Gary James' Interview With Guitarist Keith Howland Of
Chicago



They've sold over one hundred million records! That includes twenty-one Top 15 singles, five consecutive number one albums, eleven number one singles and five Gold singles. Twenty-five of their thirty-six albums have been certified Platinum and the band has a total of forty-seven 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 cites across the United States.

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."

2019 marks the band's fifty-second year of touring without missing a single concert date! Of course by now you know we are talking about Chicago. Holding down the guitar player position in the group for over twenty-one years now is Keith Howland.

Q - Keith, you achieved something that most people can only dream about and that is you joined the band you really liked. When you were growing up, you and your brother saw Chicago in concert several times. What was there about the group that you liked?

A - Well, I think what it did for my brother and I is it sort of married together the music that he loved. I was coming from more of a Rock perspective. I was listening to more Rock guitarists. I was listening to KISS and Ted Nugent and a little bit later Van Halen. My brother was coming from more of a Jazz (perspective). He was listening to The Crusaders, Weather Report. Obviously Chicago preceded a lot of those bands, but being that Chicago has all those influences in it, it just seemed like the perfect marriage of Pop songs, Rock guitar, Jazz influences, improvisation. I'll never forget the day my brother brought "Chicago II" home. His drum instructor gave it to him to take home and basically learn what Danny was playing and it just blew our minds.

Q - In the period you were coming up, you almost had to move to a music city like Los Angeles or New York. Today it's possible to post a video on YouTube and get it noticed, isn't it?

A - Well, that's true. I have young, budding musicians ask me all the time, "What do you think I should do?" They'll tell me they live in Oklahoma and they're playing in a Top 40 band and they're practicing a lot in their bedroom. I said, "Well, what I would suggest is either move to L.A., New York, Nashville or maybe Austin where there are more serious, professional musicians and start working with as many of 'em as you can. Play with as many different people as you can because it really is a business of networking and who you know and who knows about you." Yeah, sure, it's great if you can put something mind-blowing up on YouTube of you performing. That might get you an invite to come out and do something, but you've got a lot better shot if you're right in the middle of it, at least in my opinion.

Q - You made a smart move. You started working for an instrumental rental company. All these famous musicians would walk through the door and you could tell them you're available for a gig. That's almost like Kris Kristofferson working as a janitor in Columbia Records in Nashville and in walks Johnny Cash. Next thing you know, Johnny Cash is recording Kris's song "Sunday Morning Coming Down".

A - Yeah. You know different people have different opinions of how that works because not a lot of people that start out as techs were doing something within the business that's not playing their instrument. All of them want to be players and a lot of them don't make it to that goal, especially a lot of guys that choose to go on the road as a technician. The money is really good. They're working and it sort of takes 'em out of that element. I actually met a lot of my heroes doing that job, working for Andry Brauer Studio Rentals. I met Eddie Van Halen and Steve Lukather and Tim Pierce. It was through meeting those guys that I got my first good gig in L.A., which was playing with Rick Springfield. Tim Pierce, who had been Rick's guitar player, recommended me for the gig. So, that was my big break. When I finished with Rick I had the option to go back and work for Andy again. What I decided to do was I was going to put pressure on myself to continue to make a living playing the guitar and not go back to something that was comfortable. So, I took that next year and I just did every gig I could find. They had a musician's referral service that you could call and say, "A Rock 'n' Roll magician is looking for band members to back him." The craziest things. This guy was a magician, but he had a Rock 'n' Roll band behind him and we'd do Led Zeppelin covers. (laughs) It was very strange, but doing that gig I met a couple of musicians who were very high profile guys still are to this day.

Q - Are you able to name names?

A - The keyboard player was a guy named Hans Zermuehlen. He's worked with everybody from Franklin Bolle in the Jazz world to Air Supply. The drummer on the gig was Matt Laug, who played in Slash's band. And then my buddy Lance Morrison, who I moved to L.A. with, was the bass player. So, it was the four of us. It's pretty funny how small the music community really is when you get on the inside of it.

Q - Did you get an opportunity to speak with Eddie Van Halen about what it is you'd like to do?

A - The way that went down was I showed up at 10 AM for my shift and on the desk was a piece of paper, a work order that said, "Fender Twin Reverb, 5150 Studios, Coldwater Canyon, 12 Noon." And I immediately snatched it up off the table and said, "That's mine!" So, Eddie was renting a Twin Reverb for the studio. I had no clue whether he'd be there or what the situation would be. But, I put it in the van, drove up the hill, pulled up to the big, pearly gates of his mansion up in the hills there and hit the button and a familiar voice came on, "Hey man, c'mon in." It was Eddie. I pulled up and he just popped out of his studio, smoking a cigarette, opened the door of the van and helped me pull the amp out. We went inside and he said, "Hey man, do you want to hear what I'm working on?" (laughs) "Sure!" He had the track for the song "Right Now" up on huge, big studio monitors. No vocal on it yet. It was just the track which wound up being a number one song. He played the whole thing for me! (laughs) I just stood there going, "I'm in Eddie Van Halen's studio and he's playing the next single they're going to release and he's standing right next to me." (laughs) It kind of freaked me out, but he was very nice.

Q - Did he ask if you were a musician?

A - No. We didn't really get into that. He basically played the song for me and I sort of geeked out and said, "Okay. Well, have a nice day. That was really great." (laughs) We didn't talk much more than that. I did meet him later one more time in an entirely different capacity. We were in rehearsals for Earth, Wind And Fire, to go out for the first time. We did that double bill at a place called Third Encore in L.A. Eddie and Alex came into the rehearsal studio while we were rehearsing and I got a chance to go over and chat with him a little bit more, you know, peer to peer. That was kind of cool. Just to tell him what a huge influence on me he was. It was cool.

Q - You worked for Rick Springfield. You said it was like Beatlemania. What did you mean by that?

A - Well, we went into rehearsals and we rehearsed all the tunes. Rick had essentially been retired for about seven years I think, six years. He had a bad, back road ATV accident. He broke a couple of ribs. Broke a leg. I believe that's what happened. That was right around 1987. He was still peaking. He just decided to shut it completely down. Stayed home. Raised his kids. Then around '92, '93, his old drummer, Jack White convinced him to semi come out of retirement to just see what happens. So he went to a club in L.A. called Pelican's Retreat and used his real name, not his stage name, which is Rick Springthorpe, which was his Australian, given name. It took about two weeks before anybody figured out who he was. The place was just sold out every night, a line around the block. So, he decided to take the thing back on the road. I wasn't playing with him at that point. He had a different guitar player in the band. When the guitar position opened up, I got the opportunity to play with him. My first gig was a place called Slim's up in San Francisco. It was owned by Boz Scaggs actually. We were down in the dressing rooms, which were in the basement, and I could kind of hear the people milling around upstairs. I just kind of looked at Rick and said, "What's this going to be like?" I had no idea whether it would be fifty people, five hundred people, all guys, all girls. I didn't know. He just looked at me and said, "Well, you'll see, new guy." (laughs) That's what Rick called me all the time, new guy. He never called me by my name. So, we walked up and the lights came on and I couldn't hear my guitar because of the shrill screaming of all these women that had been waiting to see Rick for seven years 'cause he disappeared off the planet. When I played with him I remember thinking he was old. He was like forty-two and I was in my late twenties and I was like, "He looks pretty good for an old dude." In hindsight, I'm going to be fifty-five this summer, so forty-two is pretty young. But the girls went crazy for him and it was all women except for a few guys that were smart enough to know that he had an all women crowd. That was every single night. It was crazy. That was a whole summer tour. We took it to Japan. It was fun. Rick is nuts. He'll jump off the stage, go down into the crowd. They're climbing all over him. Security is having to pull women off of him. I remember one gig we did. We were right on Fort Lauderdale beach, on the sand. The audience was all in bikinis and Rick basically stripped down to his underwear and dove into the ocean while we were playing and the whole audience jumped in with him. (laughs) We were vamping on a keyboard solo, a song called "Human Touch", for probably twenty minutes, waiting for him to come out of the water. It was pretty cool. It was a fun summer.

Q - You were Patty Smyth's guitarist for three gigs and you got to be on The Tonight Show. Who was hosting then, Johnny Carson or Jay Leno?

A - That would have been Leno. I think it would have been shortly after he had taken over. That was a pretty cool thing. I did a music video with her for VH1. I did one live show in Irvine Meadows in L.A. and then we did The Tonight Show. Ironically enough, I almost didn't take the Rick Springfield gig because Patty was supposed to go out on the road, opening for Rod Stewart, which would have been like an arena tour, but they couldn't give me confirmation that it was really going to happen. They were still working out the details and Rick was saying to me, "I need to know what's going on here." So, I took a flier and said, "I'm gonna go with Rick, and sure enough, she never went out and and she never supported the record.

Q - I realize you're a talented musician and luck does play a role in getting the breaks, but there's something else that plays into it, isn't there? And that something else is personality. The people you've performed with must have said at some point, "We like Keith. We can get along with him." That is a big part of the total picture, isn't it?

A - Well, I think that goes for anybody. You've got to realize you're taking grown men and packing them into a hundred square feet of a tour bus and having them travel around the country together. That's not an normal environment for fifty, sixty year old people to be in, (laughs) in that kind of compressed environment. You can work with someone musically onstage that you can't get along with. But a living with them? That can be a problem. There have been many a musician that were excellent musicians, but couldn't play well with others and wound up not keeping gigs. And then there's guys that are maybe not quite as good as some of the elite, elite, elite, but they're good humans and they're good to be around and they're funny and it's like that's what you want.

Official Website: www.ChicagoTheBand.com

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