The Weakest Link: Chicago III

Well, after another PC meltdown, I am back with the 3rd album from Chicago.
An underrated album by most, but quite a good, solid album, IMO
So, let's get going...as before, all suites are considered 1 song.
2 days to vote off the 2 weekest from this album.

 

I had to edit down the titles of the 3 suites due to space limitations, but you get the general idea of the 3 suites, I hope

 

Poll question/Discussion:Where would you rate this album in the Chicago Canon?

 

Wow the best track sits in the middle of a "suite". My LEAST favorite of the classic Chicago. I call it the jazz album and Free is the only track I have listened to since whenever. Interesting, but NOT essential Chicago.

 

IMO probably the weakest of the first three classic albums. Still had lots of great moments, though. "Elegy" suite never did much for me, so didn't get much play on my turntable.

 

I always enjoyed this album...being the Chicago fanatic that I am....but I understand how others consider it a weak link in the big picture of their early albums. Even though it was a hit single I don't need to hear "Free" much these days...same for "Mother"...I liked bits of the Elegy Suite..some good stuff going on there..but I could have done without some of the sound effects.
Highlights for me...."Hour In The Shower","At The Sunrise" "Loneliness Is Just A Word","What Else Can I Say","Flight 602" & "Lowdown".

JF

 

Chicago III - One of the most underrated albums of one of the most underrated bands of the rock era.

I rank it higher than any other Chicago albums with the exception of the first two.

Side 2 (Travel Suite) is my favourite album side and my favourite song tracks are "Loneliness is Just a Word", "What Else Can I Say?", "At the Sunrise",
"Lowdown", "Flight 602", "An Hour in the Shower" , "Happy 'Cause I'm Going Home", and the instrumental track "Elegy: Once Upon a Time" from Side 4 featuring the mellow flute sound of Walt Parazaider.

Trivia:

This album almost reach the top of the album chart, peaking at no.2.

 

Chicago III vinyl record and Linn Majik turntable.

A nice combination!




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I voted out the 'Shower' suite. That's the best I can do for now.

III is my favorite Chicago album, along with CTA.

Robert

 

Why so much bad vibes for An Hour In The Shower? I really like the weirdness of this suite

 

Their most perfect album. I love every song but find "Lowdown" to be the weakest link. Every other song is my favorite. I might like "I Don't Want Your Money" best. The singing and guitar playing just has that hard drivin' stank to it. I take that back. Mother is another big time favorite, though I prefer the Carnegie Hall version. III was their artistic peak and was perfectly punctuated by their week at Carnegie Hall. The best band in the world at that moment in time IMO.

 

ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE - LESTER BANGS' REVIEW of CHICAGO III (1971)

In the beginning were the big bands: Basie, Ellington, Ferguson, et al. provided a vital form of American popular music that was great for listening and dancing. When mongrel rock emerged it all but killed them but they had their revenge when rock itself became menopausal. As a part of the process we have long since been inundated with a flood of hybrids which combine the worst aspects of both styles. If the rock big bands have usually had the crassness of the most ephemeral rock, they've also been as unwieldy as the most mediocre ballroom orchestras.

Up until now, bands like Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago have been ponderous in a way that is inimical to both rock and jazz. With Ellington or Basie, for instance, whole brass sections could swing with the grace and fluidity of a single soloist, but few of our pop melanges have that much tightness or discipline, so they settle instead for the brute force of numbers and volume, and a spurious versatility which heaps styles, solos and arrangements raided from the whole range of venerable rock, jazz, and classical sources.

Another problem is that the overkill arrangements and numbers of musicians involved in these projects tend to take the heat off of individual writers and soloists. The results amount to a wholesale substitution of quantity for quality. Compositions are seldom real songs but rather imitations of songs, with lyrics stapled onto arrangements fitted for large ensembles. Solos are seldom real solos but rather long strings of solos that taken separately (or placed in a humbler context) would amount to nothing more than some obviously inferior cabaret work.

Chicago has been a prime perpetrator of all these offenses: every release is a double album, they lack a truly outstanding soloist, and the stiffness of such songs as "25 or 6 to 4" is as far from the spirit of rock and jazz as the long, pretentious suites that the group has thus far found irresistible. Happily, III, while it contains all the weaknesses that have dragged them down in the past, is the best thing they have done and succeeds as pure entertainment by de-emphasizing the long solos and concentrating on solidly conceived tunes and gimmicks which, while they may smack of Hollywood, are fun to listen to at that very level. Another plus is the marked improvement in the instrumental work. The ensembles are generally tight and clean, and except for lapses in taste on the part of the otherwise talented guitarist, Terry Kath, the solos are quite impressive.

The record is divided into three suites and six isolated songs. Of the songs, "Mother" is a fine, loping tune enlivened by some great trombone trade-offs that are true for once to the spirit of jazz improvisation from Ellington to Mingus. "Lowdown" has standout bass playing and a rich, almost Rascalish vocal that not even Kath's wah-wah meanderings can drag down.

But "Sing a Mean Tune Kid" is a sloppy attempt at a Sly-type arrangement that just never comes together. The arrangement is hollow while the playing lacks conviction. So does everything in "I Don't Want Your Money," which sounds like it was originally composed for Johnny Winter or one of those British pretty-boy blues bands and then adapted for brass. It doesn't work.

Still, on Chicago III, the group excels most as collectors of a whole range of styles. In the course of the four sides they take us through another of those waltz-like things with a neo-jazz vocal ("Loneliness Is Just a Word") to the Springfield-CSN&Y bag ("Flight 602"), and then mold the latter with Abbey Road riffs into one dynamite single ("What Else Can I Say"). Whether or not they ever find a style of their own is highly questionable, but then that is not probably their function anyway.

Unlike the earlier albums, the best things on III are in the suites, which are comprised of short scraps and pieces, strung together by the arranging. Though they don't always work, the batting average is pretty high this time around. "Travel Suite" is the most auspicious, containing as it does the country-fluff "Flight 602," an above-average drum solo called "Motorboat to Mars," a gropingly pretty piano-and-flute duet with roots in 20th Century classical music, some slightly Latin jazz-as-muzak with wordless vocal chorus, and two worthy though unrelated songs. "Free" is a stomping, driving piece with appropriately simplistic words and razor rhythms. "At the Sunrise" is a pleasantly unremarkable love ballad that, except for a bit of gravel in the bridge, could have been done as easily by the Carpenters. The Latin jam and the flute and piano duet comprise the longest sections of "Travel Suite" and nearly half of side two; both are extremely pleasant, in the manners respectively of Mongo Santamaria and the soundtrack of some amateur art film, and quite satisfying if you don't look too deep or listen too closely.

"An Hour in the Shower" is the shortest and most cohesive of the three program pieces. Made up of five brief and very similar riffs describing a workingman's day (with titles like "A Hard Risin' Morning Without Breakfast" and "Dreamin' Home"), it works beautifully and justifies itself as a fully integrated work, even if the lead singer is milking his "Make Me Smile" Cockerisms again. If all of their work was this good, Chicago would be real contenders instead of the sort of stylistic digest they are now.

"Elegy," which is entirely instrumental and engulfs side four, is Chicago's latest contribution to our understanding of Man and Society, amplifying the pretensions first evidenced in pieces like "The Whole World's Watching." It opens with a recitation of undergraduate doggerel called "When All the Laughter Dies In Sorrow," followed by brass fanfares right out of Ars Nova, and more sweet piano and flute ("Once Upon a Time ..."). "Elegy" is the most explicitly programmatic effort yet from Chicago, so the Edenic serenity of "Once Upon a Time ..." is of course followed by the dissonant car-horn brass and jackhammer sound effects of "Progress?," which was co-authored by producer James William Guercio and really makes you stop and think. Especially since it ends with a toilet flushing.

Finally, the second half of "Elegy" and the rest of the album are filled out with the long series of solos and brass-blasts in "The Approaching Storm" and "Man Vs. Man–The End." The former sounds something like "Travel suite" 's closing jam at double time, while the latter is somewhat reminiscent in its melodramatic outbursts of things like old Stan Kenton records and the Mancini-Pete Rugolo soundtracks from late-Fifties private eye TV shows like Peter Gunn and Richard Diamond. Corn, but good corn.

In fact, that might well sum up this whole album. It's derivative, overarranged and generally excessive, but everything on it is fun to listen to–even its filler, like "The Approaching Storm," is exciting filler.

Just how bad Chicago could be is shown by groups like Cold Blood and If. The former is a noisy San Francisco band trying for Stax-Volt power, with another strident neo-Joplin singing lead, and stereotyped, repetitious material: "Understanding" and the instrumental "Shop Talk" echo Sly in a manner similar to Chicago's "Sock 'Em in the Gut Kid," but without the humor. Much of the rest, like "Funky On My Back," is just competently banal, technically up but totally devoid of originality or a track-to-track sense of dynamics.

If are from England, and some of their soloists are excellent (the sax players really burn), but their material (like "Tarmac T. Pirate and the Lonesome Nymphomaniac") is so mediocre that most of the tracks find them down to a set pattern of getting the melody and singing out of the way as soon as possible to make room for long strings of solos (like Cold Blood, they only have six songs on the entire album). And when their invention is so limited that they must resort, as in "Sunday Sad," to an endless series of fake-flamenco scales on electric guitar, it doesn't do much to compensate for the lameness of the compositions.

We'll undoubtedly be seeing more bands like these. The problems inherent in their very size make it seem questionable that anything startlingly original will ever come from one of them (although "Dreams" is a step in the right direction). But as long as there are outfits as facile and infectious as Chicago, some hope remains for the big rock bands. And of course, in the meantime, there's still Duke Ellington... (RS 78)



LESTER BANGS