decided to put our objectives in perspective and entertain people. That's what we do best, that's what our niche in life is, and so that's what we decided to do, we put our politics on the shelf."
In commercial terms, the major change that came with Chicago II, which was released in January, 1970, was that it opened the floodgates on Chicago as a singles band. In October, 1969, Columbia had re-tested the waters by releasing "Beginnings" as a single, but AM radio still wasn't interested, and the record failed to chart. All of this changed, however, when the label excerpted two songs, "Make Me Smile" and "Colour My World," from Pankow's ballet, and released them as the two sides of a single in March, 1970.
"I was driving in my car down Santa Monica Boulevard in L.A.," Pankow remembers, "and I turned the radio on KHJ, and 'Make Me Smile' came on. I almost hit the car in front of me, 'cause it's my song, and I'm hearing it on the biggest station in L.A. At that point, I realized, hey, we have a hit single. They don't play you in L.A. unless you're hit-bound. So, that was one of the more exciting moments in my early career."
The single reached the Top 10, while Chicago II immediately went gold and got to Number 4 on the LP's chart, joining the first album, which was still selling well. A second single, Lamm's "25 Or 6 To 4," was an even bigger hit in the summer of 1970, reaching Number 4.
But instead of reaching into the second album for a third single, Columbia and Chicago decided to try to re-stimulate interest in the first album, and succeeded. The group's next single was "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" which became their third Top 10 hit in a row by the start of 1971. "Up to that time, to be very honest, I don't think people were really ready to hear horns the way we were using them," says Parazaider. "But after we established something with horns - '25 Or 6 To 4,' but actually 'Make Me Smile,' which was our first bona fide hit-it seemed like it broke the ice and it became easier, and they accepted stuff that was recorded easily a year before."
_______________________________________________
CHICAGO AND THE SINGLE EDIT
In 1968, when Richard Harris and the Beatles enjoyed top-selling hit singles that ran over seven minutes each, it seemed as though the old habit of keeping songs down to three minutes - an ancient holdover from the pre-tape days of the first half of the century when recordings couldn't physically be longer - was about to be buried. True, radio had patterned itself after the three-minute limit for its commercial considerations, but clearly the audiences were willing to accept longer songs.
Artists may have recognized the change, but record companies didn't, and so, as tracks got longer and longer, groups got into fights - in the already politically adversarial days of the late '60s - over having their songs edited down to something around three minutes for single release. This was a particular problem for Chicago, who, as they became a singles force in the early '70s, more and more faced the razor at Columbia Records.
"The normal problem of that time for any group was, they would try and take a four-minute and ten-second song, and try and make it three minutes long," recalls Peter Cetera, "and we were just against that. There was a big thing at that time to be totally album-oriented, and anything that smacked of you doing this to be a single was commercialism, which was terribly frowned upon. What you really wanted was to be on the big FM [album] oriented stations, and not the Top 40 twinkie stations."
"It was a problem," argues Parazaider. "I think it was a problem for the writers, too, because they were writing whole pieces. It bothered all of us that some of these things were taken right out of context and chopped up and put on the radio. And then they became hits, what can you say? How do you complain? Say, 'Take it off the radio. We're ashamed of that musically'? We weren't ashamed of it musically. It's just, the people weren't getting the whole story. The only thing we took comfort in was, a lot of people were buying the albums, so they would definitely see these little three-minute ditties in context."
"We considered it an abortion," says Pankow about the edits. "But we were convinced by our management company and Jimmy Guercio that, hey, if you guys want to become establishment, if you want to sell millions of records and become a true phenomenon, you have to make allowances for the nature of your music. We realized at that point that it was indeed a necessary evil."
Robert Lamm, who was perhaps the most frequent victim of the edits, disputes the version of the story told in Clive Davis's autobiography. Davis says that Guercio understood the situation and helped convince the band to compromise. Lamm says Guercio's antipathy to the edits was stronger than his own. "The problems that Chicago had with Clive Davis were not really problems between the band and Clive Davis," he suggests. "They were problems between Jimmy Guercio and Clive Davis. The thing about always being at odds with [Davis] about the singles, I don't think we ever really cared that much other than we were naive and we were being programmed by Guercio into thinking that this music that we were creating was so perfect in its virgin state that nobody had the right to edit it."
Guercio certainly felt strongly about the issue, but he insists that, whatever you think of the cuts, he, not Davis, made them. "Those edits were terrible," he says. "The promotion guys, radio guys, were yelling at me to give them two to three minutes, that was it, and I had to cut everything down to so many minutes. But I cut everyone, as good or bad as they were, I did 'em all, the final ones. I had a contract: they couldn't couple anything, they couldn't package anything, they couldn't change the artwork, they couldn't do anything without my approval, 'cause I didn't take any money up front. So, I had very strong creative controls. If you want to talk about the strength of Chicago, that's the one thing that I did negotiate for and that I got, is, nobody could touch anything."
For the record, here's a list of Chicago songs that were drastically edited release as Columbia singles, with their LP and single timings. Actually, the problem diminished over the '70s, as radio loosened up its length restrictions and Chicago's song lengths shortened.
__________________________________________________
LP Time 45 Time
Questions 67 And 68 ..................................... 4:59 ...... 3:25
Beginnings ................................................... 7:50 ...... 2:47
Make Me Smile ............................................. 3:16* ..... 2:58
Colour My World ........................................... 3:01* ..... 3:01
25 Or 6 To 4 ................................................ 4:50 ....... 2:52
Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? .... 4:34 ...... 3:17**
I’m A Man .................................................... 7:41 ...... 3:27
Dialogue (Part I & II) .................................... 7:09 ...... 4:53
Brand New Love Affair ................................... 4:31 ...... 2:30
*Excerpted from "Ballet For A Girl In Buchannan."
**There is also a 2:53 edit.
Unlike some other Columbia compilations, this set contains only the LP edits.
__________________________________________
REVIEW
by Lindsay Planer, allmusic
The Chicago Transit Authority recorded this double-barreled follow-up to their eponymously titled 1969 debut effort. The contents of Chicago II (1970) underscore the solid foundation of complex jazz changes with heavy electric rock & roll that the band so brazenly forged on the first set. The septet also continued its ability to blend the seemingly divergent musical styles into some of the best and most effective pop music of the era. One thing that had changed was the band's name, which was shortened to simply Chicago to avoid any potential litigious situations from the city of Chicago's transportation department -- which claimed the name as proprietary property. Musically, James Pankow (trombone) was about to further cross-pollinate the band's sound with the multifaceted six-song "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon." The classically inspired suite also garnered the band two of its most beloved hits -- the upbeat pop opener "Make Me Smile" as well as the achingly poignant "Color My World" -- both of which remained at the center of the group's live sets. Chicago had certainly not abandoned its active pursuit of blending high-octane electric rockers such as "25 or 6 to 4" to the progressive jazz inflections heard in the breezy syncopation of "The Road." Adding further depth of field is the darker "Poem for the People" as well as the politically charged five-song set titled "It Better End Soon." These selections feature the band driving home its formidable musicality and uncanny ability to coalesce styles telepathically and at a moment's notice. The contributions of Terry Kath (guitar/vocals) stand out as he unleashes some of his most pungent and sinuous leads, which contrast with the tight brass and woodwind trio of Lee Loughnane (trumpet/vocals), Walter Parazaider (woodwinds/vocals), and the aforementioned Pankow. Peter Cetera (bass/vocals) also marks his songwriting debut -- on the final cut of both the suite and the album -- with "Where Do We Go from Here." It bookends both with at the very least the anticipation and projection of a positive and optimistic future.
TRACKS:
Side one
1 Movin' In (Pankow) - 4:06
2 The Road (Kath) - 3:10
3 Poem for the People (Lamm) - 5:31
4 In the Country (Kath) - 6:34
Side two
1 Wake Up Sunshine (Lamm) - 2:29
2 Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon (Pankow) - 12:55
Make Me Smile
So Much to Say, So Much to Give
Anxiety's Moment
West Virginia Fantasies
Colour My World
To Be Free
Now More Than Ever
Side three
1 Fancy Colours (Lamm) - 5:10
2 25 or 6 to 4 (Lamm) - 4:50
3 Memories of Love (Kath/Matz) - 9:12
Prelude
A.M. Mourning
P.M. Mourning
Memories of Love
Side four
1 It Better End Soon (Lamm/Parazaider) - 10:24
1st Movement
2nd Movement
3rd Movement
4th Movement
2 Where Do We Go from Here (Cetera) - 2:49
It was released on this date in 1970 after the band had shortened its name from The Chicago Transit Authority after releasing their same-titled debut album the previous year. Although the official title of the album is Chicago, it came to be retroactively known as Chicago II, keeping it in line with the succession of Roman numeral-titled albums that officially began with Chicago III in 1971.
Chicago II remains a classic album, encapsulating its time (1969) in all its tumult and glory. The Vietnam War (and the civil unrest it inspired) was still raging, the counterculture dream had not yet crashed and burned, and rock music could be taken seriously as an "art form" while still generating radio hits. Chicago, with their then-new fusion of jazz, rock, and pop, rose high on the charts, while taken seriously both in and beyond the rock-critic establishment.
Their approach had a freshness and vibrancy--"25 Or 6 To 4" was surging, dramatic, and slightly ominous; "Fancy Colours" and "Make Me Smile" were full of soulful optimism; a four-movement suite showed the band had ambition beyond the three- or four-minute pop song. The centerpiece of the album was the thirteen-minute song cycle "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon". Guitarist Terry Kath also participated in an extended classically styled cycle of four pieces, three of which were co-written by the well-known, arranger, composer, and pianist Peter Matz. The politically outspoken Robert Lamm also tackles his qualms with "It Better End Soon", another modular piece. Peter Cetera, later to play a crucial role in the band's music, contributed his first song to Chicago and this album, "Where Do We Go From Here".
___________________________________
FROM THE BOX SET “GROUP PORTRAIT”
The second album also saw the debut of a new songwriter in the band, although the circumstances under which he became a writer are unfortunate. During a break in the touring in the summer of 1969, Peter Cetera was set upon at a baseball game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. "Four marines didn't like a long-haired rock 'n' roller in a baseball park," Cetera recounts, "and of course I was a Cub fan, and I was in Dodger Stadium, and that didn't do so well. I got in a fight and got a broken jaw in three places, and I was in intensive care for a couple of days.”
The incident had two separate effects on Cetera's career. The first was an impact on his singing style. "The only funny thing I can think about the whole incident," he says, "is that, with my jaw wired together - and I had a broken front tooth which allowed me to shove little bits and pieces of food in there and drink some liquid - I actually went on the road a lot sooner than I should have, just because of the economics of everything, and I remember, I believe it was the Atlanta Pop Festival, although I'm not sure if it was the Atlanta or the Texas Pop Festival, there were like 300,000 people there, and I was actually singing through my clenched jaw, singing backgrounds, which, to this day, is kind of still the way I sing. I have a fairly closed mouth, just because of that."
The second effect of the incident was Cetera's first foray into composition. "I came from a band that did Top 40," he says, "and as far as I was concerned, especially when the Beatles came along, number one, all melodies had already been taken, and, number two, certain people were songwriters and certain people were singers, and I didn't consider myself to be a songwriter."
But with a broken jaw, the erstwhile singer had some silent time on his hands. "I had just gotten out of the hospital," Cetera recalls, "and was lying in my bed convalescing when they landed on the moon, and I grabbed my bass guitar and started this little progression on the bass, and started writing 'Where Do We Go From Here.' I think Walter Cronkite actually had said that, and I thought, 'Wow, where do we go from here?' So, in a melancholy way, I wrote it about that, and then I wrote it about myself, and about the world, and about everything in general, and that was my first writing credit."
In addition to its expanded musical horizons, the second album also took a more direct look at the political situation. Chicago had included chants from the demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic Convention on its first album, and here one of the LP's extended suites was entitled, "It Better End Soon," a plea for the end of the Vietnam War. Though the lyric cautioned, "We gotta do it right - within the system," the title spoke to the impatience of young people at the start of 1970.
Similarly, the album's liner notes (penned by Robert Lamm) dedicated the record, the band members, their futures, and their energies "to the people of the revolution ... And the revolution in all of its forms." It is difficult more than two decades later to describe the multiplicity of meanings the word "revolution" had for young people at the time, and even harder to determine whether a "revolution" actually took place. Clearly, something changed. "I think there was one," says Lamm today. "You may argue with the term 'revolution,' but I think for those of us who were sweaty kids in our late teens or early 20s, that sure was a sexy word."
At the time, however, the band's political commitment was subject to some misunderstanding. Robert Lamm was actually the chief political exponent of the band, and he just felt the need as a composer, as an American and a human being, to talk about these things because they were major issues in his life, and he felt that we had an incredible platform and a gift, and we could use it for things other than entertaining," explains Pankow. "We were even at the point of putting voter registration information at concerts. Robert figures if 18-year-old kids were old enough to get their brains blown out in Vietnam, they should be old enough to vote. Unfortunately, it was misinterpreted by a lot of the nut cases. The SDS and the Chicago Seven and all kinds of people were approaching us on the basis of rioting, of, "Hey, let's tear the system down.' All of a sudden, we were being enlisted to become politically involved to the hilt. I'm sure that it had a lot to do with our longevity and people taking us seriously, however, it got to the point where it almost became a burden in light of the fact that it started to infringe on the musical goals. We started thinking about this, and we started realizing, hey, man, people come to a concert or put a record on to forget about that shit. So, we decided to put our objectives in perspective and entertain people. That's what we do best, that's what our niche in life is, and so that's what we decided to do, we put our politics on the shelf."
In commercial terms, the major change that came with Chicago II, which was released in January, 1970, was that it opened the floodgates on Chicago as a singles band. In October, 1969, Columbia had re-tested the waters by releasing "Beginnings" as a single, but AM radio still wasn't interested, and the record failed to chart. All of this changed, however, when the label excerpted two songs, "Make Me Smile" and "Colour My World," from Pankow's ballet, and released them as the two sides of a single in March, 1970.
"I was driving in my car down Santa Monica Boulevard in L.A.," Pankow remembers, "and I turned the radio on KHJ, and 'Make Me Smile' came on. I almost hit the car in front of me, 'cause it's my song, and I'm hearing it on the biggest station in L.A. At that point, I realized, hey, we have a hit single. They don't play you in L.A. unless you're hit-bound. So, that was one of the more exciting moments in my early career."
The single reached the Top 10, while Chicago II immediately went gold and got to Number 4 on the LP's chart, joining the first album, which was still selling well. A second single, Lamm's "25 Or 6 To 4," was an even bigger hit in the summer of 1970, reaching Number 4.
But instead of reaching into the second album for a third single, Columbia and Chicago decided to try to re-stimulate interest in the first album, and succeeded. The group's next single was "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" which became their third Top 10 hit in a row by the start of 1971. "Up to that time, to be very honest, I don't think people were really ready to hear horns the way we were using them," says Parazaider. "But after we established something with horns - '25 Or 6 To 4,' but actually 'Make Me Smile,' which was our first bona fide hit-it seemed like it broke the ice and it became easier, and they accepted stuff that was recorded easily a year before."
_______________________________________________
CHICAGO AND THE SINGLE EDIT
In 1968, when Richard Harris and the Beatles enjoyed top-selling hit singles that ran over seven minutes each, it seemed as though the old habit of keeping songs down to three minutes - an ancient holdover from the pre-tape days of the first half of the century when recordings couldn't physically be longer - was about to be buried. True, radio had patterned itself after the three-minute limit for its commercial considerations, but clearly the audiences were willing to accept longer songs.
Artists may have recognized the change, but record companies didn't, and so, as tracks got longer and longer, groups got into fights - in the already politically adversarial days of the late '60s - over having their songs edited down to something around three minutes for single release. This was a particular problem for Chicago, who, as they became a singles force in the early '70s, more and more faced the razor at Columbia Records.
"The normal problem of that time for any group was, they would try and take a four-minute and ten-second song, and try and make it three minutes long," recalls Peter Cetera, "and we were just against that. There was a big thing at that time to be totally album-oriented, and anything that smacked of you doing this to be a single was commercialism, which was terribly frowned upon. What you really wanted was to be on the big FM [album] oriented stations, and not the Top 40 twinkie stations."
"It was a problem," argues Parazaider. "I think it was a problem for the writers, too, because they were writing whole pieces. It bothered all of us that some of these things were taken right out of context and chopped up and put on the radio. And then they became hits, what can you say? How do you complain? Say, 'Take it off the radio. We're ashamed of that musically'? We weren't ashamed of it musically. It's just, the people weren't getting the whole story. The only thing we took comfort in was, a lot of people were buying the albums, so they would definitely see these little three-minute ditties in context."
"We considered it an abortion," says Pankow about the edits. "But we were convinced by our management company and Jimmy Guercio that, hey, if you guys want to become establishment, if you want to sell millions of records and become a true phenomenon, you have to make allowances for the nature of your music. We realized at that point that it was indeed a necessary evil."
Robert Lamm, who was perhaps the most frequent victim of the edits, disputes the version of the story told in Clive Davis's autobiography. Davis says that Guercio understood the situation and helped convince the band to compromise. Lamm says Guercio's antipathy to the edits was stronger than his own. "The problems that Chicago had with Clive Davis were not really problems between the band and Clive Davis," he suggests. "They were problems between Jimmy Guercio and Clive Davis. The thing about always being at odds with [Davis] about the singles, I don't think we ever really cared that much other than we were naive and we were being programmed by Guercio into thinking that this music that we were creating was so perfect in its virgin state that nobody had the right to edit it."
Guercio certainly felt strongly about the issue, but he insists that, whatever you think of the cuts, he, not Davis, made them. "Those edits were terrible," he says. "The promotion guys, radio guys, were yelling at me to give them two to three minutes, that was it, and I had to cut everything down to so many minutes. But I cut everyone, as good or bad as they were, I did 'em all, the final ones. I had a contract: they couldn't couple anything, they couldn't package anything, they couldn't change the artwork, they couldn't do anything without my approval, 'cause I didn't take any money up front. So, I had very strong creative controls. If you want to talk about the strength of Chicago, that's the one thing that I did negotiate for and that I got, is, nobody could touch anything."
For the record, here's a list of Chicago songs that were drastically edited release as Columbia singles, with their LP and single timings. Actually, the problem diminished over the '70s, as radio loosened up its length restrictions and Chicago's song lengths shortened.
__________________________________________________
LP Time 45 Time
Questions 67 And 68 ..................................... 4:59 ...... 3:25
Beginnings ................................................... 7:50 ...... 2:47
Make Me Smile ............................................. 3:16* ..... 2:58
Colour My World ........................................... 3:01* ..... 3:01
25 Or 6 To 4 ................................................ 4:50 ....... 2:52
Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? .... 4:34 ...... 3:17**
I’m A Man .................................................... 7:41 ...... 3:27
Dialogue (Part I & II) .................................... 7:09 ...... 4:53
Brand New Love Affair ................................... 4:31 ...... 2:30
*Excerpted from "Ballet For A Girl In Buchannan."
**There is also a 2:53 edit.
Unlike some other Columbia compilations, this set contains only the LP edits.
__________________________________________
REVIEW
by Lindsay Planer, allmusic
The Chicago Transit Authority recorded this double-barreled follow-up to their eponymously titled 1969 debut effort. The contents of Chicago II (1970) underscore the solid foundation of complex jazz changes with heavy electric rock & roll that the band so brazenly forged on the first set. The septet also continued its ability to blend the seemingly divergent musical styles into some of the best and most effective pop music of the era. One thing that had changed was the band's name, which was shortened to simply Chicago to avoid any potential litigious situations from the city of Chicago's transportation department -- which claimed the name as proprietary property. Musically, James Pankow (trombone) was about to further cross-pollinate the band's sound with the multifaceted six-song "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon." The classically inspired suite also garnered the band two of its most beloved hits -- the upbeat pop opener "Make Me Smile" as well as the achingly poignant "Color My World" -- both of which remained at the center of the group's live sets. Chicago had certainly not abandoned its active pursuit of blending high-octane electric rockers such as "25 or 6 to 4" to the progressive jazz inflections heard in the breezy syncopation of "The Road." Adding further depth of field is the darker "Poem for the People" as well as the politically charged five-song set titled "It Better End Soon." These selections feature the band driving home its formidable musicality and uncanny ability to coalesce styles telepathically and at a moment's notice. The contributions of Terry Kath (guitar/vocals) stand out as he unleashes some of his most pungent and sinuous leads, which contrast with the tight brass and woodwind trio of Lee Loughnane (trumpet/vocals), Walter Parazaider (woodwinds/vocals), and the aforementioned Pankow. Peter Cetera (bass/vocals) also marks his songwriting debut -- on the final cut of both the suite and the album -- with "Where Do We Go from Here." It bookends both with at the very least the anticipation and projection of a positive and optimistic future.
TRACKS:
Side one
1 Movin' In (Pankow) - 4:06
2 The Road (Kath) - 3:10
3 Poem for the People (Lamm) - 5:31
4 In the Country (Kath) - 6:34
Side two
1 Wake Up Sunshine (Lamm) - 2:29
2 Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon (Pankow) - 12:55
Make Me Smile
So Much to Say, So Much to Give
Anxiety's Moment
West Virginia Fantasies
Colour My World
To Be Free
Now More Than Ever
Side three
1 Fancy Colours (Lamm) - 5:10
2 25 or 6 to 4 (Lamm) - 4:50
3 Memories of Love (Kath/Matz) - 9:12
Prelude
A.M. Mourning
P.M. Mourning
Memories of Love
Side four
1 It Better End Soon (Lamm/Parazaider) - 10:24
1st Movement
2nd Movement
3rd Movement
4th Movement
2 Where Do We Go from Here (Cetera) - 2:49
