![\"Chicago](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Chicago-Band-1970-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Columbia Records)<\/p>\n
Wed 8 October 2025 22:00, UK <\/p>\n
After releasing a ridiculous five consecutive number one albums between 1972 and 1975, the world\u2019s least punky band, Chicago<\/a>, was going through its first difficult period by the early winter of 1978.<\/p>\n That January, one of the band\u2019s founding and pivotal members, singer\/guitarist Terry Kath, had accidentally shot himself in the head while playing around with a gun, ending his life at just 31 and putting Chicago\u2019s future in serious doubt. <\/p>\n By this point, there was already some criticism that the group was creatively stagnating a bit, and their previous two records, Chicago X and Chicago XI, had both fallen shy of the band\u2019s earlier chart performances. Rather than break up or call for a hiatus, though, the surviving Chicagoans decided to quickly forge ahead, holding a casting call for a new guitarist.\u00a0<\/p>\n They found their man in 26-year-old Donnie Dacus, a session player who\u2019d worked with Stephen Stills and Boz Scaggs and, perhaps more importantly, was set to make his feature film acting debut in the highly anticipated screen adaptation of the musical Hair, playing Woof Dachshund.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I walked in, these guys treated me like they\u2019d known me for 20 years,\u201d Dacus told the Associated Press in April 1978, \u201cThey made it very easy for me to do what I do best\u201d. Horn player Lee Loughnane went so far as to sort of find a bizarre silver lining in Terry Kath\u2019s horrific death. \u201cThis tragic thing, Terry\u2019s death,\u201d he said, \u201csort of precipitated a change that we\u2019d been feeling for the last two albums\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe new album is going to be great,\u201d added drummer Danny Seraphine<\/a>.<\/p>\n When Hot Streets arrived in October 1978, just nine months after Kath\u2019s death, it wasn\u2019t exactly a Back in Black sort of sound or sentiment. It certainly did seem like Chicago was looking to turn the page on the tragedy and regain some cultural relevance at the same time. While it would later slot into the discography as the 12th Chicago, they temporarily broke with the numbered album tradition on this LP. They were also pushing Dacus forward as a new, exciting, younger element in their sound, both as a guitarist and vocalist, but it didn\u2019t quite work.<\/p>\n In the end, Dacus would only record two albums with Chicago, and Hot Streets\u2014despite certainly qualifying as a commercial success\u2014was the band\u2019s lowest charting album yet, failing to reach the US Top Ten. <\/p>\n One polarising choice on Hot Streets was the band\u2019s collaboration with the disco kings of the moment, the Bee Gees, who sing some fairly unnecessary background vocals on the Peter Cetera-fronted track \u2018Little Miss Lovin\u2019. To be fair, Chicago hadn\u2019t made a desperate plea for the Gibb brothers to add some zeitgeist plumage to their record; the Bee Gees<\/a> were simply recording their own new album next door in the same Miami studio. Still, not everybody enjoyed the crossover, which also included members of Chicago\u2019s horn section guesting on the Bee Gees\u2019 \u2018Too Much Heaven\u2019.<\/p>\n Dacus\u2019 departure and the return of the numbering system, Arabic or Roman, suggested the band might have seen Hot Streets as a minor misstep, as well. However, subsequent efforts rarely proved more successful, as the band only cracked the Top Five one final time with 1984\u2019s Chicago 17, once again titled in the Arabic system.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Columbia Records) Wed 8 October 2025 22:00, UK After releasing a ridiculous five consecutive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[802,96,128,78174,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-186762","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-the-bee-gees","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}