By Todd Lancaster
This time, we are going to take a deep dive into one of every late Boomer’s favorite pieces of vinyl — Boston’s first album.
If you were driving around in your Chevelle in the fall of 1976, there was a pretty good chance “More Than a Feeling” was blaring out of your speakers as you squealed out of the Tastee Freeze, Penguin Point or Dog-n-Suds.
Simply put, Boston’s first album was perhaps the best debut album ever (no offense to Van Halen 1 or Led Zeppelin 1), and it stands up today despite its near 50-year-old pedigree. It sold 17 million copies, and the album cover has probably had a significant amount of bong water spilled on it as the owner flipped it over and said. “Dude, that spaceship city is really a guitar.”
Now, most people consider Boston “a band,” but the truth is Boston is, was and always will be guitarist Tom Scholz. He recorded, wrote and performed almost every part of the album and worked on it alone for about five years before its release.
Scholz may have been one of the most un-rock and roll guitar heroes of the 1970s. He was a classically trained pianist who graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s in engineering from … MIT. He used his job at Polaroid as a design engineer to help finance his basement studio, where most of the initial ideas for the album were put together. Although singer Brad Delp was a part of the process beginning in 1971, essentially, the rest of the band was a “touring” band mainly recruited after the album was essentially done. In fact, the label Epic wanted the album done in a professional studio, so the band was sent to Los Angeles to “record” it while Scholz stayed in Boston to finish the album that would eventually be released.
Track by track, Boston was groundbreaking as the layered guitar harmonies and swirling Hammond organ parts created an “other worldly” sound. However, the liner notes were quick to point out that no synthesizers were used. Scholz meticulously worked out every solo long before he hit the record button.
The album opened with “More Than a Feeling,” and those opening chords are probably the most played 12-string riff in every Guitar Center in America to this day. The song turns on a dime between acoustic to electric to harmony-drenched lead playing. It may well be one of the most FM-friendly AOR songs ever to grace a set of Panasonic Thrusters this side of Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein.
Between “MTAF” and “Foreplay/Long Time,” there were 20 minutes of what had to be considered the ultimate lava lamp-black light anthems in radio-friendly rock.
The second side is a little more traditional with less of a composite flow, but the song “Rock and Roll Band” with the lyrics, “Well, we were just another band out of Boston. On the road and tryin’ to make ends meet, Playin’ all the bars, sleepin’ in our cars. And we practiced right on out in the street. No, we didn’t have much money, We barely made enough to survive. But when we got up on stage and got ready to play, people came alive.”
Those lyrics provided an ultimate truth for every garage band in America, except for Boston, as there were no clubs or cars in Scholz’s basement where all the work was done. Their first headlining gig was actually at Madison Square Garden.
The rest of side 2 are songs like “Smokin’” and have also been radio staples for years. It was based on a 1973 demo Scholz recorded long before Boston was even a glimmer in his eye. The record ends with “Let Me Take You Home Tonight,” a song that would fit on any make-out cassette mix tape that also included Journey, Frampton and REO Speedwagon.
This was a tremendous debut album, and if you want to time-travel back to the bicentennial, this may be the fast way to get there. On the downside, this album may be the album that launched 10,000 bad studio producers’ careers, but it also showed what one man and vision do if they get there first.
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