Gary James' Interview With James "Jimmy" Pankow Of
Chicago



They've sold over 100 million records that include 21 Top 15 singles, 5 consecutive number one albums, 11 number one singles and 5 Gold singles. 25 of their 36 albums have been certified Platinum and the band has a total of 47 Gold and Platinum awards. Their lifetime achievements include two Grammy Awards, two American Music Awards, Founding Artists Of The John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts, a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, a Chicago street dedicated in their honor and keys to and proclamations from cities across the U.S.

Their first album was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame in 2014. In 2016 they were inducted into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. They are the first American Rock band to chart Top 40 albums in six consecutive decades. President Bill Clinton called them "One of the most important bands in music since the dawn of the Rock And Roll era." The group we are speaking about is Chicago. We spoke with founding member Jimmy Pankow about a wide variety of topics in no particular order.

Q - Last year, 2017, marked fifty years of consecutive touring for Chicago. That's quite an accomplishment!

A - The show that we do this year (2018) is a particularly challenging show because we are performing "Chicago II", the second album 'live' as well as the usual suspects. We're doing a large encore of greatest hits which people expect to hear, but this musical experiment with "Chicago II" has created a show that is very challenging musically. We've never done this before. The idea is pretty much being well received across the board by the audiences we've performed for. This music is arguably the template for all of the music that followed. "Chicago II" is a journey through just about every musical genre the band has represented over the years and it's a challenge to perform 'live'. It's very intensive musically. When we created this record we were a bunch of 20 year old kids. We didn't know the rules. We didn't care. We just wrote and recorded what we heard in our head and we went for it. Perhaps we were in the right place at the right time. This is subsequent to "Chicago Transit Authority", the first album which largely escaped the understanding of most listeners because it was so pioneering. A couple of songs from that first album were released for commercial singles on the radio who did not even understand what this was and it was lost on its daring nature. So, "Chicago II" came out and "Make Me Smile" was then edited from the "Ballet", which was the multi-movement piece from the second side of that album and became our first big hit. So, the commercial break-out is represented by this album as well as all of the genres that the band had been known for in terms of identity. In the early days, people would ask us, "How would you describe your music?" I'd say human nature expects to put things into a category if you will for matters of comparison. There was really no comparative back in the day because this approach had never been done before, a Rock 'n' Roll band with an indigenous horn section that is a main character in the song. The horns were not created by me to be an after thought. They are a lead voice, almost another lead vocal, and so there is very little rest in the horn section. We are melodic. We are woven throughout the song and have become part of the trademark of the Chicago sound.

Q - Has Chicago ever missed a gig? And what happens if someone in the group becomes sick? Can someone else in the group cover for him?

A - No, not really. The show goes on. I have been victimized for illness as well as just about everybody else in the band. We've had Rock Docs come to gigs and give us antibiotics or whatever emergency care can be administered and we go and do the show. I've performed very ill in the past as well as other band members. Unless you're absolutely incapacitated with illness, you go on. It's what it is. We have never canceled a show for illness other than perhaps one show in Canada many, many years ago. But generally speaking we are batting a thousand. The show must go on and we are troopers. Sick or well, you get up there and you win an Academy Award and you do your thing. Strangely enough, that performance is extremely cathartic and I've gone onstage feeling like I've gotten hit by a truck. If you're doing twenty-five cities in forty days you are by virtue of the pace of these tours, you are exposed to conditions that for most people would be considered extreme. Forget the performance. Just the travel is epic. I mean, we're in a different place every day and it beats you up, just the traveling at the pace we do it. You're in different climates. It can be, especially in the Spring or Fall, you can be in forty degree weather. You can be in eighty degree weather. You can be at altitude. You can be in humidity. You perform regardless of the environment. The weather, especially in the Summer when you're outdoors, Live Nation presents their shows in these Summer sheds and man, on this tour alone we've experienced show delays with dangerous lightning where they have asked lawn seating to come under the pavilion and postpone the show until the danger passed. So, you never know what's gonna go on. You're at the mercy of the elements, but one way or another we do our thing. I don't think there's been a circumstance where we have to postpone the show. We go on and do our thing and the fans, bless their hearts, really get behind the band. Rain or shine they're there for the performance. They're eager. They're enthusiastic to hear this music. We never would have dreamed that fifty years later there would be this kind of excitement and demand for this music. Let me tell you it's quite heartening to go onstage and feel that approval from an audience. These people have embraced this music as a soundtrack in their lives. Every artist would be grateful for that gift of association and communion with an audience. When you perform these songs, it might be one song or another, you look into the crowd and you can see people reliving the moment that that song represents in their lives, whether it was a marriage or a birth or a graduation or whatever. They come to the show to experience those special moments in their lives. So, it's a real give and take. It's a real communion with this music that represents an emotional attachment to the band. And man, it never gets old. It's like the first night every night. People have asked me, "How do you do 'Saturday In The Park' every night with such enthusiasm?" (laughs) Well, the way it's received is what creates this excitement. It's what creates this synergy. That is something we could not take responsibility for or credit for. That is, by the very nature, the power of this music. So we are very grateful that this phenomenon has occurred and has certainly exceeded any kind of expectation of ours.

Q - When Chicago was starting out, you did hear bands on the radio with horns. These days you don't. What happened? Has the horn lost favor with the public?

A - Well, I don't know if it's so much the horn thing. I think it's more the nature of where music has come over the years. Now we have technology that we did not have in those days. When we created this music it was all in your head. It went from your head to your fingers on a keyboard that created music, and then recorded it into a tape recorder or you wrote it down. I still do it the old fashion way. I write horn arrangements on manuscript paper. I treat it as a language, the language of music. It went from my brain and my heart to the written page. Nowadays it's largely created on a digital platform on a computer. That opens up a myriad of possibilities technologically that did not exist when we created much of this music. It's instantaneous because you have this technology at your fingertips and you can manifest songs. You can manifest audio instantaneously. It goes from your brain now to an audio program that is manifested to these digital programs and then it can be massaged. It can be edited. It can be over-dubbed. It can become instantaneously a demo, a record. It isn't a matter of writing a song and then having the band get together in rehearsal and try to hash over the ideas the composer heard in his head and create this entity 'live' in a room together. The song is pretty much written and created and recorded and demo(ed) by the composer all at once on a computer. That song is the presented to the rest of the guys as a semblance of a finished song. So, it's just a matter of recreating what you hear on this digital program. I miss the old days because I'd bring a song in, and I heard the song in it's entirety in my head, but when it was rehearsed for the first time and I dictated parts to various musicians in the band and for the first time heard it played, it was magical. The song didn't take on a life until that happened, whereas now the song becomes a complete song form before it even is presented to the band. So, when the band hears the song, they hear the song and the arrangement. So, the road map is pretty much there for the guys instead of explaining each part and describing my initial inspection ideologically. They can hear what I heard already manifested digitally on a digital platform. So, that has opened up songwriting and allowed people that don't necessarily have a huge musical background or ability to create music with a beat and then a digital program that creates rhythms and chords. So much of the music today that you hear on the radio is void of actual musicians. On a lot of these radio performances that you hear there are no musicians. It's a computer program that takes digital sounds from synthesizers or programs and creates a song without the need to have an actual musician come in and perform these parts. They're all performed with pre-recorded synthesized samples.

Q - I've also been told that singers today don't necessarily have to be able to sing.

A - That is also the case on many performances. Somebody that can kind of hold a tune will come in and lay a vocal down and then it's auto corrected digitally.

Q - That means a guy like me could become a singer!

A - (laughs) Well, you never know.

Q - I could be opening for Chicago!

A - Well, there-in lies the rub. Yeah, you could record a digital performance using programs to create a song, but you go on 'live' and unless you can deliver 'live' without lip synching, you're gonna be in trouble because people are going to expect a 'live' performance. There have been examples of that very problem over the last several years of a so-called artist coming onstage to perform these digitally sampled recordings and the power has gone out and all the audience winds up hearing is a 'live' drummer because the drums are acoustic onstage. You can't pretend to play drums. You can pretend to sing or pretend to play a guitar. You hit a drum and it's going to be audible in a 'live' concert. So, the power has gone down and nobody onstage is actually creating 'live' sounds. They're lip synching to a pre-recorded digital track.

Q - Who are you talking about?

A - I really don't want to mention names. If you remember a duo quite a few years back called Milli Vanilli. These were two Jamaican clothes horses, two Jamaican male models. They had this cool dreadlock look and some entrepreneur got the idea of packaging them as this incredible vocal duo. Neither of them could carry a tune. Neither of them was schooled musically. They were a fake. They got busted. They did a performance and for some reason the audio went down and they were caught trying to perform this music and neither of them could carry a tune and it was a devastating exposure for them it was the end of their short lived, musical career. So, you gotta have the chops to back it up. Now that we have the technology, a lot of people can pretend to know music, but when you get down to crunch time and you need to take it to the next level and perform it front of an audience, you better bring the goods and if you can't bring the goods you may very well be in trouble. A lot of these people have one star if you will, a dive, a singer and that's all it is. A singer goes onstage with a circus act, dancers, pyrotechnics and a whole slew of musicians and performers that elevate this solo vocal performance to a menagerie of performers that are able to enthrall an audience with all of this smoke and mirrors. You take all that away and its one person singing a melody. That's it. With Chicago it's the real deal.

Q - At one point, Chicago had Jeff Wald as their manager.

A - Oh, God!

Q - Chicago was an established group. What did Jeff Wald do for Chicago?

A - Well, Jeff Wald was not a good choice. We were vulnerable because he had James William Guercio, the producer that was part of our team that started this whole phenomenon. We got to a point where that relationship no longer represented a fertile environment. It had lost its charm and it was time to move on. And so, we more or less became free agents. We had no management. We had no record company. Not too long after we left Guercio we also parted company with Columbia Records. So we were free agents on many levels. We had no management. We had no label. We found Jeff Wald, who was very interested in signing the band. He promised us the world, but after a short time we realized that it was not really a good choice. We stayed with him until that realization became apparent and we needed to then make more decisions and find a better fit. So, that relationship was relatively short lived. He got us the cover of People magazine and that's about it. Shortly after Terry Kath's demise, after we lost Terry Kath we were really behind the eight ball because Terry was so much of the heart and soul of this music. He was a driving force in the formation of the band and the musical journey. So, we had to make a decision whether we wanted to keep going and we chose to do that. We chose to carry on. We chose to do whatever was necessary to put the band back together to replace that void that Terry's loss represented. It wasn't easy. We found Bill Champlin. We found several guitar players, one after another, none of whom could do what Terry did, but you do what you have to do. And here we are finally all these years later, I think we probably have the best embodiment of what is the essence of Chicago that we've ever had. I don't know if we've ever had a line-up that's so strong and so musically precise and capable than we have now. So, through all of these innovations we've finally come to a place that is worthy of the shoes that Terry Kath, Peter Cetera and Danny Seraphine exits have left on us. So, it's been quite and experiment and quite an endeavor. You continually re-invent yourself musically. You have to evolve, but not only is evolution a necessary part of this music, but finding the right people to convey this music in a way that we felt we could be proud of was a challenge in itself. So, we've dealt with all of that over the years. We have felt a great loyalty to these fans that have embraced this music and given us a job for all these years and given us a purpose. You know, you write music, it's all about the song. You're sitting at a keyboard and it's a personal moment that you are experiencing. It is very intricate and then it goes out there. It becomes a performance with the audience. You can't make an audience embrace that music. That happens or doesn't happen, depending upon the roll of the dice. And there is something about this music that we had no idea existed that struck a chord in people, in listeners of all ages. This phenomenon is a gift. We have been blessed with some quality of this music that has become endeared to millions of people all over the world that have chose to embrace this music emotionally on a level that makes it critical to their life experience. Maybe they're fifteen years old. Maybe they're forty-five years old. Maybe they're seventy years old. All of them embrace this music on their own level, because they're all at a different stage in their life emotionally or chronologically in terms of their life experience. Millennials today were born into technology. They know technology like we know how to blow our nose. From the time they were babies they grew up with this stuff. Everything is an i-Phone or a laptop. That's how they communicate with their world. We did not have that. For us it was about personal contact. It was about people skills. It was about immediately creating ideas and feelings on a 'live' basis. It was a different world. But music is still created very much the same way. It starts as an inspiration by a writer, by an author and it's not necessarily somebody that has an emotion, a deep seated emotion that needs to be expressed. If the person who has this idea and is in a position to manifest this idea musically and is not musical themselves, well then they need to find musicians that can actually manifest this musical idea for them. In terms of Chicago, that's built in. We are all veteran musicians. We've done this for many years. We do this very, very well. When people come to a Chicago performance they are treated to a bunch of veterans that perform this music 'live'. There are no smoke and mirrors, brother. People are experiencing guys that do it very well and they're hearing the record performed in its entirety 'live' and they're blown away, especially the new listeners, as we call them. There's still people coming into the fold. They're discovering this music through their older siblings or their parents and they're going, "What is that?" They're listening to their Hip-Hop and their synthesized Pop that is devoid of real musicians and then they hear this and going, "What the hell is that?" That's real music my friend. That's the real deal.

Q - Who wrote "Color My World"?

A - I did.

Q - So, Frank Sinatra wanted you to add another verse to "Color My World" and you wouldn't do it, so he didn't record it.

A - Correct.

Q - Jimmy, why didn't you just add another verse? It was Frank Sinatra!

A - Why don't you just take your little kid, your son or your daughter, and sew another arm on 'em?

Q - Well, I guess that answers that question, doesn't it?

A - Theoretically, yes. I was beyond excitement when I got a call from our publishing administrator back in the day. "Color My World" was a couple of years old and it had become a hit. Again, an intimate moment for me, sitting at a keyboard. I had been listening to Bach and wss incredibly inspired by his genius and his musical movements, instrumental perfection. I started fooling around with arpeggios and similar progressions and the added a melody to this little twelve bar round and came up with this little song idea. I called it "Color My World". It was actually a small movement of the multi-movement ballet "A Girl In Buchannon". Well, it was edited out of the ballet and released as a single. Sinatra was in the studio doing a new album. He heard this piece. He fell in love with it himself apparently. His people called our people and said, "Hey man, I love this song. If this kid can write another verse I'd like to record it." Well, Bernie Silverman, our publishing administrator, calls me, "Jimmy, you'll never guess who wants to record Color My World". When he told me I was absolutely dumbfounded. I mean, the legendary Frank Sinatra wants to record my song. I said, "Bernie, I've got to think about that, man. I don't know. I don't even know if I can approach the idea of adding anything to this song." Well, I called him back and said, "I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can change what this song has embodied since its inception. This song is such a personal, intimate moment for me. I don't know if I can lobotomize it. I don't know if I can add to it after the fact." As I just gave you that analogy, I gave the same analogy to Bernie and he said, "Well, I think that's a pretty clear analogy and I understand." And so we said no to Frank Sinatra. I might be the only musician on earth that said no to Frank Sinatra.

Q - You might well be!

A - (laughs) I still wonder if I made the right choice, you know? But I'll never know. I'll also never have a song on a Sinatra album and he's gone. Ole Blue Eyes is gone. He left us and I never got a song on one of his albums. So, it's what it is, man.

Q - That's right. It's on you.

A - Well, I stuck to my guns.

Q - Chicago has played to presidents and kings. I know you played for President Clinton, but who else?

A - Well, not directly. We did the Presidential Classroom when President Ford was in office. We performed at the inauguration of The Kennedy Center, obviously honoring John F. Kennedy. But, Clinton was actually the first president we were invited to Washington to do a presidential concert at Ford Theatre and we were among a cast of various other artists. We performed at the Ford Theatre, which held this presidential performance for every president, but not until Clinton came into office were we invited to do this for him, by his choice. He loved the band. He, as you may know, is a saxophone player and he loved the horns. And so Mr. and Mrs. Clinton invited us to perform during the fourth year of his administration for The Presidential Concert series. The evening before the performance we were invited to meet The First Family in The Blue Room at The White House. And it was quite an honor. It could be a popular president or not, but the fact is it's The Commander-In-Chief and when you're invited to perform for The Commander-In-Chief, you show up. You meet the First Family and you are in the presence of very important people, the leader of the greatest country in the world and the most powerful leader in the world. You show up and do your performance and it's an honor. You look into the crowd and there's the First Family sitting in the first row. At some point in the performance I think Walt Parazaider actually said, "Hey, Mr. President, do you want to come up and blow a few licks?"

Q - And what did he say?

A - He declined. He didn't take us up on the offer, but he sure did enjoy the show!

Q - And that's what we like to hear! What does it mean to you to be inducted into The Songwriter's Hall Of Fame? Does it make you feel like you've written some pretty good songs along the way?

A - Oh, I think so. When you get invited into the company of perhaps the greatest songwriters of modern history like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, the list goes on. It's not a band honor. It's a personal honor as a composer. When Robert Lamm and I were inducted into The Songwriters Hall Of Fame, believe me, it represented the greatest personal honor as an artist and a songwriter that you could possibly realize. We showed up at the fete and we performed. Each of us performed one of the songs that put us on the map. You're up there performing in the ballroom of The Marriot Marquis in front of some of the greatest composers alive and you're nervous. (laughs) You perform your song and they stand up and cheer. They welcome you into their brotherhood. I mean, you're looking out there at Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson... Wow! It's amazing!

Q - Chicago has won so many awards. Is it still exciting to receive yet another one?

A - Yes. I mean Gary, let me tell you that's the validation for your hard work. It's a validation for the level of importance of your work. A million fans can embrace your music and give it life and excitement and purpose, but when your peers embrace it, that is a real measure of its significance because it's being recognized by the artistic community which you represent. When your peers recognize you, that is the ultimate validation. Welcome to the club, guys! We got here because what we did left a mark on American culture. It left a mark on millions of people. Well, now we're recognizing your work as having achieved the same thing. It doesn't get any more significant when the Academy Awards do a Grammy or The Songwriters Hall Of Fame recognizes you, or The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, which again is about the fans. You don't become eligible for induction into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame until you have been a recording artist for twenty-five years. So that in itself is an achievement. That kind of longevity is not achieved by many artists. The problem, the dichotomy here is Chicago is still viable. Chicago is still doing sell-out performances. We are not doing a reunion tour. This is not an oldies but goodies tour. This is a current expression of viable music that is still being experienced by people on an annual basis, on a daily basis. We didn't just get back together to commemorate this music. We're still doing it and haven't stopped and in that regard Chicago is perhaps very unique. I don't know if there are very many artists that have worked every year and have continued to carry this banner around the world. I mean, The Stones are still working. They get together once every few years and do a tour. Bruce Springsteen gets together every now and then, does a tour. Now he's got his Broadway thing going on. The Who, what's left of 'em, get together now and then and do a tour. The Beach Boys are working regularly, but Mike Love is the only guy left in the saddle. The Doobie Brothers are still slammin'. Foreigner is out there. There's only one real guy left. Crosby, Stills And Nash, they were keeping the ball going, but now they're kind of a farewell thing. It gets to the point Gary where mortality becomes reality. I mean, you can only physically do this for so long man, and then you have to throw in the towel 'cause you can't go up on that stage and be believable anymore. We've remained healthy and we get up there and we don't monkey around, bro. I mean, we get in their face. When people come to a Chicago concert they not only hear these songs performed virtually 'live' and perfectly, as much as possible, and they see it performed by guys who are far from throwing in the towel. We are performing better than ever, man. We're slammin'. And those people are watching us, enthralled and in the moment. A bomb could go off and we wouldn't know it. We're so focused and enthralled in the performance. It's a very organic thing. This isn't digital bull shit. This isn't pre-recorded samples. This is 'live' music being performed 'live' by flesh and blood musicians who do it extremely well and people are just going, "Holy shit! These guys are actually playing and singing this 'live' and it sounds just like the song we hear on the radio, note for note."

Q - When you and Bobby were touring and writing all these hits songs, was that an easy thing to do?

A - No. We were on the road three hundred days a year when these songs were written by us. So, we had to write these songs on little, electric pianos between hotel beds. We didn't have time to be home and go in the studio and put an album together. We had to manifest this music as we toured. So, we'd do a show. Then after the show we'd go back to the hotel and we'd sit around a piano in a hotel room and, "Hey, Walt! Get your flute. Try this part. Hey guys, get your sax. Get your trumpet, Lee. I want to hear if this works. Robert, sing this melody." Or if it was Robert, "Hey, Jimmy, get the guys. I want to see if the horn part works here." Then we'd hit the sack, get up the next day and go do a show. We'd be backstage at a gig, "Hey guys, c'mon in the dressing room. I want to try this part." So, we were performing and writing and rehearsing all at once. And it wasn't easy. But when you're 20 years old you can do all that shit. (laughs)

Q - When you were growing up, just how popular of an instrument was the trombone?

A - It was the last thing I wanted to bring home.

Q - It wasn't a Rock 'n' Roll instrument.

A - Exactly, man. I was a ten year old kid. My folks decided it was time to channel this music that was going on inside me 'cause I was kicking the soles out of my shoes. Apparently even before I could walk I was driving 'em crazy, tapping on the floor. My bedroom was over the kitchen. I'd be up doing my homework and my mom and dad, well, my dad wouldn't be home from work yet. My mom would be in the kitchen, making dinner for the family and she'd be hearing boom! boom! boom! on the floor over the kitchen 'cause I was up there with this song going through my head as I was doing my math or English homework. My mom and dad finally said, "We've got to take this kid to the tryouts and get him a musical instrument so he has an outlet for this." Well, they took me. It was in the church basement. I got in the drum line 'cause I wanted to be a drummer. That groove, that beat was going through me. Well, there were a hundred kids in the drum line and I didn't have the patience to stand in line. So, I wanted to go stand in the guitar line. Well, there were fifty kids in that line. I wound up; my mom and dad and the band director approached me and said, "Hey Jimmy, look at that thing over there on the table, the horn over there. There's not a lot of kids over there. You may find out you have more or a chance of having less competition and excelling more easily at that instrument." I said, "That thing? That sewer pipe on that table? I'm not gonna bring that thing home." The band director, who was a trumpet player, talked the virtues of wind instruments and how they could be employed in all kinds of genres of music and I could be playing First Choir because it was a unique instrument. Well, I guess might makes right because the three of them convinced me into bringing that damn thing home. You know, I struggled with it. I was a 10 year old kid and that was a big horn. I couldn't get all the way out to sixth position on the bottom of the fly. My arms weren't long enough to extend the fly fully and it took a hell of a lot of air to fill that thing up and get a sound out of it. And then I got braces on my teeth. Oh, joy! That made it even more fun, but lo and behold, right about the time I got braces on my teeth this gift showed up and I began to exhibit the ability to play what I heard on that horn. If I got an idea in my head, a musical thought, I could re-created it on the trombone. I didn't necessarily know the mechanics of how it was created, but my ear knew just where it was on the horn because my ear was the gift. I heard this music in my head and the trombone became an outlet of expression for these musical things going through my brain. But then another dilemma occurred. The trombone is monophonic. It's only one voice at a time. I could express lead lines musically. I could express solos musically, but I couldn't express the polyphonic structure of a song, chords. The necessary harmonies of a song were left in my head. I had to then explain these ideas harmonically to someone that could express them on a keyboard or guitar or polyphonic instrument. So, when I got to the college level as a trombonist I began to realize the need to learn a polyphonic instrument if I was to fully express what I heard. So I chose to study piano. My intent was not to become Oscar Peterson and become a great pianist. My intent was just to learn enough keyboard so I could express the harmonies of the songs that I heard in my head. Now when I expressed these songs I could express them fully. I could express them melodically and harmonically. So when I was presenting the songs to the guys in the band or to anybody else, they knew exactly what I heard because I had learned enough piano that I could show them the chords. Specific chords as well as melody and harmonies vocally. Melody and harmony instrumentally. They didn't have to guess at what I heard. They could just listen to the tape 'cause it was all there. So, it was a process of my evolution as a musician and a songwriter that brought me to completion.

Q - People over the years will lump Chicago with Blood, Sweat And Tears. You've said, "We have three horns. They have a nine man band with a front line of five horns. We were formed first, but Blood, Sweat And Tears' album came out before our album did."

A - You know what, Gary? I'm impressed. I'm impressed that you really know your stuff. You obviously have done your homework. You are a serious, and I underline that, student of this music, obviously. You know all of these anecdotes and all of this literal history and I am impressed.

Q - Thank you. As I was about to say, when people compare Chicago with Blood, Sweat And Tears, does that still get under your skin or do you just let it go?

A - Gary, history is what it is. I challenge anyone to put the two bands on the same stage and see the same results right now. Right now, fifty years later this band can go onstage in front of 10,000 people and at the end of the show those 10,000 people are on their feet, going nuts. Blood, Sweat And Tears is not even capable of working on that level anymore. They are no longer an important entity to that degree. Historically they are a comparative. Al Kooper, who heard us at The Whiskey A Go Go on Sunset Strip, was blown away. At the time he had formed The Blues Project in New York and he was a member of that outfit with Lou Reed and all those New York studio guys. He heard us at The Whiskey in L.A. and he was blown away enough to get on a plane the next day and fly back to New York and put Blood, Sweat And Tears together and run into the studio and make "Child Is Father To The Man". He heard us at The Whiskey and he was so blown away he wanted to do his vision of what he heard, and that was Blood, Sweat And Tears. Because he was a staff producer at Columbia he had the ability to take his version of this and record it right away. He had the "in." He had the political ability at Columbia to then take his incarnation of this approach into the studio and beat us to the punch on record. Do you know what? Al Kooper, and I've always respected him for it, freely admitted and will continue to that he in so many words ripped us off. (laughs) He heard us at The Whiskey and he went home and said, "I've got to put this on tape," and he was able to do it. We had not even approached a record label yet. We were still just a new act playing clubs. Then about the same time Jimi Hendrix also heard us at The Whiskey and was so blown away he invited us to be his opening act on his tours. That validated us to the point where record companies started to notice us and that eventually led to signing a deal with Columbia Records and going to New York and making "Chicago Transit Authority". But yeah, Al Kooper beat us to the punch in the studio. But then strangely enough, Al Kooper left Blood, Sweat And Tears. David Clayton Thomas came into Blood, Sweat And Tears and I think at that stage of the game Bobby Colomby, who is the drummer and also a staffer at CBS, took the re-inspired, reincarnated Blood, Sweat And Tears with this five piece horn section into the studio. Clive Davis had to find a producer and lo and behold, guess who produced them? Jim Guercio. Before he produced "Chicago Transit Authority". But this was a deal he made with Clive Davis because he needed to get us a double album in order to embody the full spectrum of what we needed to say musically, which was not three minute singles but with long exploding tracks. He felt we needed a double album to embody this full picture. These are longer, exploratory songs. I don't know the precise chronology of this arrangement, but ultimately Clive said, "I'll give you a double album if produce Blood, Sweat And Tears for me." So, that's kind of what went down. And Blood, Sweat And Tears got a huge hit, "Spinning Wheel", "God Bless The Child". The got big hits out of that album. They were all over the radio. They got big, but then there was nothing to follow that up. The band had political problems. I'm at a loss for what happened to them. It's not my place to really do a commentary of Blood, Sweat And Tears ultimate demise commercially, but I don't think they could have held a candle to Chicago's track record because once we hit with "Make Me Smile" it was boom! boom! boom! A hundred million plus albums later, 40 hit singles later, Blood, Sweat And Tears couldn't come close to that. Nor could anybody else!

Q - Jimmy, you have given me more in this interview than I would have ever expected. Thank you.

A - Gary, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to talk to me. I rally with you because not only are there not a lot of people that care enough to take the time to know the real nuts and bolts of the story, but people that understand the music behind it, and you've done both. I take my hat off to you. Because of your interest in this, it's really a pleasure to do interviews like this for me.

Q - I'm glad to hear that.

A - I mean. how many times have we heard, "What's your favorite color? What's your favorite song?" They don't know enough to ask. They ask the usual questions and we answer them because they're thrilled to be able to get their scoop. We love them as well, but when we get the opportunity to get into the nuts and bolts and the real deal, like with people like yourself, that's when it really gets interesting. Thank you!

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