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‘I Think It Was the Fourth of July’: Chicago, Central Park, and the Perfect Summer Song
“I Think It Was the Fourth of July”: Chicago, Central Park, and the Perfect Summer Song It opens with the most famous hedge in pop music. Not a declaration — a memory, half-caught, offered with a shrug: Saturday in the park, I think it was the Fourth of July. Then the piano comes rolling in,…
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The Daughter Who Brought Terry Kath Home: Michelle’s Film, Kiefer’s Toast, and the Empty Chair
Terry Kath died on January 23, 1978, a week shy of his thirty-second birthday, leaving behind a twenty-month-old daughter who would grow up knowing him only through photographs, stories, and other people’s tears. For nearly forty years, that was the end of the story: the brilliant guitarist, gone too soon, fading a little more with…
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How Chicago Recorded a Double Album in Ten Days: The Story Behind “The Chicago Transit Authority”
In late January 1969, seven unknown musicians from Chicago walked into CBS’s 30th Street Studio in New York City — the church-like former chapel where Miles Davis and Leonard Bernstein had recorded — and cut their entire debut album in ten days. They worked the graveyard shift, midnight to eight in the morning, because Simon…
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The Untold Story of Chicago: The Horn Band That Lost Its Soul — and Found a Second Life
They started as a scrappy jazz-rock experiment with an unwieldy name and a sound nobody could categorize. They became one of the best-selling American bands of all time, survived the shocking death of their leader, reinvented themselves as ballad kings, and outlasted almost everyone who ever doubted them. Chicago’s story is really two stories: the…