By RAHN ADAMS
BOONE, N.C. (Jan. 28, 2026) – The Hibriten High School pep band was the coolest group of musicians this 11-year-old kid had ever heard in person. It was three more years before I would hear Maynard Ferguson’s screaming MF horn in the old concert hall at App State. But that’s another story for another day.
Mom would take me and my little brother to our older brother’s JV basketball games — Mom was the hoops fan, not Dad — and then we’d stay for the two varsity contests that followed. That’s when the pep band played, starting at halftime of the girls’ game. Those guys and gals playing horns and banging drums were so cool. Whether it was that first year or the next, I remember admiring Joe, the trombone player, in particular. I wanted to play just like him.
Coming from a white evangelical background — a really strict fundamentalist Christian household — I didn’t get to listen to rock or even pop music openly at home. Now, I was in the elementary school band — I played trombone, like Joe — but the only good songs we played were easy arrangements of Tijuana Brass tunes. My only other link to popular music was a wired earbud and a cheap AM transistor radio that picked up only the local radio station. Top Gun, as WKGX in Lenoir was called back then, played country-and-western music, and went off the air every day at sunset.
But that’s when the pep band started heating up on those cold winter nights in that crowded and stuffy high school gym. During breaks in the games, the band stood at one end of the home stands and played neat songs like “Windy” by the Association and “Up, Up and Away” by the 5th Dimension, as well as two jazzy tunes by Chicago, the original rock group with horns. I also remember a Cliff Nobles Philly soul hit called “Horse Fever” (not to be confused with “The Horse,” which every other pep band played), as well as the first Hibriten fight song that was actually App’s “Hi-Hi-y-ike-us” (mountain talk for “Hi, how do you like us?”).
Of course, I didn’t know any of those songs by title or artist — well, except for the Globetrotters’ “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which the pep band played during warmups for the boys’ game, and then “Dixie,” even when the opposing team was predominantly black. Yes, this was that long ago, the winter of 1970-71. The Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon’s corrupt administration that led to the Watergate scandal were all in the news every day. But I wasn’t allowed to buy pop music records or listen to rock radio, even in the car. The revolution was not being televised or broadcast at my house.
One Chicago song, I later learned, was “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” by keyboardist Robert Lamm. The other tune, my favorite on the pep band’s playlist, was a song cryptically entitled “25 or 6 to 4,” also penned by Lamm but sung by bassist Peter Cetera on the rock group’s second album, the eponymous Chicago. It was rumored to be about the 25 or 26 National Guardsmen who, in 1968, shot and killed four student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio. That song interpretation turned out not to be true, but it made sense at the time.
Since those dark days for our nation, I’ve heard Robert Lamm explain that the song title and lyrics simply refer to him reading the hands on the face of a clock in predawn darkness, as in 25 or 26 minutes until 4 a.m. But that’s the beauty of good song lyrics and good poetry, in general — making a simple observation or using a well-turned phrase that can mean different things to different people, depending on their experiences and outlooks.
Later on — I mean, after all those Hibriten High basketball games that winter in Caldwell County — I fell in love with Chicago the band and figured out how to buy their albums and listen to them on the sly on the family’s huge console stereo in the den. It usually meant I had to wait until my little brother and I were home alone. He liked Chicago almost as much as I did. I even bought the little guy that beautiful Chicago album for his birthday one year. Another year at Christmas, he and our older brother gave me Chicago’s Greatest Hits. Our attraction to Chicago made perfect sense from at least a couple of standpoints.
One reason I was so drawn to that particular band was because five years earlier we had moved to North Carolina, to neighboring Burke County, from a Chicago suburb. Except for a few weeks as an infant, I had spent my first seven years of childhood in Illinois, and my little brother was born in Waukegan, Illinois, a few weeks before we moved south in the summer of 1966. The way I saw it, Chicago’s Bobby Lamm on keys, Peter Cetera on bass, Terry Kath on guitar, Jimmy Pankow on trombone, Walt Parazaider on woodwinds, Lee Loughnane on trumpet, and Danny Seraphine on drums were my home boys who’d done good. I played piano, trombone and guitar, too, though not like them, of course, but I was practicing. And I had enjoyed living in our little town, Zion, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, just north of Chicago. Again, that’s another story.
So, what was I to think just the other night when I received, out of the blue, an email containing nothing but a purported link to a YouTube cover version of “25 or 6 to 4”? No accompanying message or explanation of any kind. Just that link. And the email appeared to be from someone I haven’t heard a single word from in years. Not one word. What would you think?
To be safe, I didn’t click on the link. I’ve heard too many stories of people following links like that and having their electronic devices as well as their identities and bank accounts hijacked by cyber-criminals. But I did wonder why that particular person might refer me to that particular tune. Was the person’s choice of this misinterpreted protest song intentional? And if so, why was this particular video selected for me to view? Why not one by that popular YouTube cover band from Russia that plays Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire hits so well?
Was the timing of this email — it being sent in the wake of the heinous murders by federal stormtroopers of two nonviolent protesters in Minneapolis — just a coincidence? I wonder.
Yeah, I do tend to over-analyze things. But without any explanation, I’m left to make of that late-night email what I will. I suspect it was the sender’s way of just making any contact again, of sending a trial balloon up, up and away, or — to reference another ‘70s soft-rock group — of casting bread upon the waters, so to speak, to see if even a crumb of it would float. The person wanted to see how I would react, or how I would interpret the gesture. In other words, it was a test.
Well, this is how I’m reacting — by writing about it. It’s what a writer does. I may even try to write another song or two about these dark days we find ourselves in now, thanks to Donald and his greedy friends, just as Chicago’s songwriters once wrote and performed some great protest songs about Nixon and Vietnam. That was through the early and mid ’70s when the band was at its best, back before Terry Kath, the band’s incomparable guitarist and its heart and soul, died by a gun in January 1978, and the band lost its way. I’m no Robert Lamm or James Pankow, my two favorite songwriters in the group, but I can keep practicing.
Does anybody really know what time it is? Hell, yes, we do. It’s time for a change. For the better. And for good this time.