What did Chicago mean by ’25 or 6 to 4′?
American jazz-rockers Chicago were building a name for themselves as one of the most exciting young bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
With a ripping lead guitar player in Terry Kath and three distinctive vocalists backed up by an emphatic horn section, Chicago was as unique as any band at the time. But they were missing something essential: a signature song.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. Keyboardist Robert Lamm often recalled staying up late into the night trying to chase the artistic muse. One night in 1969, Lamm was up into the wee hours of the morning trying to get something together. It was only when he gave up and looked at the time that inspiration finally struck.
In the late 1960s, a signature song was more than a hit single. It was a statement of identity, a way for a band to separate itself from a crowded field of equally talented contemporaries. For groups experimenting with form, length, and arrangement, that defining moment often arrived unexpectedly, emerging from process rather than intention.
Chicago were very much operating in that space. They had ambition, musicianship, and a sound that blended jazz complexity with rock immediacy, but they were still searching for a song that felt unmistakably theirs. What they did not yet realise was that the breakthrough would come not from chasing grandeur, but from documenting a fleeting, almost mundane moment in real time.
What is the song really about?
“I was living with a bunch of hippies up above Sunset Strip,” Lamm told The Chris Isaak Hour. “One of the advantages of this particular house was that it was in the Hollywood Hills, and I could look out over the city late at night. I wanted to try to describe the process of writing the song that I was writing. So, ‘waiting for the break of day, searching for something to say, flashing lights against the sky’ – there was a neon sign across the city.”
“That song came from the fact that it was 25 or 6 to 4 am in the morning when I looked at my watch – I was looking for a line to finish the chorus,” Lamm added. “Most songs that were written, especially in the early days, whenever I got them to the band, and we started rehearsing them, that’s when the songs took shape – once these guys got hold of them.”
“There was definitely a lot of raw material,” Lamm said. “I thought it was a song when I wrote the words down, I wrote the changes down, and I brought the charts to rehearsal, but it wasn’t really a song until they all played it.”
According to a 2019 interview with Mix Magazine, Lamm actually glanced at an antique clock on the wall to see what time it was. Whether because he was extremely tired or because the clock was so ancient, Lamm had a hard time making out the true time, hence the indecision between 25 and 26 to four.
“I couldn’t quite tell where the hands of the clock were pointing,” Lamm explained. “It was 25 or 26 minutes before 4 a.m. I didn’t expect to keep those words. I expected to replace them with some actual lyrics. But it ended up working out OK.”
Check out ‘25 or 6 to 4’ down below.
