Chicago at 50 opens tour in Tucson tonight

They spent a couple weeks early this month tweaking their stage show, warming up their vocal chords and running down setlists and soundbites, and now Chicago the band is ready to kick off its 50th anniversary year in style.

And they will start the next leg of the landmark anniversary tour at the Tucson Music Hall Feb. 2 before what is sure to be a sold-out hall. As of this week, there were a handful of single tickets on the main floor and a few more in the balcony.

Chicago will pack five decades of hitmaking — from “Make Me Smile” and “Hard Habit To Break” to “Saturday in the Park,” “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” and the Grammy-winning hit “If You Leave Me Now” — into one night.

“Playing music is fun, and listening to music in a live context is how music should be enjoyed,” said 72-year-old lead songwriter and frontman Richard Lamm, one of four of the remaining six founding members still performing with the band. “It’s just as much fun for the musicians as it is for the audience.”

The anniversary tour has been loosely mapped out through July, and Lamm said he hopes to get back in the studio sometime this year to record a follow-up album to 2014’s “Chicago 36.”

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“We had the craziest 2016 you could imagine, all the good things that happened to the band starting with New Year’s Eve 2016 where we played freezing outdoors in Chicago and then we went right to Asia,” Lamm said during a mid-January phone call. “It got nuttier and nuttier as we went along.”

Among the nuttiness was a split with former founding frontman Peter Cetera on the eve of Chicago’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Cetera, 72, who left the band in 1985 for a solo career, couldn’t come to terms with his former band on its Hall of Fame performance; Cetera reportedly wanted the band to sing one of its songs in a different key, which Lamm said was not going to happen.

“I haven’t heard him sing live in who knows how long. He’s got a beautiful instrument, but I don’t know why he hasn’t taken care of it better,” said Lamm, who described his own voice as “better than it’s ever been.”

“All the guys are good,” he said, then marveled on the band’s longevity alongside other rock greats like the Rolling Stones. “It’s an amazing accomplishment. I can’t say it was the plan. At some point we realized that making music — and for myself personally composing music — hopefully would be a lifelong pursuit. But it wasn’t until we had been doing it for 25, 30 years, we all looked at each other and said, ‘Well, I guess this is what we’re supposed to do.’”