MAGNOLIA

Watkins: 38 minutes with Chicago's Robert Lamm

Billy Watkins
The Clarion-Ledger

It is always dangerous territory for me to interview a musician, athlete or author I’ve admired for years. I always say a simple prayer beforehand: “Lord, please don’t let him (or her) be  a jerk.”

That was my mindset as I entered a phone interview with Chicago’s Robert Lamm, the incredibly talented songwriter, vocalist and keyboard player. The interview was to help me write this preview of Chicago’s Wednesday night (8 p.m.) sold-out show at Thalia Mara Hall. (Online brokers on Tuesday offered tickets ranging from $299 to $1,081.)

He put me at ease during the first 20 seconds: “I want to give you exactly what you need. So ask anything you want.”

I told Lamm this wouldn’t be my first Chicago concert. I saw the group 43 years ago from the fifth row. Chicago was one of the top groups in the world at the time and had its original lineup: Lamm; Peter Cetera, bass and vocals; Terry Kath, guitar and vocals; Danny Seraphine, drums; James Pankow, trombone; Walter Parazaider, saxophone; and Lee Loughnane, trumpet.

The story has been told many times that Jimi Hendrix saw the band in a club one night. He went up to Parazaider afterward and said: “Your horns sound like one lung. And your guitar player is better than me.”

He might have added that Cetera was the greatest bass player in a rock band, second only to Paul McCartney.

Hendrix eventually opened shows for Chicago.

The band’s numbers are incredible: It has sold more than 100 million records, including 21 Top 10 singles, five consecutive No. 1 albums and 11 No. 1 singles. Twenty-five of Chicago’s 36 albums have been certified platinum (1 million units sold).

In previous interviews, Lamm, who is 72 but looks and sounds 20 years younger, has called Chicago “an abnormal rock band.” A full horn section in a rock group was relatively new. Certainly, Chicago’s sound was unique and different.

The three voices — Kath, deep and raw; Lamm, smooth as spring water; and Cetera’s high range that seemed to have no limits — blended perfectly.

The current lineup includes original members Lamm, Pankow, Loughnane and Parazaider; Tris Imboden, drums; Keith Howland, guitar and vocals; Lou Pardini,  keyboards and vocals; Ray Herrmann, sax and flute;  Walfredo Reyes Jr., percussion; and Jeff Coffey, bass and vocals.

Lamm and Pankow wrote some of the best songs of the 20th Century. And that is where I began the interview.

Q: What was it like when you found out you and Pankow would be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in June in New York?

A: I didn’t even know there was a Songwriters Hall of Fame, so it was nothing I ever considered. Now that we’re getting ready to go through the induction ceremonies, I’ve been thinking about it more than i ever thought I would. I don’t know what to make of it, actually.

A friend of mine who is in the music business sent me a sweet, congratulatory email with a list of some of the greatest 20th-century songwriters and very sweetly included me on the list. I found it very, very intimidating because I certainly don’t consider myself one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century or the 21st century.

It’s been very complicated for me. I’m probably making more of it than I should. I probably should just go there, sing a song or two and have a good time. But it’s really sort of rattled me a bit.

Q: I always enjoy learning how songs are born.  For “Saturday In the Park,” I’ve read that you used to take a Super 8 movie camera with you  all the time, and that you filmed some scenes from Central Park. Was that really the start of it?

A: It was. It was two days of filming there, a year apart. And as I say in the song, I think it was the Fourth of July. But I edited the film, and I’m not a great cameraman so there were a lot of blurry shots and shots of my feet. But once I put it together, I basically created the lyrics describing what I saw.

I already had this music grid, the riff that opens the song. I’m pretty sure I had most of the piano stuff ready for lyrics. I wanted to describe a lovely experience in the park in an era of people yearning for peace and love.

Q: One of the lyrics in that song has bugged me for years: “Slow motion riders fly the colors of the day.” Is it really about kids on bikes with balloons tied to the handlebars?

A: It is. In Central Park, they’ll close it off to traffic so people can skate or run or ride bicycles. On a beautiful day, it’s really a lovely thing to see. I had footage of people on their bicycles with balloons.

Really, I’m always just trying to get to the end of the song. That was the curse of “25 or 6 to 4.”  I needed a line to get me to the next line. Sometimes it’s a good line, sometimes it’s one I’m cursed with, like 25 or 6 to 4.

People constantly ask me what it’s about, and it’s really just about writing the song, which is the worst possible subject you could undertake.

Q: Probably my favorite Chicago song was written by you — “Dialogue Part I & II.” It has great give-and-take lyrics between two people in totally different places as far as their interests in politics. Did you really dream that song?

A: I guess you could say that. I woke up, and I had it. I was on the road somewhere. I woke up, didn’t even turn the lights on. Had just enough light coming through the window. I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen, and I could hear what the changes were, I knew what the structure was going to be, and I just wrote down the lyrics.

Q: I’ve often wondered how it was decided that Terry and Peter would sing that song. I could hear you singing either part, especially Peter’s.

A: One of the things I enjoyed about the early days of the band was casting the vocals. And Peter and Terry were as diametrically opposite as two singers could be. So I thought this dialogue, which is slightly contentious … I just thought them having such a contrast in their vocals would make the most sense to at least try them out. And they got it.

Q: That shows an extraordinary lack of ego on your part, but I think it tells us you were willing to do whatever was best for the song.

A: Oh, I have a healthy ego. But I think that I’m also a realist in this process of making music. I always treasured the fact that in the original band it was all about collaborating. Here’s the song. Here’s the arrangement. Here are the charts. Now let’s play it.

I didn’t even have to ask for input. Everybody was saying, “What if I try this? What do you think if we did that? Maybe he should sing that. Maybe I should sing that.” Everybody knew that was OK. Every one of my songs benefited from the rehearsal process.

Q: It was a terrible day in 1978 when Terry Kath died of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot. I’ve heard you wanted to change the band’s name. Is that true?

A: I considered it seriously. I don’t think anybody else did. I do think on some level, in a crass way, it was a business decision to go on and keep the name. Anybody who ever saw the band or thought about what Terry’s contribution was to the band for the first 10 or 12 albums, they knew it was going to be a very different band without Terry. And in a way it could never be that band again. Simple as that.

I didn’t say the band should break up. I just said maybe we should change the name because it’s not the same band. The songs will continue to come. Terry didn’t write a lot. So the fact Pankow and I, and much later, Peter Cetera around the 10th album, were doing the writing.

Q: The band still plays “Colour My World,” a song written by Pankow that really highlighted Terry’s soulful voice. You sang it for years after Terry’s death. But recently, Lee Loughnane is doing the honors. Why the change?

A: I enjoyed singing it for a long time. And I didn’t mind singing it. There is never a time I hear it that I don’t think about Terry.

But there was a period of touring where we opened the show with that long piece, “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon,” and “Colour My World” is part of that. And no matter how much I warmed up before the show, my voice wasn’t warmed up enough to sing that song to my satisfaction. Years later, we were doing some re-records in Nashville. When it came to “Colour My World,” I said, ‘Let’s see who else can sing this.’ And Lee, who is not the greatest singer in the world, loves to sing and he got the gig.

Q: One of my favorite albums is “Chicago Live at Carnegie Hall.” I thought that was when we were truly able to realize l the incredible level of talent — musician-wise, vocal-wise — that made up Chicago. I heard some band members didn’t like the album very much.

A: It was an honor to be invited to do it. Definitely intimidating, playing in the Big Apple in a venue like that. I think there were a lot of challenges in the recording of it because it was a venue not meant for rock and roll and amplifiers. I’ve heard other kinds of music recorded there and it worked OK. But amplified music, it didn’t belong there and it was really a struggle for our recordist and mixers and our producer to get it to sound something like us.

The horn section wasn’t happy with the sound. They didn’t sound brassy, they sounded plastic, like toy horns.

Have you ever heard “Chicago Live in Japan?” That sounds much better. It’s a great concert hall in Osaka. And they used two eight-track recording machines together. I especially like the song “State of the Union” on that album. Terry does an amazing solo.

Q: Talk about things going full circle, you grew up in Brooklyn and lived there until you moved with your family to Chicago when you were 15. When Chicago was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016, the ceremony was in Brooklyn, at the Barclay Center. That had to be cool for you.

A: Oh, yeah. My mom used to work at a department store that might have been on the same street as the Barclay Center. And one of my kids lives and works in Brooklyn. She was really excited about it.

Contact Billy Watkins at 601-961-7282 orbwatkins@jackson.gannett.com. Follow @BillyWatkins11 on Twitter.