Street Player

by Danny Seraphine

  I figured Pete had my back, but I still hadn’t felt as helpless in a long time. It killed me to know there were people scheming against me two thousand miles away and I didn’t have a voice in the matter. All I could do was hope for the best.

  Mother’s Day in 1990 is a day I will never forget as long as I live. I spent the weekend with my family at my brother-in-law Graham’s house in Denver. Later in the afternoon, I got an unexpected call from Howard. He sounded very shaken up.

  “I feel really awful about having to do this to you, Danny, but I have some bad news,” Howard said. “Without my knowledge, the guys got together and held a meeting.”

  Howard let out an extended sigh. I knew what was coming next.

  “They voted you out of the band, Danny.”

  The world came to a complete stop. I let my hand holding the receiver fall away from my face and stared vacantly at my joyful relatives standing in the room. They immediately knew something was wrong and got quiet. I gradually brought the phone back up.

  “What?” is all I managed to ask.

  “You have to believe me when I tell you this is the last thing I wanted, but the guys got together and made the decision. There was nothing I could do about it. It happened behind my back,” Howard explained. “I am so, so sorry, Danny. We both know this has nothing to do with your playing.”

  So this is it? I devoted my entire life to Chicago and this is how they repaid me? A phone call from Howard?

  My shock was soon replaced by anger. “Are you saying you didn’t know any of this was happening?” I yelled.

  “I am telling you the truth,” Howard answered. “The whole thing is as much of a shock to me as it is to you.”

  “I find that hard to believe, Howard,” I said quietly.

  Around the room, my family stood around watching me. I leaned back against the wall and blankly looked up at the ceiling.

  When I recovered from the shock of Howard’s call, I dialed Walt’s number. Jason and Bill had probably engineered my whole firing, but the other guys in the band would have still had to vote in favor of getting rid of me.

  “What the fuck happened, Walt?” I yelled as soon as he answered the phone. “So much for our oath, huh?”

  “I’m sorry, Danny, but things changed,” he told me. “I feel really bad, but there was nothing I could do.”

  I hung up before he said another disgusting word. The Walt Parazaider I knew wasn’t on the other end of the line. It wasn’t the same guy I had played with since I was sixteen years old. What was the use of staying on the phone and listening to him harp on the same tired excuse that my playing had slipped? The end result was still going to be the same. I was out.

  Part of me wondered whether Walt’s wife, Jackie, had prodded him into his decision because she always held me responsible for her brother Jack’s death. In my heart, I couldn’t truly believe that Walt wanted to fire me, because there was too much history between us. Over the years, we had our differences, but there was always a deep sense of love and respect. Sure, Walt didn’t like that I was responsible for getting Jack fired. But did he also blame me for Jack’s death? I suppose it is a possibility, but I don’t think it’s true.

  My phone call with Jimmy was an absolute joke. He sat on the other end of the line and tried to rationalize the band’s decision. Jimmy explained that everything had come as a result of my poor playing and shaky live performances. Was my playing worse than his when he was on a drinking bender? Not a chance. But Jimmy didn’t want to hear any of what I had to say. He had no idea that I had saved him from getting thrown off our last tour and being put into rehab. Jimmy’s drinking and partying had gotten way out of hand and the guys were disgusted with his antics. I had stood them down because I knew Jimmy’s father was about to have major surgery. Being booted from Chicago at that point in his life would have killed him. In the end, I thought he would stand behind me, but I was wrong.

  By the time Robert got in touch with me, I was sick and tired of everyone’s double-talk and petty excuses.

  “Do you want to know how it all really went down?” he asked me.

  “You know what? It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself! You guys are a bunch of chickenshit motherfuckers!”

  I slammed the phone down and went out onto my porch to take in some fresh air. To this day, I regret not letting Robert speak. He was trying to be honest with me, but I refused to listen. I felt sick to my stomach. It was the worst scenario I could have imagined.

  And where had Pete been when all of this went down behind the scenes? Trying to understand his role in the situation left me scratching my head. Pete and Howard always insisted that the other members got together and made the decision to fire me without their knowledge, but that explanation didn’t sit right. It was tough to believe that Pete had no idea what was going on. He prided himself on having eyes in the back of his head. Needless to say, our relationship would never be the same.

  As I wallowed around the house in Evergreen, I received an interesting envelope in the mail one day. It was a legal document announcing a Chicago Corporation board meeting in two weeks to make my firing official. By law, Chicago was obligated to notify me of the proceedings.

  “You should go back there and make each and every one of those guys look you right in the eye,” Teddy told me.

  I agreed with her. There was no way I was going to miss out on a chance to confront the band face-to-face. It was important to make sure they knew what I thought about the gutless way they had fired me. I flew out to California for the meeting at a law office in West L.A. I wanted to be the first face the guys saw when they walked in, so I arrived early and carefully snuck past the receptionist and into the conference room. Then I sat down and waited. As the band filed in, they looked like they had seen a ghost. Their jaws nearly hit the floor. They probably weren’t sure that I would take the time to fly out to Los Angeles and attend the meeting. When Lester Kaufman walked in with two of the band’s attorneys, he wore the same expression.

  I asked to have a minute alone with the band. Once Lester and the attorneys left the room, I closed the door and sat back down at the table. One by one, I looked Walt, Robert, and Lee dead in the eye. Jimmy turned out to be a no-show.

  “Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, imagine it would come to this?” I asked them. “What did I do that was so bad?”

  There was a silent moment before Robert spoke up. “Listen, Danny, you lost your focus,” he told me.

  “I lost my focus?” I repeated. “Did I lose my focus any more than you when you were so strung out on coke you could barely play?”

  Then I looked at Lee. “Any more than you when you were drinking yourself into an early grave?”

  And then Walt. “Any more than when you lost your mind and had to be put into a psychiatric ward?”

  The silence in the room was broken when Lee finally spoke up. “Well, this isn’t about us, it’s about you,” he said.

  What a bunch of hypocrites. I had said my piece and was done talking. It was obvious nothing would ever change in their minds. The time came to finally put forth the official vote, so Lester and the attorneys came back into the room.

  Lester stood up at the head of the table. “All those in favor of Daniel Seraphine remaining as drummer in the band Chicago, raise your hand,” he said.

  I raised my hand.

  “Duly counted,” Lester said. “All those in favor of dissolving Daniel Seraphine’s association with the band Chicago, raise your hand.”

  When Walt, Robert, and Lee raised their hands, I glared at them from across the table.

  Lester turned toward me. “Could you please excuse us, Danny? The band has pending business matters to attend to.”

  Without a word, I got up from my seat and walked out of the conference room. I left the building with my head held high. I wanted those guys to look me dead in the eye when they pulled the trigger. And they certainly did.

  22

&nbs
p; Evergreen Daze

  A tornado had just torn through my life and left behind a wake of utter destruction. For the first time since I was sixteen, I was without a band and scrambling to find shelter from the harsh reality that was setting in.

  I couldn’t keep it together and sank like a stone into a deep depression. The life had been sucked out of me and it was difficult to find the strength to get out of bed in the morning. Even therapy had no effect on my state of mind. Not that I gave it a chance. I went to an appointment or two, but shut down once things became too painful.

  Luckily, my family and a few good friends were around to support me. I flew my parents out to Colorado regularly to visit and spend time with their grandchildren. Sometimes they stayed at my house for months at a clip. My mother was having health problems, so I had an elevator installed to help her get around. I was grateful that my relationship with my parents improved as we got older. Despite what had happened throughout my teen years, my father and I were finally able to develop a deep love and understanding of each other. He was always there to talk things out with me.

  One afternoon, we were out driving along a backwoods road not far from my house. “You know,” he said looking out the passenger-side window at the rays of sun pushing through the trees. “It should have been so perfect.”

  His statement rang true. I had moved my family to a beautiful area in Colorado and should have been enjoying the fruits of my labor during the twilight of my career. Instead, everything had imploded. Many people say that when one door closes in life many more open, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth in my case. Every one of them had closed at once. Most of the friends I thought I had in the music business soon disappeared and my phone stopped ringing.

  My father understood what I was going through and saw how dissatisfied I was with the way everything had turned out. My identity, my heart, and my soul were directly tied to Chicago. Over the years, I had fought for the band tooth and nail. I would have done anything for the guys. Chicago came before everything in my life—my wife, my children, and at times my own well-being. In the end, maybe that intense devotion was my downfall, but it was the only way I knew how to operate. As far as I was concerned, it was all or nothing.

  My dealings with the band weren’t completely over. Walt called me one day to try to settle some of the lingering business issues. He wanted to know if I would be willing to sell my rights to the Chicago name for $200,000. I was so insulted I hung up on him. They were offering me a paltry settlement for my entire life’s work. Not a chance. I hired an attorney named Mike Rosenfeld and filed a lawsuit against the band.

  I halfheartedly opened a small recording studio under my Street Sense Productions moniker in a space in downtown Evergreen and tried to develop local talent. But nothing ever came of it. I was going through the motions, trying to sort through the pieces of my broken life.

  After almost a year, Teddy had finally reached the end of her rope. We had been drifting away from each other for years, and now that I was out of the band and at home the distance was painfully obvious. One night she told me that our marriage was over and I needed to move out. I don’t blame her for leaving me and wanting a divorce, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. I was already hanging on by a thread and her leaving put me over the edge. For the first time in my life, I was convinced it was the end of everything. The bottom of my world had dropped out. My band was gone and my wife was leaving and taking the kids.

  In the beginning, I had moved out to Colorado to start a new life. Boy, I had started a new life all right!

  My lawsuit against Chicago proved to be ridiculously expensive. The courts froze all of my band royalties. The guys were trying to wait it out and starve me off. Once they caught wind that Teddy was seeking a divorce, they seized the opportunity to come after me with another settlement offer. I didn’t want to budge, because they had a tough case to build. I was a founding member of the band and held a full share in the corporation we created. They would have to prove that my playing had fallen off so drastically in the end that it was impossible for Chicago to continue performing. No matter what they claimed, that obviously wasn’t the case.

  As time wore on, however, I lost the will to continue the fight with the band and with my wife. I was tired, depressed, and wanted everything to be over and done with. The stress and the financial strain of fighting a war on two fronts was overwhelming.

  Over the course of the process, I regretted my choice. I discovered I had hired the wrong attorney to help me with my legal fight. I repeatedly asked him to track down the contracts that detailed when Chicago’s recording masters would revert to the band, but for some reason Mike never found them. The masters were the most important issue because I understood how valuable they were going to be in the future. I decided to take the case into my own hands and directly negotiated with Howard to reach a settlement.

  “I don’t want to give up my rights to those masters, Howard,” I told him over the phone.

  “Well, Sony’s never going to let those masters go,” he quickly answered. “So consider that a nonissue and let’s not make them a deal breaker.”

  I thought of Howard as a close friend and believed what he was telling me. He knew what kind of state my life was in. Besides advising me on the settlement, he even offered to help me get back into the music business to start managing and producing bands. It was a small consolation, but I certainly had no interest in playing drums anymore. That part of my life was over.

  In the end, I reluctantly agreed to settle with the band and flew out to Los Angeles to put an end to the madness. I met Mike at a café in Santa Monica to sign the papers.

  I was officially out.

  It may have been legally over, but the pain had just begun.

  What is left to live for? I wondered to myself.

  I considered anything that would cure my heartache—even suicide. It seemed like I had already been left for dead by everyone who knew me, so what was the difference?

  When a buddy of mine from back in my time living in Westlake, Bill Denton, called from California to check up on me, I was inconsolable.

  “Listen to me carefully,” I told him. “Don’t ever let me get married again.”

  Bill was there for me in a real period of crisis. He was doing a real estate project in downtown Denver at the time and visited me whenever he could. I was a wreck and Bill gave me his unconditional support every step of the way.

  After Teddy and I settled our divorce, she decided to stay in Evergreen for a while so I could be close to the children. Good friends of mine, Kit and Beverly Bradshaw, lent me a pop-top trailer that I moved into on forty acres of land I had purchased from the Coors family, on top of a nearby mountain. Originally, I had bought the lot in hopes of one day building a large house with a full recording studio similar to Caribou Ranch, but that dream was a thing of the past. I retreated up into the woods into an area called Soda Creek and kept to myself. Although there had never been much religion in my life, I started saying a Hail Mary and an Our Father whenever I felt down and out. I must have said thousands of them.

  I became, for all intents and purposes, a hermit. My beard grew long and I wore the same clothes for days on end. I no longer had an important image to uphold. There were no more media and fans to impress. I wouldn’t have to show up to a photo shoot anytime soon. The hairpieces were tossed into the trash. That life was a hundred years ago.

  The pop-top trailer had no running water, so I did all my bathing at a local health club or a friend’s house. For electricity, I ran a power cord from a nearby abandoned caretaker’s house that was operated by the Colorado School of Mines. I kept a large cooler to store food in and dug a fire pit so I could cook. At night, the strong mountain winds violently shook my small trailer. Many times I wished they would sweep me up and carry me off somewhere, anywhere.

  My young son, J.D., knew I was hurting and constantly wanted to stay with me out in the trailer. We both had a great deal
of pain to deal with from the divorce, and it was good to have J.D. out there in the forest to keep me company. But overall I wasn’t thrilled about him seeing me in such a condition. Who knows what kind of effect the whole scenario was having on him.

  Interestingly enough, during that dark period my thoughts also turned to the young daughter Terry had left behind, Michelle. It always broke my heart to think of her growing up without her father around. And then a thought hit me—I remembered the black satin Caribou Ranch tour jacket I took from Don’s house the night Terry died. I decided the time had come to pass it on to Michelle. I had kept the jacket folded up in a trunk for years and it wasn’t doing anything but collecting dust anyway. Through her mother, Camilla, I managed to get it to Michelle for her sixteenth birthday. In the end, it’s what Terry would have wanted, and it felt very rewarding. In my mind, the jacket was finally with its rightful owner.

  The following days were spent out on my land replaying the years of Chicago back in my mind. When I wasn’t skiing or fly-fishing, I reclined in a chair outside my trailer and listened to old CTA records on a cheap stereo system. The music brought me back to the golden years—the traveling and touring, the sense of brotherhood, and the overwhelming success we achieved together. But for the most part, the memories remained on an endless loop and constantly tormented me.

  I was living out in the harsh elements of the Colorado winter with little shelter. The weather turned and the snow season descended upon me. Some local friends offered me a place to stay, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept. The peace and tranquillity of being alone high up in the evergreens was calming. I saw why God had led me to such a beautiful place.

  One morning I was sitting in the middle of the trees on a makeshift toilet when I heard a rustling from over the hill. I looked up to see a group of elk come wandering out of the woods. They stopped and stared curiously at me sitting half-naked with my pants at my ankles. The absurdity of my situation finally hit me. Everyone believed I had gone off the deep end, and now even the elk were looking at me like I belonged in the nuthouse.