Chicago 17 (1984)Peter Cetera - Bass, Vocals
Bill Champlin Keyboards, Guitars, Vocals
Robert Lamm - Keyboards, Vocals
Lee Loughnane - Trumpet
James Pankow - Trombone
Walter Parazaider - Woodwinds
Danny Seraphine - Drums
Additional Personnel
(too many to list)
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Stay the Night (Cetera, Foster) 3:50
We Can Stop the Hurtin' (Lamm, Champlin, Neal) 4:11
Hard Habit to Break (Kipner, Parker) 4:44
Only You (Pankow, Foster) 3:53
Remember the Feeling (Cetera, Champlin) 4:28
Along Comes a Woman (Cetera, Goldenberg) 4:14
You're the Inspiration (Cetera, Foster) 3:51
Please Hold On (Champlin, Foster, Richie) 3:41
Prima Donna (Cetera, Goldenberg) 4:13
Once in a Lifetime (Pankow) 4:11
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Chicago 16 was a huge success and a huge comeback for the band, so of course producer David Foster was retained to work his magic again on
Chicago 17. He took things farther, adding more synths and electronic drums, another layer of polish to the sound, and an army of session musicians. If
Chicago 16 was less Chicago than it was David Foster, the ratio is even lower here. More electronics and less horns, more session players and less actual Chicago players on the final record. And as hard as that is for purists to accept, the result was twice as many hit singles (four total), nearly twice the sales (quadruple platinum upon release, eventually going 6x platinum and still counting), and Chicago's most successful record.
"Stay the Night" starts things off again with a rocker, or at least an "Adult Contemporary" rocker. The two hits from
Chicago 16 were both ballads, but the lead track and first single from
Chicago 17 shows that Peter still has some edge to him. "Stay the Night" went to #16, a hit. Not Top Ten, but certainly strong enough to let everyone know that that last album wasn't a fluke. There's more to come.
"We Can Stop the Hurtin'" reminds us that Robert Lamm is still in the band, back from whatever issues he was handling during the
Chicago 16 sessions, and singing lead on a song co-written with Bill Champlin and someone named Deborah Neal. It also reminds us that Chicago has a horn section, as they didn't play on the opening track but are featured here. They even take a break. It's against a backdrop of synths, but you take what you can get, and it's even kinda cool hearing them in a somewhat different setting. Actually, as electronic and synth-heavy as this song is, I was surprised to learn that Robert wrote it. It's a nice combination of new and old Chicago.
"Hard Habit to Break" was the second single and went all the way to #3 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts. By outside writers Steve Kipner and Jon Parker, it's a ballad, but it's also another masterpiece of production, with horns, strings, synths, guitars, and drums, all sharing space and somehow sounding full yet clean.
"Only You" is an interesting song. A James Pankow song, with (presumed studio-earned) co-writing credit to David Foster, the verses are sung by Robert Lamm, the pre-chorus by Bill Champlin, and I'm honestly not sure who that is singing the chorus, but it's a high falsetto, and between that and the horns and synths, my first thought was that we'd suddenly switched to an Earth, Wind & Fire song. Not that that's a bad thing; as mentioned upthread, EWF also had a great sound which featured horns, and they were pretty hot around this time, too. But this is a Frankenstein of a song. Not bad, actually pretty good, but weird.
"Remember the Feeling" is a Cetera-sung ballad co-written by Peter Cetera and Bill Champlin. It has all of the hallmarks of an Adult Contemporary Power Ballad -- distorted guitars low in the mix and topped with strings, heavy gated drums (compressed and also slightly lower in the mix so as not to be confused with actual rock and roll), acoustic and electric piano, synths, and background vocals in high harmony. The result is a song with enough schmaltz to get the girls excited but enough balls to not completely offend the guys, or at least be mostly tolerable while they slow-dance with the girls.
"Along Comes a Woman" is another Cetera song, co-written this time by Mark Goldenberg. It's an uptempo song, actually something like rock and roll or at least what passed for it in the 80's. It was the fourth and final single from the album and reached #14 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The third single was "You're the Inspiration" yet another Cetera ballad with co-writing credit by David Foster. It reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 but went all the way to #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart.
"Please Hold On" is an interesting song. Co-written by Bill Champlin and Lionel Richie back when they worked together, David Foster also has co-writing credit, presumably earned in-studio. It's a shuffle, almost funky, but smoothed out by the horns and and electric keyboards into something like Adult Contemporary R&B. Except I'm not sure if such a thing even exists. If it does, it was probably invented right here.
"Prima Donna" is the other Cetera-Goldenberg composition. You know the song "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins (actually written by Georgio Moroder with lyrics by Tom Whitlock)? I'm pretty sure they listened to this song a few times. The beat, the accents. It's really hard for me to listen to this song and not hear "Danger Zone" but at least I know that this one came first, so it's not Cetera's fault.
And apparently we're back to closing the album with a James Pankow song. "Once in a Lifetime" is, incredibly, the only song on the album not co-written by at least two people. James' horn charts are great, of course, and they even take the break. So you can look at it a few different ways. Either David Foster wanted to put the Pankow song with all the horns last because he considered it of a lower priority, or he was aware that old-school Chicago fans were still looking for something to latch onto, and if this was the last thing they heard, then they would be somewhat appeased.
Actually, the whole album feels like a balancing act between the old and the new. Foster knew that he'd brought Chicago to a new audience with
Chicago 16, but he also knew that at least some of the sales, and credit for even being there in the first place, was due to the old-school Chicago fans. Where
Chicago 16 was remarkably consistent, especially considering everything he had to do and everyone he had to please all at once,
Chicago 17 feels like he was trying hard to drag the band into the 80's, and at the same time break new ground in order to not appear to just be doing more of the same.
I think that while
Chicago 17 did better commercially, as an album it is overall less consistent and less balanced. There's very much a feeling like "okay we've had a few rockers in a row, time for a ballad... okay now time for an old-school song with horns to please the fogies... okay now another ballad..." I'm tempted to say that you can't please everybody, but since this is Chicago's top-selling album of all time, I don't think that that was much of a concern here. How do you argue with this kind of success? Six million copies sold.