Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Anyone who read this space Friday knows what got me the most excited about this year’s EAA AirVenture.

So how was Chicago? (I hope you’re not expecting an objective review here.)

Well, unless you’re a fan of their less well known songs (including the title of this blog post), I can’t imagine any Chicago fan was less than enthralled with the concert. (In my case, this is the third time I’ve seen the best blend of horns and the traditional rock band lineup in the history of sound.) All of their usual selections — “Count on Me,” “Old Days,” “Beginnings,” “I’m a Man,” “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is,” “Just You and Me,” “Saturday in the Park,” and one of their number one hits, “Hard for Me to Say I’m Sorry/Get Away” — got played. The only three songs I might have added were “Questions 67 & 68,” “Wishing You Were Here” (on which the Beach Boys did backing vocals) and “Love Me Tomorrow” (which would have been difficult to do given that the band didn’t bring an orchestra with them), which demonstrates how difficult it is to plan a concert when you have 40 years of songs to choose from.

Had I bet on the song order with a newspaper publisher/trombone player of my acquaintance, he would have lost. The group started with “Dialogue,” the first time I’ve heard (from live appearance or on TV or DVD) them open with that. After “Alive Again” (which non-fans may have heard opening a sports show) came their first number one hit, “If You Leave Me Now,” which was cosung by the winner of an auction on Chicago’s Web site to raise money for breast cancer research. (Though that is a favorite cause of mine, I did not bid, because hearing me sing might cause airplanes to fall from the sky.)

This concert also had songs I haven’t heard at their concerts, including “Along Comes a Woman” and “Wake Up Sunshine,” plus a couple of instrumentals used as bridges between songs. And it had an ’80s vibe to it, with “Hard Habit to Break” and “You’re the Inspiration.”

One thing that makes Chicago remarkable is how successfully they have added new players into their core group. Two of the four original members — trombone player Jimmy Pankow and trumpeter Lee Loughnane — are pictured here (and as you can see they still enjoy this); keyboard player Robert Lamm apparently wandered off to the side while I was shooting, and saxophonist Walter Parazaider wasn’t in this concert, replaced by Ray Hermann. (After 40 years, you probably deserve a vacation.) At the right is bass player Jason Scheff, who replaced Peter Cetera and sounds very much like Cetera. On keyboards is Lou Pardini; Lamm was playing a keytar, which, well, you can imagine what it is from the name. (First popularized, believe it or not, by Devo.)

While Chicago has recorded a few albums, most of their performance time has been playing, as noted previously, songs that are not quite as old as, well, me. It must be difficult for a band to want to introduce new things when their fans want to hear more of their (older) favorites, but Chicago evidently has managed to reconcile this. Just watching Pankow, Loughnane and Lamm makes one understand why Chicago is still on the road five decades after it began. (And that, as I discovered, for some people playing concerts is more fun than watching concerts. However, I remain uninvited to tour with Chicago …)

I have heard of people entering cars in car shows to avoid having to find a place to park. I have never heard of someone entering an airplane in a plane show just to have a good place to watch the concert. (Riiiiiiight.)

The pictured airplane, and the others around it, made for an unusual concert experience. I walked around the flight line throughout the concert, and the sound bouncing off fuselages made for interesting acoustics. (I imagine the sound man just throwing up his hands and leaving it up to, in the words of an old David Letterman moment, “Volume! Volume! Volume!”) People sat on chairs (guess who didn’t bring one), leaned against cars in the Ford display, and even lay down on the flight line. People danced to the slower songs. The band also played while planes took off and landed, which made me ponder the concept of a band playing with instruments whose technology is newer (synthesizers and electric guitars and bass) than the planes taking off. The band should have shot a video Monday night; between the huge crowd, the lighting from the setting sun and the planes, it would have looked most impressive.

As typical with a Chicago concert, the age range of fans was most impressive. (The youngest fan appeared to be less than a year old, and it is always encouraging to see parents introducing their children to the classics.) And, perhaps in a first (of which, as I believe Pankow noted, they have few) for Chicago, the fans included a gray bird perched on its owner’s shoulder. (Winner of the Most Unusual Moment Involving Living Things Award of the day.)

The concert “closed” with the last half of “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day.” And then the band left. And then the band came back to play the first notes of my favorite of theirs, “Make Me Smile.” And I thought they were just going to play that. Instead, after nearly 90 minutes of non-stop playing, they played the entire 13-minute-long seven-song “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon” (which my trombone friend and I would have thought would have began the concert), starting with “Make Me Smile,” including “Colour My World” (my wife’s favorite, played at our wedding), and ending with the “Make Me Smile” finish, “Now More Than Ever.”

Then the band left, only to return one more time to play “Free” with a U.S. flag as backdrop. (Thanks to the setting sun, the Ford logo leached through the flag, which is an interesting unintended political comment, given that, as EAA chairman Tom Poberezny noted before the concert, Ford is the only one of the Big Three automakers to not get a federal bailout.) The concert wound up with the song about writing a song, “25 or 6 to 4” (a song I can identify with given that I am writing this in my office at 11 p.m.).

Those who haven’t been to AirVenture yet have two more concert opportunities this week, the Lt. Dan Band (fronted by “CSI: New York” and “Forrest Gump” actor Gary Sinise) Friday and Asleep at the Wheel Saturday. Think of AirVenture as either a great airplane show with music thrown in for free, or as a great concert with Everything Aircraft Associated thrown in with the tickets.