Page 123: Chicago - You may not deliver thrills, but you sure deliver value.
True to the need of the album-oriented rock (AOR) format that launched them, the first four released by the band called Chicago comprised three double albums and one quadruple album. That's 10 LPs in a little less than thirty months, and if you factored that into your Birthstar's already staggering album-sales figures, you might find that in terms of sheer tonnage, Chicago shipped more vinyl than any other American rock band in the 1970s. Not bad for a band that could have walked through O'Hare Airport at the height of their success without attracting so much as a single screaming fan. That's not because their fans didn't love them, but because total subjugation of individual ego to the collective good of the group was the rule in Chicago, even to the point of using a logo rather than a picture of the band on all of their albums. It would turn out in the end, of course, that the incredibly accomplished and hardworking musicians who had chosen so admirably to prosper as seven anonymous dwarves had been harboring a would-be Snow White in their midst all along. Peter Cetera was his name, and as soon as his name became well known to those who loved his high tennor voice, he was asked to leave a hive that was perfectly happy not to have a queen. "Team player" may sound like faint praise sometimes, but find the right team to play with and you'll realize your true power.
Lasting, Massive, Whitebread, Familiar, Not Sexy
Constellations: Launching Pad, Lite & White
Birthsongs: #1 Hits
If You Leave Me Now - October 17-30, 1976 Hard To Say I'm Sorry - September 5-18, 1982 Look Away - December 4-17, 1988
Page 117: Peter Cetera - You are the glorious butterfly who's reluctant to emerge from the cocoon.
What Michael McDonald and Lionel Richie were to the Doobie Brothers and the Commodores, Peter Cetera was to Chicago: the man who found his true voice while teaching his former group how not to rock. It took your Birthstar 17 albums with Chicago before he worked up the nerve to go solo, but when he finally did, his timing couldn't have been more perfect. The year was 1986, the constellation Reaganrock was in its ascendancy, and Kenny Loggins was simply too busy to record every single movie sound track, which left Karate Kid, Part 2 to Cetera and his Glory of Love. And if your Birthsong's bombastic Whitebread grandeur seems indistinguishable from Chicago's 1982 #1 Hard To Say I'm Sorry, it only goes to show you (a) the degree to which Cetera had transformed his former group by the end of his tenure and (b) the enduring appeal of a full-tilt, over-the-top power ballad in the hands of an uninhibited master. If you sometimes feel like renting the entire film oeuvre of Ralph Macchio and staying up all night to watch it, that's just popstrology at work. Because like your Birthstar himself, you are the type who understands the importance of the word "sometimes" in the edict that less is sometimes more.
Massive, Whitebread, Familiar, Not Sexy, Forgotten
Page 118: Peter Cetera and Amy Grant - You might actually be a saint, but to someone you're a sinner.
It's extremely difficult to imagine Peter Cetera as a defiler of a pious and virtuous young woman, but that's exactly how many of Amy Grant's biggest fans saw him when he tempted her into a popstrological Power Couple in late 1986. Ms. Grant wasn't a pop singer, you see--she was a singer of gospel and Christian Contemporary with a devout following that bought her records in the millions and viewed her move away from their chosen genre as a true fall from grace. You are too young to remember, but as powerful as the constellation Reaganrock was in the 1980s, its watered-down sound was still demon rock and roll to some, and not just a lunatic fringe. These were the years after all, in which Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was at the apex of its powers, and devotees of his brand of Christianity viewed Ms. Grant's crossover as a grim portent indeed. And perhaps their fears were well founded, for not three months after you were born, the taint of sin was shockingly revealed even within the holy confines of the Praise the Lord Ministries, whose leader Jim Bakker provided America with what historians may someday call the first great scandal of the modern media age. As a child of Peter Cetera and Amy Grant, you are unlikely to be viewed as an iconoclast, and yet your capacity for toppling dubious icons through seemingly innocent actions is popstrologically unquestionable.
Whitebread, Familiar, Not Sexy, Forgotten, Minor
Constellations: Power Couple, Reaganrock
Birthsong: #1 Hit
The Next Time I Fall - November 30-December 6, 1986
[ 27. July 2008, 17:34: Message edited by: BabyLove19781999 ]
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Just in case anyone hasn't read this topic yet with references to KK2.
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