terry kath

With respect to the question of taste: One of the paradoxes – and/or tragedies – of getting older is that your ear becomes more refined with the advancing years but also much more restrictive. It's largely the result of absorbing received ideas.  When you’re 8 or 9 years old, you haven’t been around long enough to assimilate the critical consensus into your own thinking.  You’re probably not even aware of anything like a critical consensus. You just know what sounds good to you, and you play it, and you dig it, and there’s nothing to clutter your mind or qualify the pleasure you experience. There’s no such thing, yet, as a guilty pleasure.  It’s just pleasure, full stop.  I mention all this as a preamble to my trying to make at least a limited case for Chicago. Most folks my age or older, when they think of Chicago, they probably remember them as that horn-heavy MOR outfit that went from 70s soft rock hits - Saturday in the Park, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is, etc. - to horrible purveyors of 80s yuppie soundtrack music, most of which I’ve blocked out of my memory because the thought of Peter Cetera and his blond mullet makes me wanna break shit.  But a lot of those 70s lite rock hits are actually quite good, though enjoyment of them will likely require that you step outside those received ideas I was talking about… Before their lite period, Chicago was actually kind of heavy. I don’t mean heavy here in the way that Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple were heavy, where heaviness is combined with hardness. Chicago were rarely if ever hard. But they were heavy in the sense of fusing rock with jazz in an effort to create ambitiously ‘conceptual’ music, the kind of thing that was endemic to the late 60s and early 70s, as in, ‘man, that’s some heavy shit.’  If you’re having trouble grasping my meaning here, try to visualize a white guy in a dashiki playing a ten-minute flute solo… When I was a kid and still blinkered to critical opinion, I really liked Chicago. My father owned their first three records, which doesn’t surprise me now that I think of it, and I played those albums all the time. They’re not really my thing anymore because I’ve since become a narrow-minded Anglophile with a deep antipathy towards horns. But let’s not forget that Chicago also had a great guitarist in Terry Kath.  His playing has always been the aspect of their music I liked the most.  There’s nothing particularly distinctive about his style, but with his ballsy solos and accompaniment on tunes like 25 or 6 to 4 and Hour in the Shower: A Hard Day Risin’ (heavy, man!), he was the guy most responsible for injecting the rock component into Chicago’s blend of rock and jazz. I loved hearing his guitar playing when I was a kid, and even now, after having absorbed so many critical judgments, all of which have formed a wall of superego around my musical taste, Kath’s guitar, and a few scattered Chicago songs more generally, sound pretty good now and again...