Talking Chicago With Lee Loughnane

Do you credit some of the band’s success to the relationships you’ve formed over the years?

I think so. They know they’re going to get a good show. … They know we’re going to show up and we’re going to play on time. If we have meet-and-greets backstage, that’s important to the show as well. We’ve learned how important every aspect of the business is. Taking a picture with somebody is very important.

Having toured all over the world, do you have any personal favorites in regards to venues?

I’m not necessarily talking about venues, but I like playing certain cities. Chicago and Boston are two of my favorites. Because when there is time off, time to relax a little bit, you can go out and walk in the park or go to a museum or zoo. There’s a lot of stuff to do. Besides the food that’s available.

But the venues, themselves? … We have built systems to make those venues sound better. They always have their little foibles where there are certain areas you just can’t fix. But we try to sound as good as we can in almost every seat in the house.

Chicago has released its share of live albums. Do you have a favorite?

Think Chicago in Chicago [that] we just did, that’s just come out in the last few months. That one came out really sonically because the systems have gotten better. We were able to sit back and mix it properly. HD filming turned out really good.

You recently released another live album – Chicago 34: Live In 75.

We didn’t actually have to record it because it was done in ’75. The technology wasn’t what it is today and weren’t able to go back and take anything a part and make it sound better or mess with it sonically one iota. It is what it is. You hear that raw energy that we had back in the ’70s when we were just running around playing music everywhere we could.

Back when you were essentially a collection of musicians talking about forming a band, did you ever dream you’d make it this far?

No way. There’s no way of looking this far ahead, first of all. Second of all, how many people, single artists or especially bands … to go on for this length of time, you have to pinch yourself. We know how to walk the tightrope of getting into harms way and getting out of it.

Can you tell us a little more about the business of Chicago. For example, does the band own its own master recordings?

The masters reverted to us in the ’90s. We formed Chicago Records and had a successful business at that time. Other than that, we found out how difficult a job it was to accomplish without the Internet’s help. So we put it up for sale and sold the masters, again, to Rhino / Warner Bros. They’ve had ownership of the original masters since the late ’90s. They’ve allowed us to cooperate with them to repackage and put bonus material in.

We still have control of our destiny so it’s been very rewarding all the way through. Other than that, now we have our website that we’ve built for the past two or three years, that we’ve made all-encompassing. If this had existed, we would never have had to sell our masters. We would have had a mechanism to get them out to the public and pretty much make all the money ourselves rather than have to share it with somebody who had a marketing system in place. The way of the world today is to figure out how to market your music, as it always has been. But now you can figure out how to do it yourself. The last two or three years we have built it [the website] to a one-stop shop.

We’re doing video, premium access, you can pay $11.88 per year and get all the videos that are available. We update it every month and put something new on the site. We also have a recording system that is traveling with us on the road. Within our schedule and travel and the lack of time we have off to write and record, we’re putting together brand new original material we can sell from the website. So we’re moving forward.

When looking at old images of Chicago’s early years and seeing you and the horn section stripped down to the waist, sweating under the lights and playing your hearts out, can you still relate to the 20-something Lee Loughnane in the photograph?

Yeah. There was a lot more fear involved. I still just wanted to play, but I tried to hide in the midst of all the chaos. I have pretty much grown up in the business and learned how to project that music energy out to the audience. I’d never realize that the nervous energy you have before the show is actually a performance tool that you use.

Initially I drank it away and did drugs and all that stuff to get in the groove. … to prevent myself from being nervous. Once I got sober I realized that [it’s] the energy you use to perform with and it’s been a lot more comfortable since. It took me 20 years to get there. Some people don’t have that longevity. They learn how to use the energy or some people never figure out what it is. Unless you get up there and you are nervously excited about what you’re doing, and you project it out to the audience and they take that energy and throw it back to you, you don’t have much of a performance. It just sort of lays there. If somebody pays a lot of money [to see you] and they find themselves falling asleep, they’re apt not to come back the next year. They can sleep at home.

Was there ever a sense that Chicago was competing with other acts on the Top-40 charts?

Not between the musicians. In the press, that’s where all that tension was created. It was something to write about … because they have horns and we have horns, we’re competing with each other. But that wasn’t the reality. They were playing and we were playing. We were doing the best we could.

But didn’t critics compare the band to Blood, Sweat & Tears at one time?

The first [BS&T] album was produced by Al Kooper. He saw us play at The Whiskey and said, “That’s the band I want to do.” He went back to New York, wrote the music, hired the musicians, went into the studio and recorded the album. He was on staff at Columbia Records in New York and got their album out before ours was released. The struggles of trying to get a deal going, nobody wanted to buy us. They would come in and look at us and go, “Hey, you got no show.” They were looking for show business stuff rather than music.

Then Clive Davis saw and heard the merit in the music and put the deal together. We had an unprecedented double-record set because the songs were so long, to have it on one record, there would only have been three tunes. We had to stretch it out to two records.

Wasn’t that part of Chicago’s rep during the early days, that the band had so much music it needed to release double albums?

Exactly. It wasn’t just having the songs long to have them long. There was actually merit to having them [long]. Those sections were used for musical tools. One section would move into a horn ensemble then lead to a guitar solo and then maybe a vocal passage back into the line again. They definitely undulated themselves from the intro through the course of the songs to different movements, if you would. [“Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon”] took a whole side of a record.

A lot of other bands, when those things [long songs] became popular, they would just take long solos, 15-minute solos – rather than write a piece of music that went from one place to the next. And that became more of what they called the “album cuts” at the time. Everybody was doing it.

The thing that stopped it [double albums], it was a business decision, really. Because there weren’t as many songs on a record, because the solos were longer, the album cuts were longer, people started naming [parts of songs]. Instead of it being one long piece – “Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon” – it became seven different copyrights. “Make Me Smile,” “Colour My World” and other movements within that song, they all became songs in themselves and [we] were paid a royalty on each movement.

Then all of a sudden, instead of paying for unlimited copyrights, the [record] companies decided to pay only on 10 copyrights per album. That eliminated double-record sets and long songs. Then, you couldn’t name all the different movements. If you had to say something, you had to say it right now. You couldn’t wait five minutes to get to the point. You had to say it in the first 10 seconds to get people’s attention.

How do you describe the band today?

I think we still face the music business the way we did before. We still love playing music. Every time we get on the stage, we enjoy what it sounds like. We are fanatical about it sounding as good as possible. I think, without that available to us, there wouldn’t be much sense in being in this business.

Also, we are trying to move forward. As much as people try to say we’ve played out our time, as far [as] moving forward, musically, with new material, we’re trying to build that up now. And if somebody isn’t willing to pay for it, we’ll pay for it ourselves. We’ve found a cheaper way of recording that’s still world class, that eliminates the need for having to go into a … studio, and rent equipment. We own the equipment now and can record anywhere we want. We can make any room sound like a studio. We’re moving forward, baby. Watch out!