One of the most argued-over titles in rock is a man looking at his watch. It is twenty-five minutes to four in the morning, or possibly twenty-six, and he cannot finish the song he is writing.
Here is what the title means, what the lyrics describe, and why an entire country decided it was about drugs.
The Short Answer
A time. Twenty-five or twenty-six minutes to four means 3:35 or 3:34 in the morning. Robert Lamm wrote the song about writing the song: sitting up all night in the Hollywood Hills with writer’s block, looking for a line to finish the chorus, and using the time on his watch when nothing better arrived.
The Story Behind the Song
Chicago had moved from their home city to Los Angeles. Lamm, the band’s keyboard player and one of its singers, was living in a house above the Sunset Strip with several other musicians, close to the Whisky a Go Go where the band regularly played.
He has described the sequence more than once. Coming home from the Whisky one night in 1969, unwinding, he sat at the piano and worked on a descending riff for around half an hour. It had no name and no words.
The house was in the hills and looked out over the city. The lights on the tall buildings and a neon sign across the skyline became the imagery. When he needed something to close the chorus, he checked the time.
What are the lyrics actually describing?
Insomnia and failure. The narrator is waiting for daylight, searching for something to say, closing his eyes because they hurt, staring at nothing, going to splash water on his face, trying to work out how long he can keep going.
Every image is what a person does at four in the morning when the work is not coming. There is no metaphor in it. Lamm’s own phrasing is that the song is about writing a song, and that it is not mystical.
Why did people think it was about drugs?
Because it was 1970 and reading codes into lyrics was a national hobby. The theories included LSD-25, quantities of various substances, and readings of individual lines as descriptions of lighting or taking something.
The line about whether to try to do some more is the one that convinced most people, and it makes perfect sense as a frustrated writer wondering whether to attempt another verse. The band have never had any reason to deny a drug song, and Chicago took their writing seriously enough that the denial is credible.
It had consequences. Singapore banned the song in 1970 over the alleged drug references, and the ban extended to later albums containing a re-recorded version.
Did Lamm help the rumour along?
Occasionally. He has been consistent that the title is just a reference to the time of day, but he also told an interviewer at one point that the title was a cricket score, which is not true and was presumably not meant to be.
An alternative reading points at Cockney rhyming slang, where six to four rhymes with a word for a prostitute. Nothing in Lamm’s account supports it and there is no evidence he intended it.
What makes the record work?
The arrangement, which turns a private complaint into something enormous. The song opens with a descending chromatic line layered across guitar, bass and drums, a figure Lamm wrote that became a rite of passage for beginning guitarists.
Lamm sings the verses and plays organ, Peter Cetera takes the high lead vocal, and Terry Kath plays a wah-wah guitar solo that is the most aggressive thing on the record. The horn section, James Pankow on trombone, Lee Loughnane on trumpet and Walter Parazaider on saxophone and flute, gives it the weight that separates Chicago from every other band of the period.
Lamm has said he thought it was a song when he wrote the words down and brought the charts to rehearsal, but that it did not become one until the rest of them played it.
How successful was it?
It appeared on the band’s second album in 1970 and was edited for release as a single that June, reaching number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number seven in Britain. It was the band’s first top five American single.
It remains one of the most played Chicago songs on classic rock radio, and the band close their shows with it. Pankow has described it as having become an anthem. A re-recorded version appeared on Chicago 18 in 1986.
Why does the mundane explanation satisfy people less?
Because the record does not sound mundane. A song that opens with that riff and contains that guitar solo feels as though it ought to be about something enormous, and the actual subject is a tired man at a piano who cannot think of a line.
That gap is the reason the theories persist. It is also what makes the song better than the theories: almost nobody has taken LSD, and everybody has sat up too late trying to finish something.
Why it lasted
Because the frustration in it is real and the arrangement takes it seriously. Lamm turned the least glamorous experience available to a musician into a top five single, and then had to spend fifty years explaining that it is a clock.
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