plorentz's Full Review: Stone of Sisyphus: XXXII by Chicago
In the early 70s, the band Chicago established themselves as the foremost practitioners of a briefly fashionable corporeal-horn-section-enhanced hybrid of jazz, pop and rock, churning out an impressive series of ambitious albums (four of their first seven albums were double-LPs and one was a four-CD live box set), and seemingly endless and almost infuriatingly diverse string of successful pop singles including songs like the apocalyptic rocker “25 or 6 to 4”, the hauntingly atmospheric (thanks to the Beach Boys’ harmonies) “Wishing You Were Here”, the perky-quirky fun-in-the-summertime pop of “Saturday in the Park”, and “Colour My World”, a shoo-in for the Wedding Song Hall of Shame.
Their dominance of their chosen subgenre was the result of a combination of things. For one thing, their outspokenly liberal politics (their first album featured a song called “Someday” inspired by the Democratic Convention of 1968 which integrated the protesters’ chant “The Whole World is Watching” into its intro), were far more palatable to their chief competitors’ Blood, Sweat & Tears’ tangential ties to the Nixon administration. And where B,S, & T featured one very powerful vocalist in the form of David Clayton-Thomas, Chicago was a far more democratic animal, with three distinctive vocalists – the husky, bearish Terry Kath (Clayton-Thomas’s most obvious competition), Peter Cetera, who could sound like a Fogerty when he wanted, but became more notable as the band’s lovey-dovey crooner, and Robert Lamm, who, along with being the band’s social conscience, boasted a smooth smoothey blue-eyed soul baritone – and virtually every member of the 7-man band were contributing songwriters. They loved to experiment as much as lesser known peers like Chase, but unlike that band, they also new how to make an irresistible 3-and-a-half-minute single, and in their first decade of recording, they sent 21 of those singles into the American Top 40.
But as the ‘70s waned, so did Chicago’s fortunes, and a break with their long-time producer-manager James William Guercio and the tragic death of their founding guitarist Terry Kath, whose fiercely rhythmic licks and soulful Ray Charles-style vocals were the band’s primary link to cover-of-the-Rolling Stone critical credibility (Hendrix was a fan!), left the band directionless, hit-starved and floundering. With a new record deal, a new guitarist-vocalist in the form of Bill Champlin, and the heavy production-songwriting hand of David Foster, the band found a renewed commercial footing (and how!) with their 1982 album Chicago 16, and throughout the ‘80s, they band became the pre-eminent brand for well-crafted – if artistically empty – power balladry, and where the end of the ‘70s found the band limping into obscurity, the end of the ‘80s found them at the peak of their unit-moving powers. Chicago 19 yielded 5 hit singles, 4 of which sailed into the top 10, one of which, the ubiquitous “Look Away”, was declared by Billboard the number one song of 1989.
Unfortunately, by then, the band was having a crisis of the soul. They had never been more successful, but they felt (rightly) they’d lost a connection with what had made them great (and successful) in the first place. Their iconic horn section – still the clear stars of their live act – were virtually inaudible on record, their social consciousness relegated to an album track here and there, and their songwriting voices jettisoned in favor of the prefab prom-ballads of Diane Warren. A change was clearly in the offing, and the band made some overtures toward artistic redemption with 1991’s easily but unfairly maligned Twenty 1. If the album was crippled by conflicting motives, an over-reliance on blah outside material, and really, really bad cover art, it also marked a dramatic re-emphasis on the horns, and a concrete demonstration that the band’s self-written songs really could outshine Diane Warren’s, even if the record company still insisted on giving Warren the singles. When those singles unceremoniously flopped, it appeared that the band had an opportunity to really change directions in a big way.
With their next album, that’s exactly what they’d set out to do. Enlisting producer Peter Wolf who, due to work with both Frank Zappa and Starship, had impressive credentials both artistic and commercial, the band set out to reclaim the soul they’d sold out ten years earlier, and eventually called the project Stone of Sisyphus. By all accounts, it was the most fun they’d had in the studio together as a band in years, and also the work they were proudest of – a collaborative, experimental, band-written, and band-driven record, which, as with their early albums, allowed for a few marketable radio singles. But their label Warner Bros. rejected the record, and it was shelved. In the following years, the band retreated into the land of product – a big-band themed covers album, a Christmas album, a live album, and an endless stream of compilations. All the while, the mythical Stone grew in stature in the minds of curious fans.
- - - - - Any album saddled with that much baggage is bound to fail on some, and probably most, levels. But when Stone of Sisyphus finally saw the light of legitimate release in the summer of 2008, fully 15 years after its recording, and really (despite its titular numbering of XXXII) only the second full-length studio album of Chicago originals released since Chicago Twenty 1, Stone of Sisyphus, also had anachronism and a starving (and/or long-since departed) fan base to contend with. This is, to be sure, a weird little record, and not always in a good way. If the band was trying to recapture some of the spirit of their earliest records, they missed and landed somewhere in an artistic netherworld most reminiscent of late 70s albums like Chicago 13, where each track seemed like an almost suicidally desperate attempt at relevance – here a disco song, there a country-rocker. This is a fitful, messy record, and for every idea that almost works, there are a couple others that crash and burn spectacularly. Nevertheless, it’s the only truly vital record they’ve produced since the end of their 80s heyday.
“Bigger Than Elvis” is Jason Scheff’s touching tribute to his dad Jerry Scheff, Elvis Presley’s bassist. With a lyric about how the young Jason missed his dad while he was traveling, but got to watch him on TV where, to Jason, he was “bigger than Elvis”, it’s a monster tearjerker, made even more so by the fact that Jason got his dad to play on the song: they muted the vocals when the elder Scheff was in the studio so he wouldn’t know what the song was about – Jason presented the song to him as a Christmas present. Hallmark Special anyone? But wait, there’s more: the band also called in Elvis’s back-up singers The Jordanaires to sing back-up and their rich, aged-to-perfection harmonies are one of the most gorgeous things I’ve heard on a CD. The song’s moving grandeur is marred only by a weird, theremin-like synthesizer solo that sounds interesting, but so wrong.
“Interesting, but so wrong” is “Sleeping in the Middle of the Bed” in a nutshell. But then, “wrong” may be putting it charitably when it comes to a song that couches Robert Lamm’s rapped (rapped!) verses about urban apocalypse in the middle of a new jack rhythm loop, heavy metal guitar squalls, and some of the busiest most frenzied horn arrangements trombonist (and lead horn arranger) James Pankow has ever come up with. The song is every bit as disastrous as you might imagine, and yet I find myself drawn to it, if for nothing else than its sheer bird-flipping bodaciousness. That, and Bill Champlin delivers one hell of a fiery vocal on the song, which, by itself, almost lends the song a bit of Pentecostal redemption. For all the wrong reasons, “Sleeping in the Middle of the Bed” is one of the highlights not just of this album, but maybe of Chicago’s latter-day career. With a more focused execution (maybe get a real rapper to do the verses?), the song might have been a masterpiece, however uncharacteristic of the band that produced it. Instead, it’s merely an endlessly fascinating trainwreck.
The rest of the record pretty much falls between these two extremes and really, is not nearly as revolutionary as its reputation might suggest, nor as hitless as the Warner execs had assumed. Sure, the industry-bashing “Plaid” opens with some nifty Peter Gabriel-style world music textures (all the rage in ’93, people!) that would have sounded wildly out of place on any other Chicago record, but it evolves into a sharply played, sharply sung, sharply worded Steely Dan-style groove on the chorus: Turtle Wax-slick group harmonies and another tour-de-force vocal from Bill Champlin, who sounds, throughout the disc, like a caged animal released. “Here With Me (Candle in the Dark)” is a frightfully strong power ballad which starts from the band’s 80s hitmaking formula and advances it by way of one of Jason Scheff’s most powerful vocal performances and an elaborate horn interlude. And it’s not hard to imagine the Champlin-sung “Cry for the Lost” becoming an adult contemporary programming staple, and the emotionally supercharged “The Pull” is a monumental rock number.
Collectively, these songs, along with the title track, the circle-closing “All The Years” (which reprises the “Whole World Is Watching” chant from their first album while reflecting on how much we’ve progressed, or regressed, as a society since the revolutionary ‘60s), and “Let’s Take a Lifetime” (all three of which had been released in one form or another prior to the official released of this album), find the band re-energized, and ready to make good on the promises they’d made to themselves with Twenty 1. So much so that even when the songs fail, the ambient energy of the performances makes them well worth listening through. Had it been released as scheduled in 1994, Stone of Sisyphus may still have flopped. But it still would have been the band’s most vital work in years (decades, maybe), and almost certainly would have steered the band clear of the arid limbo their career as recording artists has become – or at least deferred for another decade that eventual fate. It’s good to have Stone of Sisyphus out now. It would have been far better, for fans and band alike, 15 years ago.
- - - - - BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
“Chicago XXXII: Stone of Sisyphus” by Chicago Rhino Records Released 6/17/2008
Produced by Peter Wolf 69 min.
SONGS: Stone of Sisyphus – Bigger Than Elvis – All The Years – Mah-Jong – Sleeping in the Middle of the Bed – Let’s Take a Lifetime – The Pull – Here With Me (A Candle for the Dark) – Plaid – Cry for the Lost – The Show Must Go On /BONUS: Love is Forever (demo) – Mah-Jong (demo) – Let’s Take a Lifetime (demo) – Stone of Sisyphus (No Rhythm Loop)
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