By Geoff Edgers
Globe Staff / February 20, 2011

In his basement, the gawky engineer fresh out of MIT painstakingly recorded layers of guitars, keyboards, and bass until he got it right. But it wasn t until Tom Scholz, the stubborn perfectionist, met Brad Delp, the dark, complicated singer with the soaring voice, that those basement demos came alive.

They became Boston, a band that dominated the FM airwaves through the 1970s with hits such as  More Than A Feeling  and  Don t Look Back.  Boston s 1976 debut remains, at 17 million copies, the second biggest-selling in US rock history. It launched Scholz, Delp, and the band s three other members into a world of sold-out arenas from California to Copenhagen.

The sensation of their rise was matched by the bitterness of the breakup of the original five members, who last performed together in 1979. Scholz and the three other musicians, later cast from the band, have battled in the press, courts, and Internet ever since. And no part of the feud has been as ugly as the latest: the fight over who or what caused Brad Delp, the man in the middle, to take his life in 2007.

Now a pair of defamation lawsuits, filed by Scholz in the wake of Delp s suicide, have exposed new details about the bitter turmoil ebony porn within the band that preceded Delp s death. And they have led to revelations about the never-before-reported relationship problems that burdened Delp in the last year of his life.

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