The Night Chicago Died: Terry Kath 80

Chicago - I Don't Want Your Money

OK, the last hour of the waning month allows me 60 minutes of leeway to get this one up whilst it's still the right day.

This guy, though. Is this the biggest, least necessary non-drug related Rock death ever? Definitely in the running.

I'll tell the story of when I heard about it.

It was January of 1978 and I was listening to WABC-AM in NYC. It might have been the great Dan Ingram that made the announcement, although I can find no record of this on YouTube or whatever.

I was a huge Chicago fan -- I may have been 11, but who doesn't crave a bit of Brass Rock now and again? -- so when the voice on the radio said that their guitarist had just been reported dead in a "Russian Roulette incident," my neck about snapped toward the little transistor set I had back then.

I was too young to be this cynical in those days, but of course today my first response would have been "Damn, those Peter Cetera Syrup Ballads were that irritating, eh? It's hard for him to say he's sorry, man."

In my little bedroom in 1978, I reacted much more purely: by bursting into tears. This might have been the first Rock Star death that I cried about, unless you count age 10 six months before, when Elvis died and they found me curled up in a little, improvised manger at the gates of Graceland. No, I am just kidding, I totally just made that last part up.

The stories about him when he was not idiotically fooling around with guns are many and legendary, the most memorable perhaps being in 1969, when Chicago first blasted onto the scene and Jimi Hendrix was asked, as he often was, what it felt like to be the Greatest Guitar Player In The World. To which he replied that he had no idea, and that the reporter would have to go find Terry Kath and ask him.

Had he not forgotten that damn thing still had a live round in the chamber, he'd have most likely ended up out of Chicago and into his own thing. He'd probably have been a major solo superstar, too, but we'll never know.

Instead, he never got to finish his first solo record, and his band proceeded to faceplant into the next decade on the wings of a click-track and synths so cheesy, middle-aged matronly Eighties housewives of the day started burning their aprons in protest.

That's the way Chicago crumbles, I guess.

Anyway had he lived, he'd have achieved octo status today, born five years minus one day before Phil Collins as he was.

If we're talking about the somehow-as-yet-unissued Chicago concert that most puts the raw, visceral talents of Terry Kath on Peak Display, it's gotta be this one, where our hero commands the Tanglewood stage like he'd been doing it for decades.

Chicago

Tanglewood

Lenox, Massachusetts USA

7.21.1970

01 Bill Graham intro/Introduction

02 In the Country

03 piano solo

04 Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

05 25 or 6 to 4

06 Poem for the People

07 I Don't Want Your Money

08 Mother

09 It Better End Soon

10 Beginnings

11 Ballet for a Girl In Buchannon

12 I'm a Man

13 Bill Graham outro announcement

Total time: 1:35:05

disc break goes after Track 08

Robert Lamm - keyboards & vocals

Terry Kath - guitar & vocals

Peter Cetera - bass & vocals

James Pankow - trombone & percussion

Lee Loughnane - trumpet, percussion & vocals

Walter Parazaider - woodwinds, percussion & vocals

Danny Seraphine - drums

original, soundboard-sourced files from Wolfgang's Vault

spectral analysis is lossless past 22 kHz

retracked & remastered by EN, January 2026
645 MB FLAC/direct link

That's gonna do it for this month, but no fear because I've already got three things cooking for February.

I wasn't gonna let January 2026 go to its eternal rest, however, without this remembrance of the late Terry Kath -- born this day in 1946 and still in the pantheon of greatest guitarists of our age -- and that crappy winter's night 48 years ago that Chicago died.--J.

1.31.1946 - 1.23.1978

Time for Towner

Ralph Towner - Spirit Lake

Continuing the March Of Inexorable Mortality -- OK, the January of that -- which often defines this page, we'll move along to the next headstone of 2026 with a tribute to a recently fallen Ultra Maestro.

I've gotten no less than three messages on the Blog Contact Form this week, alerting me to the necessity of a tribute to this guy, but before the first one came in I was already well into one show and headed, in prototypically manic fashion, for de facto box set territory.

He passed away last week, after a whole half century bringing a whole lot of beauty into this often unbeautiful world of ours.

This began in the 1960s at the U of O here in Eugene, where he studied piano, and he soon jumped to Vienna to study classical guitar.

He returned to the US in 1968 and joined the World Music-pioneering Paul Winter Consort, before quitting in 1970 to form the band for which he is perhaps most known. For which he stayed in the spiritual vicinity of Eugene and named, simply, Oregon.

This group continued the progression of the multiethnic music from the PWC and streamlined it into something even more sonorous and accessible, unintentionally helping launch both the World Chamber Jazz and New Age genres that now sell billions.

Can a music sound like a place? Because I can't think of a more Oregon sound than Oregon. Four bars and you're amid rows of pristine pines, gazing at mountain paths and springs at sunset in 1975. There's also a sommelier in a Sponge Bob costume, protesting the police or something.

Anyway he didn't just stop with Oregon... I mean, it's a great place and all, but it can get a little monochromatic and predictable at times, Sponge Bob sommeliers for social justice notwithstanding. My friend and I had a whole text debate a while back over whether Oregon is the Vermont of the West Coast, or just the Norway of America lolol.

Regardless, over a varied and prolific career, Ralph Towner -- as talented an instrumentalist and composer as has existed in our lifetimes -- collaborated with a million luminaries in a zillion combinations, many of them captured for perpetual posterity by Manfred Eicher's superlative-on-steroids ECM label I'm always babbling on praisefully about.

And every note and phrase he ever played, whether on his many stringed instruments or at the keyboard, carried with it a sonorous and lush feeling of resonant gorgeousness. The kind of vibe that only a seasoned explorer such as he could impart, and imbue with a depth of feeling today's Army Of Autotuned Assholes couldn't approach if you replaced their brains with those of Prince or Paganini.

When he departed this rapidly nosediving plane a week ago, he left a vast discography people will be spelunking into for centuries to come, if by some miracle there's still people around in centuries not perma-tunneled into underground caves.

He made it to 85, so you can't say it's a crippling tragedy of a man taken too soon. Although I'd have had no issue whatsoever if he'd have lived and continued birthing his particular brand of brilliance for another 85 years.

To properly tribute such a seminal figure of culture, I started with one performance and quickly expanded my efforts to include a triple play of shows that feature Mr. Towner at the apex of his aperture, letting in the maximum light.

I guess the unifying field theory of these is that they were all taped in the same room, over the course of a decade's time starting 40 years ago, and all feature exactly the coterie of qualities that makes the music of Ralph Towner stand out like one of those wicked Oregon Coast sunsets we mentioned.

Ralph Towner
Hamburg, 1987-96

1.

Ralph Towner

NDR Funkhaus

Studio 10

Hamburg, Germany

12.21.1987

01 Les Douzilles

02 Spirit Lake

03 Reggae for One (aka Jamaica Stopover)

04 The Juggler`s Etude 

05 Ralph's Blues

06 Ballad for Janet

07 Witchi-Tai-To

08 Nardis

09 The Donkey`s Jamboree

10 Nimbus

Total time: 51:40

Ralph Towner - guitars & percussion

NDR preFM reels of indeterminate origin

retracked, edited & remastered by EN, January 2026
261 MB FLAC/link below

2.

Ralph Towner & Gary Peacock

NDR Funkhaus

Studio 10

Hamburg, Germany

3.26.1993

01 untitled improvisation/Hat and Cane

02 Gaya

03 My Romance

04 Inside Inside/Janet

05 Veldt

06 bass solo

07 Sustained Release

08 Blue In Green

09 Jamaica Stopover

10 Burly Hello

11 Tramonto

12 Nardis

13 Celeste

Total time: 1:47:21

disc break goes after Track 05

Ralph Towner - guitars, piano & percussion

Gary Peacock - bass

NDR preFM reels of indeterminate origin

retracked, edited & remastered by EN, January 2026
493 MB FLAC/link below

3.

Oregon

NDR Funkhaus

Studio 10 

Hamburg, Germany

12.11.1996 

01 Waterwheel

02 Take Heart

03 Nightfall

04 Pepe Linque

05 Claridade

06 Raisa Point

07 Yet to Be

08 Joyful Departure

09 Fortune Cookie

10 untitled improvisation

11 Ecotopia

12 Green and Golden

13 L'Assassino Che Suono

14 Witchi-Tai-To

15 Icarus

Total time: 2:07:35

disc break goes after Track 07

Ralph Towner - guitars, keyboards, electronics & percussion

Paul McCandless - woodwinds & reeds

Glen Moore - bass

NDR preFM reels of indeterminate origin

retracked, edited & remastered by EN, January 2026
672 MB FLAC
all 3 shows are in the same folder/direct link

If you're wondering, I didn't intend this as one big box set -- it came together all modular, one set at a time -- but it kind of structured itself as a solo performance, followed by a duo and concluding with a trio. As easy as 1,2,3 you might say.

So I hope that's a satisfactory 5-hour feast to celebrate the legacy of this extraordinary player and writer. Obviously because these are pre-broadcast tapes, you'll find the sound quality exceeds that of a good many commercial albums people charge that funny paper we think is money to purchase.

I'll be back at month's end, when it'll be on to Chicago and let's win there. But no month of exquisite music could be complete without a necessary homage to a figure with the gregarious gravitas (is that a thing? it's late and I'm high as a lamppost on the lunar surface) and the colossal catalog of the instantly immortal Ralph Towner.--J.

3.1.1940 - 1.18.2026

All Troubadour: Richie Havens 85

Richie Havens - Easy

Let's move the month along -- before WW3 breaks out and we're all turned to soup for some hideous babyfucker's brainlessly unconstitutional imperial delusions -- with a milestone birthday of a guy who dedicated his whole existence to trying to make such an outcome not happen.

He's long gone now, and I'm sure he'd be appalled at what has become of things since he left us in 2013.

Of course he's most notorious as the dude in the orange kaftan that opened the stereotypically iconic Woodstock fair in the also-overly-romanticized summer of 1969.

Initially kind of tossed to half a million Hippie wolves as an acoustic stopgap whilst the organizers finished assembling the electronics for the bands, he ended up turning in one of the central performances of not just that concert, but of the whole era.

Of course, nothing could be more legendary to the culture -- not even a billion Woodstocks! -- than his voiceover work in 1980s commercials. How else would you know that the best part of waking up is Folger's in your cup, silly? His Amtrak song was the jam too.

He started doing music and poetry in Greenwich Village -- is there a better place to do music and poetry in the 1950s and 1960s? -- and upon returning to NYC in the mid Sixties after a spell away he got signed and started recording a series of eclectic and forceful albums featuring his distinctive, growl-gravel voice, which resembled that of one you might attribute to an ancient African griot.

By the time of Woodstock he had released a few LPs and was considered a rising star, but the film of the festival in 1970 blew him up to the galactic, This Poor Guy Has Gone Alone To The Supermarket For The Last Time Without An Autograph Pen level.

Almost as much a gold standard interpreter of songs as a songwriter in his own right, it was his incandescent improvisation on the folk spiritual Motherless Child at Woodstock -- with its repeated incantation of the word freedom -- that turned him into a household name.

In addition to the spectacular musical career that followed -- and all the commercials -- he also acted, in films and television. He's likely the only Woodstock performer ever to have been in a Todd Haynes film.

Born in 1941, he'd have been 85 today, so in his honor let's see what he was up to on West Fourth Street in downtown Manhattan 48 Februaries ago.

Richie Havens

Bottom Line

New York City, New York USA

2.16.1978

01 introduction & RH speaks

02 Fire & Rain

03 Nobody Left to Crown

04 Tupelo Honey/Just Like a Woman

05 What About Me

06 Easy

07 No More, No More

08 I Was Educated By Myself

09 No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed

10 tuning & intro by RH

11 Shalom Salam Aleikoum

12 I'm Not In Love

13 RH talk: In the Middle

14 Zodiac/Freedom

15 I Don't Need Nobody

16 Stranger In a Strange Land

17 Long Train Runnin'

Total time: 1:53:31

disc break goes after Track 09

Richie Havens - vocals, guitar & piano

Paul Williams - guitar

Darryle Johnson - guitar & vocals

Tony Broussard- bass & vocals

Sam Henry - keyboards & vocals

Herman Ernest - drums & percussion

320/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault

spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making this equivalent to a preFM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, tracked, denoised and remastered by EN, January 2026
735 MB FLAC/direct link

As an aside, this looks like it'll be the last of my little thefts from Wolfgang's Vault, as they've finally, after all these years and lawsuits, taken down the music streaming aspect of that site altogether.

The only reason I was able to do this one is that I had captured it almost a year ago, and didn't get to work on it until recently.

So maybe it was a good idea to gaffle as many classic shows off of there as I did, given that now we may never get to hear them any other way.

Be all that as it may, if that's the last of those from there we went out on the best of all possible notes, with almost two hours of prime proof of what made Richie Havens the towering figure -- and no-papers-carrying advocate of Freedom -- he'll always be. This, no matter what depredations the brainlessly imperial and brazenly pedophilic might impel upon us.--J.

1.21.1941 - 4.22.2013