two

COLOUR MY WORLD

What the fuck is a Cowsill?

—WADDY WACHTEL

ONE DAY IN MID-1967, AFTER AVIDLY LISTENING TO EVERY song several times over on the Beatles’ new Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, James Pankow, the trombonist for a Chicago-based band called the Big Thing, realized there was only one thing left for him to do: throw his bottle of Vitalis hair tonic in the trash.

Working a nightclub circuit throughout the upper Midwest, the Big Thing had been almost exclusively playing the Top Forty radio hits of the day during countless shows from Milwaukee to Sioux Falls, Peoria to Des Moines, along with dozens of smaller cities and towns across the region. Familiar favorites such as “Soul Man,” “Got to Get You into My Life,” and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” got the crowd dancing and singing, all right. Which naturally pleased the club owners, as happy patrons drank more and therefore spent more. But other than paying the bills, performing covers of other people’s records every night meant little to a seven-piece group of highly skilled musicians intent on creating their own songs and sound—not to mention jettisoning their buttoned-down stage attire of cheap suits and slicked-back hair.

In August of 1967, during the height of the Summer of Love, while playing a weeklong residency at a club in the small town of Niles, Michigan, the Big Thing’s fortunes began to change. There they caught up with a college friend from Chicago named James Guercio, who had come to see them play after a heads-up phone call from the band’s saxophonist/flautist, Walter Parazaider. Guercio, a supremely confident, charismatic, classically trained musician, had recently achieved major success on the other side of the studio glass as the Los Angeles–based, million-selling producer of fellow Chicagoans, the Buckinghams (“Kind of a Drag,” “Don’t You Care,” “Hey Baby”). And he liked what he saw from his old pals in the Big Thing.

“You’re the best band I’ve heard in a long time,” Guercio enthused at the end of his visit. “It may take a while, but I want to get you guys out to L.A.”

In the interim, by mid-1968, having changed their live set list to include an array of original compositions and now wearing whatever clothes they felt like on stage, the Big Thing’s members were finally staying true to their musical instincts, despite being frequently fired by irate club owners who were less than thrilled with the band’s new, non–Top Forty direction. Featuring the unusual presence of three equally capable lead singers—Robert Lamm (tenor/baritone), Terry Kath (deep baritone), and Peter Cetera (high tenor)—each with his own distinctive phrasing, timbre, and range, along with a crackerjack three-piece horn section led by Pankow, little by little the Big Thing was actually becoming a big thing, at least regionally. Unlike their competition, they played rock, jazz, blues, and R&B with equal facility, sometimes all in the same song and often with a set of provocative, socially conscious lyrics to match.

Within a year of James Guercio’s promise to whisk the members of the Big Thing to sunny Southern California, the twenty-three-year-old wunderkind producer was as good as his word. After signing them to an all-encompassing contract that made him both their manager and producer as well as a co-owner of their song publishing rights, Guercio paid for the band to move to Hollywood, where he promptly rechristened them Chicago Transit Authority (or CTA) after the real Windy City bus and train system.

Guercio put the group up in a cramped, rundown, three-bedroom rental house underneath the busy 101 Freeway and let them have at it. Though not much to look at and filled with the buzz of nearby traffic, the group’s new domicile nevertheless served its intended purpose. Pankow, for one, staked his claim to the bungalow’s tiny dining room, turning it into a makeshift bedroom and trombone practice area with an old blanket hung as a room divider. Others crashed where they could, even in the bathtub.

Despite taking advantage of their fair share of what Hollywood had to offer young rock-and-rollers on the rise, including plenty of girls, pot, and the occasional harder substance, the members of CTA were nothing if not disciplined. The minimum of eight hours a day they spent for months on end woodshedding while holed up in their almost laughably small living room yielded a slew of new self-penned tunes.

After playing a short run of West Coast club dates in order to test out their new name and material, they then auditioned for the famed Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip and quickly became that storied venue’s house band on Sunday and Monday nights. Celebrities such as Jimi Hendrix, Joey Heatherton, and Steve McQueen were regular attendees, with a bowled-over Hendrix even telling Parazaider one evening, “You guys got a horn section that sounds like one set of lungs and a guitar player [Terry Kath] that’s better than me.” Shortly thereafter, at Hendrix’s specific request, CTA became the opening act for a couple of dozen shows on his late-spring 1969 American tour.

After securing a deal for Chicago Transit Authority with Columbia Records, based on some demos of the songs they had painstakingly worked up while sitting cheek-by-jowl in their home, Guercio flew with the band to New York City to cut their first LP. Over a whirlwind five-day period inside Columbia’s smallish sixteen-track sixth-floor Studio E on East 52nd Street, the band completely let loose. The music, fueled by years of pent-up dreams, ambitions, and just plain dues paying, came pouring out of them in a torrent of notes and passion, enough to unexpectedly create a double album.

Their hip, one-of-a-kind rock-meets-horns sound leveled a sonic heaviness and lyrical maturity at listeners that perfectly fit the tenor of the times. With powerful tracks such as “Someday” (with the famous “the whole world is watching” crowd chant from the 1968 Democratic Convention police riot), “Listen,” and “Questions 67 and 68,” CTA had become the Big Thing on steroids, with a desire for social change to match. In a year that would feature youthful rebellion as its moral centerpiece—from Woodstock to antiwar protests to John and Yoko’s bed-ins for peace—Chicago Transit Authority had joined the revolution. Straight-laced Columbia Records executives, if a bit wary of what they might have on their hands, were nonetheless blown away by the band’s profit potential.

Three months later, in April of 1969, the album, simply titled Chicago Transit Authority, hit the streets to widespread critical acclaim and steady sales. Six months after that, by the end of the year, the seven members of CTA—despite having a strong first LP release—had not so much as dented the upper half of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, which based its rankings on a combination of retail sales of 45s and Top Forty airplay.

Conversely, underground FM programmers loved CTA. The counterculture embraced the band. College radio played their music incessantly. But hit-song-driven AM radio, where a successful career could happen virtually overnight with the right set of spins by the right disc jockeys in the right cities, gave CTA a collective shrug. The marketing, promotion, and A&R people at Columbia Records did what they could to help break the band among the mainstream, but the program directors at the big AM Top Forty stations in places like New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas always came back with the same question: “Where are the singles?”

Which left a disappointed Chicago Transit Authority searching to find an answer. They wanted hits, but they also played only what they felt. And what they felt generally turned out to be seven-minute-plus message songs, far too long for the average pop radio listener who mostly just wanted something catchy to sing along with. More so, nationwide radio shows such as Casey Kasem’s American Top Forty, while hardly hip, delivered a weekly countdown of “the biggest hits in the land” to millions of avid listeners. Something that could provide unprecedented exposure if a song met Casey’s stringent length and content requirements, which, in turn, were based on the all-powerful Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

Fortunately for Chicago Transit Authority, record labels at the turn of the seventies were surprisingly patient—in today’s terms—with their acts regarding chart success and sales, so Columbia wasn’t likely to drop them, at least not yet. But earning a prominent enough position in the label’s music-talent pecking order was another story. With superstars such as Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Barbra Streisand, and the suddenly white-hot Blood, Sweat & Tears—Columbia’s other horn-based band—already on the roster, a newbie, hitless outfit like CTA had to fight for their place at the table. There were only so many marketing and promotion dollars to go around, let alone time available among those who made the corporate-level decisions about how to spend that money, which meant that being a favored act mattered greatly. A major record label might sign twenty or more new artists in a given year and then only focus their resources to any meaningful degree on just two or three.

So the big issue remained: How can a band that is determined to share its political and social philosophies in songs that are at least twice as long as almost anything else on the Top Forty still find a way to achieve widespread popularity?

For Chicago Transit Authority the answer would come soon enough from between two beds inside a Holiday Inn motel room somewhere in middle America.

AS THE FATHER OF SIX PRECOCIOUS PERFORMING CHILDREN FROM Newport, Rhode Island, Richard “Bud” Cowsill ran a family consisting of equal parts musical brilliance and violent dysfunction. During 1967 his kids, known simply as the Cowsills, had burst on the national music scene with their debut single, “The Rain, the Park, and Other Things,” which made it all the way to number three. At first the media dismissed them as just another novelty act. With the band originally consisting of four boys (soon to be five, plus one girl) in various stages of pre-through-post pubescence, along with, eventually, their ever-present, pint-sized singing mother, Barbara (affectionately known as “Mini-Mom”), it was easy to make that mistake.

However, it quickly became clear that the Cowsills—the future template for ABC’s Partridge Family television series—were anything but a bunch of featherweight one-hit wonders. Skilled singers and musicians, even if a couple of them were still in elementary school, they were tight and talented. This was especially true of the oldest of the siblings, Bill, who was the band’s familial equivalent of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in terms of his brilliant musicianship. Bill Cowsill knew how to sing, play guitar, create a memorable melody line, and write compelling lyrics with remarkable polish. He was also the Cowsills’ unquestioned in-studio leader and all-around musical guiding light, revered by everyone in his family—everyone, that is, except his father.

There is no other way to describe Bud Cowsill than to say that he was an angry, jealous, depraved man. Growing up in unimaginably seedy circumstances as the child of a broken-down prostitute and a smalltime boxing promoter, the underside of life was all he knew. Joining the Navy while still in high school to escape the fractiousness and poverty of his home, the military provided Cowsill with the only example of any real discipline he had ever known. And he made sure to put those same unyielding, heavy-handed techniques to good use on the tender flesh and bones of his own flesh and blood.

Beaten senseless over the slightest of infractions, the Cowsill children were regularly ordered to meet as a group in the living room where, with great theatricality, Bud would move the furniture out of the way, as if creating a giant boxing ring. The quaking kids would then be forced to line up in a row and have the daylights punched out of them, one at a time. If anybody resisted or dared to talk back, they were hit again and again. Some were struck multiple times simply because Bud didn’t like the look on their faces. While lips were being fattened and eyes were being blackened, the children would hear their dad solemnly repeat over and over, “You’ve got to pay the fiddler,” as if his deranged flurry of unwarranted fisticuffs was somehow an important teaching moment.

Worse yet, the usually drunk-out-of-his-mind Bud Cowsill took to making illicit late-night visits to his young daughter’s bedroom. Long petrified of hearing her father’s footsteps coming down the hall and knowing that yet another round of sexual abuse was about to occur, Susan Cowsill eventually managed to summon the courage to turn the tables one evening at the age of twelve, bloodying her loaded father’s face and knocking him to the ground. From then on, she lived with one of her older brothers, Paul, usually the only one to fight back against Bud’s beatings, who had moved to his own place following his eighteenth birthday.

But the flip side of the Cowsills’ family journey was the music—always the music. It was their only escape from the living hell of their home life. It was also their undeniable gift. In addition to “The Rain, the Park, and Other Things,” the band’s late-sixties Top Forty entries included “We Can Fly,” “Indian Lake,” and, most prominently, the number-two-charting cover of the theme song from the musical Hair. Despite his unpardonable sins against his children behind closed doors and without any meaningful managerial direction on his part (an agency booked all their appearances and MGM handled the recording end of things), the ambitious Bud Cowsill nevertheless ended up with a very public hit act on his hands. Something he never ceased to crow about (“I’m the band’s manager—everything goes through me,” he reminded people). The clean-cut mom-and-kids Cowsills septet starred on network TV variety shows. They appeared in milk ads. They became the fresh-scrubbed darlings of leading teen ’zines, such as 16 and Tiger Beat. Most of all, the Cowsills did whatever their old man told them to. Or else.

Though lacking any kind of musical talent and having no business experience, the monetary success Bud Cowsill began to experience through his children only encouraged him, by early 1968, to try his hand at adding to his “stable” of artists. Maybe he couldn’t strum a guitar or decipher a recording contract, but the functionally illiterate Cowsill knew one thing if he knew his own name: more was always better than less.

Which is the precise philosophy that led him, inebriated as usual, to start visiting a nearby club in order to check out a band called the Orphans.

WHILE NOODLING AROUND ON A FENDER RHODES ELECTRIC PIANO in the middle of the night inside a guestroom at a Holiday Inn in early 1970 while on tour with Chicago Transit Authority, a simple chord progression suddenly caught James Pankow’s ear. Having lately been immersing himself in the Brandenburg Concertos by Bach, the German composer’s style of layering melody lines was very much on Pankow’s mind as he played a three-note ascending and then a three-note descending Fmajor7 arpeggio: Bah-dah-dah, Dah-dah-dah, Bah-dah-dah, Dah-dah-dah. As he then changed the lead note in the arpeggio in relation to the arpeggio before it, the hypnotic, up-one-side-and-down-the-other chord pattern turned into a round, eventually ending up back at Fmajor7.

Excited by what he had come up with, Pankow began humming an even simpler yet lilting contrapuntal melody over the top as he went along: Dah-dah-dah-dah, Dah-dah-dah-dah. Immediately recognizing the melodic sound he had in his head to be that of a flute, Pankow leapt to his feet from his playing position sandwiched between the two beds in his room and dashed down the hall. Banging for nearly a minute on flautist Walt Parazaider’s door, Pankow was not to be turned away.

“Dude, what time is it?” is all that a half-asleep Parazaider could muster.

“I don’t know—three-thirty, I guess,” the out-of-breath Pankow huffed. “Quick, get your flute.”

An initially hesitant Parazaider, the founder of the band, did as he was told. He had seen that kind of fever in Pankow before and knew it usually meant something good was about to happen. After throwing on some clothes, Parazaider grabbed his instrument and headed down the hall to Pankow’s room. There the two began running through Pankow’s new composition, with the classically trained Parazaider adding the melody line just as his bandmate and friend had written it. The sound of Pankow’s arpeggiated keyboard chord changes in combination with the sublime elegance of Parazaider’s flute were a thing of beauty, even better than Pankow had imagined. After they finished playing the short, less-than-three-minute instrumental, the two sat in silence, reveling in the magic. Finally, however, Pankow needed to know if his intuition was right.

“Tell me the truth, man. Is this any good?”

“Any good?” a wide-eyed Parazaider replied, breaking into a huge smile. “This song is going to make me famous, motherfucker!”

A few days following their late-night hotel room jam, Pankow came up with a set of simple romantic lyrics to match his instrumental piece. With the trombonist being a firm believer that the biggest hits on the planet have always been love songs—that love is the most powerful of human emotions—he called his new composition “Colour My World.” And to put the song over the top, he opted to go with the husky-voiced, preternaturally soulful Terry Kath on lead vocal, a decision that paid immediate dividends. The instant Kath opened his mouth in the recording studio and began to croon the words, “As time goes on…” Pankow felt himself get goose bumps. He still wasn’t sure the song would be a success with the public, but he knew then and there it was the best damn thing he had ever written.

AS NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD WADDY WACHTEL STOOD ON STAGE playing his electric guitar with his band, the Orphans, before the usual Izod-and-Topsiders-wearing crowd inside Dorian’s nightclub in Newport, Rhode Island—home of the famed America’s Cup yacht race—he did a double take. There at a table with a big shit-eating grin on his face was the same heckling drunk who had been giving him trouble for the better part of a week.

“Play us some real music for once,” the middle-aged lush bellowed, obviously pleased with himself, especially after getting a couple of chuckles from fellow patrons.

A by-now fed-up Wachtel gamely played on, doing his best to temporarily ignore the distraction. At the end of his band’s set he motioned for the club’s manager to come over.

“See that guy over there? I want you to throw him out,” Wachtel said angrily. “He’s driving me crazy.”

“I guess you don’t know who he is then,” the manager replied.

“No, and I don’t care.”

“You should. He’s the Cowsills’ father.”

A puzzled Wachtel looked as if some kind of space alien had just spoken to him.

“What the fuck is a Cowsill?”

DURING MARCH OF 1970, AS JAMES PANKOW CRUISED ALONG with the top down in his used Mercedes 450 SEL convertible on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, glorying in the kind of gorgeous warm weather seldom experienced at that time of year back home in Chicago, he decided to flip on the car’s radio. While idly punching through the various preset buttons on the dashboard, the trombonist and songwriter happened to land on 93 KHJ-AM, the Southland’s premier Top Forty radio station. Figuring it might be a good chance to check out what the competition was up to, Pankow cranked the volume. But instead of hearing the latest single release from the Beatles or the Doors or the Rolling Stones, what he heard was… himself.

After almost slamming into the car in front of him out of surprise, Pankow, his head spinning, pulled to the side of the road. “Make Me Smile,” the song now on the radio, was but a small part of an almost thirteen-minute suite of interconnected songs he had composed called “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon.” Taking up almost the entirety of side two of his group’s second album, simply titled Chicago, “Ballet” recently had been recorded partly in Hollywood this time around, just down the street inside Columbia Record’s cavernous Studio A. Written as an ode to a girlfriend who had gone off to college in West Virginia and broken Pankow’s heart, no part of “Ballet”—which also included “Colour My World”—was ever intended to be a single, certainly not in the stand-alone, truncated form he had just heard. Yet there it was, front and center, on the most important music station in all of Los Angeles, maybe even the country. Pankow guessed that James Guercio or somebody at the label—probably both—had taken it upon themselves to edit “Make Me Smile” right out of the suite and down to AM-friendly size.

Though unsure on one level about how he felt hearing his prized artistic work hacked up for public consumption, Pankow was far from taking umbrage. In fact, he was thrilled. Pankow instinctively knew what the moment meant. He and his band finally had a hit single to call their own—they were on their way. The mighty KHJ was not in the business of playing random songs that had no future. If a record made the station’s playlist, it was almost surely bound to be a hit.

What Pankow found out next pleased him even more. “Make Me Smile” made it to number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 just a few weeks later. Chicago Transit Authority (now officially known as just “Chicago” for its simplicity, not due to any threatened legal action from the real mass transit folks as some have speculated) finally had their big AM hit. More so, they were about to have two of them from the same album. Sung by Peter Cetera, the Robert Lamm–written “25 or 6 to 4”—a song about writing a song—became a virtual AM anthem during the summer of 1970, leaping to number four on Billboard through the strength of its mesmeric, machine-gun-like—and now-classic—descending chord progression along with a gnarly, rollicking, wah-wah-infused one-minute-plus electric guitar solo.

From there the audiotape editing floodgates burst open at Columbia Records. Viewed as found money, nothing makes a record label happier than discovering possible gold in an artist’s back catalog. With razor blades and cutting blocks poised, three more songs, this time from the band’s first LP—“Questions 67 and 68,” “Beginnings,” and “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?”—were also promptly trimmed down to a suitable AM radio length, culminating in yet more Top Forty smashes for the group, all within barely over a year. Further, “Colour My World,” snipped from “Ballet” just like its sister song, “Make Me Smile,” became a Top Ten single too, in the process making Walt Parazaider’s indelible flute solo world famous, just as he predicted.

An avalanche of popular success, it represented the kind of mass appeal that most bands never experience. However, it proved to be only the beginning for Chicago. Soon thereafter, as the early seventies moved forward, they would become one of the biggest bands in the world. But their much-coveted fame and fortune would also take a dark turn. The seven members would pay an unbearably heavy toll for their runaway success, especially their guitarist and lead singer, Terry Kath.