“Naked in the Garden of Allah” was one of the oldest songs included on 2014’s Chicago XXXVI: Now, and also one of the earliest previewed.
Robert Lamm was struck by America’s modern-era military actions, and began constructing this topical item years before it finally found a home on a Chicago LP. Still, Lamm pushed back against the notion that he had returned to the activist days of “Dialogue (Part I & II)” and “Harry Truman.”
“It’s something I wrote after reading a lot of books about what’s going on in the Middle East, starting out with [Operation] Desert Storm and post-9/11 and Iran and Afghanistan,” Lamm told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2014. “I basically read a lot of books and watched a lot of films, and was inspired to write that song – but I don’t know if it’s ‘activist.'”
The lyric sheet from “Naked in the Garden of Allah,” however, begs to differ:
Pie in the sky and gingerbread
(we seek protection)
We never meant to get in bed
(we seek refuge)
With wannabe intelligentsia
I think we’re naked in the garden of Allah
Lamm was engaged enough to update the old saw about the emperor and his clothes for a new era, but suddenly seemed wary of criticism in a way he’d never been before. He mentioned it, in fact, years before the slow-gestating Chicago XXXVI: Now arrived.
“Naked in the Garden of Allah” is “very edgy commentary about this past 10 years we’ve spent in the Middle East, screwing everything up,” Lamm said in a 2012 talk with UCR. “So I may get some blowback from that one, I don’t know,” he added with a laugh.
Lamm kept working on it, adding era-specific lyrics in the wake of 2011’s troop surge in Afghanistan to a track already marked by Middle Eastern-imbued musical flourishes. Chicago previewed an early demo in the spring of 2013, following a sneak peek at both “Something’s Comin,’ I Know” and “Watching All the Colors.”
The rough track didn’t even include Chicago’s legendary horns at that point. But its larger message still resonated: Chicago had belatedly decided to balance their now-expected balladry with a return to more politicized songcraft.
Lamm continued to downplay “Naked in the Garden of Allah,” confiding to the Hartford Courant in 2015 that only a “very limited audience gets that song, and wants to hear it more than a couple of times.”
But this well-received turn of events didn’t produce the tidal wave of criticism Lamm apparently feared. Quite the opposite, in fact. Perhaps that helped Lamm grow more comfortable in fully embracing the song, and all of its implications.
“It’s something I worked very hard on – the lyrics and the way that the music sounds,” Lamm told Billboard in 2017, while asserting: “It’s not a piece of music that would ever have been played on AM or FM hits radio.”
This is no insult. Neither were the sharp social commentaries that had once been among Robert Lamm’s chief contributions to the Chicago legacy. “Naked in the Garden of Allah” showed they could be again.
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