“I don’t think that will work, Danny,” Marty said. “You better come and see him now because the doctors don’t know how much time he has left.”
It was difficult to process what Marty was saying. The last time I had seen Freddy, he was healthy and in good spirits. I jumped in my car and drove down to the hospital.
The heartbreaking sight of Freddy lying withered and frail in his hospital bed proved almost too much for me. The doctors weren’t sure what was wrong, but they concluded he had some sort of rare blood disease. Sores all over his body had made him barely recognizable. I held it together as best I could and sat down in a chair beside the bed. Freddy reached his hand out and laid it on top of mine.
“Man, I don’t think I am going to make it,” he told me weakly. “But I wanted to tell you what a great friend you have been to me, Danny.”
I patted Freddy’s arm tenderly and smiled.
Freddy managed a smile in return. “I love you, man,” he said.
“I love you too Freddy,” I answered. “We sure had some good times, didn’t we?”
“We sure did, Danny.”
When the nurse came in to give him his medicine, Freddy let out a long sigh. “Listen,” he told me, “I want you to remember me for the way I used to be and not the way I am right now lying in this hospital bed.”
“Of course, Freddy,” I assured him.
I said goodbye and left. The encounter weighed heavily on my mind as I set out on a northwestern tour with the band. It reminded me of the fragility of life. It doesn’t matter who you are or how successful your band is. You could be here today and gone tomorrow. Money and fame have nothing to do with it.
A few days later on the Seattle stop of the tour, I had a vivid dream about Freddy. He came to me, not as the sick and feeble man I had last seen, but as the young aspiring musician who used to invite me over to the Speed Press’s house to practice drums on Holly Drive back in the early days. In my dream, Freddy looked me straight in the eye and smiled. “Take me back to Chicago,” he told me. And with that he disappeared.
I woke from my sleep and restlessly paced back and forth in my hotel room. I couldn’t get the image of Freddy out of my head. Eventually, I grabbed a pen and paper and sat back down on the corner of the bed. I wrote the words Freddy had spoken in my dream down on the paper, “Take Me Back to Chicago.”
And then more thoughts came together in my mind. They began to flow in a steady stream of consciousness. I wrote the words down as fast as they came:And lay my soul to rest
Where my life was free and easy
Remember me at my best
Take me back to Chicago
’Cause hustlin’s not my style
L.A. was just a bit too hard
I wish I could be a child
Livin’ back in Chicago
The next morning, Marty called to say Freddy had passed away during the night. I was sorry to see him go, but at least he said his final goodbye in my dream. In writing the song, I was being guided by some kind of higher power to express my inner feelings. The experience brought with it a new type of awareness. It led me to open myself up through my writing.
My creative awakening still had a strong hold on me when I took my daughter Krissy to Paris on a promotional tour a month later. One morning, I sat in silence staring at her as she slept in her bed. A ray of sunlight was shining through the window and falling across her face. She looked like an angel. I sat down and came up with the lyrics for a song I titled “Little One.” I wanted to express the emotions I was never able to convey to her as I wrestled with the guilt for not being there for her and Danielle as a full-time father. My girls loved me, but we spent a great deal of time apart from each other. I poured my heart and soul into the lyrics as I wrote them down in my notebook:Little one, it’s so nice to have you near me
To feel once again the love you bring here
Ooh, my little one, I am sorry for the pain you’ve felt
Say the word and Daddy will make it disappear
Oh, my little one
Bring your love here
Little one
I need you near
Little one
Don’t live in fear of the future
’Cause I will always be there
Oh, my little one
Music is my life, I hope you understand
Traveling on the road with me you can see the way
we live
Oh, my little one
I will always cherish these days with you
As time goes by I hope you see the love I tried to
give
Oh, my little one
Let your love flow
My little one
Like a flower you’ll grow
Someday you’ll have your own little one
And you will always be there
Upon returning to California, I gave my lyrics to Hawk. We got together in my studio and hashed out the music to the two new tracks. The guys in the band were very supportive and Bobby in particular told me how much he liked “Take Me Back to Chicago.” It was nice to hear, because I had written it with his voice in mind. The rest of the band recognized that my material stood up to what everyone else was doing. I may have been a newcomer to writing lyrics, but I was quickly becoming another voice we could draw from.
While Chicago was on tour in Europe in 1977, I met a stunning pop singer from Germany named Ingrid Peters and fell for her on the spot. I jumped in with both feet, and almost immediately Ingrid and I were enmeshed in a passionate relationship. I had been in love before, but my feelings for Ingrid were far more intense than anything I had ever experienced. I could not stop thinking about her night and day. Luckily, Chicago was touring Europe, so I was able to fly her in regularly so we could spend time together.
When the time came for the band to return to the United States, I became very depressed. It was terrible that I had to return home without Ingrid. I called her daily from California to tell her how much I missed her and wanted us to be together. On more than a few occasions, I jumped on a plane to Europe with only a moment’s notice. I visited her at her home in Saarbrücken, Germany, and we often drove down to the south of France together for the weekend. It was like something I’d seen in a movie, but I was living it.
My heart jumped when she told me she wanted to try to get signed with CBS America and move to California. I assured her I would do everything I could to help. I even talked to Guercio about having him secure a recording contract for her. But when Ingrid visited the United States and stayed with me at my house in Westlake, it was a complete culture shock. She wasn’t used to the wheeling and dealing associated with the fast-paced Hollywood music business. She saw it as a big turnoff and couldn’t wait to get back home to Germany. It broke my heart.
It was never going to work between Ingrid and me, but the intensity of my emotions was overpowering. I was lovesick—desperate to be with her. My daily calls to Germany from Los Angeles weren’t cheap, either. Over the course of the year, my telephone bill added up to somewhere around $20,000!
A few weeks after she returned home to Germany, Ingrid called to tell me she was getting back together with an old boy-friend. The news didn’t come as a surprise, but that didn’t lessen the sting. Although it was over, I still couldn’t let her go. Somehow, I convinced her to see me one last time in Stockholm. I needed to hear the words from her in person. Our relationship wasn’t going to end over the phone.
When we met in the town square, I begged her not to break it off.
“I can’t do it, Danny,” she explained. “I’m sorry, but I can’t move to America. This is the way it has to be.”
The walls caved in all around me. Even though I had seen the end coming, there was no choice but to follow my heart. The affair had taken off like a speeding train and I couldn’t get off the tracks in time to avoid being run over.
As always, the band served as a comforting escape from my increasingly disappointing personal life. Our
career was still in high gear and we were already getting ready to go into the studio to record our next album, Chicago XI. Again, I got together with Hawk and we crafted my lyrics for “Take Me Back to Chicago” and “Little One” into full arrangements. The recorded demos came out better than I’d hoped. Thankfully, the rest of the guys in the band felt the same way and both songs made it onto the record.
But after Chicago XI was released in late 1977, tensions between the group and Jimmy Guercio finally came to a head. We hired a high-powered attorney by the name of Ken Kleinberg to spearhead an audit of Chicago’s business arrangements, and the process turned up some unbalanced numbers that finally piqued the band’s interest. It wasn’t only a case of Danny being paranoid anymore; the proof was in the black-and-white digits on the spreadsheets. The profit margins and gaps in the royalty splits between the band and management were shocking. At one meeting, Bobby got so angry that he tossed a chair across the conference room and shattered it to pieces.
Are you listening now? I wanted to ask the guys. Do I have your attention?
A few of the lawyers suggested that the band sue Guercio for millions, but we had no intention of taking legal action. We didn’t want anything to disrupt our unbelievably successful band. We initiated the renegotiation process with Guercio, but our relationship was permanently damaged.
It wasn’t long before Howard and Larry had a falling-out with Guercio and were both let go. Everyone in the band knew how important those guys were to the success of Chicago, and we weren’t too happy with the decision. In Howard and Larry’s place, he brought in a guy named Dick Duryea to manage us. Dick had talent as a tour manager, but as far as managing our band on the whole was concerned, he wasn’t the right guy for the job.
Guercio’s choice to book Chicago to play a bunch of festivals throughout Europe in the fall left me scratching my head. Suddenly, we were playing outdoor venues in thirty-five-degree weather to less than capacity crowds. The shows weren’t successful and most of the concert promoters lost money. On top of that, life on the road with our new manager Dick Duryea wasn’t getting any better.
Needless to say, CBS Records panicked because they didn’t want anyone to kill their golden goose. They were terrified Chicago might implode. The infighting between the band and management drove the suits at the label crazy. They wanted us to settle with Guercio as soon as possible and be done with the entire ordeal. But it wasn’t going to be that easy. The time had come for the band to part ways with Guercio once and for all. We never wanted things to reach the point of no return, but there we were. Our confidence in our management was at an all-time low and in the end, there was no way we could re-sign.
The band had to act fast and brought in a renowned manager named Jeff Wald, who was best known for being married to Helen Reddy and masterminding her career. He was also notoriously difficult in dealing with record companies, so CBS clearly wasn’t thrilled with our choice. They tried to persuade us to go with Earth, Wind and Fire’s management team of Ruffalo and Cavallo, but we had no interest.
It should have been the perfect launching point for a new direction in our career. But everything was going to get a hell of a lot worse before it got any better.
13
Losing Terry
More than ever, cocaine had gained a powerful hold on the band. The drug was everywhere in the 1970s and nobody knew exactly how destructive it was. There were many times when I considered coke a ninth member of our group. The guys thought they would be able to control its effects, but it often ended up controlling them. Over time, they became slaves to it. As we played on, relationships within Chicago soured. Guys were stoned and erratic or burnt out and irritable. There was no middle ground. “Tune out, turn on” was a motto of the past. The beauty of the hippie movement had long since turned ugly. The drug culture had cast a shadow over everything. People like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had already succumbed to their addictions. Nobody simply experimented anymore. Drugs were being used for daily maintenance, not recreation and exploration.
Occasionally, I saw kids come up for autographs and watch Bobby and Terry snap back at them. It bothered me to watch any of the guys disrespect our fans, and I regularly got into it with them over the way they treated people. That wasn’t who they were. Both of them were good-hearted guys, but more and more the drugs were turning them into strangers to me.
Coke had its hooks deep into Terry and his behavior spiraled out of control. Drugs turned him from a fun-loving guy into a nasty, short-tempered mess. To make matters worse, he had taken to carrying his guns around with him whether we were out at Caribou Ranch, in the recording studio, or out on the road. Each band member was his own man, but when that behavior started disrupting the group as a whole, it had to be dealt with. There was no alternative but to address what was going on. It wasn’t going to be easy. Everyone did their fair share of the stuff, so it was difficult to stand in judgment. How aggressive could any of us be without sounding like complete hypocrites? We all had our shortcomings and were getting high in one way or another, but Terry took it too far. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a holy roller by any standards—maybe a little grass here and there, but nowhere near what Terry was doing. In my mind, I could be more vocal because I was fairly clean at that point.
“I am worried something bad is going to happen to you, man,” I told Terry at our band meeting. “You have to be careful of the drugs. Besides, you’re carrying guns around everywhere you go.”
Terry smiled and ran a hand through his hair. No matter what was going through my head at the time, he had the type of genuine smile that always made me think everything was going to be fine. And I hoped it would be.
“Don’t worry, I’m okay, Danny,” he told me.
When he showed up to a barbecue at my house a few weeks later, Terry was a complete wreck. He was strung out like I hadn’t seen him before and I had to pull him aside at one point.
I looked him in the eye and put my hand on his shoulder. “Man, you don’t look too good,” I told him.
Terry let out a long sigh and stared down at the ground. “I know,” he said, shaking his head. “This shit is killing me. I’ve got to stop.”
Not only was Terry the most talented guitar player I had ever played with, but he was also an incredible person with a wonderful heart. It hurt me to watch the coke eat away at his soul. Because of his ridiculously high tolerance, an aura of invincibility had set in over time. I desperately wanted him to regain control of his life and make his health a top priority, but I couldn’t force him to do anything. Nobody could. Although Terry understood he needed to make some major changes, it was difficult for him. He couldn’t manage to pull himself away from the party crowd he had fallen in with. The hangers-on he had picked up along the way tightly clung to him like leeches. I supported him unconditionally in whatever he did and encouraged him to take the steps to get help. But my urging alone was never enough.
On the night of January 23, 1978, I was driving home from a Lakers game at the Forum when I received a call on my car phone from our new manager, Jeff Wald. It was one of the earliest models of mobile telephone, and I wasn’t used to being contacted on it.
“Did you hear?” he asked.
“Did I hear what, Jeff?”
There was an extended silence on Jeff’s end of the line that made me uneasy. And then he spoke:
“Danny . . . Terry’s dead. He killed himself.”
“What do you mean?” I asked confusedly.
“Terry is dead, Danny,” Jeff repeated.
My stomach shot up into my throat and the surging adrenaline in my veins caused me to grip the receiver tighter in my hand. I fought off the urge to smash it into the dashboard.
“What the hell are you talking about, Jeff?” I screamed. “Don’t joke around like that!” I jerked the steering wheel of my car and cut across two lanes of the 10 freeway.
“Listen, it’s the truth,” Jeff said. “But stay away from there, Danny. It won’t
be long before the police and the press are crawling all over the place.”
“Stay away from where, Jeff? Where is Terry?”
He fell silent once again.
“Jeff!” I screamed.
“It happened at Don’s house in Canoga Park,” he finally confessed. “I just got a call from Don and I didn’t know if he had talked to you first or not. He was rambling about Terry playing around with a gun and it going off.”
Donny was a keyboard technician and roadie for the band who partied with Terry on a regular basis. No matter what, I had to get to his house. I needed to see Terry. I pushed my Mercedes as fast as it could go. Jeff’s words continued to reverberate in my head.
Terry’s dead. He killed himself.
In my mind, I desperately hoped it wasn’t true, but in my heart I knew it probably was.
I needed air. I rolled all of the windows down in the car and the front seat was suddenly a churning windstorm. The sound of the air whistling into my ears was deafening, but I didn’t mind. Maybe the noise would drown out my racing thoughts.
When I finally arrived at Donny’s house in Canoga Park, everything was eerily silent. I burst through the front door to find Donny standing in the corner of the living room absolutely hysterical. He hugged me tightly like I was a life preserver.
“It wasn’t my fault, man,” Donny sobbed. “I tried to warn him but he just kept fucking around with that gun. I’m telling you the truth.”
My focus shifted to the center of the living room. Terry’s lifeless body sat back on the couch, his head angled up toward the ceiling. When I saw a pistol down on the floor next to his foot, a wave of dread shot through me. Another two steps forward revealed a bullet hole in the side of his head. His eyes were wide open, staring off blankly into the distance.
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