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Recording

The band recorded their first album in late January 1969 at the CBS studios on 52nd Street in New York. After the Blood, Sweat & Tears album Guercio produced at first looked like a flop, Columbia limited the group to five days of basic tracking and five days of overdubbing. They worked from midnight to 8 a.m., because Simon & Garfunkel had the studio for the rest of the day. Guercio said it was done on an 8-track console.

The band members had never been in a studio before. Walter Parazaider said they found out they knew very little about what they were doing. The first song, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?, was tried live with everyone playing at once, and the band then settled on recording the rhythm section first and adding horns and vocals afterwards. With more material than a single LP could hold, they asked for a double album, and Columbia agreed on condition that the group take a royalty cut.

Music

Lamm, Kath and Pankow were the main composers. Lamm, Kath and Cetera shared lead vocals, while Pankow, Loughnane and Parazaider covered trombone, trumpet and woodwinds. Band members added percussion when they were not playing their main instrument: on I'm a Man, Pankow played cowbell, Parazaider tambourine and Loughnane claves. Free Form Guitar is Kath's improvisation, played on a Fender Stratocaster plugged straight into the studio amplifier with no pedals. Prologue, August 29, 1968 is a recording of under a minute of protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, including the chant "The whole world is watching." Cetera has no songwriting credit on the record.

Release and reception

The album came out in April 1969. It entered the Billboard chart in the week ending 17 May and peaked at number 17, with a peak of number 9 in the UK. Pankow said AM radio would not touch the band, while FM album rock stations, especially college radio, played it. By December 1969 it was a gold album. It stayed on the chart for 171 weeks by June 1975, a then-record for a rock album, and was later certified double platinum. It earned a Best New Artist nomination at the 1970 Grammys, entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014 and joined the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2025. AllMusic's Lindsay Planer wrote that few debut albums can boast so consistently solid an effort. In 2002 Rhino remastered it for a single CD, and in 2019 it issued a 50th anniversary remix.