By December 1969, Chicago Transit Authority, still without benefit of a hit single, was a gold-selling album, and Chicago was a famous band. It changed their lives. "Your life dream is to have a hit record," says Parazaider. "It was amazing because we were close friends, we had gone through all of this upheaval of leaving Chicago, moving to L.A. at a young age, leaving our families, just rolling the dice. We stuck real close together, kept everybody's ego in check. I think for some guys in the group it was harder to cope with the success than others. I don't think there were any of us that sat down around my kitchen table that day in February of '67 and said, "Hey, our goal is to be famous." The one good thing that seemed to help us is, we were the faceless band behind that logo."

Indeed, though critics would always misinterpret their intentions, Chicago's logo and its facelessness were very much in keeping with the style of the late '60's that valued group effort over individual ego. (To the delight of the poor folks who have to put up the letters on theater marquees , the group shortened its name simply to Chicago during its first year as a national act.)

In early December, Chicago flew to London to begin a 14-date European tour. Robert Lamm remembers it as a tour during which the band played for audiences that understood them and took them seriously for the first time. "Even we were not aware of how edgy and different the first album was," he says. "We were just doing what we were doing, and we were hoping that it was different enough for people to notice it was different. But when international audiences heard the album, it just really stopped them cold. We played in clubs all over Europe, and the audience took to it much more readily than we had experienced anywhere in the States. When we came back, the album had gone gold, and we began headlining a little bit, but still the feeling was that American audiences didn't really get it. They got that the band was becoming popular, but we didn't have the sense that they were hearing the music for what it was. So, I think laying in Europe and being treated to a certain musical and artistic respect was eye-opening and really encouraging to the band. It made us realize that what we were doing was substantial, was artistic, and was respectable rather than just this pop commodity that we always felt like in the States, because of the audience, the press, and the way the record company regarded us. That success in Europe and the feeling that we got from the regard we were given as artists really told us in a way that has lasted to this day that this is more than just kid stuff."

In between tour dates in August 1969, Chicago had found the time to record its second album. One of the first songs Lamm brought in for the album was "25 Or 6 To 4," a song with a lyric Chicago fans have pondered ever since. What does that title mean? "It's just a reference to the time of day," says Lamm. As for the lyric: "The song is about writing a song. It's not mystical."

Perhaps the album's most ambitious piece was Pankow's "Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon," which affected the tone of the whole LP. "The second record had more of a classical approach to it," says Parazaider, "whereas the first one was really a raw thing. The second one seemed a little more polished."

"I had been inspired by classics," says Pankow of the Ballet. I had bought the Brandenburg concertos, and I was listening to them one night, thinking, man, how cool! Bach 200 years ago, wrote this stuff, and it cooks. If we put a rock 'n' roll rhythm section to something like this, that could be really cool. I was also a big Stravinsky fan. His stuff is classical, yet it's got a great passion to it. We were on the road, and I had a Fender Rhodes piano between Holiday Inn beds. I found myself going back to some arpeggios, a la Bach, and along came "Colour My World." It's just a simple 12-bar pattern, but it just flowed. Then I called Walt into the room, and I said, "Hey, Walt, you got your flute? Why don't you try a few lines?," and one thing led to another. These things were disjointed, but yet I liked it all, and ultimately it was a matter of just sewing these things together, creating segues and interludes."

The second album also saw the debut of a new songwriter in the band, although the circumstances under which be became a writer are unfortunate. During a break in the touring in the summer of 1969, Peter Cetera was set upon at a baseball game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. "Four marines didn't like a long-haired rock 'n' roller in a baseball park," Cetera recounts, "and of course I was a Cub fan, and I was in Dodger Stadium, and that didn't do so well. I got in a fight and got a broken jaw in three places, and I was in intensive care for a couple of days."

The incident had two separate effects on Cetera's career. The first was an impact on his singing style. "The only funny thing I can think about the whole incident," he says, "is that, with my jaw wired together, I actually went on the road, and I was actually singing through my clenched jaw, which, to this day, is still the way I sing."

The second effect of the incident was Cetera's first foray into compositions. With a broken jaw, the singer had some silent time on his hands. "I was lying in my bed convalescing when they landed on the moon, and I grabbed my bass guitar and started this little progression on the bass, and started writing "Where Do We Go From Here." I think Walter Cronkite actually had said that, and I thought, "Wow, where do we go from here?" So, l wrote it about that and about myself and about the world and about everything in general, and that was my first writing credit."

The second album also took a more direct look at the political situation. Chicago had included chants from the Yippie demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic Convention on its first album. The second album's liner notes (penned by Robert Lamm) dedicated the record, the band members, their futures, and their energies "to the people of the revolution and the revolution in all of its forms."

The development of Lamm's political consciousness dated back to the band's last months in their hometown in the spring of 1968. "Chicago actually was rather like a pressure cooker," Lamm recalls. "During the last couple of months that we were there, there was a lot of unrest and there were National Guard troops in the streets. Now, this is before the Democratic convention, and the city was gearing up and already had a built-in fear of, if not Yippies, at least hippies, and we actually experienced it because we were playing clubs. You know, in Chicago you played pretty late, and a couple of us had run into situations where, leaving the club and having to walk through especially the Rush Street area when the bar's were emptying out, there was a lot of angst directed toward longhairs. That was the first inkling that I had that something as simple as growing your hair long could be construed as a political statement. l think I really started paying attention then to the anti-Vietnam War protests, a lot of the rhetoric that was flying back and forth between members of our government and people who were well-known in show business and the media, talking about whether they were against the war or for the war. There was a lot of that kind of thing every day."

When the band moved to California and continued working up original songs, Lamm's awareness of the world around him affected his lyric writing. In songs like "It Better End Soon" and "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?", he reflected on the kinds of questions: political, social, and philosophical that young people around the country were starting to ask. "I'm not sure exactly what led me to the realization that I could write about things other than romantic topics," Lamm says, "but I think just being alive in those times and watching that conflict in Asia unfold on television daily because Lord knows we all sat around and watched a lot of television, then the culture shock of moving from Chicago to California. And then the alternative press, the L.A. Free Press, was very much into the hot topic of revolution. It seemed that the generation of which I was a member and the generation which was peopling the new bands had a connection, and so it seemed natural to give voice to some of the thinking. As pinheaded (he laughs) as some of my opinions and those of some of my contemporaries may have been at the time, it felt really real, and also it felt like it was right, it was right that a lot of bands at the time were giving voice to the idea of the average person having a certain amount of power, and power maybe enough to stand up to the policies of the government and protest the war."

At the same time, a confluence of the music business and the political movements was occurring. "We had begun in 1969 to play universities and colleges, Lamm recalls, "and very often those concerts were used as a springboard for political gatherings". In other words, everybody would show up at the show, and then they would go and talk about either the anti-war effort or the more abstract concept of actual revolution. Then we played the pop festivals, which were a melting pot of everything, everything from free love to drug use to information dissemination about the anti-war movement, political climate, and social issues. So, it was really heavy stuff for everybody because nobody knew what was going on, but we all had a sense that there was some power available, just by the sheer numbers of us."

Looking back, Lamm says, "I think there has been a revolution. You may argue with the term 'revolution,' but I think for those of us in our late teens or early 20's, that sure was a sexy word." Of course, the political activists at the time sought an idealistic and disruptive revolution that would replace "the system." Lamm feels the actual revolution was less concrete, but perhaps ultimately more persuasive.

"In my view, the promise of paradise and peace on earth, that was something we all fervently believed was possible," he says, "and what occurred was something more subtle. I believe that there was a revolution, and I believe that it happened so gradually that we didn't realize what was going on. Even if you take something as mundane as music (he laughs), there's a whole young generation of rap artists who are saying everything they want and actually expressing themselves politically and socially, and people of all cultures are hearing it, and that form of protest has flourished within the system, and it's accepted, and for the most part it's okay, except to extreme right wingers."

The most obvious example of the social/philosophical revolution Lamm perceives are the changes brought about by the civil rights and anti-war movements so prevalent at the time. "I hate to harp on the whole racial thing, but I think that's probably the easiest way to spot that things have changed immensely since the '60's," he says. "Obviously, they're not perfect for people of color in this country, but they are a lot different. We don't think of black men the same way that we did in 1969. We just don't. The stereotype has changed 180 degrees. Then, certainly a lot of the people who were on the front lines, whether civil rights movement, student revolt, or the anti-war movement, now are in the government. You could say they were absorbed by the system, but I think that looking back now, it was fantasy to think that you could replace the system. You couldn't replace the system, but you could change the system." So, perhaps the revolution, in at least some of its forms, has come to pass.