The Unlikely Origin of a Timeless Hit, a Musical Mystery

The Podcasting Store
3 min readJul 18, 2024

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By Drew Holmes

Bob was a keyboard player in a band, living in the Hollywood Hills with a bunch of hippies above Sunset Strip. Unwinding after a night out at the Whisky a Go Go, he found himself seated at his piano. In his head was an idea for a riff and after a half hour of messing around it was reasonably fleshed out. Now he needed to add some lyrics.

It was late at night or early in the morning, depending on how you keep time, and he had no idea what the song was about. Inspired by the neon lights outside his window, the impending sunrise on the horizon, and the antique clock in the room, the words he penned were placeholders about the process of writing the song. Final lyrics would come in later collaboration with his band.

The next day he brought the raw ideas to the band and the group worked together to turn a riff into a song. An extended guitar solo emerged and the arrangement evolved into a horn section showcase. Throughout this collaboration the only thing no one bothered to change were the lyrics.

The band’s producer, sensing a hit, was eager to get into the studio and record it. But there was a big problem. Pete, their lead singer, had been injured. He had attended a baseball game between the hometown Dodgers and his beloved Cubs. The visitors got the best of the home team, and four marines upset at the game’s outcome took exception to Pete’s long hair and Cubs attire. The ensuing brawl broke his jaw in three places, and it was still wired shut. With no time to wait for it to heal, Pete sang through clenched teeth. The resulting sound was a revelation and became his signature vocal style.

But what about the words he was singing?

The band never changed them. Because sometimes when inspiration strikes, any muse will do. Sometimes writing a song about writing a song is just the right canvas to create something special. And sometimes when you’re struggling to stay awake or staring blindly into space vainly searching for the words to say, the words themselves don’t really matter.

In the end, those were just the right words for Peter Cetera to create his iconic vocal sound as frontman for the band Chicago. Singing a song about writing a song, penned late at night or early in the morning, depending on how you keep time. And when it came to the title of his song Robert Lamm glanced at the antique clock in the room knowing it was well past three, but unsure of exactly what time it was. The clock face was hard to read, so he deciphered it as best as he could, wrote down the time, and inserted that as the song’s title. Some would have called it 3:35 or 3:34. But Robert kept time slightly differently, instead titling it 25 or 6 to 4.

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The Podcasting Store
The Podcasting Store

Written by The Podcasting Store

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