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Originally Posted by Oh Haha
Cool!!
Thanks for sharing.
Chicago was one of the first "rock" bands I heard. I used to play my drums along with the album when I was young. Danny Seraphine was a huge influence on me and I can hear it in some of our recordings.
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Ditto! (except for the part about recordings. I've been a recovering drummer for about 25 years and usually only play the steering wheel nowadays.)
My first reaction to seeing that video was that I really, really, needed to search to find the original CTA members on the stage -- until I noticed that they were playing with EWF, so I'm OK with that. While the performance was spot-on, to me it felt like it could have been done by any number of studio players. I guess I'm old school.
The first and last Chicago concert that I saw was about a year before Terry Kath shot himself. That really yanked the heart out of the band since he was guy who seemed to identify with all of the different factions and kept them focused in one direction. I can respect Pete Cetera leaving to do his own thing. But when they fired Danny Seraphine, every other drummer they've had has sounded like a plug-and-play studio player to me. Nobody seems to have the same lyrical quality to their playing -- they have all sounded like they're "playing time". Since then it's been just be a hollow shell of the original band.
To give you a sense of how deep the talent was of the original in the original line-up, all that you need to do is listen to "
A Song for Richard and His Friends". While admittedly not an accessible pop piece like "25 or 6 to 4", it shows where the band could go if they wanted to. A Ballet for a Girl in Buchanan was another piece that showed the band's abilities.
Nowadays they sound like a cover band when playing some of this stuff.
Time moves on for everyone, and some things like the original Chicago, the Beatles, James Brown -- all that we'll ever have are the memories, and thankfully the recordings.