1972 · Behind the Songs
The opening track of Chicago V salutes an avant-garde composer most pop fans had never heard of — and asks why radio won’t play music that free.
Most hit bands open their albums with a single. In 1972, Chicago opened Chicago V with a tribute to Edgard Varèse, the French-born pioneer of electronic music, whose name meant nothing to the average pop fan. ‘A Hit by Varèse,’ written by keyboardist Robert Lamm, runs 4:56 as the album’s lead track, and it is one of the strangest things the band ever recorded: a proggy, brassy, feedback-laced plea for radio to make room for music as free as Varèse’s. It was never released as a single, which only sharpens its point. Lamm wasn’t chasing a hit with this one. He was asking, in public, why hits had to sound the way they did.
Lamm’s road to Varèse ran through Frank Zappa. He first heard the composer’s name before Chicago even existed, via Zappa’s Freak Out! album, and the discovery stuck. Guitarist Terry Kath then got hold of a few Varèse LPs and played them through a Voice of the Theater speaker system in the apartment he shared with Lamm and trumpet player Lee Loughnane. Lamm later said the music set them free in terms of what was possible musically, a big claim that ‘A Hit by Varèse’ tries to make good on. The song’s central lyric has Lamm declaring himself tired of old music and asking for a seed that will lead to a hit by Varèse — a wish for the avant-garde to find a home on the pop charts.
Lamm was explicit about what he wanted. He later explained that what he was trying to say was, in effect: wouldn’t it be great if music this free could actually be accepted on radio — not just by the programmers, but by the people listening? The recording tries to embody that freedom. It opens with guitar feedback from Kath, settles into a guitar rhythm, then veers into what one account calls an ‘odd’ organ part from Lamm before the horns come crashing in. After a stretch of Lamm’s vocals, the feedback returns, and each of the horn players gets a solo turn, with drum, organ, and guitar passages woven between the vocal sections. AllMusic’s Lindsay Planer described the result as progressive free-form, while the Winston-Salem Journal’s Jim Shertzer heard a mocking, mournful plea to pop music tastes, sung over steady but vigorous, pulsing cadences of guitar, bass, drums, and colorful brass.
Later critics found an irony in the song that Lamm couldn’t have intended. Writing for Something Else!, Bob Helme noted the bite in the line about being tired of ‘oldies and goldies and moldies,’ given how Chicago’s own music would eventually evolve — he joked that if only Lamm had known what the band would turn into after the commercial failure of Twenty 1 in 1991. Helme found a similar irony in the lyric ‘Would you agree to attempt something new?,’ observing that by the 2000s the band’s members could barely agree to record new music at all. The song’s plea for freshness curdled, in retrospect, into a portrait of a band that stopped taking its own advice. But that hindsight shouldn’t obscure what the track was in 1972: a hit band using its clout to demand something better from the medium that made it famous.
Contemporary reviewers got it. The Buffalo News suggested listeners could get off on the track’s blazing waggle of horns, and the Moncton Times and Transcript simply called it superb. Later rankings have been generous: Ultimate Classic Rock’s Dave Swanson rated it Chicago’s seventh-best song, calling it the essence of jazz rock, while the Patriot-News placed it eleventh and praised its funk. Cleveland.com’s Troy Smith went furthest, calling it the greatest opening track of Chicago’s career and arguing that it showcased the band at its most adventurous. For an album opener that name-checks an avant-garde composer, that is about as good as reception gets. It never troubled the singles chart, but as a statement of intent, it has outlasted plenty of hits.
What to listen for: the feedback. Kath’s opening squall is the sound of a pop band deliberately roughing up its own polish, and when it returns mid-song it feels like the track clearing its throat to say the important part again. Then the horns, each player stepping forward for a solo — this is Chicago’s famous brass section deployed not for punch but for exploration. Lamm’s ‘odd’ organ part is worth isolating too; it lurches where a session player would glide, and the wrongness is the point. And listen to how the vocals sit inside the chaos: Lamm sings his plea for free music over some of the most disciplined playing of the band’s career, which may be the song’s quietest joke. Freedom, it turns out, takes a very tight band.
‘A Hit by Varèse’ sets the tone for all of Chicago V, an album that found the band confident enough to lead with its weirdest foot. The record was cut in 1971 at Columbia’s 52nd Street studio in New York and released on July 10, 1972, with Guercio again producing. It became the band’s first chart-topping album, which makes its opening seconds — raw guitar feedback, no less — even more audacious. Chicago could have opened with a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Instead they opened with a dare, and the audience followed them to No. 1 anyway. That is the real hit by Varèse: not the song, but the proof that a mass audience would, at least once, follow a band somewhere genuinely strange.
Varèse himself never had a pop hit, of course. He died in 1965, long before a rock band put his name in a song title. But somewhere in the afterlife of the avant-garde, you have to think he would have appreciated the gesture: seven musicians at the peak of commercial power, using their opening track to ask why music this free couldn’t be on the radio. More than fifty years later, the question still hangs in the air, feedback and all.