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All I ask of dying is to go naturally

I can’t decide if it’s ironic or merely coincidental that I’m ending up writing obituaries/tributes in two consecutive weeks about members of the two trailblazing and most prominent “brass rock” groups of the late ’60s/early ’70s.

Last week, it was founder/sax-flute man Walter Parazaider of Chicago, which you can read here in case you missed it: https://hackbackpages.com/6/26/2026/weve-all-got-time-enough-to-cry-time-enough-to-die

This week, we recognize the passing of vocalist David Clayton-Thomas of Blood, Sweat & Tears, who died June 24 at age 84.

Beyond their imaginative, groundbreaking use of trumpets, trombones and saxophones in a rock band, though, the two groups actually didn’t have all that much in common. Certainly their career trajectories have been wildly different, as has their degree of commercial success. Many decades before anyone had ever heard the term “cancel culture,” BS&T found themselves stuck in a political maelstrom that proved to be, if not fatal, a devastating hit to the group’s momentum.

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Blood, Sweat & Tears — the band that would become one of the most popular acts of 1969-1970 — has roots dating to 1966 when a ragtag outfit from Greenwich Village, New York, known as the Danny Kalb Quartet changed their name to The Blues Project, featuring guitarist Kalb, guitarist Steve Katz, keyboardist Al Kooper, drummer Roy Blumenfeld and bassist Andy Kuhlberg. Playing an eclectic mix of blues, folk, R&B, jazz and pop, The Blues Project recorded two live LPs and one studio LP on MGM’s Verve label, managing to reach #77, #52 and #71, respectively on US album charts.

*The Blues Project, 1966 (Al Kooper, lower left; Steve Katz, upper left)*

Kooper, who had been a New York session musician who ended up in Bob Dylan’s 1965 sessions for the seismic “Like a Rolling Stone” anthem, had proposed the idea of bringing in a horn section to broaden the band’s musical options, but bandleader Kalb rejected the concept, so Kooper quit and took his idea with him. Inspired by The Buckinghams, a Chicago-based pop group which featured lively horn arrangements in four Top Ten hit singles in 1967 (“Kind of a Drag,” “Don’t You Care,” “Mercy Mercy Mercy,” “Hey Baby”), Kooper envisioned a group that would use a rock band’s basic instrumental foundation and add a brass section. They would play a mix of musical styles similar to The Blues Project — jazz, blues, rock and pop — with classically trained horn players taking a featured role.

Kooper assumed the role of singer and creative director in addition to keyboard duties. He recruited Katz on guitar, bassist Jim Fielder and drummer Bobby Colomby, and Colomby then drafted multi-instrumentalist Fred Lipsius, trombonist Dick Halligan and trumpeters Jerry Weiss and Randy Brecker. Kooper came up with the name Blood, Sweat & Tears after seeing an early Johnny Cash album with that title, and hired respected producer John Simon, who worked with Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and The Band. With Kooper writing half the tracks, including the fledgling single “I Can’t Quit Her,” the eight-piece group cut the debut LP “Child is Father to the Man,” released in early 1968 on Columbia. Critics praised its innovative approach; one wrote, “It borrows styles from contemporary folk to acid rock with fresh jazz elements. This is the sound of a group of virtuosos enjoying themselves in the newly open possibilities of pop music.” It managed to reach #47 on US album charts, and #40 in the UK.

*BS&T’s debut LP (Al Kooper is front and center)*

But there was dissension in the ranks. Katz, for one, felt Kooper’s vocals were average at best and lobbied hard to hire a new lead singer. The band agreed, and Kooper, who didn’t want to stay if he couldn’t be the vocalist, dropped out (continuing his session work on dozens of albums and eventually becoming a successful producer and manager of groups like Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Tubes, and a published author as well). Weiss also left, as did Brecker, who would go on to greater heights with brother Michael as The Brecker Brothers in the 1970s and beyond.

The band was now in danger of losing their record deal, so they started searching in earnest for a new singer, and it turned out they didn’t have to look too far. Colomby got a call from his friend, folk singer Judy Collins, who told him about a powerful blues singer she’d heard at a club in The Village. His name was David Clayton-Thomas.

Born David Thomsett in England and raised in Toronto, Canada, he suffered beatings from an abusive father as a young boy, leaving home at 14 and sleeping in parked cars and abandoned buildings, stealing food and clothing to survive. He was arrested several times for vagrancy, petty theft and street brawls, and spent much of his teens in various jails and reformatories. He took to singing to pass the time in custody, learning guitar on a battered instrument and developing a kinship with folk and blues music — songs by men who were “dirt-poor working-class hobos with nothing to their name,” he wrote in his memoir. He got enough encouragement to eventually try singing at open-mic nights at some of the clubs in Toronto’s Yonge Street district, which had a vibrant folk and R&B music scene in the ’60s.

Changing his name to Clayton-Thomas to distance himself from his father, he developed a solid reputation singing with various bands and trios, including one called The Bossmen, purportedly one of the first rock bands anywhere to include jazz musicians. He performed with legendary bluesman John Lee Hooker, going with him to New York in 1966 and settling there, although he had no work visa, which would cause serious legal consequences years later.

At the urging of Collins, Colomby checked out one of Clayton-Thomas’s shows in New York and was knocked out by his vocals and his commanding stage presence. As fate would have it, Clayton-Thomas opened his set with a smoldering version of Kooper’s song “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know,” which BS&T had recorded for their debut album. “I think I heard about half the song, and I just knew,” said Colomby. “I offered him the job on the spot.”

*Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1969 (from left): Jim Fielder, Steve Katz, Chuck Winfield, Lew Soloff, Bobby Colomby, Dick Halligan, Fred Lipsius, Jerry Hyman, David Clayton-Thomas*

With Clayton-Thomas out front and new horn players Lew Soloff, Chuck Winfield and Jerry Hyman, the reconfigured nine-man lineup did a two-week stand at New York’s Café Au Go Go in 1968. The reaction was so positive that Columbia honcho Clive Davis promptly got them back into the studio, this time with producer James Guercio (who, ironically, was simultaneously producing Chicago’s debut as well). It was recorded in CBS’s New York studio on what was then a new state-of-the-art 16-track machine, and the result was sonically marvelous. They chose only three original tunes, opting instead for covers of material by Billie Holiday, Traffic, Laura Nyro and Brenda Holloway.

Little did anyone know how rapidly things would explode upon the release of that album, simply titled “Blood, Sweat & Tears,” in December 1968. First came the joyous Motown tune “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” which reached #2 in March 1969. Three months later, Clayton-Thomas’s song “Spinning Wheel” also peaked at #2 in July, and finally, Nyro’s gospel-inflected “And When I Die” made it a hat trick of #2 singles in October. The album spent an impressive seven weeks at #1; the band was a featured act at Woodstock in August (although they weren’t included in the film or soundtrack album because their manager foolishly insisted on more money); and when the annual Grammy Awards rolled around, the BS&T album beat out The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” for Album of the Year honors.

Me, I’ve always been crazy about some of the deeper tracks: Katz’s ballad “Sometimes in Winter” (on which he handled lead vocals); a remarkable adaptation of Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”; and the 14-minute “Blues Part II,” a mostly instrumental tour-de-force that’s represented on my Spotify playlist as a five-minute edit that showcases Clayton-Thomas’s vocal section at the longer track’s conclusion.

Clayton-Thomas’s charisma, burly physique and indelible tenor, alternately gentle and snarling, had very quickly become crucial to the group’s popularity. Said Davis about the addition of the singer: “He jumped right out at you. He seemed so genuine, so in command of the lyric lines, a perfect combination of fire and emotion to go with the band’s somewhat cerebral appeal. He was almost animalistic.”

The group played nearly 100 concerts in 1969 in ever-bigger venues to ever-larger audiences from coast to coast. It seemed they could do no wrong…but their one questionable decision was to do a three-night stand at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in December, which the rock press labeled “an un-hip establishment place where your parents’ entertainers performed.” Indeed, Rolling Stone magazine, which tended to look down its nose at anything that wasn’t bonafide rock, said in its review of the album earlier that year, “The listener responds to the illusion that he is hearing something new when, in fact, he is hearing mediocre rock, OK jazz, etc., thrown together in a contrived and purposeless way.” It was clearly a minority opinion, but it stung.

Things would get much, much worse in 1970. Like the majority of rock musicians at the time, BS&T had been vocal about their opposition to the war in Vietnam and other policies of the Nixon administration. They weren’t strident about it, but their remarks attracted enough attention for The White House to take umbrage, particularly coming from Canadian Clayton-Thomas. When they discovered he had been in the country illegally for years, and that he had a prison record in Canada, they brought the hammer down, insisting that the group participate in a State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern European countries as part of a detente effort, or Clayton-Thomas would be deported. Several in the band (especially Katz) didn’t want to do it but felt they had no choice. “It was blackmail, pure and simple,” said Katz.

Their experience there was mixed. They played to enthusiastic audiences in Poland and indifferent crowds in Czechoslovakia, and in Romania, the crowds were so pumped up that the communist authorities used vicious dogs and the military to control them, and they confiscated the film footage that was being shot by a film crew. The band was rattled by the experience, but were even more shaken by the critical reaction they got from the rock press and many of their politically minded fans upon returning to the US. “We were just musicians trying to play music for people,” said Clayton-Thomas. “We were the #1 band in the world. And it turned into this huge political rat’s nest. The political right felt we were too antiwar and anti-Nixon, and the political left hated us for being what they felt were pawns of Nixon. It was insane. It immediately became clear that we were not going to be forgiven by the counterculture for becoming what they saw as sellouts.”

Colomby lamented, “We became the most uncool band in the world. It was so unfair.”

Talk about cancel culture.

Three years ago, a documentary was released called “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears?” I was stunned as I watched the nearly two-hour film, with long-ago footage and new interviews with band members Katz, Clayton-Thomas, Fielder and Lipsius shedding light on a rather extraordinary tale of deception, strong-arming and political propaganda. One critic wrote this about it: “Did Nixon’s State Department cause BS&T to bleed out prematurely? That’s the film’s implicit premise. It’s an absorbing spy movie made with smuggled footage, and an incisive history lesson about international relations in the ’70s. Above all, it’s a cautionary tale for now about the risks we take when we rush to judgement without all the facts.” I can’t recommend strongly enough that you need to watch this (now on Amazon Prime) to truly understand the answer to its titular question.

Like most young fans, I knew nothing about the entire incident at the time. Neither the tour itself nor the negative domestic reaction to it were widely reported, and the deal struck between the government and the band to prevent Clayton-Thomas’s deportation was not public knowledge. All I knew was, their next LP, “Blood Sweat & Tears 3,” came out the same month and went right to #1, producing two more hit singles, “Hi-De-Ho” and “Lucretia MacEvil.” (The latter song included the telling lyric, “Hard luck and trouble ’bout to be your claim to fame.”) It wasn’t as strong an album overall, but enjoyable enough, with captivating additional tracks like “Something Coming On” and “He’s a Runner.” To its detriment, the album also included a ghastly cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil” entitled “Symphony For the Devil,” and a lame version of James Taylor’s then-new hit “Fire and Rain.”

Despite how they found themselves victims of character assassination, Blood, Sweat and Tears soldiered on, touring and recording another LP (“BS&T 4”) in 1971, which had two more singles (“Go Down Gamblin'” and “Lisa, Listen To Me,” which barely made the Top 40), but clearly, the bloom was off the rose. To return to the comparison with Chicago, BS&T was on the decline just as Chicago was riding high with multiple singles and high-charting albums.

In early 1972, Clayton-Thomas chose to leave BS&T and return to Canada, citing burnout from touring, dueling egos and disputes over the band’s business affairs. He had also developed a reputation for heavy alcohol and drug use, and belligerent behavior. His first solo effort, titled simply “David Clayton-Thomas,” is a pretty decent LP that should have fared better than its anemic #184 showing on the album charts, but there was apparently little interest in him on his own. A couple more solo LPs did no better, despite some bright moments. He struggled professionally and personally, with several divorces and a lawyer who stole most of his money, he said.

*Clayton-Thomas’s solo debut LP* *(1972)*

Within a month of his departure, Columbia released a Greatest Hits collection to recapitulate the Clayton-Thomas-era hits, and it has gone on to sell seven million copies.

Difficulties had arisen inside the group between its pop-rock and jazz factions, and Lipsius and Halligan, probably the two most talented musicians in the lineup, also chose to depart when Clayton-Thomas did. The remaining six added two new brass players and, most notably, a singer named Jerry Fisher, a blues singer from Texas with a sizable regional following. He wanted to sing new material instead of the old Clayton-Thomas songs, and the band agreed they needed a fresh re-start, but audiences obviously wanted to hear the big hits, so a balance was struck between the two. They released the aptly titled “New Blood” LP in 1972, with “So Long Dixie” charting modestly on Top 40 charts. When the group brought in Swedish guitarist Georg Wadenius, Katz decided to take his leave as well.

By 1975, drummer Colomby was the only remaining member from the classic lineup. With Clayton-Thomas’s solo career struggling, Colomby was able to woo him back to the new BS&T fold for the next three LPs, “New City,” “More Than Ever” and “Brand New Day,” but each album did progressively worse on the charts, with no singles in sight. A wholesale change brought an entirely new lineup of musicians (except for Clayton-Thomas) for the 1980 release “Nuclear Blues,” which failed to chart and remains the last LP the group ever released.

From then on, Blood, Sweat and Tears has been a performing band with a revolving door of musicians, some staying several years, some staying a few months. On the band’s Wikipedia page in the “Members” section, an astounding list of more than 150 musicians (including a dozen different lead vocalists) are listed as having been part of the group! If that’s not a record, I can’t imagine what is.

For his part, Clayton-Thomas remained as vocal frontman for 20 years until finally calling its quits in 2004. “I discovered, and they discovered, that Blood, Sweat & Tears wasn’t worth much without me — and I wasn’t worth much without them,” he told The Toronto Star in 2020.

In the wake of Clayton-Thomas’s death last week, Steve Katz said, “David and I had a difficult relationship, but we did have those wonderful years and a lot of great music in common. There were nights when David’s singing was just astounding, and it was great to be on the same stage. I would love to have had the chancer to do it all over as the more tolerant and much wiser men we both turned out to be.”

An older Mr. Clayton-Thomas, in a tan sports jacket and blue button-down shirt, sings into a microphone as he gestures with his left hand. — *Clayton-Thomas in 2011*

Toronto keyboardist Lou Pomanti, who worked with Clayton-Thomas on and off for several decades, praised the man’s vocal chops. “When you pair those blues roots with that raunchy voice, that flexibility and the agility that he had… When you team it with a fantastic jazz band and the great arrangers that they had, it was like nothing anybody had ever heard.”

R.I.P. to a remarkable vocalist.

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The Spotify playlist I’ve assembled offers two tracks from the first incarnation of BS&T, followed by a comprehensive look at the songs from the band’s heyday with Clayton-Thomas (1969-1971). There’s also a healthy dose of material from Clayton-Thomas’s solo work, which includes several convincing covers of classic R&B and blues from one of his final LPs in 2010.

We’ve all got time enough to cry, time enough to die

Posted on 7 Days Ago by brucehhackett

In the long-ago summer of 1969, I was 14 and seriously ramping up my modest record collection. Six months earlier, I had abandoned the practice of buying 45-rpm singles and embraced the idea of owning albums instead. I bought LPs by The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, and I became drawn to the music of more boundary-expanding artists like Cream, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf and Blind Faith.

My friend Steve was similarly tuned into new bands that weren’t Top 40, and he’d periodically show up at my house with albums he thought I might like. One such record was a double album called “The Chicago Transit Authority.” Its most noticeable characteristic was that it had very prominent horns — trumpets, trombones, saxes — on pretty much every track. This was a substantial departure from the guitars-bass-drums-organ lineup of most bands at that time. No rock band I knew at that point used horns beyond the occasional sax solo.

I was totally taken by this music. Growing up in a household with a father who often played Big Band, swing and Sinatra records, I loved the sound of a vigorous horn section, but as a kid of the ’60s, I also loved rock and roll. Now, on this “CTA” album, I had a merger of these two things — a rock band with horns. How cool was that?

The opening track, the aptly named “Introduction,” had lyrics that came right out and explained the group’s mission:

“We’ve all spent years preparing before this group was born, /With Heaven’s help, it blended, and we do thank the Lord, /So this is what we do, sit back and let us groove, and let us work on you…”

Boy, they worked on me, all right. The great melodies, the infectious rock beats, ferocious electric guitar solos, strong lead vocals and harmonies, and the dominant, thrilling horn parts combined to create something really dynamic. I simply couldn’t get enough of this stuff: “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?,” “Questions 67 and 68,” “Someday,” “South California Purples,” “Listen,” “I’m a Man” and especially the exhilarating “Beginnings,” still one of my all-time favorite songs.

Critics were intrigued by the group. One wrote, “Few debut albums can boast as consistently solid an effort as the self-titled ‘Chicago Transit Authority.’ Even fewer can claim to have enough material to fill out a double-disc affair.” FM radio gave some of the tracks enough airplay to earn the debut album a #17 perch on the US albums chart in 1969, but neither of the singles they released (“Questions 67 and 68” and “Beginnings”) made any impact on Top 40 charts. They toured across the country, headlining mostly smaller venues or, sometimes, as warm-up acts for more established groups.

In early 1970, only eight months after the release of “CTA,” the band made the unheard-of move of releasing another double album as their second release, this time titled simply “Chicago” (because the real CTA, the metro rail system in the Windy City, insisted they cease and desist in the use of its name). Again, the seven-piece group bowled me over with instantly likable songs (“Movin’ On,” “The Road,” “In the Country,” “Wake Up Sunshine, “Fancy Colours”), smart arrangements and solid musicianship across the board. The chief difference this time was that the group soon found themselves riding high on Top 40 charts in 1970 with three big singles from that album: the exuberant “Make Me Smile” (#7), the guitar-driven rock classic “25 or 6 to 4” (#4) and everyone’s favorite prom slow-dance tune, “Colour My World” (#7).

So who were these guys? For the most part, they preferred to remain mostly nameless and faceless, letting the music and the group dynamic do the talking. If they had a frontman, it was either keyboardist Robert Lamm, guitarist Terry Kath or bassist Peter Cetera, all of whom took turns as lead singer on Chicago’s repertoire of songs.

This month, in 2026, I learned that the true founder of the group was sax/flute player Walter Parazaider, who died June 17th at age 81. It was he who, inspired by the Beatles horns-heavy 1966 song “Got to Get You Into My Life,” became enamored of the idea of creating a rock ‘n’ roll band with horns. Not just the occasional use of sax, mind you, but a permanent three-man horn section who would be an integral part of virtually every song.

Born in suburban Chicago, Parazaider began playing the clarinet at age 9 and, by his teen years, he and his parents and music teachers had their sights set on having him pursue a career as a professional orchestral musician. He even earned a degree in classical clarinet performance from nearby DePaul University. During his college years, though, he was pulled away from classic by a newly-developed affection for jazz music, and also dabbled in rock and roll once he picked up the saxophone.

He formed a college band, The Missing Links, with future Chicago bandmates Terry Kath and drummer Danny Seraphine, also meeting eventual producer Jimmy Guercio on the DePaul campus. Once they joined forces with keyboardist Bobby Lamm, trumpeter Lee Loughnane and trombonist Jimmy Pankow and changed their name to The Next Big Thing, they began talking seriously about their musical path. Said Pankow years later, “We had a get together in Walter’s apartment on the north side of Chicago. It was Walter, Danny, Terry, Robert, Lee, and myself, and we agreed to devote our lives and our energies to making this project work.” Bassist Cetera was the seventh and final member to join a few months later.

*Chicago in 1969 (L-R): Robert Lamm, Peter Cetera, James Pankow, Lee Loughnane, Walter Parazaider, Terry Kath and Danny Seraphine*

“When I started the band,” Parazaider said in 2003, “I knew one thing – that the personnel we had in the band were really good musicians who were dedicated, trying to do something great. I knew that we would have some success.”

Lamm emerged as the chief songwriter, with Kath and Pankow contributing a few songs apiece on the first two LPs. Parazaider rarely wrote music, concentrating instead on developing horn arrangements and adding memorable solos (most notably the flute on “Colour My World” and sax on the 1973 hit “Just You ‘n’ Me”).

Back in late 1970, I had the good fortune to see Chicago perform in a gymnasium on the campus of John Carroll University, only a couple miles from where I lived, and was immensely impressed by their energy and tight ensemble playing. The band was performing relentlessly, up to 300 gigs a year, and this show had been booked before their success on the charts made them the bigger concert draw they would soon become.

It was astonishing to me when their next move was to release a third double album, “Chicago III,” in early 1971, and I was very disappointed with what I heard. Clearly, they had been overworked and stretched thin, because there weren’t more than two or three memorable tracks to be found. I bought it, and played it a fair amount, hoping the tunes would grow on me, but they simply didn’t match up to the songs on first two LPs. Three sides were taken up by grandiose “suites” filled with listless instrumentals, banal lyrics about eating Spam for breakfast (?) and meandering solos with little melody anywhere. If not for the vibrant singles “Free” and “Lowdown,” it would’ve been pretty much a washout. Even those singles charted only modestly (#20 and #35, respectively), and Columbia Records chose to go back to the debut LP and re-release “Beginnings” and “Questions 67 and 68” as singles, which did much better the second time around and kept Chicago’s star rising.

To make matters far worse, Chicago’s next move was a live album, which was in vogue at the time, but they turned a week-long stint at Carnegie Hall into a bloated four-album set completely lacking in the excitement I’d heard in concert only 10 months earlier. I think I listened to it only once, maybe twice, before getting rid of it. One of my worst album purchases ever.

*The venerable horn section: Pankow, Parazaider and Loughnane*

The next summer, the band wisely focused on just nine quality tracks to comprise “Chicago V,” a single album that offered a return to solid melodies, integrated horn charts and great vocals. “Saturday in the Park” was one of the most popular singles of the summer of ’72, and just about as much fun as “Beginnings” or “Make Me Smile.” Still, the adventurousness and immediacy which had so enthralled me when they entered the scene in 1969-1970 seemed to be missing (for me, at least), even though “Chicago V” became the first of five consecutive LPs to reach #1 on the album charts.

I need to mention one nagging truth about Chicago that bothered me from the outset. They (mostly keyboardist Robert Lamm, evidently) had a penchant for making political statements in some of their songs that, while well-intentioned, usually came across as simplistic and lame. A typical example is “Dialogue (Parts I and II),” which was curiously popular as a follow-up single in the fall of 1972. With lyrics written as a conversation between an activist and a clueless college student, the track was designed to coax people to take to the streets and speak out against war, injustice, etc. Its awkwardness made me cringe, and still does.

From that point on, I basically lost interest. I can’t deny the continuous stream of hit singles were engaging, even infectious — “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day,” “Just You ‘n Me,” “Call On Me,” “Old Days,” even the Peter Cetera heartbreaker ballad “If You Leave Me Now.” But I couldn’t get motivated to buy the albums. I guess the sheen had worn off for me, and I’d moved on to other bands, other genres, although I still returned to the first two Chicago albums fairly regularly.

Chicago had always been one of those bands that remained an essentially faceless entity. Its members could go out in public and be unrecognized, and they seemed to like it that way. Still, I was among many music industry observers who assumed the band would hang it up in 1978 following the tragic death of Terry Kath, Chicago’s inspirational leader and best instrumentalist. He was messing around with a handgun one night and accidentally shot himself fatally. The idea that Chicago was “a rock and roll band with horns” pretty much died with Kath, as his fiery guitar work was the key ingredient in their rock band credentials. Indeed, no less a guitar god than Jimi Hendrix had been quoted back in 1970 as saying, “Terry Kath plays better than me.”

But no. The band chose to soldier on, hiring journeyman guitarist Donnie Dacus as the first of several replacements for Kath in the lineup. Chicago, whose Roman numeral-titled albums were a source of some ridicule by those who labeled their music “corporate rock,” endured a comparatively fallow period during which their so-so chart performance matched their tired formula on the records. By 1982, Columbia Records, their label from the beginning, let them go.

This didn’t stop them from shopping around for another label and producer. Full Moon Records took the bait, and with notorious Canadian pop producer David Foster at the helm, Chicago re-emerged with an altogether different sound. Peter Cetera’s strong tenor had become the group’s primary lead voice, which was fine, but now the group was doing material written by outside songwriters, with almost no horns in sight. Veteran musician Bill Champlin joined the ranks, playing a substantial role in the soft-rock sounds favored by Foster and Cetera. The resulting album, “Chicago 16,” turned off older fans but found a new, younger audience who responded favorably to the ’80s version of the group. Cetera’s smooth “Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry” put them back at the top of the singles chart.

On tours, Chicago was no longer packing stadiums or arenas, but they filled smaller halls with enthusiastic fans as they built their new audience. I was reviewing concerts for a Cleveland newspaper at the time, and saw them at the Front Row, an intimate theater-in-the-round venue, and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the show. The new songs didn’t do much for me, but it sure was great to hear the old stuff, both the hits and deeper album tracks.

Lamm, who had been such an important singer and composer for the band, became almost invisible as Cetera assumed the role of Chicao’s pretty-boy front man singing songs co-written for him by Foster and others. These tunes charted well — “Hard Habit to Break,” “You’re the Inspiration,” “Along Comes a Woman” — but their success went to Cetera’s head, who left the band in 1986 for a solo career and chose not to maintain ties with the group. (Indeed, he was famously absent when the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016.)

A guy named Jason Scheff, a bassist with a tenor voice eerily similar to Cetera’s, joined in 1986, and he and Champlin became Chicago’s primary singers for the next five years, and through the ’90s and 2000s as well. Scheff got off to a rocky start when Foster made the misguided decision to feature a radical, unpleasant reworking of “25 or 6 to 4” as the first single from “Chicago 18,” which justifiably stalled at #48. Still, it was newcomer Scheff’s vocals that carried “Will You Still Love Me?” and “If She Would Have Been Faithful…”, both Top 20 hits.

In the ’90s, Chicago took to touring as part of a double bill with other classic rock bands, taking turns as the evening’s headliner. I saw them perform with The Moody Blues in 1992 at a show when Chicago happened to have top billing, but The Moodies were clearly the better band that night, and we actually ducked out early on Chicago’s below-average gig.

Over the past 30 years, Chicago has toured periodically and released numerous greatest hits packages, a Christmas collection and even a winning tribute to Big Band music (a couple tracks are included in my Spotify playlist). But they’ve bounced around on four or five different labels, and their sporadic albums of new material (“Chicago XXX” in 2006, “Now” in 2014 and “Born For This Moment” in 2022) were met indifferently by press and public alike.

*Original members Pankow, Parazaider, Loughnane and Lamm at their Rock Hall induction in 2016*

Lamm and the three-man horn section of Parazaider, Pankow and Loughnane continued as the core group, but a raft of personnel changes on bass, guitar, drums, percussion and vocals didn’t do the group much good. Sadly, Parazaider developed a heart condition in 2017 that caused him to retire from live performances, and his health deteriorated in recent years.

A few years ago, I watched “Now More Than Ever: The History of Chicago,” an award-winning documentary on the band, its successes and struggles, and I gotta tell you, it was an entertaining and eye-opening two hours well spent. It incisively tells the band’s story from initial rumblings up to the mid-2010s, and I urge anyone with even a passing interest in Chicago’s music to check it out.

I learned, for instance, that the excesses that plagued so many ’70s groups — The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin — took their toll on Chicago as well, according to the documentary. Original manager/producer Jim Guercio had played fast and loose with the band’s finances, pouring them into a new studio in Colorado and failing to pay royalties. Cocaine use among the band was rampant and destructive, negatively affecting interpersonal relationships. New members didn’t join the lineup seamlessly.

Chicago has always had its detractors. A review of the documentary in The Chicago Reader described it this way: “It’s an altogether fitting testament to Chicago’s hippie self-absorption and dopey excesses, all far out of proportion with both the amount of listenable music Chicago produced and its musical importance.” Ouch. Unduly harsh, I think, but clearly, they weren’t universally admired.

But I’ll always have a soft spot for Chicago, if only for those first two groundbreaking albums that dared to fully integrate horns into a professional rock band. Thanks, guys, for bringing that dream to fruition all those years ago. And rest in peace, Walter.

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The Spotify playlist below is, as you’d expect, heavy on the first two albums, but there’s also a hefty dose of material from their later work. Nearly every studio album is represented with at least one track in order to provide you with a representative cross section of Chicago’s entire career arc, running more than four hours.

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