Chicago II- Robert Lamm
Chicago Transit Authority/ Chicago original woodwind player, songwriter, and arranger Walter Parazaider passed away June 17 after a long illness.
“Who are these guys?” was still the admiring rhetorical question floating about the music world when Chicago II came out January 1970, only a year after the other non-notorious “Chicago Seven” had stunned the rock world in 1969 with the most popular double album debut in history, Chicago Transit Authority. Like the first, Chicago II was so full of talented lead singers (three) and songwriters (four) that they needed four vinyl sides to accommodate all of that music. Chicago placed no less than three songs from II into the Top 10, including “Make Me Smile”,”25 or 6 to 4″, and “Colour My World” with its legendary flute ride-out solo by Walter Parazaider on Jimmy Pankow’s composition sung by Terry Kath. Yet the hooky melodies and truly bold arrangements extended to “Poem for the People”, “Movin’ In”, “In the Country”, and “Where Do We Go From Here?”.
Chicago II climbed to #4 sales in America, #6 in the UK, a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year and sales of over a million, igniting a legacy of thirty-six Chicago releases in fifty years together! Chicago co-founder Robert Lamm tells the insider tale of the birth of America’s second-biggest selling band, second only to The Beach Boys, but he is too much of a class act to acknowledge the fact that 120,000,000 units sold apparently did mean something to the gatekeepers of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who until recently refused to even consider Chicago with a nomination. But with that long-overdue honor in 2016, that all changed. 
Not unlike the times that Americans find themselves in today, the songs on Chicago II were conceived amidst sharply divisive issues, the nation fraying around the edges, tribal factions, a struggle for control of the country, and yes, violence. The last song of this deep collection, the first ever from Chicago bass player/singer Peter Cetera, evokes this uncanny sense of deja vu:
“Every day just gets a little shorter, don’t you think? Take a look around you and you’ll see what I mean
People got to come together, & not just out of fear
Where do we go, Where do we go, Where do we go from here?”
– Redbeard
