On the other hand, given that he’s looking at an analog clock/watch, his first impression is that it’s 25 to 4, but upon closer inspection he realizes it’s actually 26.
That’s not definitive. The thing about analog clocks is that you typically work by approximates, that is you start loosely and tighten up your reading of the time of you want to be more precise.
Look at the clock; it’s around 4:30. Except it’s about 5 minutes past the half hour; except it’s a little less than 5 minutes past the half hour.
Though I can see an argument that “26 or 5 to 4” has a poetic ring to it.
If you look at the whole body of Lamm’s work, even all of Chicago’s work, there is no running theme or references to drugs. If this song is really about doing drugs, it is a strange anomaly among their other ingenuous, earnest, fresh-faced lyrics from that album, their second, as well as their first and third. Their songs in those times were generally love songs, and political and social commentary, or about being in a band.
See also “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”.
Yes, totally not about LSD. It’s about sleep deprivation. It’s about staying up until 4 in the morning trying to write a song.
“Trying hard to stay awake. Wondering how much I can take.” are the lines right before “Should I try to do some more, 25 or 6 to 4”.
It’s about staying awake for so long you can’t remember how to tell time anymore, so you look at the hands on an analog clock and can’t figure out what time it is.
The version of the story I’d heard years ago made it seem like the two competing answers were “six minutes to four” or “twenty-five”, as if “twenty-five” were a valid answer to the question “what time is it”.
From the quote above it seems like he meant it was either “25 minutes until four” or “6 minutes until four”, in which case it probably was really 25 or 5 to 4, but that had too many "five"s in it to make a good lyric.
Or what Smapti said, which makes so much more sense: 25 0r 26 minutes to four. I guess in learning the song was about being tired, I projected being so tired you can’t tell time any more.
Yeah, I’m not buying it either. Americans don’t tell time this way. 25 minutes before 4:00 is typically expressed as “three thirty-five” and there is no way 26 minutes to 4:00 is expressed any other way than “three thirty-four”.
Would anyone know what a speaker is referring to if he said it was “twenty-six to four”? Sounds more like a football play than a time. Imagine the confused looks from others if someone exclaimed “I can’t believe it’s twenty-six to four!” Simply odd, and unlikely phrasing.
We don’t? That comes as quite a surprise to this American who’s been telling time that way, and hearing it told that way, his entire life.
What? How old are you?
I am 64. I grow up with analog clocks and watches everywhere. Phrase like “it’s 25 or 6 to four” were exactly the way that real people spoke in colloquial English. Saying it that way was much more common than saying “it’s three thirty-five or thirty-six.” People looked at clocks and divided them by the half hour into “past” and “to.” (Or “after” or “before” or “of” or a number of other possible markers depending on region.)
The song has it exactly right. Any other way would be odd.
I’m not nearly as old as EM (I keep telling myself) but I am old enough to remember when digital watches were a novelty, and “twenty-five to four” was a perfectly common way to express the time.
My kids, however, get confused when I tell them to be ready at quarter to eight.
I recall a discussion I had with a friend about this song, around 1979-81. He basically gave the analog clock interpretation, which I accepted. Except I would have called it a “Clock”: digital clocks then were the more unusual devices, though I owned one. In 1970 they would have been rarer. Yes, folks of different generations report the time a little differently.
The song is about a bleary eyed guy pulling an all nighter or something close.
Echoing what’s above, back when analogue clocks were the norm people normally just approximated to the nearest quarter hour. What time is it?
- Almost 3:30
- Almost quarter to four
- Just past 6:00
and of course the more typical:
- Five after four
- Ten to five, etc.
Most definitely one would say twenty-five to four.
Echoing the above, before digital clocks became commonplace, telling time was about only being as precise as required. People regularly divided the clock by 6 and 12, I.e. “bottom of the hour” and “top of the hour”. Ever heard news stations say those phrases? That’s where they come from.
Because people regularly spoke about “a quarter after six”, etc, it was habitual to phrase things that way, and “25 till 4” was natural. Debating 25 or 26 would be about being bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and unable to see where the hand is versus the line. Or being old, and having to squint. 
I work in the GPS biz. I can assure you that none of you really knows what time it is.
Digital clocks!? Back in our day we had cutting edgeflip clocks!
Heh. But did you call it a flip clock?
Sony called their clock radio of the day a Digital 24 and later a Digimatic. It used a split-flat display, a term I just came across. It was first available in 1968.
The songwriter has nonetheless done so. The fact you think he shouldn’t have is pretty much completely irrelevant at this point.
I’m pretty sure that the first one of those was in the lobby of the Chrysler Building when it opened in 1931. I don’t know what they called it, though.
From what I remember, we just called it the alarm clock or the clock radio.
This site claims that the flip clock was invented in 1948 and first deployed at a railway station in 1956. http://www.flip-clock.net/discoverflipclocks.html
IIRC, I referred to my Sony clock radio as a digital clock. Analogue clocks were called… clocks.
A guy looking at an analog clock might say “3:34”, sure, but a songwriter looking for a line to fit the meter of a song, might say “twenty-five or six to four”. What someone might say in natural speech is irrelevant; this is a song lyric, and has different constraints.
This sure looks like a flip clock to me. And it’s not a more recent style; all the contemporary accounts of the Chrysler Building talk about a “digital” clock.
