Chicago Chicago's heyday
 The band was formed when a group of DePaul University music students began playing a series of late-night jams at clubs on and off campus. They added more members, eventually growing to seven players, and went professional as a cover band called The Big Thing. The band featured an unusual and unusually versatile line-up of instrumentalists, including saxophonist Walter Parazaider, trombonist James Pankow, and trumpet player Lee Loughnane, along with more traditional rock instruments — guitarist Terry Kath, keyboardist Robert Lamm, drummer Danny Seraphine, and bassist Peter Cetera (who was the last to join the original group). While gaining some success as a cover band, the group worked on original songs and, in 1968, moved to Los Angeles, California under the guidance of their friend and manager James William Guercio, and signed with Columbia Records. Upon release of their first record in early 1969, the band took a new name, Chicago Transit Authority.
The band's first album, the eponymous The Chicago Transit Authority, was an audacious debut: a sprawling double album (virtually unheard of for a rookie band; only Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention preceded it) that included jazzy instrumentals, extended jams featuring Latin percussion, and experimental, feedback-laden guitar abstraction. The album began to receive heavy airplay on the newly popular FM radio band; it included a number of pop-rock gems — Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?, Beginnings, and Questions 67 and 68 — which would later be edited to a radio-friendly length, released as singles, and eventually become rock radio staples.
Soon after the album's release, the band's name was shortened to simply Chicago, when the actual Chicago Transit Authority threatened legal action.
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