Not every day in the band Chicago’s career was a “Saturday in the park,” as trumpeter Lee Loughnane remembers.

Despite their decades of success and awards and accolades, the band still fills arenas in 2024, but there was once a time when fans literally threw leftover food at the group.

The whole thing was the result of a botched marketing ploy by a club owner who promised his guests free chicken if they attended a concert in Chicago, the group’s founding member tells PEOPLE.

“You know what happens when you eat a piece of chicken and all that’s left is the bone? They threw it at the band,” Loughlane describes the experience.

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Being pelted with chicken bones isn’t a pleasant experience for most, but the musician notes that it wasn’t all bad. “So you have to go through that. At least it wasn’t oranges. And they still liked what we were doing. It was just drunks doing crazy things,” he says.

“It wasn’t really that outrageous,” he adds of the experience. “Every now and then, someone would throw something on the stage and we probably threw something back at them, since they know us.”

Leftovers aside, Loughnane credits those early moments playing in small Chicago venues as crucial to the band’s success in the years to come.

“Our musical ideas were that we should be free,” he says. “And eventually we found a club owner who let us play new music so we didn’t have to play the Top 40 all the time. They wanted to hear original songs. And suddenly they didn’t mind us playing them anymore. And that’s how we got other people to hear what we had to offer.”