WHAT CHICAGO WERE THEY WRITING ABOUT, AGAIN?
THE ONE IN ILLINOIS?

I may have said this before, but ...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

I've been told numerous times, by people from Chicago I've met  (and you'll never meet anybody from Chicago, outside Chicago, who won't proudly, loudly tell you s/he's from there, and how unfavorably the place you both share compares to the Windy City, trust me), that this song is (gasp!! shudder!!) historically inaccurate.

If The Night Chicago Died weren't enough -- and I'll go back to it momentarily -- this band has yet more stink on its foot than that.  They also won an ITV talent contest in the U.K. with a version of that glurge classic Billy, Don't Be A Hero (immortalized in its cultural deathmongering by Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods, on these here shores).   If they had all died of some mysterious fungal infection immediately after recording Chicago Died, it would probably have been too humane, after having their fingers in these two stinky pies.

Anyhow, here's the uber-quote from Chicagoans everywhere, any time the subject of the song comes up:

"Where th'hell is the 'old East Side' of Chicago supposed to be?  The east side of Chicago is f*cking Lake Michigan!  What was he, a SCUBA cop or somethin'?"

Not good enough.  The song was glurge and sucked -- the historical inaccuracies are just icing on the cake, lakesiders.  You totally miss the point by getting hung up on the least important part of the song (the lyrics), but then, you guys have kept Peter Cetera in biz long after he should have retired and started writing soundtracks for Hello Kitty cartoons, because he still throws you a sop now and then and mentions what you all perceive to be the finest city ever built.

It's not that I don't like Chicago.  People from Chicago are fine -- when they're in Chicago.  They become blowhard jerks when they travel anywhere else, is all.  I have yet to go anywhere on the face of this earth, run into someone from Chicago, and not hear these words:  "Back in Chicago, we don't do it that way," or "we'd never stand for that, back in Chicago." 

As if that were relevant in the desert, or in the south Atlantic -- where, as a matter of plain fact, an entire busload of us (on a scheduled tour from a cruise) was detained until after the ship was supposed to have left the harbor because one of the Chicagoans on the bus decided he was going to rewrite Sosua Beach road law right then and there, and shoved a local cop's shoulder a little too hard in emphasis when he said 'we'd never stand for this, back in Chicago.'  It took the intervention of the cruise line to keep him out of the Sosua Beach lockup.

I even heard from a friend of a friend that someone did that on a whitewater rafting tour of Australia, and almost found out how the water in an Australian whitewater river compares to Lake Michigan (probably unfavorably).

It isn't relevant, guys.  Get over it or just stay home.  We don't care.

The Night Chicago Died sucks because it sucks, not because it's historically inaccurate.

It just plain sucks.