Are you working on a new Boston album?

I am. I had planned to have that album done before touring, but I was unable to finish it in time. The good news is, I also remastered the Sony greatest hits album and revised the song list on it, and that s going to be released in June when we start our tour. On tour, we re concentrating more on the classic Boston hits.

Do you have to do anything special to recreate the sounds of those hits, like  More Than a Feeling and  Foreplay/Long Time ?

All of the equipment we ve had has been tailored just to produce Boston sounds. The reason we use what we use live is that it would be impossible to present a Boston performance without amps you can repeatedly make instantaneous changes in tone, sound, and effects on.

I could plug into a regular guitar amplifier and play you the lead part to  Peace of Mind or the rhythm to  More Than a Feeling, but to play the whole song would be impossible. You d have to make a half-dozen changes in EQ, gain, output level, and effects, and there s no way to do that with standard amps. With the Rockman stuff, we can do anything we want. It s all programmable and you can run through every sound you need while you play each song. It becomes second nature after a while.

That s why when people say,  Why don t you come down to our party and play a couple songs? We ve got an amp here, we just can t do it. There s no way it would sound like a Boston song unless you had three engineers in the house running a mixing board to change all these settings.

Every great guitar player has an immediately recognizable tone and you set out to invent your tone from the first diode on up. It has to be a lifetime preoccupation.

I m not sure if that s a blessing or a curse, but it is true. And I m always on the spot, because if something doesn t sound quite right I know it s because something I built, designed, or decided to do didn t work.

But it does enable us to create all the crazy things you hear on a Boston album live, and it wouldn t be possible if I didn t have my engineering background. And my experience at Polaroid, because strangely enough that was my apprenticeship for getting into rock and roll. That s where I got my background for understanding the physics of music and musical instruments and tape recording.

How important are these summer tours for you?

Being a band that doesn t tour regularly the last time we went out was four years ago we don t get out much, so when we do go out on the road it s a big deal. It s a blast, to be honest with you.

Well, do you miss the ebony porn road when you re not out?

I m usually entertained with other projects. But playing Boston songs on the road & Well, it s an extravagant sound and it s moving. But it s very difficult. The parts you have to play and sing are very difficult. Even though all six people are excellent at what they do and have drilled and practiced and rehearsed, it s still right at the edge of your abilities.

That s why you don t go into bars and hear people doing Boston songs all that often. They re hard to sing; they re hard to play. It s difficult. And in getting the sound out into the house, because of the many sounds that happen during the course of a Boston tune, there are a lot of technical issues. So everybody has to do their part and it all has to pull together at each moment for the audience to be swept into it. It s like going out to compete at a free style ice skating championship: you ve studied, worked, and conditioned for it and then a moment comes.

So, on one hand it s very high pressure, but on the other you re going through it with a bunch of people who are very talented that you really like, so you have a great time despite the difficulty of what you re trying to do. And you get the warm fuzzy feeling of being one of the people that gets to do it.

It s both a blast and very hard. With that sort of intensity it s not the sort of thing you d want to be doing 50 weeks out of the year. But when we do go out and do it, it s very exciting.

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