I couldn't join Mother's Milk, of course, because I started the band. It was a last desperate attempt to get my original music heard by performing it live. Besides putting up the money for equipment and promo ads, I drew the band logo, laid out the promo ads, built a crude lighting system for the shows, and wrote all the original material performed by the band. As you might imagine, I did also lead the band. I hate to admit I was the one who thought up that God awful name after hearing the term on a TV show one night. I wish people had fixated on Middle Earth instead, which was the band I started before that, with a much less embarrassing name.
I actually met Goudreau years earlier in 1970, my last year at MIT, in a band called "Freehold" that was led by a fellow MIT student. I'm not going to debate whether Goudreau led that band or not, but it was the MIT dude that sang most of the lead vocals, provided the practice space, found the gigs around campus, named the band, and wrote most of the original material we played - make your own call.
Freehold played one very important role in the formation of BOSTON; it introduced me to drummer Jim Masdea. Jim was the first musician I ever recorded with, and he played drums on nearly every demo I ever made.
Years later, Mother's Milk would hold no such distinction. It was the last straw in a string of dismal failures that made me give up on working with groups. In addition to Brad and Barry, I had invited Jim to play drums and Frank Cremoni for bass. Brad quit early on, and was replaced by a guy who called himself "Rabbit." I think that might have actually been his whole name.
Because the sole purpose of forming Mother's Milk was to play my songs live, I had provided all the original music for Mother's Milk, and spent some serious cash getting it started. When I finally threw in the towel some time after Brad left the band, Mother's Milk mercifully ceased to exist.
Finally free from the distractions of other musicians, and the ordeal of playing local gigs, I went back to my basement studio to write and record, on my own. To get the sound and style I had been searching for, I gave up the idea of involving other players in my recording, with the exception of my old friend Jim Masdea. After purchasing some "new" used equipment, I finished several new songs, and made one last set of six demo recordings with Jim playing drums, and me, myself, and I playing everything else. Now at the end of my bank account, I knew this would be my last shot.
After completing instrument tracks for 4 of the new songs, I got back in touch with Brad and invited him to sing on my new tapes, hoping he would forgive me for the Mother's Milk disaster. He laid in all the vocals the same way I recorded the instrument tracks, laboriously overdubbing them one part at a time. These four songs resulted in three major labels contacting me, and led to a management contract. The final two songs, one of which was "More Than a Feeling," resulted in Brad and I being signed to Epic Records.
The real point here is that Mother's Milk, regardless of who was responsible for it, really had nothing to do with the music later released by BOSTON. The songs played by Mother's Milk were songs I wrote at home, and brought to the practice for the others to learn. The six demo tunes later sent to the ebony porn labels were never recorded by, or pitched as a "band." Brad and I were not viewed as just founders of a band, but as the actual act, and as such, only he and I were named on the contract offered in 1976. The two of us eventually went on to write all the songs for the first two BOSTON albums.
I think people want to believe that things grow or morph into something grander as a natural sort of progression. But sometimes something really cool happens because there is a completely new start, divorced from what was tried before. Such is the case with BOSTON, created in a basement with a beat up tape machine by a couple of unknowns experimenting with their songs.
Because Barry was not involved in making the demos that landed the Epic deal, and played such a minor role in the debut BOSTON album, referring to Mother's Milk as somehow being the forerunner of BOSTON would enhance his image. He did play in Mother's Milk after all, and that would provide him a more plausible connection to the origin of BOSTON. Epic publicity latched on to the Mother's Milk angle, and I did my best to ignore it over the years until it faded into oblivion, only to now be exhumed like the dreaded mummy. Possibly Barry believed that it would bolster his claim of having somehow been a founder of BOSTON, now that Brad is gone.
Disbanding Mother's Milk allowed me the freedom to finally create the sound and many of the songs that would eventually be called BOSTON, including "More than a Feeling," "Peace of Mind," "Rock and Roll Band," and "Something About You" (titled "It Isn't Easy" on the demo), without the typical art-by-commitee influence. Jim Masdea and especially Brad contributed greatly, but there was no band, and I actually always worked individually with Brad, or Jim.
To avoid having the recordings sound rigid due to the lack of a live band, I closed my eyes each time I played a part and imagined a sea of fans in a live concert, a habit that stuck with me on stage after it actually became a reality. The illusion that the demos were recorded by a band was so convincing that Brad thought they were, until years later.
Somewhere along the way, some self appointed music biz marketing expert decided to promote BOSTON as if it were a "normal" group, and as Cameron Crowe pointed out in his Rolling Stone piece a couple of years later, there was a conscious effort to downplay my importance in making the recordings of what was now perceived as a band.
Fast forward to today...
Currently on Barry Goudreau's website, a much different account of the origin of BOSTON appears, in which the fantasies of the Mother's Milk story on the old Wiki page we keep correcting are absent, but new theories conveniently link him as a force behind BOSTON in a more subtle way.
Barry's website now claims that "we" were signed to Epic Records in 1975, (but he wasn't)...That "we" were looking to record demos (but only I had written music, booked studio sessions or paid for them)....That "we" put together a demo tape (but I don't remember anyone else figuring out arrangements, sweating over a mixing console, writing songs, signing checks, running off copies, sending letters, making long distance calls, addressing dozens of mailing envelopes, or digging up record label information). Barry and I did drive to New York once though.
Speaking further of these demos, his bio still insists that I continued "to refine the songs and recordings to a point where they could no longer be denied," which is still untrue. As explained above, I didn't buff and polish some old demos made with outside musicians. Isolated in a basement, I wrote new songs and made new recordings, with only Brad and Jim's help, to come up with the music that convinced Epic Records.
Barry also mentions that "since Tom had a real job, he began to finance it" [recording demos]; he doesn't mention that I continued to pay for all of it.
There are other inaccuracies, but it is true that the demos I made back when I included Barry's playing were all unanimously rejected. This only changed after I decided to record the instruments myself - not that Barry wasn't a good guitar player, I just found it impossible to get the feeling, style, or emotion I was striving for without doing it myself.
Why I don't like to look back...
Concerned about egos, back in 1976 I naively suggested to Brad that we pay Barry Goudreau a share of the record royalties equal to ours, not just for the two cuts he played on, but for every song on the album. After performing with BOSTON a scant three years, Barry left to pursue a career separate from mine, but he kept his share of royalties for all the songs he was not involved in recording, and has continued to collect it for the last thirty years. Accepting money for someone else's work is one thing, taking credit is quite another.
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