If it’s summer, the rock band Chicago must be coming to Southern California
Chicago arrives at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay in San Diego for sold-out concerts on Tuesday and Wednesday after swings through Orange and L.A. counties last week.
When the band Chicago first formed, trumpeter Lee Loughnane says he and the other guys in the group knew the horn-drenched rock ‘n’ roll they made was great music, but had no idea whether anyone else would agree.
“We didn’t know it was going to go over,” Loughnane says. “We knew that we enjoyed what we were doing, and we had a good time playing together as a unit.
“But people started enjoying what we were doing in live performance every night, when we got out of the clubs and Jimi Hendrix let us come on the road with him,” he says. “And also Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis Joplin.
“So we were exposed to larger audiences. We had our foot in the door as far as the larger crowds. And we never took our foot out of the door.”
More than 50 years later, Chicago still draws large audiences each year when the band heads out on the road. Loughnane, who plays trumpet and flugelhorn, is one of three original still in the lineup, with guitarist-singer Robert Lamm and trombonist James Pankow the others.
“It’s amazing how long we’ve been doing this,” Loughnane says on a recent call from his home in Sedona, Ariz. “I mean, I have to pinch myself.
“We played the Greek Theatre when there were quite a bit fewer seats,” he says of the Los Angeles venue that Chicago played on Saturday. “People were climbing up in the trees outside of the venue to come to the show. It’s changed quite a bit.”
So many hits
Chicago has a good kind of problem — too many fan-favorites, not enough time — when it comes to putting together its live show.
“We’ve tried every lineup of songs that you can possibly imagine through the years,” Loughnane says. “We have one that we tweak from year to year just to make it more interesting for us, and hopefully the audience as well.
“But at the same time, we’ve been pretty consistently starting out with ‘Introduction,’ which is the first song of the first album,” he says. “And then from there we do a cross section of the entire career.”
And what a career it’s been. With more than 100 million albums sold, the Rock & Roll Hall of Famers are one of the most commercially successful bands of all time. Five of the band’s 26 studio albums went to No. 1 on the charts. Twenty-one singles reached the Top 10.
Songs such as “25 or 6 to 4,” “Saturday in the Park,” “Colour My World,” and “Make Me Smile” are recognized classics, and they and many others are surely in the must-play-or-fans-will-cry category of setlist-making.
Last year, Chicago released “Chicago XXXVIII: Born for This Moment,” its 26th studio album and first of new original material in eight years. It’s a great record, Loughnane says, with a single, “If This Is Goodbye,” that reached No. 16 on the adult contemporary charts.
Still, it’s tough to get both fans and the record label to new music when the old stuff remains so popular, he says.
“For a while we were doing the new song, ‘If This Is Goodbye,'” Loughnane says. “We did that for probably two, three tours. And now we have pulled that out of the show. You don’t want people getting up to go get popcorn when you start playing your songs. Or go to the bathroom. You want them to wait.
“Hold it now,” he says, laughing. “We’re working here!”
Old songs, new fans
Loughnane is proud that with him, Lamm and Pankow, Chicago still has half of its original six on stage each night. (Peter Cetera, ed shortly after the others, making the classic lineup of seven, but left for a solo career years ago.)
He says the band keeps going partly because the players love to play the music, but even more for the successive generations of generations of fans that turn out to shows.
“We have built a fanbase that is extremely loyal,” Loughnane says. “And we play good shows. We have a fanbase which keeps growing through the years rather than diminishing. I mean, we’re definitely not the Taylor Swift-type fanbase, but we have enough to keep people coming back, and bringing their kids with them.
“To me, that’s a testament to the music, because the same music that we did early on is resonating with people in different age groups,” he says. “Somebody else hears it goes, ‘I like that, have you heard these guys before?’
“Then the parents come out with another stack of albums: ‘You mean these guys?’ And it grows from there.”
No goodbye yet
Today, Loughnane is 76, Pankow, 75, and Lamm, 78.
“Whether we would like to it it,” Loughnane says, laughing, when asked his age. “I think we’re like 20 with 60 years of experience.”
Still, you release a single in 2022 titled “If This Is Goodbye,” and you’re gonna get the obvious question: Is it? Goodbye?
“Personally, I thought the album title should have been ‘If This Is Goodbye,'” Loughnane says. “Because we would have created even more questions. Which would have been great, because we have no intention of breaking up. Not at all.
The band’s longtime manager, Peter Schivarelli, always has a plan for the next three years of the group’s activities, Loughnane says. Barring something unexpected, Chicago will be on the road again in 2024.
“To put the suggestion out there is newsworthy,” Loughnane says of the single’s suggestive title. “You know, we didn’t do it intentionally. It just happened to be the title of the song, which was obviously a double meaning.
“But we’re not going anywhere.”
Chicago
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday
Where: Humphreys Concerts By the Bay, 2241 Shelter Island Drive, San Diego
Tickets: Sold out
Online: Ticketmaster.com
Larsen writes for the Southern California News Group.
