I read all the research you provided on the meaning of “25 or 6 to 4” as appearing in the Chicago II album, but there is a strange other correlation that seems a little too convenient. If you use your favorite online map program, you can see that Highway 25 intersects Highway 4. Highway 4 intersects Highway 6. What if the numbers were directions to a site. Either take Highway 25 or take Highway 6 to Highway 4. Either way, you get to an area which could be Wilton Center Road or Wilmington Peotone Road. Anyone from Chicago adventureous enough to take a group to see what’s out there now?
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, Vee, we’re glad to have you with us.
There are hundreds (thousands?) of Staff Reports and Columns in our archives, and it helps readers to have a clue what you’re talking about if you provide the link when starting a new thread.
The link to the Staff Report is Straight Dope Staff Report: What does the Chicago lyric “25 or 6 to 4” mean?
25 or 6 to 4 refers to the bus lines that he used or whatever. on some days some bus lines dont run(25) , so you use the substitude (bus line 6) but bus line 4 never stops.
Yeah, but did you ever notice that Chicago’s “Questions 67 And 68” was released in '69 but didn’t become a hit until '70?
Wierd, but inconsequential!
Uh, no.
I bet are our guests are so young that they don’t remember analog clocks or the way people viewed them. 
25 or 6 to 4 as a time of day is exactly the way people referred to a time in the olden days. Just as Cecil - and the song’s author - says.
Hey! No need to cop a substitude!
No, this is the 60’s/70’s were talking about, it can’t be that straightforward, it MUST have a deeper mystical meaning. It must!
I alway thought it was about a guy staying up all night doing drugs and that’s what time it was - 25 or 26 minutes to 4.
You know, I was monkeying around with maps.google.com in the greater chicago area, and I could not find Highway 25, nor could I find anyplace where a Highway 4 intersected a Highway 6. Any takers?
25 to 4? Sure. 26 to 4? Who the heck was the precise? When going to an appointment, or waiting for a show to come on, or waiting for a Gemini launch, maybe. But in the middle of the night?
And I can speak from experience, being up at that time of night in college, only a few years after the song came out.
Perhaps he just put the six in because it sounded good.
Oh, c’mon. There must have been a million times in my life when somebody (or even I) said the equivalent. It was just something you did because you looked at a watch, tried to figure out exactly where the minute hand was, and bounded it. Nothing at all special. It wasn’t something everybody did all the time either, but it’s utterly real as a comment.
“Hey, man, what time is it?”
Looks blurrily at watch. “I dunno. About twenty-five or six to four.”
“25 or 6 to 4.” Takes puff. “Hey, song name!”
“Righteous!”
It’s far more logical than Rainy Day Women #12 and #35 coming from the coincidence that a mother and daughter came into the studio wet from the rain, but that probably is how that song got its name.
Or the Cream album Disraeli Gears coming about because one of their roadies malapropped derailleur gears, but that happened too.
Song titles are like that.