{"id":57467,"date":"2016-02-11T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2016-02-11T18:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57467"},"modified":"2016-02-11T16:30:42","modified_gmt":"2016-02-11T22:30:42","slug":"things-everyone-liked-that-i-hated-but-found-something-to-like-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57467","title":{"rendered":"Things Everyone Liked That I Hated, But Found Something To Like Anyway"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was in high school and college, music majors – and the high school kids who planned to become music majors – weren’t\u00a0supposed\u00a0<\/em>to like rock and roll.<\/p>\n

But the music kidz were always given a pass for Chicago. \u00a0The band’s pseudo-jazz roots made Chicago sort of a safe space for young people in the seventies who wanted to be accepted by both their music teachers and their rock’n roll-listening friends.<\/p>\n

And so every time a new Chicago album would come out – for the first eleven albums, they were just numbered – the music kids would flip rhetorical cartwheels; “it’s like rock and roll, only\u00a0better<\/em>!<\/em>“, I remember our high school stage band’s star sax player hyperventilating. \u00a0“Terry Kath is one of the great guitar players!”, others would exclaim as I practiced windmilling\u00a0a la\u00a0<\/em>Pete Townsend.<\/p>\n

I didn’t buy it – not even at the depths of my need to be accepted. \u00a0Oh, the part of me that appreciates technical skill could listen to Robert Lamm (keyboards), Terry Kath (guitar), James Pankow (trombone), Peter Cetera (bass), Lee Loughnane (trumpet), Walter Parazaider (reeds), Danny Seraphine (drums) and Laudir D’Oliveira (percussion) [1] and go “there’s some musical skill going on here”, all right.<\/p>\n

But when it came to the part where the music was supposed to grab me in the liver, Chicago did not. \u00a0Part of it was that jazz, at least jazz from after about 1950, has always bored me stiff; how is a watered-down second-generation copy an improvement? \u00a0 To be fair, it was the same problem I had with Blood, Sweat and Tears and all of the other jazz-rock fusion experiments; neither needed the other to be valid music.<\/p>\n

Part of it was Peter Cetera’s soggy contralto voice. \u00a0 There. \u00a0I said it.<\/p>\n

As to those who said Terry Kath was one of the great guitarists ever – in a league with Hendrix, Beck, Page and Clapton?<\/p>\n

Terry Kath was a great guitar player in the same sense that I was a “great aeronautical engineer” because I’d built a nifty model of a Supermarine Spitfire. \u00a0I was not! \u00a0I had simply pieced together a bunch of plastic parts to make a scale facimile; Reginald Mitchell was the engineer. \u00a0Likewise, Terry Kath took the bits and pieces of a bunch other great guitarists’ styles, mixed in some technical chops of his own (all respect due), and put it on a record. \u00a0 Oh, Jimi Hendrix once told Parazaider that Terry Kath was better than he was<\/a>; Hendrix had a bit of a drug problem, you know.<\/p>\n

“But Mitch – have you\u00a0heard\u00a0<\/em>“Free Form Guitar”, off of the first Chicago album?”<\/p>\n