“25 or 6 to 4” by Chicago

Chicago's second album, simply titled Chicago, arrived in 1970 with this one riding its crest: a Robert Lamm song cut in July 1969, sung by Peter Cetera and put out by Columbia as a single that June. Lamm worked it out on a 12-string that was missing its 2 low E strings, leaving him 10 to play with, and the song is about exactly that kind of night: a guy wide awake in the small hours, trying to wring a song out of himself. The title is simply the time on the clock, 25 or 26 minutes shy of four in the morning, though plenty of listeners have heard drugs or secret code in it.

Under James William Guercio's production the band plays it like a freight train with the brakes cut, that descending guitar riff grinding away underneath while Cetera wails over the top.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.