Boston – ‘Boston’
It was the perfect ruse. After getting his upstart band signed to Epic Records and changing their name to Boston, Tom Scholz became bound and determined to record the band’s debut record his way. When record executives baulked at Scholz using his home studio to record a major label album, producer John Boylon was dispatched to convince the suits that Boston was hard at work in a professional studio. In reality, Scholz was recording nearly the entire LP on his own from the basement of his house.
Although it didn’t sound like it, Scholz was adding to the proud tradition that was pioneered by Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren, later to be picked up by artists Kevin Parker and Frank Ocean. However, instead of creating a ragged and lo-fi charm that often comes with one-man band projects, Scholz sought to create the slickest and most powerful rock and roll music ever recorded. In doing so, he pioneered the sound that would eventually become the platonic ideal of classic rock.
Across just eight songs, Scholz and a few of his friends crafted Boston, one of the most popular and triumphant debut albums in rock history. Scholz was in charge of guitars, basses, keyboards, and production, but that left some important gaps that needed to be filled. First and foremost, Scholz needed a singer. Enter Brad Delp, the vocalist for the pre-Boston band Mother’s Milk. Delp had a powerful vocal range that included staggering high notes. His ability to harmonise with himself also became a key component of Boston’s sound, helping to establish the massive scope that Scholz had been seeking out with his orchestra of electric guitars.
Drummer Sib Hashian became the other missing piece of the musical puzzle. Although guitarist Barry Goudreau and bassist Fran Sheehan contributed to ‘Foreplay/Long Time’ and ‘Let Me Take You Home Tonight’, their parts were largely recorded by Scholz in his basement. The musician had become almost completely self-sufficient when it came to recording, honing in on his signature sound by overdubbing multiple guitar parts to create a thicker sound. With additional layers of acoustic guitars, bass, and keyboards, Scholz created a precise sound by mostly shutting everyone else out.
It’s hard to argue against his reasoning. With a cheap 12-string guitar, Scholz picked out the legendary opening chords to ‘More Than A Feeling’, the album’s opening track. Everything that made Boston unique was present in ‘More Than A Feeling’: a mix of smooth 1970s soft and muscular hard rock, ear-catching pop melodies, and Delp’s indelible voice that could reach glass-shattering high tones. The track is ostensibly about a breakup, but in reality, it’s about the power of music. Scholz was never going to be a poet, but he was an expert on how music could transcend words and emotions.
Years later, Kurt Cobain would reconfigure the central riff to ‘More Than A Feeling’ for his own biggest hit, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. There’s actually more Boston in Nirvana than one might expect: a master of soft-loud dynamics, a reliance on riff-rock, and the balance of pop hooks with distortion were hallmarks of both groups. The guitar sound that Scholz was able to coax out of his relatively modest home studio became the blueprint that nearly every rock band would follow for the next decade. They sounded like they were recorded by the most expensive equipment on the planet, but Scholz was recording into a used 12-track tape recorder, a virtual dinosaur of a deck by the mid-’70s.
The limitations never made their way onto the album. ‘Peace of Mind’ explodes with manic energy, with Scholz and Delp in a two-man race to see who could overdub the most of themselves in the most seamless fashion. Scholz variety of guitar tones was matched by Delp’s one-man vocal choir, and with Hashian providing a solid anchor for both, ‘Peace of Mind’ was destined for classic rock radio. Scholz decided to take a swipe at the corporate realities that were encroaching on his music dreams: he originally wrote the song about his day job at Polaroid, but the song became emblematic of Scholz’s battle against Epic executives to have full control over the album’s production.
It was show-off time on ‘Foreplay/Long Time’. Scholz found the perfect outlet for his classically-trained keyboard chops, blasting off with the iconic Hammond organ motif underpinned the first song in the pairing. While Jon Lord had pushed the organ to its breaking point in Deep Purple, Scholz truly solidified its place in the rock canon on ‘Foreplay’. When his sci-fi epic came to an end, the rest of the band kicks into one of the album’s most potent pop songs, ‘Long Time’.
Scholz clearly had a taste for meta-textual lyrics that went beyond the self-referential ‘Peace of Mind’. ‘Rock and Roll Band’ chronicled the (slightly made-up) origin story of Boston as they tried to make it as a professional band. The story seems paint-by-numbers now: a struggling local band gets swept up by a record company executive smoking cigars and driving Cadillacs, but their true salvation is on stage. It’s corny and clichéd now, but Boston was one of the bands that got to experience that story first-hand.
After the boogie rave-up of ‘Smokin’, Boston descends into one of their most introspective tracks, ‘Hitch a Ride’. Most of the song stays on the mellower side of Boston, but when Scholz busts into the song’s organ solo, the hard-hitting rock and roll side of the band re-emerges. Delp soon returns to lead the song back into its euphoric chorus, dreaming of escape. Boston is refined in its presentation, but just like Scholz’s paired-back home set-up, the album’s themes are yearning and even slightly naive the way someone dreams of being a rock star before they actually see what being one is like.
‘Something About You’ adds to the album’s potent punch, while ‘Let Me Take You Home Tonight’ is the most clearly ’70s song on the record. It’s no mistake that ‘Let Me Take You Home Tonight’ was the only song recorded in a professional studio: Sheehan’s bass is louder in the mix, Delp’s vocals are crisper, and the guitars are more varied in texture. That doesn’t make it better – in fact, ‘Let Me Take You Home Tonight is missing that distinct sound that Scholz conjured up on his own.
Scholz’s control over the band rankled the original lineup not long after their debut was released. After quickly following up with 1978’s Don’t Look Back, all original members left with the exception of Delp. It would be another eight years before the band released their third studio effort, and in due time, Scholz continued to shuffle different members as he focused on making Boston a profitable nostalgia act. Delp tragically took his own life in 2007, putting a permanent end to one of rock music’s most distinctive voices.
Part of the Boston legend is that they never got better than their debut album. Although they scored more hits, including reaching number one in 1986 with the ballad ‘Amanda’, none of their follow-ups could match the pure explosion of creativity that helped make Boston one of the highest-selling debut albums of all time. Scholz didn’t really need to match his golden goose: as a pioneer of engineering pedals and recording equipment, Scholz’s Rockman devices helped revolutionise the making of rock and metal records since the 1980s.
Scholz perfected the sound of classic rock so brilliantly on Boston that punk rock had to come in immediately and destroy it. In truth, his signature guitar sound never went out of style, even being appropriated into grunge and pop punk by the 1990s. Boston remains one of the most immaculate and invigorating classic rock records ever made, and it was all made in one man’s basement.
