25 or 6 to 4
The title isn’t a riddle. It’s a timestamp.
Terry Kath was sitting up at somewhere around 2:54 in the morning — twenty-five or twenty-six minutes to four — trying to write a song and coming up empty, and 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, and what came out was one of the most ferocious rock tracks a horn band ever put on tape.
That’s the thing people miss when they first hear the original 1970 cut — from Chicago II, the double album the band knocked out in New York with James William Guercio producing, barely a year into their recording career. They hear the horns and they hear the riff and they think: soul, R&B, maybe proto-funk. They don’t expect what happens next, which is Terry Kath turning the guitar up and playing like he’s trying to settle a debt. Jimi Hendrix reportedly told someone once that Kath was a better guitarist than he was. You can believe it or not, but put on this track and at least you understand why the conversation happened.
The riff is a descending chromatic figure that shouldn’t work as hard as it does. It’s not complicated. It’s the kind of thing a competent player figures out in an afternoon. But Kath plays it like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do, and the brass section — Peter Cetera, Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, Walt Parazaider, and Trombonist James Pankow doing double duty as arranger — comes in behind it like a wall moving. This is before the band softened into the ballads that paid everybody’s mortgage in the early eighties. This is Chicago when they were still 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, recorded in 2018 for the PBS series, comes a full forty-eight years after the original. The people in the room are older. Kath has been gone since January 1978, when 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 then — 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.
The question you have to ask about a live version this far from the source material is whether the fire is still there or whether the fire is just a thing they’ve gotten good at performing. And with “25 or 6 to 4,” the honest answer is: both, and it doesn’t matter as much as you’d think. Because the architecture of the song is so solid — that riff, those horn charts, the way it builds into the solo like water finding a drain — that even a competent band would have trouble making it small. These are not a competent band. They 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” — delivered in front of a live audience with the full horn section locked in, it does what the best live recordings of the best songs do: it reminds you that this was always meant to be heard in a room with other people.
Peter Cetera had already left by 1985. By 2018 he is long since gone, and the band carries on with Jason Scheff handling bass and vocals for most of that stretch, and then with 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 long since scattered into lawsuits and solo careers and the ordinary centrifugal force of time. That’s always part of the story with a 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’s not a song about being young or being in love or any of the other things that age on you. 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.
Terry Kath turned that feeling into a riff that’s been rattling around for fifty years and shows no signs of stopping. Not a bad night’s work for a song that was supposed to be about not being able to work at all.
