Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –

COULTERVILLE, Calif. – “I just want to be free … free of all the hurt … all the pain … end those lonely hours … those lonely days, yeah, yeah…”

Someone could definitely write those lyrics now and I could relate, as I’m sure many of you can too in this crazy, mixed up world.

Not sure why Robert Lamm of the rock-horn band Chicago wrote those words in the late 1960s or early 1970s. But by the time I heard them live in concert at Birmingham’s Boutwell Auditorium in November, 1973, I was free for the first time in my life in a sense. In the sense that I obtained my drivers license in October and drove a double date to a rock concert for the first time.

Chicago was one of the first rock bands to grab my attention in those days, probably because it was a horn band that even our high school band director Ron Widener liked. He even used arrangements on some of their songs in football game half time shows in those days. Perhaps “25 or 6 to 4” or “Saturday in the Park.” He died back in 2010.

I had ended up as a drummer in the school band by sheer accident in September 1971. In choosing our fall schedule that year, we had to choose one “art.” I was interested in taking art classes, but a close friend of mine chose band and urged me to do the same. You could not be in the band and take art.

Then you had to pick an instrument to play. Widener tried to get us both to play the trumpet, his instrument of choice. We chose drums instead. It just seemed cooler, I guess in retrospect.

Many of our fellow band members would go on to love and remember Widener fondly. That was not my recollection. I just recall him cussing out the drum section all the time, calling all drummers “stupid.”

Perhaps with the exception of Hugh Carpenter, the best drummer I knew in high school and my friend to this day on Facebook. He went on to play in the marching band at Southern Mississippi University in Hattiesburg, a great marching band. I thought Widener was an ass and quit the band before my senior year. By then I had my own rock band anyway.

By the fall of 1973, in fact, I had a set of blue sparkle Ludwig drums and my own rock band practicing in our underground basement about a mile from Erwin High School and right down the street from Jefferson State Community College on 26th Avenue. Hugh was raised right up the street and around the corner, and Wayne and Dale Perkins were raised on 25th Avenue not far away.

Related: It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll But I Like It: Wayne Perkins, The Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd

Danny Seraphine was the great drummer for Chicago, and by that time the band was in their prime, headlining large concert venues. We got very close to the stage that night, and I recall being mesmerized by Seraphine’s performance. He not only played an amazing drum solo, but he did stick twirls and tossed his sticks high up into the air, then into the audience after catching them while never missing a beat.

To this day I’ve never found a video of the band on YouTube that shows what I remember from that night. I do not believe we were so high that I would have hallucinated it. These videos are as close as I can find on YouTube.

Chicago was an American rock band formed in Chicago, Illinois, in 1967. Self-described as a “rock and roll band with horns,” their songs often also combine elements of classical music, jazz, R&B and pop music.

Growing out of several bands from the Chicago area in the late 1960s, the original line-up consisted of Peter Cetera on bass, Terry Kath on guitar, Robert Lamm on keyboards, Lee Loughnane on trumpet, James Pankow on trombone, Walter Parazaider on woodwinds and Danny Seraphine on drums. Cetera, Kath and Lamm shared lead vocal duties. The group initially called themselves The Big Thing, then changed to the Chicago Transit Authority in 1968, and finally shortened the name to Chicago in 1969.

After a decade of success, the band reached a crisis in 1978, when in January, the great guitar player Terry Kath died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound playing Russian Roulette with a gun he thought was not loaded.

But the band found a way to keep going for many years. They have their own YouTube channel where you can listen to their greatest hits and albums and also interviews and live shows over the years.

You can also follow them on Facebook.

Long live Rock ‘N’ Roll.

Chicago circa 1975 (left to right, front: Lamm, Kath, Parazaider; back: Cetera, Loughnane, Pankow, Seraphine)