Stone of Sisyphus

[uwe]

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

[Barklessdog]

Stone of Syphilis

I imagine this is a very serious effort.

[uwe]

 

Ok, the juvenile quality of contributions is final proof of how uncool I am I guess!

[Barklessdog]

Syphilis has never been "cool".

[gweimer]

I've heard about this album for years.  I know that a boot was widely available for quite a while.  I may actually try to listen to them again.

[uwe]

Syphilis has never been "cool".

I beg to differ.

Oscar Wilde

[Barklessdog]

 Capone!



His grave is a stone's through from work.
Note da Chicago axescent youse guys.

[uwe]

Ah, another unjust taxation victim - much in line with the patriots that dumped the limey tea leaves into the Boston Harbor! 

Ermm, did he have syphylis? Not much chance to get it for great parts of his life unless he had "special visitors".

[gweimer]

Ah, another unjust taxation victim - much in line with the patriots that dumped the limey tea leaves into the Boston Harbor! 

Ermm, did he have syphylis? Not much chance to get it for great parts of his life unless he had "special visitors".

As I recall, he had it going into prison, but only started showing the symptoms after he was locked up.  Nobody particularly cared if he got treatment, and I believe he died out of prison, in a Florida home, and quite insane from the disease.  Any Windy City folk recall this?

[Barklessdog]

Wiki  - which is the absolute truth!

Though he adjusted relatively well to his new environment (Prison), his health declined as his syphilis (contracted as a youth) progressed, and he spent the last year of his sentence in the prison hospital, confused and disoriented.

[gweimer]

Wiki  - which is the absolute truth!

Wiki?  Bah....we should just ask Geraldo.   

[chromium]

[uwe]

It couldn't really be treated until they discovered penicillin, right? Which was sometime in the early thirties or late twenties, but first treatment of a patient only took place in 1942 and it wasn't - probably understandably so - Al. Penicillin only went into large scale production 1943/44 (in time for the Normandy invasion where it would save many a wounded Allied soldiers life, casuality rates of wounded German and Russian soldiers who went without penicillin treatment were much higher) by which time it must have been too late for poor Al. As I understand, penicillin cures the disease but it can't undo what the disease has done to a patient's body (and his genes) and Herr Capone's siphyllis must have progressed quite a bit in all those years without proper treatment.

Uwe

[Barklessdog]

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1079501

Rembrandt's poster boy of siphyllis - Gerard de Lairesse

It is generally accepted that he suffered from congenital syphilis.1 That diagnosis has been based almost entirely upon a portrait by Rembrandt in the Lehman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Figure 1). Yet, as he painted the portrait, Rembrandt did not realize that he was labelling his younger colleague with syphilis, because at that time the characteristic facial deformities of late congenital syphilis were not recognized and would remain unknown for another 200 years.

de Lairesse's misshapen face disturbed his contemporaries. One of them, Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719), wrote that when the artist first arrived in Amsterdam in 1665, two colleagues 'gazed at him in horror because of his nauseating appearance', but judged that since the facial deformity had been present since childhood it could not have been due to syphilis.4