One of the most memorable story songs of the 1970s reached the top of the charts 52 years ago today, despite getting some rather important details about its subject spectacularly wrong.
Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the chart week ending Aug. 17, 1974. Written by Mitch Murray and Peter Callander, the song tells the dramatic tale of a bloody showdown between Chicago police and gangsters working for mob boss Al Capone.
There was just one rather large problem: the battle never happened. And the two British songwriters had never even been to Chicago.
“The Night Chicago Died” depicts a massive gun battle between Capone’s men and Chicago police, with the narrator anxiously awaiting word about his policeman father. While the song was inspired by Chicago’s Prohibition-era gangster history, there was never a confrontation resembling the one described in the lyrics.
Murray and Callander later acknowledged that they had never visited Chicago when they wrote the song and that much of what they knew about the city and the era came from gangster movies.
That might help explain one of the song’s most notorious details: its reference to the “East Side of Chicago.” While Chicago does have a neighborhood called East Side on the city’s Far South Side, the city isn’t conventionally divided into an East Side in the way the song suggests. Lake Michigan sits directly east of downtown.
In “Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs,” Barry’s readers voted “The Night Chicago Died” among the selections that inspired particularly strong reactions, writing that the song “still arouses great hostility” for both its music and lyrics.
As one reader wrote, “There IS no east side of Chicago; just awfully, awfully big lake. Daddy would’ve needed scuba gear to walk the beat.”
In “The Billboard Book of Number One Hits,” author Fred Bronson recounts Murray admitting that the pair’s research was “a little bit slipshod.” Murray also explained that the song wasn’t written with American listeners in mind. It was recorded by Paper Lace, a Nottingham, England, group that had recently found success in its home country.
“The Night Chicago Died” wasn’t even Paper Lace’s first Murray-Callander story song. The band previously recorded “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” which became a No. 1 hit in the U.K. Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods then recorded their own version and beat Paper Lace to the American market, taking the song to No. 1 in the U.S.
There was no such obstacle for Paper Lace’s follow-up.
“The Night Chicago Died” became the band’s lone Billboard Hot 100 No. 1, while also reaching No. 3 in the U.K., No. 2 in Canada and No. 1 in Australia and New Zealand.
Chicago itself wasn’t exactly thrilled by its fictional musical bloodbath.
After Paper Lace’s song became a hit, a copy was reportedly sent to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. According to accounts of the incident, the response from his office was considerably less than congratulatory.
The song’s reputation hasn’t necessarily improved with age.
Wayne Jancik was similarly amused by its relationship with reality in “The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders,” writing that Paper Lace “rewrote a piece of history” with its account of the “mythical night.”
“Their bubblegummy voices maintained that 100 officers died one mythical night in a big gun battle on Chicago’s non-existent East Side. By evening’s end, the forces of truth and justice triumph by either killing or arresting all the vermin, and the Windy City lived happily ever after,” Jancik wrote.
More recently, Paste included “The Night Chicago Died” near the bottom of its ranking of 1974’s No. 1 hits, placing it No. 28 out of 34, writing, “‘The Night Chicago Died’ is basically a novelty song but a good-sounding one, so that counts for something, I suppose. Chicago mayor Richard Daley hated the song, and one of his staffers allegedly said that Paper Lace should ‘jump in the Chicago River, placing your heads under water three times and surfacing twice.'”
Yet none of that stopped Americans from buying the record. “The Night Chicago Died” earned a Gold certification in the U.S., and its bizarre combination of gangster mythology, historical invention and irresistible pop storytelling gave Paper Lace the biggest American hit of its career.
Fifty-two years later, it remains an unusual piece of chart history: two English songwriters who had never been to Chicago wrote a song about a Chicago battle that never happened, and Americans took it all the way to No. 1.
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