Chicago’s Lee Loughnane on Releasing the Band’s Long-Lost 1971 Concert at the Kennedy Center

By 1971, Chicago had been together four years and had three consecutive hit albums from their 1969 debut Chicago Transit Authority, Chicago (1970), and Chicago III (1971). That year, Chicago was one of the first artists to perform at the then-newly opened John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., following Leonard Bernstein, who played its inaugural show on September 8, 1971.

Just two weeks into the opening of the Kennedy Center, Chicago was invited to perform, making them the first rock band to play at the venue, before Diana Ross, Johnny Cash, Stevie Wonder, Liza Minelli, and more, along with Kennedy Center honorees Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Grateful Dead, the Eagles, U2, and more.

Banded by vocalists Peter Cetera and Robert Lamm, guitarist Terry Kath, drummer Danny Seraphine, trumpeter Lee Loughnane, James Pankow on trombones, and Walt Parazaider on woodwinds, Chicago delivered a nearly 30-song set on September 16, 1971, peppered with songs from the first three albums and four teasers from their next, Chicago V.

For decades, Loughnane and the band forgot that the concert was recorded since the band went straight into releasing their fourth album (Chicago IV), a live concert from Carnegie Hall that same year before working on Chicago V.

Loughnane also forgot about the Kennedy recording until Rhino asked him if he was interested in restoring it. In 2023, Loughlane revisited Chicago’s lost recording, a trove of songs from the earliest chapter of the band, a snapshot in time when Chicago was at the apex of their career. Along with engineer Tim Jessup, Loughnane remixed the recording from the original multi-track tapes. The 26-track Chicago At The John. F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts, Washington D.C. (9/16/1971), available on four vinyls or three CD and digital formats, features previously unreleased live performances with the exception of “Goodbye,” which was released on the 2018 album Chicago: VI Decades Live.

A Chicago & Friends – Live At 55 DVD and 2CD set will also be available November 22, featuring the band’s 2023 performance at the Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with special guests Steve Vai, Robin Thicke, Chris Daughtry, VoicePlay, Judith Hill, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and Robert Randolph.

Loughnane can’t recall why the Kennedy Center recording was shelved for more than 50 years but suspects it was a result of the band’s fourth release and an incessant touring and recording scheduling leading up to Chicago V. In the rush of everything, the Kennedy Center performance was put on hold, indefinitely, and forgotten.

“As much as it was a unique event, playing at the Kennedy Center, which had just opened, there were a lot of things coming up, and I think maybe the fifth album took precedence,” Loughnane shares with American Songwriter. “We were working constantly. We’d go out for three months and come home for three days, then out for another three months. It was a constant working environment. Even when we were home, we were thinking of what’s coming next.”

In 1968, just a year after the band formed, was the start of a whirlwind of touring and recording. “We were recording it [‘ChicagoTransit Authority’] in ’68 and it came out in ’69, then the second album came out in ’70, and the first album was still up on the charts,” recalls Loughnane. “Then the second album came out, and that hit the charts. The third album was the same thing, and then Carnegie Hall was released.”

The band was in a constant flux of rehearsing and developing new songs for the next album and “moving forward with the career,” says Loughnane. “[The Kennedy Center concert] was almost a break for us because we didn’t actually have to go into the studio to record it. They just needed to mix the live album, and it was just that cacophony of one show after another, night after night. We would play five shows a week, every week.”

From the opening tuning up and band introduction and raw deliverance of an unfinished “Dialogue,’ leaves the sense of being in the newly christened hall. “That was the design of what we were trying to accomplish,” says Loughnane, “to be able to bring the music out so it feels like you’re sitting in the audience.”

A big surprise when listening to the concert again, for Loughnane, was the band’s performance of “Saturday in the Park,” the only time the Chicago has performed the Chicago V track live. Throughout the two-hour set, the band also introduced more songs from Chicago V, including the first part of “Dialogue.” Robert Lamm hadn’t yet written the second part, “Dialogue II,” which appeared on the band’s fifth album.

“I was shocked when I first at the end of the guitar solo, the horns come in and do a couple of licks,” says Loughnane of listening back to only the first half of “Dialogue.” “Jimmy Panko said it on the microphone, ‘This is not a political song. This is the first time we’re playing this,’ and I went, ‘Oh, really,’ because we would rehearse it since the track was pretty set in stone, and that’s exactly what you hear once we recorded it a couple of weeks later. Terry [Kath] is still playing the guitar solo behind it, and then it just stopped.”

The Kennedy Center set was also a testing ground for two other Chicago V tracks, “Goodbye,” and their ode to the French composer who helped define musical matter, Edgar Varèse, with “A Hit for Varèse.”

Several days after their performance at Kennedy Center, Chicago set off to work on Chicago V. Released in July 1972, the album was the band’s first No. 1 release. Along with releasing the Kennedy Center performance, 2024 also marks the 55th anniversary of the band’s debut Chicago Transit Authority.

To Loughnane, who wrote a few songs for Chicago, including “Call on Me,” and “No Tell Lover,” which was co-written with Cetera and Danny Seraphine, songwriting within the band hasn’t shifted much in six decades with Lamm predominantly coming in with the “skeleton” of a song. “Then Jimmy Pankow or myself would come up with a brass arrangement,” shares Loughnane. “Most of the time, Jimmy would come up with a brass arrangement, and then we would put that on as well as the frosting on the cake.”

Nearly 60 years since Chicago formed, Loughnane is still astonished that the band has been around this long and consistently. Loughnane, Lamm, and Pankow are the three of longest-running original members still with the band.

“I remember thinking of how old I was going to be and what I might be doing at 60, 62, 63,” laughs Loughnane before singing the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” chorus. “I sure didn’t think that I’d still be working at 64 years old, none of us did, because it’s a young people’s business, and to go this long … we’re out there because people want to hear it,” he adds. “And they are satisfied with it to the point where they want to come back and hear it again. It sounds easy, but I really feel like we try to make it sound like we’re playing the songs for the first time every night.”

Loughnane continues, “The songs that were written back then still work for different generations of people. When you originally write a song, from my point of view, I hope that anybody else besides myself likes the song, so for them to have lasted for decades is unbelievable.”

We have a legacy of songs that have lasted through the test of time.”

Photo: Chicago at the John F. Kennedy Center for The Performing Arts, Washington D.C., September 16, 1971 by Fred Lombardi