May I rise on the Uncoolometer again? I like the new Chicago album "Stone of Sisyphus"
which is really from the early nineties and only saw official release on Rhino now. In the early nineties it actually led to Chicago parting ways with their then record company (Warner Bros I think) because the record company thought the album too little AOR and too much off-the-wall horn work while Chicago would not budge after years of outside writer ballad albums and the carrot being dangled before their face: "Yes, you can do a horn rock album again, after you've finished this one with the ballads that is."
Mind you, that album still has a bit too much late eighties/early nineties production sheen to it, some synths could have been left away and there is (group penned) ballads and AOR'ish melodies on it too, but the horns are really up front (not tucked away on "special horn mixes" on single B sides as in the latter Cetera years) and inventive, played with reckless enthusiasm. Unleashed so to to say.
And there is a beautiful ballad on it written by Peter Cetera replacement Jason Scheff for his father who played bass with Elvis. It's called "Bigger than Elvis" and tells how Jason as a boy admired and missed his father on those long Elvis tours. And he even got his father to play bass on that song with the vocals muted out, so his dad wouldn't know about the lyrical content until he finally heard the completed song which had the old man sob ... now where's my hankerchief, I'm a hopeless romantic ...
Uwe
