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http://www.cnn.com/shows/history-of-chicago (http://www.cnn.com/shows/history-of-chicago)

I'm glad they're doing this, as that first Chicago CTA album was one of the most influential albums of my life and still a favorite. Terry Kath as well, among my top 5 easily of best all time guitarists. Same with Danny Seraphine on drums, incredible player.

So I'll definitely be watching to see any "new" footage of the classic lineup with Kath, and of course any Beach Boys content too that may show up in the clips or interview segments. Trying to find original footage with Kath was next to impossible before YouTube and the internet, so maybe they've found even more new archival material for this.

Being up-front about my fan status: It's hard for me to listen to anything they did after Terry Kath's death, and I'm sure the reasons will be given why they canned him but I also cashed in my chips entirely on any new formation of the band after Danny Seraphine was shown the door too. But the first 4 albums or so...essential. CTA, II, and III should be in every collection.

I may have to DVR that. 

Is there a DVD/Blu Ray release set?

It should be - CNN acquired the rights to broadcast the documentary, but it had already made the film festival rounds in 2016, so it's not a premiere, but a broadcast TV premiere of the existing documentary via CNN Films.

The company who was involved in brokering the deals also acquired the rights to the Terry Kath documentary, and THAT is one I have to check out.

From what I've heard, and I have not seen it but only read reviews from the festivals, the first half is strong when dealing with the original band and their roots, but the second half after Kath's death, after all the pop success (which for me is almost a different band than the original run of albums), it starts to devolve into inter-personal infighting and the like...and that's why I kind of check out after Kath.

But it should be worth watching, and it will be good to see the band's history get a wider audience via CNN.

I like some of the post Kath material, but I'll agree, it's not at all the same band. 

Even the Steve Morse Deep Purple still sounds like Purple, 20+ years after Blackmore left for good. 

I have not seen it yet, but I hope it delves into some of how these guys got together in the first place, a combination of trained college-educated music school guys who could play jazz and classical and a few guys who cut their teeth playing gigs and package tours for Dick Clark and other caravans/clubs/etc.

One thing I heard only recently was that Danny and Terry were locked together personally and musically, Danny was Terry's drummer and vice versa. That lines up with something Neil Young once said, every guitar player gets one drummer in his/her lifetime...and it's similar to if you've seen "Bronx Tale" when Sonny says you only get three women in your life...it's true about drummers! If you play for a living, you find that one drummer that just locks in perfectly, and others just don't have the same connection.

I never heard Chicago - especially the live shows with Kath - the same way again after that revelation. Terry and Danny in some concerts I've seen and heard (which I'm sure will be excerpted for this doc) are just locked in like a machine, they drive the whole band and where they decide to go, the band goes too. It's terrific to hear that happen. I wonder if the decision to get rid of Danny had anything to do with his connections to Terry going back to the 60's.

That's pretty interesting.  I'll admit, I'm a novice when it comes to the backstory of Chicago.  I've only fairly recently bought some of the 70s albums. 

One of the best things about music going digital is that back catalog CDs have become very cheap.  I got a set with CTA, II, IV, and V for $10. 

That's a great deal for a set like that. I'd only add that Chicago III should be included in such a pack too, it gets overlooked because there were no "hits" that were spun on the radio but Kath particularly is on fire and terrific throughout that album. I'm sure it will come out in the film, or maybe not, but as the band got into the mid-70's and saw a ton of success, their albums got away from some of the vibe that drew me into CTA, II, III, etc. After Kath, I remember all the Cetera-driven hits but they lost something vital when Kath died.

I guess that's why III was left out. 

Thanks for the heads up, Craig.  I remember seeing some TV show, maybe "60 Minutes" or some such show, back in 1969 or '70 that did a story on this new rock band with horns.  I was maybe 13 or 14 years old and I was hooked right away.  I played saxophone in school at the time and I had just received my first guitar as a Christmas present, so they were right up my alley.  Terry Kath was a monster on guitar.  I read an article in Guitar Player magazine (I think) that said he plugged his guitar into a Bogun PA, and then ran the output of that through a Fender Dual Showman to overdrive the Fender's preamp.  These days it's easy to do that, but nobody had ever got that sound before.  Listen to "Free Form Guitar" on CTA to get an idea of what that sounded like.  I'm sorry I never got the chance to see them live back in the glory days.  I stopped buying their albums after Kath left, but they were on the radio so much after that I couldn't stop listening.

I will be setting the DVR as soon as I get home.  Thanks again.

Maybe I am misreading your post, but they certainly did not "can", Terry Kath.  In fact, the band briefly considered disbanding after his shocking death. Seraphine, on the other hand was indeed let go years later.  Fortunately, he was included in the band's induction ceremony to the RR HOF earlier this year unlike Cetera, who was invited by the band but did not show up.

You're misreading it, and my wording was shaky too - In no way was I saying they canned Terry, but they did can Danny and that was the last straw for me as far as any band touring as Chicago.

Chicago today is pretty darn analogous to Mike's "Beach Boys." No, it's not a 100% perfect analog, but it's pretty close. A certainly solid, pro presentation and performance, with some long-time backing members, but little original left intact, and with living, active members still around but not part of it.

Only difference is that Peter Cetera was kind of a douche about the R&R HOF ceremony. I'm very much of the mind that even losing Cetera made Chicago kind of inert; he needs to be there. I'm not even opposed to a decision to not play the R&R HOF. It appears some of the other guys in the band were a-holes to Cetera too. But the way he strung out his "decision" late last year/early this year on the R&R HOF ceremony was pretty silly.

I've seen clips on YouTube of Cetera playing Chicago songs with his own band.  He still sounds great but the songs don't sound right without those Chicago horns.  He was always better with Chicago and I think it's crazy that he's gone 30 years without even a one-off reunion.  Maybe now that Jason Scheff has left the band to judge a TV singing competition (which I think says a lot about the state of the band), they'll reach out to him for an olive branch.

I didn't even known Scheff left (that rhymed) the band!

Yeah, a guy named Jeff Coffey has been filling his role since the summer.
http://ultimateclassicrock.com/chicago-jason-scheff/

Man, shows how far out of the loop I have been! I'm pretty much with HeyJude on my feelings, so yeah that says volumes

Interesting in terms of this documentary, as Terry Kath's daughter crowdfunded a documentary on her father, which apparently finally premiered a few months ago. There were some interviews with her discussing who did and didn't agree to be interviewed. I think she got most of the Kath-era Chicago members, although not Cetera as of the last interviews with her that I had read (which probably date from a year or two ago). I think she remained hopeful Cetera might agree to an interview, but was not assuming one was forthcoming. He apparently doesn't do a lot of interviews I guess.

Looks like the film also picked up a distributor recently and will be released next year:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/chicago-terry-kath-experience-doc-acquired-by-filmrise-948824

Previous comments from Scheff suggested it was "family health reasons" that led to his absence. Obviously, it's impossible to know what's what.

Ask Mark Hudson what happens when you quit a gig (in his case Ringo's All-Starr Band) to judge a reality singing competition. Hudson's case was extra pathetic, as the show he left Ringo for was axed after only a few episodes as I recall, and Ringo ended a near-decade-long extremely close partnership allegedly because of it.

Scheff was still with Chicago when he agreed to tape the reality thing.  As Hey Jude suggests, the reason given by Scheff and the band was that he left due to family reasons.  I would suggest that  saying he left the band to judge a reality show is playing kind of fast and loose

Especially since it appears the show was only X number of episodes and surely didn't require a full-time leave of absence. I'd also venture to guess Scheff would make more money in Chicago than a short-term reality TV show gig on a third-tier cable channel.

RE: Chicago II

Steven Wilson has remixed/remastered the Chicago II album for release on 1/27. He has remixed recent releases for King Crimson and Jethro Tull, among others.

45 minutes into this documentary.  It's not incredibly revelatory.  Cetera gets the short end of the stick but I think that can be forgiven, especially as he refused to even be interviewed for the film.  Seriously, what is this guy's beef?

A pretty good documentary/bio.    Raw at times.    I think I liked that aspect of it.   

I was left feeling like some crucial points were left out, but as in any case they only have 2 hours to work with and cram in 50 years of history, so it's a tall order. But...no mention of Chicago III? No mention of Live At Carnegie Hall? There were also some purely musical topics left unaddressed, but that I can understand if they were going for universal appeal with this film.

The second half confirmed a lot of why I checked out after the mid 70's, and especially after Terry Kath's death. I appreciate a good song that catches the public ear, I appreciate wanting to get hits and generate money for the band...but there are few examples among my most loved bands and artists who have changed so drastically as Chicago from their first 5-6 albums to what they did later. They had hits with, basically, Peter Cetera and David Foster minus the rest of the band.

All the talk in the doc about being a team, and brothers in arms...I can see where that 80's run of MOR and MTV hits and balladry would cause a lot of tensions.

Some of that came out when Bobby Lamm described a phone call about their live shows he made to Terry Kath shortly before Terry's death, where Bobby said "f*** it, why don't we just give them all the hits if that's what they want", and Terry cursed him out and hung up on him. Terry and Bobby were both there in the early days when they were told by club owners "ply the hits", cover songs of the day to get people drinking and dancing in the clubs, and the band actually got fired or kicked out for playing originals. They stuck to their guns, and became who they became based on staying true to their music...songs in particular which Bobby, Jimmy Pankow, etc wrote and which Terry played a major role. Then when things got kind of tight, and people told them to "play the hits", I guess Terry saw the contradiction there.

After that, as much as I love what Peter added to those early albums and shows, a hell of a musician even though he had some self-doubts about it, the band became Peter Cetera (and Chicago) where the horn section became bit actors in videos and were barely on some of those massive MOR hits if they were on the records at all.

It was good, but the first half was more uplifting and enjoyable for me. I was also sad to see no Beach Boys footage or mentions of them together or at Caribou.

Building on Rocky's post, what is Cetera's problem with the group?

Only he could answer that. It is a mystery, I mean I'm no respected Chicago historian or anything but I know about the band beyond the norm, and I really haven't heard a solid answer why Cetera has such a beef.

I think one of Cetera's beefs is that he was kind of fired from the band. He has discussed this in several interviews. Here's on from a couple years ago from "For Bass Players Only" Magazine:

His story with Chicago came to an abrupt end in 1985, though. At the time, he wanted a pause from relentless touring and an opportunity to work on solo material. He vocalized this to the group’s management, who, he says, promised him a break after another tour and album. After the tour, however, Cetera tells FBPO he got a notice in the mail asking him to do the album and another tour.

“At the bottom of this letter, it says: ‘If you don’t, it will cause us to consider looking elsewhere,’” he says. Cetera contacted management, and they reiterated this ultimatum, so he decided to go his own way.

“They sort of backed me into a corner, and then gave me a little doorway to get out,” he says. “And then I took it. Was I fired or did I quit? I think it was both.”

I think his current beefs about continued "negativity", as alluded to last year during his R&R Hall of Fame "decision", obviously has more attached to it than that one mid-80s incident. But surely a good hunk of the continued bad blood could be linked to that. Cetera probably thought the band were crazy to get rid of the who was singing and writing most of their hits. Yet, they were able to continue on (more as a strong touring band than making a TON of additional hit singles), while Cetera had initial solo success and then basically went to solo touring in casinos and small theaters. The band did kind of prove (much like The Beach Boys did over the years as members dropped off or were picked off) that it's the band's name and songs selling tickets, not the guys on stage.

I recall an interview with their manager (not Guercio, but the guy from later on and to this day, I think his name is Peter Schivarelli) from last year where he wasn't exactly super positive and nice in talking about Cetera either. I think Cetera, as I've already said, was needlessly melodramatic last year with his HOF decision. Not the decision itself or even the reasons for his decision (it sounds like he was quite possibly d**ked around by the HOF organizers), but the way he continually dangled his non-decisions and waffling as if he was announcing the winner of the Nobel Prize or something.

If the Chicago guys could have had more long term vision about their career, they could have easily kept Cetera on and did what some bands successfully do, which is to take a break once in awhile and let people do their solo projects, other pet projects, and so on. I think, much like the Beach Boys again, Chicago probably didn't want to *ever* slow down the cash cow that was and is touring. Not even for one year. I dunno, maybe Chicago in the mid 80s didn't know that they would be able to lucratively tour for over 30 subsequent years and wanted to get as much in while they could. But geez, I don't know if there's another example of a band firing the guy singing all of their hits over wanting to take a year break to do solo stuff.

The beef I replied to was more in line with the era of the HOF non-appearance and his general refusal to even touch the subject more recently. Watching the doc, post-Kath it seemed like a fair number of the peripheral musicians who were in and out of the band throughout the late 70's and 80's didn't want to participate in this doc, and it felt like they swore off the band entirely.

The contradiction was, for me, on full display as the film showed a full hour of the original members talking about team and family and almost swearing a blood oath to stick together from the earliest days of the group, and with that in mind all of that seems to have flown out the window as soon as they had that run of hits with David Foster.

I can see Cetera's point about wanting a break, but at the same time even the film made clear that in the 80's it became Peter and David Foster without the core band doing much if anything on some of those hit records. That isn't a team at all, and while a natural progression to have MTV and the press focusing on the lead singer of a smash hit song, Chicago was not that band at all when Terry Kath was still involved.

It felt like the whole dynamic changed beyond the surface issues, the core band members in the 80's weren't even needed to make the hit records, yet Cetera walked over not being allowed to do solo projects even though he was the face and voice of Chicago making the hits? It just felt like a bad scene all around.

And might I add too the chapter on Danny's firing did nothing at all to change my opinion that the band turned their back on their brother and fellow traveler from the earliest days. If they swear a blood oath to stay together, and the issue comes down to Danny not keeping up to the band's satisfaction in terms of playing to MIDI sequences and click tracks to be more "current" in the directions the band was going in the 80's and 90's, that's just not cool to fire the guy.

And considering they also tried to pin some of his firing on Danny playing some bad shows, the previous half hour had depictions of the band in general engaging in all kinds of drug taking and alcohol abuse to where they had a phone booth installed on stage where they could dip back there for a toot of coke during the shows, to where they had open access to any form of drug they wanted to be delivered like a pizza to Caribou...can they say honestly that no one else in the band throughout the 70's had a run of playing bad shows, being late for rehearsals, etc? It felt like they needed something to justify booting Danny as the drummer, and it didn't wash with me.

The whole early-mid 80s deal with Cetera and Foster being dominant is a tough one, because the entire band still reaped a lot of benefits from that.

As far as I know, Cetera didn't refuse to sing "Feelin' Stronger Every Day" in concert in the 80s, and I'm pretty sure Chicago kept doing the Cetera 80s ballads well after Cetera left (Jason Scheff, I'm assuming, sang "You're the Inspiration" along with Carl Wilson during the '89 "Beachago" tour), so it's not like the Styx thing where the other guys seems to openly reject some of the melodramatic Dennis DeYoung stuff and sometimes ignored it in their post-DeYoung concerts.

There were other bands that were heavily reliant on a "sound" who then pared it back later on. Even Jeff Lynne ditched orchestras for ELO on some of the 1979-1986 stuff.

Obviously, ideally Chicago would have been able to have some sort of happy compromise (and maybe they did, I don't own a ton of Chicago albums so I don't know if the horn players appeared on maybe some of the album cuts from the 80s still). I always wondered if Chicago were annoyed as much by David Foster's hand in the mix as they were Cetera. But then, didn't Chicago use David Foster on their first post-Peter Cetera album? Didn't they kind of continue to do some more 80s pop/ballad numbers post-Cetera. They were even using hack Diane Warren material several years after Cetera was gone ("Look Away").

Don't get me wrong; the reason I think Cetera needs to be there is because he kicked ass (and apparently still sounds pretty good) on that 70s "Chicago" stuff. Listen to the isolated vocals on "Feelin' Stronger Every Day" on YouTube. Awesome stuff. If Cetera ever reappeared with Chicago, I'd be pining for "25 or 6 to 4" and stuff like that as opposed to the 80's power ballads.

I think all of the guys are probably inconsistent to some degree on what they liked or don't like. Cetera got pegged for doing sappy stuff, yet I remember someone commenting that Cetera said he hated singing the lyrics to "Old Days."

What did surprise me awhile back is that there was some old Cetera interview from some time in the late 80s or 90s, years after he left Chicago, where he mentioned he had recently hung out with Jason Scheff. So apparently outside of the band those guys have actually met and hung out. I'm not sure if they remained close buddies or anything, but kind of funny (though not surprising I guess) that Cetera would potentially have a harder time being buds with Lamm or the horn guys as opposed to Scheff. Al Jardine gets along more with David Marks than he does with Mike Love, and perhaps part of that is because they didn't have 40 solid years of being joined at the hip!

I remember seeing the videos for a couple of those 80's hits on VH1 and thinking, "where is the horn section?" IIRC, the horn players were all seated at keyboards in the video. And then I remember seeing Tower of Power shortly after that, and they were still featuring their horn section, in fact the whole band was rockin' and funky. It just made me think "what happened to Chicago?" But when you have been a hit making machine for many years, I suppose it's a lot harder to get off the merry go 'round. Tower never had the big hit singles that Chicago had.

It lines up with a review I read in Goldmine when the Chicago box set first came out. That set was a blown opportunity, but onto my point - The reviewer even wrote, and I paraphrase "Is it against the law for the horn section to be in the studio?" That was...maybe 1990, 91? I don't recall exactly, but even then among reviewers there seemed to be a sense of a band that was woefully under-utilizing one of their strongest assets and calling cards.

I can totally understand riding the commercial wave and making good bank via whatever style and run they had going with Foster and Cetera, but still - This sounded nothing like the Chicago which I knew and loved, and it was beyond a Jekyll and Hyde scene for me. There was literally nothing, but nothing, beyond the name to connect the original band with what they were doing in the 80's or even a few years after Kath's death.

It's almost unbelievable to hear the difference, but if it made them a ton of money with Foster, then I guess there is their justification.

I'm finding there's a weird secrecy among the members of Chicago.  Not only are the details on the departures of Bill Champlin and Jason Scheff very slim, Walt Parazaider has been largely absent from touring in the last few years, so much so that he has a regular subsitute named Ray Herrmann as part of the lineup but as far as I can see, no reason for Parazaider's absence has been given.  Huh.

Im a big fan off CHICAGO.. But i finally lost it when Bill Champlin left the group..  And what happened to that monster guitar player Dwayne Bailey..?? The players that came in to replace them were not as good.. the last time i saw them was september 2015..  Everything they played was real old and they had become an oldies act..well played but no soul.. RIP..

I think I stopped being a fan when Champlin joined. He represented a lot about what was wrong with that band in the 80's. Just bland, heartless, radio friendly fodder. He was one of those guys when he sang that sounded like "i have so much soul in my singing", when it fact it was all just overwrought, fake soul. Cetera got very bland in the 80's, too. One dull ballad after another. Cetera had/has a good voice, but not good enough to make the the bad material sound good. In other words, he's not Carl Wilson.

Thanks for the heads up on this. I knew next to nothing about Chicago before watching and found this doc to be interesting and entertaining.