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Author Topic: CNN Films: "Now More Than Ever: The History of Chicago" Airs Sunday Night 1/1  (Read 8822 times)
guitarfool2002
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« Reply #25 on: January 02, 2017, 07:22:47 AM »

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.
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« Reply #26 on: January 02, 2017, 07:54:44 AM »

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.
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« Reply #27 on: January 02, 2017, 08:02:36 AM »

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.
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« Reply #28 on: January 02, 2017, 08:18:27 AM »

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.
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« Reply #29 on: January 02, 2017, 10:09:22 AM »

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!
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« Reply #30 on: January 02, 2017, 01:11:53 PM »

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.
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guitarfool2002
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« Reply #31 on: January 02, 2017, 07:08:29 PM »

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.
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« Reply #32 on: January 03, 2017, 04:49:41 PM »

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.
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« Reply #33 on: January 04, 2017, 12:41:55 AM »

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..
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« Reply #34 on: January 05, 2017, 12:16:57 AM »

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.
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Marty Castillo
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« Reply #35 on: January 05, 2017, 07:33:06 AM »

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.
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