A title nobody could decode
Few hit singles have generated as much amateur cryptography as “25 or 6 to 4”. When Chicago’s hardest-rocking early single stormed American radio in the summer of 1970, listeners treated its title like a riddle wrapped in a riddle. Was it a drug quantity? A code name? A Bible reference? A measurement of something unspeakable? The theories multiplied for decades, spawning magazine columns, radio call-in debates and eventually a famous entry in The Straight Dope, the syndicated column devoted to answering exactly this kind of question. The truth, when songwriter Robert Lamm finally explained it, was almost disappointingly mundane — and, in its way, far more charming than any of the legends. The song is quite literally about the act of writing the song itself, sometime in the small hours of the night, when the composer looked up at the clock and could not quite focus on what it said.
The number in the title is a time of day: twenty-five minutes to four in the morning — or possibly twenty-six. “25 or 6 to 4” is simply how a tired man phrases “3:35, or maybe 3:34.” Lamm has confirmed the reading repeatedly over the years, telling one interviewer: “It’s a reference to time. It’s a song about writing the song, and I looked at my watch while I was writing and it was 25 minutes to four in the morning, or maybe 26.” The hesitation is the poetry of it. Anyone who has sat up all night chasing a stubborn idea knows that blurry moment when the clock becomes a guess. Lamm turned the guess into a chorus.
Written in a day, on a broken guitar
Lamm, a founding member of the band and its most prolific early songwriter, composed “25 or 6 to 4” quickly. In a 2013 interview he recalled writing it on a twelve-string guitar that was missing its two lowest strings — “It didn’t have the two low Es” — and said he wrote the lyrics in a single day. The band first rehearsed the song at the Whisky a Go Go, the Sunset Strip club that served as a proving ground for so many Los Angeles acts of the era, before taking it into the studio.
The lyric is a miniature portrait of creative insomnia. The narrator sits at his desk “waiting for the break of day,” eyes blurring, wondering whether he should “try to do some more.” There is no story in the conventional sense — no lover, no journey, no villain — only a musician, a page and a room full of half-finished thoughts as the hours thin out. It is one of rock’s earliest and most honest songs about songwriting itself, hidden inside what sounds, on the surface, like a swaggering hard-rock workout.
A riff that joined the canon
What lifts the song from confession to anthem is its construction. Beneath the verses runs a descending five-chord figure — commonly rendered as A minor, G, F-sharp, F and E — that LA Weekly editor Andy Hermann simply crowned “The Riff.” Hermann traced the pattern’s relatives through George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”, and noted that Green Day’s 1996 hit “Brain Stew” later built itself on a strikingly similar descent. Whether by inheritance or coincidence, the progression became one of the fundamental hand-me-downs of rock guitar, taught to beginners in bedrooms everywhere. Jason Newsted, later of Metallica, has said it was the first rock or metal riff he ever learned; guitar virtuoso Paul Gilbert recalled teaching himself a one-string version of it as a boy.
The recording, made on July 24, 1969, for the band’s second album, Chicago (later known as Chicago II), is driven by Terry Kath’s ferocious wah-wah guitar solo — later ranked by Guitar World among the greatest wah solos of all time. Kath, whose playing Jimi Hendrix reportedly admired enormously, treats the solo like a controlled detonation, and the horn section answers him with the drilled precision of a soul revue. It is the Chicago formula at its most potent: a jazz band’s discipline, a rock band’s aggression.
The singer with the wired jaw
Peter Cetera sings the lead vocal, and the circumstances were grimly absurd. On May 20, 1969, Cetera had been attacked by a group of Marines at a baseball game at Dodger Stadium — the story goes that his long hair provoked them — and his jaw was broken and subsequently wired shut. According to producer James William Guercio and trumpeter Lee Loughnane, Cetera recorded his vocal for “25 or 6 to 4” while his jaw was still wired together. “I can’t wait,” Guercio recalled telling him. “We’re gonna do this.” The slight strain and clenched quality in the performance, that sense of a man singing through his teeth, is no studio effect. It is a bassist with a broken jaw refusing to let the session slip.
The album around it
Context matters here, because “25 or 6 to 4” did not arrive as a lone provocation. The album it came from — the band’s second, released in January 1970 and titled simply Chicago after the transit authority made the group drop its original name — was itself a double LP, containing James Pankow’s seven-part “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon” suite alongside political broadsides and extended jams. It was a lot to ask of pop audiences, and the album delivered commercially anyway, carried by a run of singles that seemed to cover every corner of the band’s personality: the edited suite excerpt “Make Me Smile” for the romantics, “25 or 6 to 4” for the rockers, and, reaching back to the first album, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” for the philosophers. Taken together, the three hits of 1970 are a complete portrait of what Chicago was trying to be — a band that refused to choose between the concert hall, the protest march and the guitar shop. Of the three, it was “25 or 6 to 4” that proved the rock credentials were real, the one that made guitarists, rather than only arrangers and horn players, sit up and take notes.
Release, the Singapore ban and the charts
The album Chicago arrived in January 1970, and Columbia released “25 or 6 to 4” as a single on June 12, 1970, in an edited form that dropped the second verse and most of Kath’s solo, shrinking the album’s 4:50 down to 2:52. The edit hardly blunted its impact. The single climbed to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the band’s first top-five hit in the United States — reached No. 6 on the Cash Box Top 100, No. 2 in Canada, No. 3 in France and No. 7 in the UK. It announced that Chicago, a band with a trombone in the front line, could slug it out with the heaviest guitar bands on the chart.
Not everywhere welcomed it. Singapore banned the song in 1970 over alleged drug references — the title’s mystery, for once, worked against the band — and the ban extended to later albums that included the track, not being lifted until 1993, alongside long-standing bans on songs by the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Creedence Clearwater Revival. A song about a man squinting at his alarm clock had been classified as a narcotics threat for twenty-three years.
The 1986 remake and the long afterlife
Chicago returned to the song in 1986, cutting an updated version for Chicago 18 with new bassist Jason Scheff singing lead and James Pankow added as co-writer. The remake trimmed the song to two verses and reached No. 48 — respectable, if no threat to the original — and its video won an American Video Award for cinematography. More tellingly, the original never left the band’s stage. It remains a fixed point in Chicago’s set lists, in Cetera’s solo shows, and in the memory of the band’s great reconciliation moment: at their 2016 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, estranged original drummer Danny Seraphine rejoined the band on stage to play it.
The song’s afterlife spreads well beyond the group. It is a staple of American marching bands — the Omaha World-Herald named it the greatest marching band song of all time — and Chicago performed it on the field with the Notre Dame Marching Band in 2017. It has been covered by Earth, Wind & Fire, Local H, Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil and jazzman Dave Koz’s Summer Horns project, among many others, and placed in films from I, Tonya to The Flash, where it introduces Michael Keaton’s returning Bruce Wayne. Billboard‘s critics ranked it the No. 1 Chicago song of all time in 2019; Ultimate Classic Rock did the same.
In the end, the mystery was never the point. “25 or 6 to 4” endures because it captures something every working musician and every night owl recognises: the stubborn, bleary determination to finish the thing you started, even when you can no longer quite read the clock. It is 3:35 in the morning, or maybe 3:34. Robert Lamm stayed up. We are still listening.