Tonight, the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inducts — among other acts — Chicago, the nation’s premier horn-rock band. (You can catch the televised ceremony at various times this summer in your stepdad’s rec room.) It’s been a long time coming. Per the Hall’s peculiar rules, Chicago have been eligible for election since 1994, 25 years after their first release. To the consternation of their mighty fanbase, though, they didn’t make the shortlist of nominees until last year. I can’t presume to speak for a Chicago superfan. Were I one, though, the induction of acts like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (whose two primary claims to fame are one, contributing a few non-Butterfield players for Bob Dylan’s first electric set, and two, Elvin Bishop going on to release “True Love”), Gene Pitney (a teen idol with a four-year prime and a glancing connection to the Stones), and the Beastie Boys (I dunno, if I’m a Chicago superfan I assume it’s called the Rock Hall for a reason) would set my jaw to a permagrind.

After the Hall announced its inductees, Chicago founding member Lee Loughnane said all the right things. “It’s very exciting,” he told Billboard, “I had no idea it would be as exciting as it is.” Still, he had to get a dig in. “Everybody assumed that we’re already in the Hall Of Fame,” he shrugged. Co-founder Robert Lamm expanded on this in an interview with Rolling Stone: “For years now, whenever the inductees were announced there was always a number of DJs or entertainment reporters who would make the point of, ‘What’s going on here? Why aren’t these guys in the Hall Of Fame?’… When you have a long career and you’ve weathered the storms of different trends in music and the changing of the guard as far as tastemakers are concerned, you project a large target to be criticized or ignored, or sometimes actually praised.” He might as well have started crooning “Critics’ Choice,” his 1973 riposte to the parasites (his word) slagging off Chicago.

But they’re in! And perhaps just as important, they’re being remembered on their terms. Of the potted inductee bio on the Rock Hall’s site, two-thirds of it are spent on Chicago’s first two records; though the Hall underlines the band’s “keen pop sensibility,” the latest single mentioned (“If You Leave Me Now”) dates to 1976. It notes that “If You Leave Me Now” was a #1 pop hit, but it wasn’t their only one: “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” and “Look Away” were yet to come, along with seven more top tenners. Two of the latter (“Hard Habit To Break” and “You’re The Inspiration”) appeared on 1984’s Chicago 17, the best-selling item in their catalog. But if the bio is to be believed, the Hall, like the band, prefers to remember “their inception through to the late 1970s.” The Hall’s induction press release offered a “selected discography” for each act; Chicago’s latest is from 1977.

“Critics are listening for what’s new or different or fresh. I completely get it,” Lamm conceded in that Rolling Stone interview. “By the 1980s, it was power-ballad land for us since that is what enabled us to maintain a career.” Lamm and company were led on that journey by former singer/bassist Peter Cetera, whose ballads (power and otherwise) kept the band on the charts long after their peers had bitten the dust, or renamed themselves Starship. In a December interview with Radio.com, Lamm affirmed that Cetera and erstwhile drummer Danny Seraphine would perform with Chicago at the induction ceremony. Cetera squashed that idea in a post on his website; the only performance he was willing to entertain was “25 Or 6 To 4″ in the key of E. That Peter Cetera would say this — the man whose seersucker tenor graced four US #1s (two with Chicago, one solo, one with Amy Grant), every one of them a ballad — is fairly astounding. “25 Or 6 To 4″ may be the band’s signature song, but it wasn’t their biggest hit. Cetera sang it, but he wrote and sang their first two #1s.

He was also the lead or co-lead singer on 10 consecutive Chicago singles. And that, I think, is the issue. The popular notion of Chicago in their heyday was of a countercultural compositional collective: a horn-rock workshop where anyone’s tune could get the deluxe treatment. The first three records were double albums; the first four were stuffed with two-parters and movements and suites, pretentious references to Varèse and dopey references to Nixon. “If Johann Sebastian Bach were alive today,” manager James William Guercio said to an NBC news crew in 1970, “he would probably be performing in a group similar to Chicago.” The Rock Hall didn’t induct percussionist Laudir de Oliveira, whose rhythmic sensibility made sure the band’s ’70s commercial slump was funky. The Hall didn’t induct Bill Champlin, who was initially tapped (but declined) to be a replacement for guitarist Terry Kath, but did eventually take over for Cetera, singing on three top-ten hits for 1988’s Chicago 19. The Hall inducted the Chicago Seven — Cetera, Kath, Lamm, Loughnane, Seraphine, James Pankow, Walt Parazaider — and their body of work: nine albums of perfervid rock ‘n’ horn geniality.

But on those last couple of albums, Cetera showed them the way forward. The heavy-lidded “If You Leave Me Now” topped the Easy Listening chart and won two Grammy Awards: one for the arrangement, and one for pop-group vocals — for that last one, Chicago beat out “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It was the only top-30 hit from the album, and the 7th consecutive top-10 Chicago song to feature Cetera at the mic. Chicago XI — the final record with the core lineup — spawned only one single that cracked the top 40, the #4 prom jam “Baby, What A Big Surprise.” For once, the group got to contribute to the treacle. Parazaider swaps his sax for that graduation-ceremony flute; Lee Loughnane slides from trumpet to piccolo trumpet. On the verses, Cetera turns into a very not-desperate “Desperado,” backed by brother Tim and other-brother Dennis Wilson.

Still, Chicago resisted. After Kath died in January 1978 from an accidental, self-inflicted shooting, the band — which had been sloooooowly moving from side-length suites and classical-inspired composition to punchy tunes — cast about for a new direction. They dabbled in disco and R&B on 1978’s Hot Streets (their only record to forgo numeralization) and 1979’s Chicago 13. Those were good records (their reimagining of Rufus and Chaka Khan’s “Street Player” became a go-to sample source), but they were also the first Chicago LPs to miss the Top Ten since the debut. Having already ditched Guercio on Chicago XI, the band switched producers yet again for the leaner Chicago XIV. But their fortunes didn’t improve, so Columbia released a second greatest-hits album and also the band. With a new producer (David Foster) and a new label (Warner Bros.), Chicago finally remembered an old route: creamy Cetera slow jams.

The smash of 1982’s Chicago 16, “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” features an et of Ceteras making their harmonized pleas for presence over stately piano chords. That piano is played by Foster (who wrote the tune with Cetera), and it’s the first thing you hear. Other things you hear include three members of Toto, including Steve Lukather, whose guitar solo unfurls over a Foster/Cetera string arrangement, with the horns daubed in. The brass section got a little more play on #22 hit “Love Me Tomorrow,” but when the chorus hits, it’s the strings that feature. Lesson learned, Foster and Chicago created a marketplace monster with Chicago 17. No single topped the Hot 100, but for the first time in their career, they parked four singles inside the Top 20, all of them sung by Peter Cetera (with one assist from Champlin). Leadoff cut “Stay The Night” struts a stiff groove, courtesy of minimalist upstroke and Jeff Porcaro’s gated snare; “Along Comes A Woman” suggests a dance-band Huey Lewis and the News. But “You’re The Inspiration” was the powerhouse: colored with squelchbass, tastefully splashed with cymbals, garlanded with bland strings. The chorus keeps feinting at a key change. In the video, Cetera’s wearing a Bauhaus tee.

Clearly, Cetera was feeling himself. A few months after David Lee Roth ditched Van Halen for unknown climes, Chicago bid farewell to their gold-encrusted cheese curd. He matched their two #1s in just one year. There was “Glory Of Love” from The Karate Kid, Part II, co-written (the song, not the movie) with David Foster and Cetera’s wife Diane Nini. And there was “The Next Time I Fall,” an early stab at secular success from co-lead Amy Grant, who’d jumped from Myrrh Records to A&M the year before. Meanwhile, Chicago (still working with Foster) got to #3 with Chicago 18’s longest cut, the constipated, Bill Champlin-sung power ballad “Will You Still Love Me?” (In a classic bit of bet-hedging, there was also a sluggish — yet coked-out! — redo of “25 Or 6 To 4.”)

1988 was the final commercial hurrah for both parties. Cetera had one more top-5 hit, and thanks to Diane Warren, Chicago got its third #1. Cetera blamed his career downturn on a label that would prefer to promote him as Chicago’s lead singer. Once the Diane Warren singles stopped charting, Chicago blamed Diane Warren. Instead of being grateful that they’d nabbed a #1 on their 16th studio album (for comparison: Tattoo You was the Stones’ 16th UK release, and “Start Me Up” hit #7 there, #2 in America), they went Full Styx and recorded an album called Stone Of Sisyphus. It was shelved for almost 15 years. Honestly? It’s not bad: super intense and hippity-hop in places, but the title track bangs and “All The Years” casts the band as a TK Records crossover act.

And…that’s it? I can’t sit here and pretend that Chicago was some epochal act whose time was overdue. They were definitely the best at writing songs with “mama” in the title. They plundered Led Zeppelin to fine effect, which was only fair. As a rock band with horns, they were better than Blood, Sweat & Tears; equal to Ides Of March; less than Steely Dan. (To be fair, nearly everyone’s less than the Dan.) What I dig about Chicago is how congruently they mapped their generation. Sonically, they went from stuffy dorms to summery bandstands to tourist-trap dancefloors to frigid living rooms. They began their career sampling the protestors of the ’68 Democratic Convention; on their last record, they drop the couplet “make them pass laws that help us all/the Founding Fathers’ echo will be heard in the hall.” They were opportunists, but only insofar as all of us are. You call it selling out, I call it hanging on. Chicago was comfortable with disaffection and disco; they prized the free-for-all approach, but rode the Peter Cetera/David Foster combo until Cetera left, then relied on outside writers like Warren and Bobby Caldwell. In other words: They did what they could to survive in rock’s middle class. And out of nowhere, they’ve been given a pension.