A Conversation with Chicago’s Robert Lamm – HuffPost 6.18.14

Mike Ragogna: Robert, I’m honored to speak with you. LMike Ragognaet’s get caught up with Chicago. You have a lot of irons in the fire right now, including a tour. I’m sure you’re looking forward to that, huh?

Robert Lamm: Oh we are, but it’s one of those things where we’re always on tour so it’s just a question of what exactly we’re going to do while we’re on tour. We started this year going clear across Canada, our second Canadian national tour in the last few years. Of course, we went across during the month of January and February, which was an experience this year, especially with all the zero temperatures. But going from there, going to a couple of concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra interspersed with our first appearance on the Grammys and heading of to Europe next week for roughly three weeks and then coming back to do the REO/Chicago tour.

MR: So how long has Chicago been around now?

RL: I would say about a hundred and thirty-six in rock years.

MR: [laughs] What does Chicago mean to you these days?

RL: For me, besides the extended family aspect which it has become–and I’ve said this to people who were really involved with Chicago early on–I think that without Chicago there would be no Robert Lamm. I always wanted to be a composer, so I was able to develop as a composer, I learned how to arrange by arranging for Chicago, I’ve learned how to be a better songwriter, be a better composer, be a better musician. For decades now I’ve been surrounded with really wonderful musicians who continue to be curious about music and that’s really what it takes. Again, I think that it’s provided a growing experience for me as a person and as a musician.

MR: Why do you think Chicago continues to be popular and remains part of the culture?

RL: I make a joke about this from night to night about, “What is the reason for Chicago’s longevity and appeal?” I joke that it’s our dancing, but really I do think that even from the beginning, even from the context of the psychadelic sixties going into the seventies where rock groups were allowed to experiment and record those experiments and in those days FM radio provided access to those experiments, where today that’s not so much the case, I think that what we contributed is this enigmatic approach to songwriting. I contend that a lot of our tracks are not really songs, they’re compositions because we’ve always had to make room for the brass sections and percussion and vocals and lyrics, they’re sort of longer things than a three-minute song, which I have no problem with. When you can write an elegant song in less than three minutes, like a James Brown tune, forget it, there’s nothing more perfect than that, but I think what Chicago contributes is an approach that other people dug and said, “Okay, we can do that too.”

MR: I agree with you. I remember Chicago’s beginnings were so unique, you were doing double albums right off the bat. I can’t think of any other act that was afforded that kind of support by a label as far as their creativity. Right out of the chute you guys were doing double albums, complicated horn arrangements that professors in colleges and kids were getting into together, and it was easy for you. Being a a kid the inspiration was different than being a mature adult. What is your creativity like now versus how you did it then?

RL: Well a lot of people haven’t heard the new album because it’s yet to be released, but when our manager first heard the master mixes he emailed me and said, “Why are these songs so long? You’re never going to get them on radio.” I said, “Peter, listen, this is really a pure Chicago album.” The atmosphere in the world of music and the music business has completely changed. You’d better be ready to do anything because we’re basically on our own here.” I think that nowadays we are inspired by the technology and we are inspired by the wild west of the music business right now. We can do anything. We basically self-produced and recorded this on the road. You may have done that article about the rig, what we laughably call “our portable recording studio,” even though it takes several people to move it around. All that is inspiring in the context of this large arc of our career where we’ve gone through so much stuff. Of course as a songwriter the globalness that we’re all living with now is a very different atmosphere than the seventies, let’s say, when we were dealing with voting rights, racial issues–still–we were dealing with the war in Vietnam, we were dealing with student protests, it’s a very different situation now. There are global issues that we now have to look at and a lot of that finds its way into our new music.

MR: Wow, beautiful. You didn’t lose the fire.

RL: Well we are all bombarded by the twenty-four hour news cycle. I think if you’re reading newspapers or watching television or online at all there’s a lot of information coming in. It’s amazing how much information we didn’t used to get. Of course, it’s all really controlled anyway, but we do have access to so much now. It’s the same with music, you have this incredible access to music in every corner of the world. Every culture in the world that’s making music somehow finds its way onto the web and you can hear things you never dreamed you would ever hear. I find that very inspiring as well.

MR: Any current social issue we should be discussing?

RL: Well, I would say obviously the issue of guns in America…definitely global warming–and this is an issue that appears in one of the Chicago songs that Lee Loughnane wrote, a song called “America.” It was when our party politics had descended to a new low where nothing was getting done and we had lots of pressing problems in this country last year and the two sides of the aisle could not even sit down and talk as adults. They were squabbling like grade-schoolers. Of course, the big thing is that USA always seems to be involved in some sort of conflict and the thing that’s not spoken about is that it’s usually about access to oil. All those things bother me and I don’t want to waste your time by going down my shopping list. All those things are worth thinking about and worth raising in the context of a song when it’s appropriate.

MR: Again, wow, well said. How do you think Chicago music fits into this mess?

RL: Hey listen, when we play our concerts we play two, two and a half hours, maybe thirty or thirty-five songs and there’s a lot of, “You’re the inspiration” and “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” and “If You Leave Me Now” and all that kind of stuff because that’s what we all relate to and that’s what we want to hear to kind of shut off the stuff that’s going on in the world around us. I understand it’s necessary to have both things.

MR: Robert, one of the projects that you worked on that I’ve always liked was Like A Brother with Gerry Beckley and Carl Wilson…

RL: Oh, no kidding! What a surprise, thank you.

MR: What’s interesting to me is that for years Chicago and The Beach Boys almost had this cousinship going on. What was that relationship built on?

RL: A lot of it had to do with our longtime producer Jim Guercio who produced a dozen or so Chicago albums and also helped revitalize The Beach Boys. They had kind of lost their way, by the early seventies I would say no one even wanted to think about The Beach Boys. Guercio was convinced that Brian was a genius and if he could get on the right path The Beach Boys could be revitalized. It didn’t quite happen the way that Jimmy was hoping it would happen but Guercio did play a lot of bass on some of those mid seventies records and really was the inspiration for the two bands touring together, which is where we met for the first time. It was a really crazy couple of years, two bands hanging out and as you say a cousinship developed. I had friendships with all of them, I’m still very close friends with Brian and as you may suspect Carl was one of my very closest friends. We had him for as long as we had him but it was really an honor to call him my friend.

MR: Beautiful. You were in a choir, too, with Harry Chapin. Do you remember Harry?

RL: Of course I remember Harry. Harry was a little older than me, he was already in college I think when I was in junior high school. All the Chapins were musical, their father Jim is a very famous jazz drummer, but I remember Harry, when he first started hanging around with the younger Chapins and the kids in the choir he was actually playing trumpet at the time. He was good trumpet player. I don’t think anybody knows that. He and Tom began teaching themselves to play acoustic guitar and that was my first exposure to the possibility of small groups of musicians sitting around playing instruments. That was sort of the beginning of the folk immersion into pop culture.

MR: I’ve heard that phrased as “The Folk Scare.”

RL: [laughs] It was a strange time, wasn’t it?

MR: Hey, I want to talk about Phil Ramone. You shifted from Jim to Phil as a producer. Was it just time to move on to another producer?

RL: There was actually a business acrimony going on between Guercio and the band. It was a very good relationship and a long relationship while it lasted, but at some point, we had to walk. While we were with Guercio, Phil had done some remixes, mixed some singles for us. We had done a number of television specials in the mid to late seventies and Phil was always the sound guy on those, so we developed a friendship with him. He was a gregarious, smart, fun guy to hang out with. Just to hear him tell stories about who he recorded and what went on in those sessions was worth the price of admission anyway.

MR: You were on the stage with Robin Thicke at the Grammys, what was it like merging the genres?

RL: First of all, we didn’t know we were going to do the Grammys until a couple weeks before and we had rehearse and do the Grammys around the concerts we did with The Chicago Symphony, so it was really switching gears back and forth across a couple weeks there. Our attitude was that we were a little skeptical going into rehearsals but I Googled the guy, we listened to stuff and I realized he knows his way around a studio, he had had some succes already, I thought the music he was making was worthwhile. He was very professional. He showed up on time, he was prepared, he made some suggestions, he helped us put together that little medley that we played during the Grammys. Once the skepticism was gone–on both sides probably, he probably expected he’d be playing with dinosaurs who needed to sit down to play, I don’t know–after the rehearsals were over he knew we were the real thing, too. I think our attitudes were, “We can do this, this is not a problem, we’ve done this before.” We had a lot of fun.

MR: And in the back of his mind, he had to be thinking, “I’m playing with the world’s greatest horn band.”

RL: He did confide that to me later on.

MR: You talked about The Chicago Symphony earlier, that must have been a very cool event for you guys.

RL: As you know, that is a world-class orchestra. A couple of the players were young teachers of their instrument back in the day when some of the horn guys were studying their instruments at the University level. So there was an awareness of the guys in the band already but we also were aware that that band, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra had won something like three or four dozen Grammys over the years. We just walked into rehearsal and said, “Listen, we are totally intimidated by you guys. Let’s just have some fun.” I have to say, at this point in our career we’ve played with a number of symphonies and The Chicago Symphony was spectacular. They rocked. Mostly the problem with symphonies is that htey can’t swing, they can’t rock. That group can do it. It was really terrific fun.

MR: Was that recorded? Will it ever be released?

RL: I’m sure there’s already bootlegs of it around, but no, we couldn’t record it or film it. Riccardo Muti, who is the main director of The Chicago Symphony attended the concert on the second night and was completely blown away. He’s been chasing everybody around trying to get us to come back and do that again and film it and recorded it. I’m sure it will happen sometime in the next year or two.

MR: Speaking of projects that are or were release-challenged, Stone Of Sisyphusremained unreleased for a long time. What is that story?

RL: The story was that sometime in the early nineties, I’m guessing ’93 or ’94, it was time to do another album for Warner Brothers. The producer was Peter Wolf, again a terrific producer and a terrific musician. In pre-production, we talked about the kinds of songs we wanted to do. We wanted to stretch out and harken back to the way that Chicago recorded during its first albums and approach the songs that way. We did, and Peter Wolf was especially leaning on me to provide lyric content that was a little more meaningful than some of the eighties ballads. So we did all that, we put it together, we loved it, but the mistake we made was that we didn’t let the executives at Warner Brothers come to the studio and listen during the process. We didn’t tell them to stay away, but we also didn’t invite them. There was no particular reason why we didn’t, but I later found out that they were offended because those guys like to feel like they had a hand in everything. When we finally delivered the album, they essentially didn’t like it, and they said, “We can’t release it as this, you guys have got to go back in the studio and do some other tracks.” We, at that point, were in love with the album as it was; we loved all the elements of it, we liked the energy of it, we liked the forward-thinkingness of it. We said, “Number one, we don’t have time because now we have to go on the road, and number two, we like this album as it is.” We agreed to disagree, we owned the album, we walked away and that was that. Cut to the following decade when we were essentially on our own and we decided to remix it and see what else was happening and we released it ourselves.

MR: That album was somewhat appropriately titled, huh.

RL: Yeah, really. Who knew?

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

RL: My opinion is that when your muse leads you to doing music it needs to be something that you would do no matter what. You need to realize that aside from practicing and aside from playing it really is a lifetime exploration. An important component to being a musician that some people don’t understand, aside from practicing and playing, is listening. You need to listen to music, you need to listen also to the other guys in your band when you’re playing music. I think that component gets lost. Nowadays I would say don’t expect to be famous next year, or even two years from now. There are all these alternate ways that people are accessing music now and alternate ways that people are beginning their careers whether it’s The Voice or American Idol or anything like that. The other day I just happened to be looking at my Shazam app and I decided to click on it and I looked at the top hundred Shazsammed artists or the week or the month and there were some artists on there I had never heard of, I never would’ve ever found them, I never would have found them on the radio, they wouldn’t have been on television but interestingly enough there was some good music on there I really want to explore further. Having said that, you’ve still got to go out and play, you’ve still got to do live gigs and as they say, “you never know how people are going to find your music, but the only way you can be sure they won’t find your music is to quit.” So don’t quit. Keep it going.

MR: Over the years, you’ve been able to donate about a quarter of a million dollars for breast cancer research for the American Cancer Society from performances. How is that going now?

RL: For a number of years now, I’d say at least five years we have run kind of an auction where the highest bidder for any given show comes up on stage and sings with Chicago. The audiences have loved it, we’ve raised a good sum of money for the American Cancer Society, specifically for breast cancer research. It’s something that we find we usually know somebody or are related to somebody who has this disease. The treatment programs have imporved quite a bit as a result of the research but it’s still something that is on the horizon, that needs to be solved. That’s the reason that we got involved with it.

MR: Do you have a favorite Chicago song?

RL: I always like playing “Just You And Me” mainly because of the soprano sax solo, it gives us a chance to stretch out between Lou Pardini and myself on keyboard we have a great time grooving with each other and making that solo into something different every night. So for me that’s always been my favorite song to perform live.

MR: And also with a catalog as huge as you’ve got, how do you even start to choose a set list for a live show or a greatest hits album? It must be very hard.

RL: [laughs] We argue a lot. We do. On the bus, backstage, in airports, you can make a case for almost any of the songs. I’m the radical guy in the band, I always want to play the newest stuff or the stuff that is the most obscure. Then there are the conservative party within Chicago who claim that if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. “The set worked last night” or last year or ten years ago and that’s a reason to play it the same every night. Somehow we find the middle ground…unlike our congress.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne