Isn’t it ironic that of the city of Chicago’s two biggest rock ‘n’ roll claims to fame–the most successful American band of the 70s and one of the best–one left town before cutting its first record and the other is really from Rockford? The first group, of course, is Chicago, whose string of singles and consecutively numbered albums (Chicago II, III, ad infinitum) made it one of the largest-selling groups of all time; the other was the fiery and funny hard-rock foursome Cheap Trick, whose bruisingly clearheaded first couple of records are among the best and most influential of the 70s. Many years on from their respective heydays–Chicago’s over the entire decade and Cheap Trick’s in the years ’77 to ’79–the reputations of both bands have been distorted: Chicago’s by its unaccountably successful first decade, Cheap Trick’s by a few latter-day Top 40 singles.
There is one thing you can say about the 63-song, four-hour Group Portrait–it is an altogether fitting testament to Chicago’s hippie self-absorption and dopey excesses. The group, remember, began its career with the two-record Chicago Transit Authority, and after shortening its name continued with two more two-record sets (Chicago II and III) and then the four-record Chicago at Carnegie Hall. The 63 songs in the new set are drawn not from Chicago’s entire 22-year recording career but just the first 12 years of it, leaving open the possibility that another four-CD set will come along in the next couple of years. The liner notes, by one William James Ruhlman, look to be about 25,000 words long–about three times the length of an average Reader cover story, or a fourth the length of an average novel. I submit that this is all far out of proportion with both the amount of listenable music Chicago produced and its musical importance, which of course is nil.
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Ruhlman’s notes, exhausting to read and occasionally outlandish but otherwise lucid and intermittently interesting, tell the story of how Chicago got its first album produced. Guercio was an independent producer allied with CBS, and his success with the Buckinghams gave him some leverage with the label. An early Chicago supporter, he invited them to move to LA, where he promised to try to interest CBS in the group. His frustrated efforts paid off after the company asked him to produce the second Blood, Sweat & Tears album. (The first, overseen by Al Kooper, had gone nowhere and Kooper had left, with the previously unknown David Clayton-Thomas moving in as lead singer.) Guercio cut the deal, only to have CBS try to renege after the company decided the album, Blood Sweat & Tears, was going to be a flop. But the album, which included the songs “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” “Spinning Wheel,” and “And When I Die,” went on to become an enormous hit. Guercio earned the clout to do Chicago his way, and the rest is history.
I suppose if you have to do something as pointless as injecting Stravinsky–or Glenn Miller, or Bach, or whoever–into rock ‘n’ roll, the least you can do is do it creditably. Chicago sold millions of records to teenyboppers who liked “Saturday in the Park” but had little credibility with the serious rock audience. The press didn’t like them either. Rolling Stone sneered at just about anything they did (I distinctly remember being outraged as a kid at a review of, I think, Chicago VII), and they never made it onto the magazine’s cover.
But a peaceful fight
In other words, a major reason Chicago never got any critical respect is that nothing the band ever did remotely lived up to its pretensions; predictably, the band’s skin was pretty thin on this issue. On Chicago VI’s “Critic’s Choice,” Lamm, winding up his emotions for a performance that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Plastic Ono Band, calls critics “parasites,” and intones “What do you need? / Is it someone just to hurt / So that you can appear to be smart?”
Moments like that explain why Cheap Trick holds a special place in certain people’s hearts. (To this day, in fact, “Surrender” is rivaled only by “Sweet Home Chicago” as the song most likely to be played by touring bands passing through town.) Most groups don’t write about subjects like that, and when they do they’re too serious. Cheap Trick were never serious; they were lovable because they were basically misfits. They didn’t look right in the first place, and in the second they never seemed to be trying to be a “great” rock band. It’s important to remember that what made Cheap Trick so interesting was its hard-rock, almost heavy-metal beginnings. Like Kiss and Aerosmith, its direct musical forebears, Cheap Trick built its career–and eventual success–out of a no-nonsense guitar attack and laborious touring. The band’s giddy Zen came out of the tension between this rather limited heritage and their own fuck-all sarcasm. So the band had a big guitar sound and a pretty-boy lead singer–these still couldn’t hide the goofy pop sensibility of the man behind it all, songwriter Rick Nielsen.
