Boston (album)
Boston is the debut studio album by American rock band Boston, released on August 25, 1976, by Epic Records. It was produced by band guitarist Tom Scholz and John Boylan. A multi-instrumentalist and engineer who had been involved in the Boston music scene since the late 1960s, Scholz started to write and record demos in his apartment basement with singer Brad Delp, but received numerous rejections from major record labels. The demo tape fell into the hands of CBS-owned Epic, which signed the band in 1975. The album is characterized for its unique blend of electronic effects, the Hammond organ, heavy guitar riffs, and early rock and roll to create what Scholz referred to as the "Boston sound".
Defying Epic Records's insistence on recording the album professionally in Los Angeles, Scholz and Boylan deceived label executives into believing the band was recording on the West Coast, when in reality, the bulk was being tracked solely by Scholz in his Massachusetts home. The album's contents are a complete recreation of the band's demo tape, and contain songs written and composed many years prior. The album's style was developed through Scholz's love for classical music, melodic hooks and early guitar-heavy rock groups such as the Kinks and the Yardbirds, as well as a number of analogue electronic effects developed by Scholz in his home studio. Besides Scholz, who played most of the instruments on nearly all of the tracks, and Delp, other musicians appear on the album, such as drummers Jim Masdea and Sib Hashian, guitarist Barry Goudreau and bassist Fran Sheehan. All except Masdea became full-time band members.
The album was released by Epic in August 1976 and broke sales records, becoming the best-selling debut LP in the US at the time, and winning the Recording Industry Association of America Century Award for the best-selling debut album. The album's singles, "More Than a Feeling", "Peace of Mind" and "Foreplay/Long Time", were major hits, and nearly the entire album receives constant airplay on classic rock radio. The album is often regarded as a staple of 1970s rock and has been included on many lists of essential albums. It has sold at least 17 million copies in the United States alone and at least 20 million worldwide, making it one of the best-selling debut albums of all time.
Background
In the late 1960s, Tom Scholz began attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he first wrote music. After graduating with a master's degree, he began working for the Polaroid Corporation in the product development division. By night, he played keyboards for bands in the Boston bar and club scene, where he collaborated with drummer Jim Masdea. The two – who shared a concept of the perfect rock band, one "with crystal-clear vocals and bone-crunching guitars" – viewed themselves as only part-time musicians. Despite this, the duo built a small studio near Watertown, Massachusetts to record ideas. Scholz recorded for hours, often re-recording, erasing, and discarding tapes to create "a perfect song."Both musicians later joined Mother's Milk, a band featuring guitarist Barry Goudreau that vied for recognition in the Boston music scene. Scholz quickly went from keyboardist to lead songwriter, and the band went through dozens of lead vocalists before Brad Delp auditioned. Delp, a former factory worker at a Danvers electric coil company, spent much of his weekends performing in various cover bands. Upon hearing that Mother's Milk needed a vocalist, Delp drove to Revere Beach, where the three-piece was performing at a club named Jojo's.
Delp was impressed that the band had already recorded a demo tape, and he earned his position in Mother's Milk after auditioning with the Joe Walsh song "Rocky Mountain Way". Mother's Milk thus became an early version of Boston, with Goudreau on lead guitar.
By 1973, the band had a six-song demo tape ready for mailing, and Scholz and his wife Cindy sent copies to every record company they could find. The songs on the demo were "More Than a Feeling", "Peace of Mind", "Rock & Roll Band", "Something About You", "San Francisco Day" and "Love". The group received rejection slips from several labels - RCA, Capitol, Atlantic and Elektra among the most notable - and Epic Records rejected the tape flatly with a "very insulting letter" signed by company head Lennie Petze that opined the band "offered nothing new". The tape that received the most attention contained embryonic renditions of future songs that would appear on Boston's debut album. Delp departed shortly after that because "there just wasn't any money coming in."
By 1975, Scholz was finished with the club scene, concentrating exclusively on the demo tapes he recorded at home in his basement. Having to both pay rent on the house and maintain his recording equipment ate up his finances; at one point, he spent the money he had saved for a down payment on a future home to buy a used professional 12-track tape recorder made by Scully Recording Instruments.
He called Delp to provide vocals, remarking, "If you can't really afford to join the band or if you don't want to join the band, maybe you'd just want to come down to the studio and sing on some of these tapes for me."
Scholz gave a copy of the Mother's Milk demo to a Polaroid co-worker whose cousin worked at ABC Records. The employee forgot to mail the tape out, and it sat on his desk for months until Columbia began contacting Scholz about auditioning for the label, after which he sent the tape to ABC.
Charles McKenzie, a New England representative for ABC Records, first overheard the tape in a co-worker's office. He called Paul Ahern, an independent record promoter in California, with whom he held a gentleman's agreement that if either heard anything interesting, they would inform the other. Ahern connected with Petze at Epic and informed him, even though Petze had passed on the original Mother's Milk demos.
Epic contacted Scholz and offered a contract that first required the group to perform in a showcase for CBS representatives, as the label suspected that the "band" was, in reality, a "mad genius at work in a basement."
Masdea had started to lose interest in the project by this time. To complete the lineup, Scholz recruited Goudreau and two other musicians who had recorded on the early demos, bass player Fran Sheehan and drummer Dave Currier. In November 1975, the group performed for the executives in a Boston warehouse that had previously been used by Aerosmith as a practice facility.
One month later, CBS Records signed Mother's Milk in a contract that required 10 albums over 6 years. Currier quit before he knew the band passed the audition, and Scholz recruited drummer Sib Hashian in his place.
Epic had signed an agreement with NABET, the union representing electrical and broadcast engineers, which specified that any recording done outside of a Columbia-owned studio but within a 250-mile radius of one of those studios required a paid union engineer to be present.
As such, the label wanted the band to travel to Los Angeles and re-record their songs with a different producer. Scholz was unhappy with being unable to be in charge, and John Boylan, a friend of a friend of Ahern, came on board the project.
Boylan's duty was to "run interference for the label and keep them happy", and he made a crucial suggestion: that the band change their name to "Boston".
Recording and production
Boston was recorded primarily at Scholz's Foxglove Studios in Watertown in "an elaborate end run around the CBS brain trust." Epic wanted a studio version that sounded identical to the demo tape, and Scholz decided he could not work in a production studio, having adapted to home recording for several years, stating, "I work alone, and that was it."Scholz took a leave of absence from Polaroid and was gone for several months to record the band's album. "I would wake up every day and go downstairs and start playing," he recalled. Scholz grew annoyed reproducing the parts and being forced to use the same equipment on the demo.
The basement, located in a lower-middle-class neighborhood on School Street, was described by Scholz as a "tiny little space next to the furnace in this hideous pine-paneled basement of my apartment house, and it flooded from time to time with God knows what."
There was a Hammond organ and a Leslie speaker stuffed in the corner of the room alongside the drums; whenever it was time to record the organ parts, they would tear the drums down and pull out the Leslie.
Boylan felt that while Scholz's guitars "sounded amazing," Scholz did not understand how to record acoustic instruments correctly and flew in engineer Paul Grupp to instruct him on microphone technique.
Boylan's hands-on involvement would center on recording the vocals and mixing, and he took the rest of the band out to the West Coast, where they recorded "Let Me Take You Home Tonight". "It was a decoy," recalled Scholz, who recorded the bulk back home in Watertown without CBS's knowledge. While Boylan arranged for Delp to have a custom-made Taylor acoustic guitar for thousands of dollars charged to the album budget, Scholz recorded such tracks as "More Than a Feeling" in his basement with a $100 Yamaha acoustic guitar.
That spring, Boylan returned to Watertown to hear the tracks on which Scholz had recut drums and other percussion and keyboard parts. He then hired a remote truck from Providence, Rhode Island to come to Watertown, where it ran a snake through the basement window of Scholz's home to transfer his tracks to a 3M-79 2-inch 24-track deck. The entire recording was completed in the basement, save for Delp's vocals, which were recorded at Capitol Studios' Studio C with Warren Dewey engineering the overdubs. Some of the equipment used in the recording of the album was designed by Scholz himself.
All vocals were double-tracked except the lead vocal, and all the parts were done by Delp in quick succession. When Scholz arrived in Los Angeles for mixing, he felt intimidated. He feared the professional engineers would view him as "this hick who worked in a basement." Instead, Scholz felt they were backward in their approach and lacked the knowledge he had obtained. "These people were so swept up in how cool they were and how important it was to have all this high-priced crap that they couldn't see the forest for the trees," he said.
Boylan encountered his only real confrontation with the autocratic Scholz during the mixing stage, in which Scholz handled the guitar tracks, Boylan the drums, and Dewey the vocals, with Steve Hodge assisting. Scholz pushed guitars too high in the mix, rendering vocals inaudible at times.
The operation has been described as "one of the most complex corporate capers in the history of the music business." Except for "Let Me Take You Home Tonight," the album was a virtual copy of the demo tapes. The album was recorded for a few thousand dollars, a paltry amount in an industry accustomed to spending hundreds of thousands on a single recording.