Podunkian Music Club

Chicago-Does anybody really know what time it is?





While we wander around our homes tonight setting the clocks back, we take a moment out to commemorate the weekend’s duty with a look back at one of the monster groups of the sixties and seventies.

Chicago complete with the biggest sound in music at the time was a wonderful amalgam of blues, jazz and rock. Formed in the city that provided the band with its name, they came to embody the free form era of FM music of the time.

An experimental time for music where radio station play lists weren’t closed to only the hottest of groups and when record labels didn’t cater to the latest whim or trend.

Originally known as the Chicago Transit Authority, they delivered their first self titled album in 1969. The band would shorten the name to the now legendary Chicago after that first album, reportedly according to musical lore under threat of legal action by the real transit authority of Chicago.

The first effort, proved to be a monster success, making the band the staple of the recently arrived radio music format of Album Rock which was beginning to take over the FM band of North America’s radios.

The Band, with its mix of guitars, drums, horns and vocals proved to be the perfect fit for the new musically pure new way of delivering the songs of a new generation, they were as hip as was the new medium and the two fit together perfectly, highlighting a shift in musical direction that would burst out through the seventies.

Chicago would go on to record multi platinum recordings year after year, making them one of the world’s most successful recording groups. A massive production run would take place over the next three decades as the band recorded a huge volume of music over the years.

One of the most recognizable and complete collections of their early years is the amazing Carnegie Hall recording, a live four disc set which in a way is the first of the box sets that now are so prominent in the music world.

The journey began in 69, with tonight’s Podunkian Music Club selection, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?".
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We provide it tonight as our way of helping you put some background music on, as you get to work getting those clocks turned back!


Artist-Chicago
Recording-Chicago Transit Authority