25 or 6 to 4
The title is a timestamp. Twenty-five or twenty-six minutes to four in the morning.
Terry Kath was up at that hour trying to write a song and getting nothing. Instead of writing nothing, he wrote about that — the blank ceiling, the fading light, the cigarette, the pen that won’t move. He wrote about the failure to write. What came out was one of the most ferocious tracks a horn band ever put on tape.
People miss this when they first hear the original 1970 cut. It’s from Chicago II, the double album the band recorded in New York with James William Guercio producing, barely a year into their recording career. You hear the horns and the riff and you think soul, R&B, maybe proto-funk. Then Terry Kath turns the guitar up and plays like he’s trying to settle a debt. Jimi Hendrix reportedly told someone Kath was a better guitarist than he was. Believe it or don’t. Put the track on and you understand why the conversation happened.
The riff is a descending chromatic figure that shouldn’t work as hard as it does. It isn’t complicated. It’s the kind of thing a competent player figures out in an afternoon. Kath plays it like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do, and the brass comes in behind it like a wall moving — Peter Cetera, Lee Loughnane, Walt Parazaider, and James Pankow doing double duty as arranger. This is before the band softened into the ballads that paid everybody’s mortgage in the early eighties. This is Chicago when they were a street band from the North Side who had gone to California, gotten loud, and hadn’t yet been told to turn it down.
The Chicago II - Live on Soundstage version was recorded in 2018 for the PBS series, a full forty-eight years after the original. The people in the room are older. Some of them aren’t in the room at all.
Kath has been gone since January 1978. He died from an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound at a party in Woodland Hills. He was thirty-one. The guitar chair has changed hands a few times since — Donnie Dacus, Chris Pinnick, Dawayne Bailey — and for this run it’s Keith Howland, who has been with Chicago since 1995 and knows these songs the way a mechanic knows an engine he’s rebuilt a dozen times.
You have to ask, about a live version this far from the source, whether the fire is still there or whether the fire is just a thing they’ve gotten good at performing. The honest answer is both, and it matters less than you’d think. The architecture of the song is too solid for a band to make it small — the riff, the horn charts, the way it builds into the solo like water finding a drain. These are professionals who have played this song hundreds of times and still know where the moments are.
“Staring blindly into space, getting up to splash my face” — sung in front of a live audience with the horn section locked in, it does what the best live recordings do. It reminds you the song was always meant to be heard in a room with other people.
Peter Cetera had already left by 1985. By 2018 he is long gone, and the band carries on — Jason Scheff handling bass and vocals for much of that stretch, then other configurations. The original lineup, the one that cut Chicago Transit Authority and Chicago II and played Woodstock and made enough noise to get banned in some venues, has scattered into lawsuits and solo careers and the ordinary centrifugal force of time. That’s part of the story with any legacy act doing a Soundstage session. You’re watching something that survived despite every reason it shouldn’t have.
But “25 or 6 to 4” survives with them, which is the stranger thing. It survives because it isn’t a song about being young or being in love. It’s a song about sitting in the dark when the words won’t come. That’s a universal affliction. Every musician in that studio in 2018 knows exactly what Kath was describing, and so does every person watching from a couch at home at whatever hour they happen to be watching.
Twenty-five or twenty-six minutes to four. The light is fading. Something is almost there and not quite there, just at the edge of what you can reach.
Kath turned that into a riff that’s been rattling around for fifty years. Not a bad night’s work, for a song that was supposed to be about not being able to work at all.
