25 or 6 to 4

The Zoo Crew has got a stack of Chicago II on the turntable, and the needle is dropping into "25 or 6 to 4," the cut that turned a bunch of horn-playing Chicago kids into a national rock and roll band. Zoo Freaks know this one the way bikers know a favorite stretch of blacktop. It rolls out of the speakers with that descending guitar figure, the horns punching in like a row of headlights, and Peter Cetera riding the vocal high over the whole machine. If you are tuned in to THE ZOO, you already know the Crew does not play the hits and walk away. They stay with the record, the story, and the people who made it.

Robert Lamm wrote the thing in 1969, not long after the band had packed up and moved west. They were working the off nights as house band at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, and Lamm was living a short walk up the hill in a rented Hollywood Hills bungalow with a pack of fellow musicians who had come out from Chicago. There was a piano in the back room. He came home from the Whisky, could not settle, sat down, and started fooling with a riff that had no name and no words. He told Dan Rather years later that he messed with it for maybe half an hour, looking out over Hollywood and watching the lights on the tall buildings. Those lights became the line about flashing lights against the sky. A neon sign across the city helped write the picture.

He still did not know what the song was about. Across the room sat an old grandmother clock on the wall of that 1920s bungalow. He could not quite make out the hands. They sat somewhere around 25 or 26 minutes before 4. He told Mix magazine he did not expect to keep those words. They were a placeholder, a way to jot down what he was actually doing while he waited for a real lyric to show up. He laid out the grid, figured the chorus, and took the chart into rehearsal at the Whisky. Once the rest of the band got hold of it, the song took shape. Lamm has said more than once that he thought he had a song when he wrote the changes down, but it was not really a song until those guys played it. James Pankow later put it plain: the tune is about writing a song. Lamm had been up, stretched out, looking over Los Angeles, searching for something to say, and the title is just the clock.

That never stopped the rumors. A stubborn one claimed "25" meant LSD-25 and "6 to 4" meant a long trip running from 6 until 4. Singapore's authorities took the talk seriously enough to ban the single when it came out in 1970. Lamm has waved that reading off every time somebody asks. On The Chris Isaak Hour he walked through the same night: living with hippies above the Strip, trying to describe the process of writing the song he was writing, and grabbing the time off his watch because he needed a line to finish the chorus. The watch story and the antique-clock story sit side by side in his interviews. Both end in the same place. He was tired, the hands were hard to read, and the indecision between 25 and 26 stayed in the lyric because it worked.

On the record, the vocal belongs to Peter Cetera, who had come into the band from a group called The Exceptions after hearing what these guys were building. Terry Kath's guitar is the other half of the engine. The solo, soaked in wah, is the part guitar players still pull apart. Kath had room on the studio take and even more room when the band played it live, which they did constantly once the single took off. Chicago II, the 1970 album still called Chicago by a lot of the original fans, went platinum. The single climbed to number 4 in the States and number 7 in Britain, the band's first real Top Five hit, and it never left the set. The official site still treats it as one of the signature tracks from that breakthrough record, horns, Kath's descending figure, Cetera's lead, and Lamm's late-night notes all locked together.

The band that cut it did not start as Chicago. Walter Parazaider, a woodwind player out of DePaul University, had the idea of a rock and roll band with horns and went looking for the best players in town. He already knew Terry Kath and drummer Danny Seraphine from a group called the Missing Links. Parazaider pulled in fellow DePaul students Lee Loughnane on trumpet and James Pankow on trombone, and Kath made the move from bass over to guitar. They still needed somebody to cover the bottom and the keys. Organist Robert Lamm, a Brooklyn kid who had landed in Chicago, got the call. Asked if he could cover the bass lines on the organ pedals, he said he could. He was guessing. They rehearsed in Parazaider's parents' basement on James Brown and Wilson Pickett tunes and called themselves the Big Thing.

Peter Cetera heard them while they were opening for his band and jumped ship. With a real bass player in the lineup, Lamm could stay on the keys and write. Producer James William Guercio, a friend of Parazaider's, caught the new sound and pushed Columbia to sign them. The name grew into Chicago Transit Authority, which fit a band that Guercio then told to leave town and set up in Los Angeles in late 1968. The city transit authority was not amused by the name on the debut album, so by the second record they had shortened it to Chicago. That second album is the one spinning here. Lamm, Pankow, and Kath were already writing stacks of original material, and the horn charts Pankow built gave the rock songs a size nobody else on the strip was carrying.

They have kept that name and that idea for decades, a rock and roll band with horns, more than three dozen albums, and a pile of records past the hundred-million mark. Lamm and Pankow are still listed with the group on the official pages, even when the road lineup shifts around them. The story on the band's own site still starts in 1967 in Chicago, Illinois, with Parazaider's basement plan. "25 or 6 to 4" is the track that carried that plan onto the radio, a song about not knowing what to write, finished by a band that knew exactly how to play it.

Zoo Freaks who want the long trail can start at the band's own house, Chicago, where the discography and the news still name "25 or 6 to 4" and Chicago II among the records that built the catalog. The official pages on Facebook, Instagram, and X carry the same crew, tour notes, and the old songs right alongside the new dates. The Chicago Fan Club is the members' room run from the band site, and fans also gather in the Official Chicago Fan Club group on Facebook, moderated on the band's behalf. The Crew will keep the record going. Sit back, Zoo Freaks. The horns are just getting warm.