Happy Fourth of July! I woke up at 3:35 am or 3:36 am. You might say I woke up at 25 or 6 to 4 this morning! So I thought it might be a good time to release this Chicago revisited classic song today!

Now some Chicago songs will always be hard to play exact or even close to the original for me. I have learn to play this song in two eras of my drumming life, very young teenager and as a 40 something drummer watching my drum idol Danny Seraphine comeback and start his career over in 2006! Boy this song is fast! It burns!!

One thing I learned about this recording was Danny played the five stroke roll tom part which was part of a second second drum track recorded over the first drum track! My approach to playing this song is a mix of my youthful “Danny” licks and learning the back story many years later. This version of the cover is my best attempt to play it closer to the record, but my “Danny influenced” drumming style is still very much part of this drum cover!

“25 or 6 to 4" is a song written by American musician Robert Lamm, one of the founding members of the band Chicago. It was recorded in 1969 for their second album, Chicago, with Peter Cetera on lead vocals.
Composition

In a 2013 interview, Robert Lamm said he composed "25 or 6 to 4" on a twelve-string guitar with only ten strings—it was missing the two low E strings—and that he wrote the lyrics in one day. The band first rehearsed the song at the Whisky a Go Go.

Lamm said the song is about trying to write a song in the middle of the night. The song's title is the time at which the song is set: 25 or 26 minutes before 4 a.m., phrased as, "twenty-five or [twenty-]six [minutes] to four [o’clock]," (i.e. 03:34 or 03:35). Because of the unique phrasing of the song's title, "25 or 6 to 4" has been interpreted to mean everything from a quantity of illicit drugs to the name of a famous person in code.

The original recording features an electric guitar solo using a wah-wah pedal by Chicago guitarist Terry Kath, and a lead vocal line in the Aeolian mode.

According to the recollections of producer James William Guercio and horn player Lee Loughnane, Cetera had to record the vocal while his jaw was still wired together after he had been attacked at a baseball game at Dodger Stadium on May 20, 1969. Guercio said he told Cetera, "I can't wait, we're gonna do this."

The album was released in January 1970 and the song was edited and released as a single in June (omitting the second verse and most of the guitar solo), climbing to number 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and number 7 on the UK Singles Chart. It was the band's first song to reach the top five in the US. It has been included in numerous Chicago compilation albums. In 2015, Dave Swanson, writing for Ultimate Classic Rock, listed the song as number one on his top ten list of Chicago songs. Classic Rock Review says the song is "one of the most indelible Chicago tunes". In 2019, Bobby Olivier and Andrew Unterberger, music critics for Billboard magazine, ranked the song number one on their list of "The 50 Best Chicago Songs". Guitar World rated "25 or 6 to 4" No. 22 for "greatest wah solos of all time."
Bans

The song was banned in Singapore in 1970 due to "alleged allusions to drugs"; the ban extended to later albums that included the song, such as Chicago 18. In 1993, the ban on this song was lifted, along with long-time bans on songs by other artists such as the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

My Original drum cover:

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Earldrum's Spring Store
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Drums & Gear:

Gretsch - 8x10, 9x13, 16x16, 14x20
Nobel & Cooley SS - 5x14
Paiste -15" Giant Beat HH, 20" Giant Beat, 24" Giant Beat, 18" Giant Beat Thin, 16" 2002 Thin Crash
Presonus StudioLive 24.4.2

Please check me out on Instagram @earldrum
Please check out my series on how to make a drum cover in this playlist [ Ссылка ]

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