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
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