A question posed by a man in a hurry
Every era gets the anthem its anxieties deserve, and turn-of-the-seventies America — commuters, deadlines, punch clocks, a war on television — got a hit single that simply asked whether anyone actually knew what time it was, or cared. “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” is Chicago at their most philosophical and their most playful at once: a bright, brassy pop song built around a genuinely wistful thought. People rush past each other all day, the lyric observes, trading the same empty question — does anybody really know what time it is? — and never waiting for the answer, which is that nobody does, and nobody much cares. It is a song about hurry disguised as a song about clocks.
The writer and singer was Robert Lamm, the keyboard player whose songs formed the backbone of Chicago’s early catalogue. Lamm has described his intentions with a musician’s precision: “[It’s] not a complicated song, but it’s certainly a quirky song. But that was my intent. I wanted to write something that wasn’t ordinary, that wasn’t blues-based, that didn’t have ice cream changes, and would allow the horns to shine and give Lee Loughnane a solo. So all that was the intent.” “Ice cream changes” — the doo-wop era’s I–vi–IV–V comfort food — were exactly what the young band wanted to leave behind. AllMusic critic Lindsay Planer heard the result as a portrait of “the hurried and harried modern society as it ultimately fails to take the ‘time’ to appreciate anything existing outside of its insular world.”
The band that asked the question
To understand why this band, of all bands, wrote this song, it helps to picture where they stood in January 1969. Chicago Transit Authority — they would shorten the name within the year, under legal pressure from the real transit authority — were seven musicians from Chicago newly transplanted to Los Angeles, signed to Columbia through their producer and mentor James William Guercio, and determined to prove that a rock band could carry a full horn section without becoming a novelty act. The debut album they were about to record was a double LP, a format reserved for statements, and its songs ranged from a Steve Winwood cover to a fifteen-minute guitar improvisation. Lamm was the group’s engine of composition, the keyboard player who wrote like a man emptying a notebook he had been filling for years.
A song about the tyranny of the timetable fits this band precisely. These were working musicians in a working city, men who had played weddings, bars and ballrooms on other people’s schedules, now suddenly making an album in which the schedules were theirs. The question in the title is not abstract philosophy; it is the shrug of a man who has watched a thousand people ask the time without caring about the answer. That Lamm set it to such an intricate, jazz-inflected arrangement — piano in free fall, horns in fanfare, meters slipping sideways — turns the shrug into a manifesto. The song doesn’t merely say that nobody knows what time it is. For its first seventy-five seconds, it makes sure nobody can tell.
First in the studio, last to the shops
According to Lamm, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” was the very first song Chicago recorded for their debut album, laid down during the sessions of January 27–30, 1969 that produced Chicago Transit Authority. There is something fitting in that: before the hits, before the logo, before the numbered albums, the band’s recording career began with a song questioning the value of the schedule itself.
Yet for all its seniority, the song was made to wait. Chicago Transit Authority appeared in April 1969 as an ambitious double album, and Columbia initially pushed other tracks as singles. It was only after the band’s second album produced two smashes in 1970 — “Make Me Smile” and “25 or 6 to 4” — that the label reached back to the debut and issued “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” as a single on November 4, 1970, with “Listen” on the B-side. A song recorded first was released, in effect, as an encore — and it followed its two younger siblings straight into the top ten, peaking at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 5 on the Adult Contemporary chart and No. 5 on the Cash Box Top 100, and climbing all the way to No. 2 in Canada. Chicago had opened their career with three consecutive top-ten singles, and two of them were, in one way or another, about time.
The song’s chart run straddled the turn of the year so awkwardly that it fell between the stools of the American year-end rankings — a song about time, ill-served by the calendar. Canada, where it charted higher and longer, honoured it in both years, ranking it among the biggest hits of both 1970 and 1971.
Seventy-five seconds of free-form piano
What radio listeners heard, however, was only part of the picture. The album version of the song opens with a full 1:15 of free-form piano solo from Lamm — impressionistic, wandering, deliberately unhurried — before the band crashes in with a fanfare whose lurching, shifting meters (the passage cycles through bars of 7/8 and 9/8 against 4/4) make the ensemble sound like it is gleefully losing track of the beat. For a song about society’s obsession with the clock, Chicago built an introduction that refuses to keep time at all. Lamm also mixed a spoken verse of his own voice into the final sung verse, a quiet monologue running underneath the chorus — hurry talking over itself.
The single, predictably, cut the free-form introduction and was issued in mono. That was only the beginning of the song’s many shapes. A stereo re-edit surfaced on the Only the Beginning hits set; a still shorter 2:54 radio edit — which starts at the trumpet solo and drops the spoken passage — appeared on the original vinyl of Chicago’s Greatest Hits; a 2:46 promotional edit eventually turned up on the 40th anniversary Best of Chicago. Depending on which station you grew up with, you may know a different version of this song from your neighbour, and both of you will swear yours is the real one. The trade papers of the day had no doubts about any of them: Cash Box predicted an “aural outburst that should blossom as a flowering chart entry,” while Record World called it “a natural hit if ever there was one.”
Carnegie Hall and the expanding introduction
Live, the song grew back its missing minutes and more. When Chicago recorded their marathon four-LP set Chicago at Carnegie Hall in 1971 — the first rock act to sell out a week at the hall — the free-form piano introduction was expanded into a performance in its own right, given its own track on the album. On stage the song became what Lamm had designed it to be back in January 1969: a showcase in which the horns shine, Loughnane’s trumpet takes its solo, and the machinery of the band demonstrates that looseness and precision can live in the same arrangement.
There is one more afterlife worth noting, and it is a quiet tribute to the song’s design. Lamm wrote the trumpet solo into the song’s DNA — he has said plainly that giving Lee Loughnane a solo was one of his intentions from the start — and the solo remains the moment in a Chicago concert where the oldest member of the horn line steps into the light. In a band that has survived more than half a century of personnel changes, the arrangement still does the job it was built to do in a New York studio in 1969: it lets the horns shine, in a song about the impossibility of pinning down the present moment.
That balance — a pop single with a jazz musician’s restlessness smuggled inside it — is the song’s real legacy. It asked a throwaway question and made it immortal; the title phrase passed into the language as the standard reply to pointless urgency everywhere. Half a century on, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” remains inescapable on oldies and classic-hits radio, where its several competing edits still circulate like rumours. And the question itself refuses to retire. It has become one of those rare titles that escaped its song entirely, quoted by headline writers, weather forecasters, cartoonists and every exasperated soul who has ever watched a meeting drift slowly, helplessly past its scheduled end without a single decision being taken. Songs about time usually age into nostalgia; this one aged into a proverb. Chicago recorded it first and released it almost as an afterthought. History, appropriately enough, took its own sweet time catching up with the band’s first recording — and decided, eventually, that the hurry had been worth it all along.