Unknown to Scholz and Delp, one of their demo tapes had taken hold. Charles McKenzie was a New England representative for ABC Records (and had signed another Boston-based group, the J. Geils Band, to their first contract). McKenzie just happened to be in someone's office when he heard the demo tape that previously languished in a Polaroid desk drawer.

Paul Ahern was working as an independent record promoter in California, and Ahern and McKenzie had a gentleman's agreement between them - if either one came up with anything interesting, they would call the other person. Ahern had connections with Lennie Petze at CBS, and called him - even though Petze had passed on the original Mother's Milk demos. "There was some unknown dealings with this guy at Epic, Lennie Petze, and then suddenly they were interested," said Scholz. "I understand Lenny has been very quick to mention in public that he was a big part of Boston getting signed to Epic Records, so I always keep the letter that he signed, saying that they had no interest in Boston after they listened to the demos. I have one framed and hanging on the wall in my office."

Epic contacted Scholz and offered a contract - but first they had to perform in a showcase for some CBS representatives. Scholz and Delp were ready to perform, but at least three more members were needed to complete the live performing group. A few phone calls to recruit the original guitarist from Mother's Milk (Barry Goudreau), and two other performers who recorded on the early demos, bass player Fran Sheehan and drummer Dave Currier, and the touring group was complete.

Unfortunately, the lineup did not include drummer Jim Masdea, who had started to lose interest in the project. "During those last demos," said Delp, "Jim used to play piano, self-taught, but we'd be in the studio - I think he actually told me he was losing interest in playing drums. I know Tom felt very bad when the whole thing happened. And then, of course, we started getting some interest."

Their first live performance was the showcase - a select group of CBS reps in a Boston warehouse that doubled as Aerosmith's practice facility. One month later, the CBS reps signed the group to a contract - 10 albums over the next six years.

But before the ink had dried on the contract, problems arose. "Their drummer, David Currier, was fabulous," said Sib Hashian. "and they passed the audition. But Tom didn't tell David they passed the audition. So David said, 'If you want me in the band, you're gonna have to start paying me to practice.' And David quit. So they auditioned other drummers, including myself. And eventually, that's how I got the job."

The band needed to travel to Los Angeles and re-record their songs with a different producer. CBS claimed that they wanted to have a union engineer on the premises - but Scholz could have composed Rhapsody in Blue and CBS still wouldn't have let him produce the band's first album. "It didn't matter what it sounded like to them," said Delp, "or whether they loved the tape or not. So that's how John Boylan came on board. Boylan was a friend of someone that Ahern knew. When we first came out from California, he said to us, 'I've listened to the tapes, I think you guys obviously know what you're doing. I'm going to be here to run interference for the label and keep them happy. I'm another set of ears if you need them. But basically, you guys go ahead and do your thing.'"

It was Boylan who also suggested a name change for the band, from "Mother's Milk" to "Boston," after the band's home city. "Boylan suggested the name Boston," said Delp, "and coming from Boston, it sounded ridiculous, the first time I heard it, it was too obvious. But upon reflection, I realized that people not from the area, the name has some meaning for them. It certainly sticks with you, and it worked out great for us. People in and around Boston became very supportive of the band, kind of adopted us as their home town band. Even though we weren't a known commodity like Aerosmith. Aerosmith played every high school and dance party in New England on their way to getting signed, they played everywhere."

"It was a decoy," said Scholz. "CBS wouldn't let me produce an album in a basement by myself. John Boylan took the rest of the band out to the West Coast, and they hung out there and they did some work in the studio, recorded a few cuts, including 'Let Me Take You Home Tonight.' While they were doing that and the record company was thought the record was being recorded on the West Coast, I was recording it in the basement of my apartment house. I remember at one point Boylan arranged for Brad to have a custom-made Taylor acoustic guitar for some incredible amount of money, thousands of dollars on the album budget, and at that exact same time, I was recording 'More Than A Feeling' with a $100 Yamaha acoustic guitar - which was Brad's - back in the basement of my apartment house. When I had finished with it, I transferred the tracks onto two-inch tape. And I went out there, Brad sang most of the tracks out there, a couple of them he couldn't do because he was having trouble with his voice in the smog. We finished a couple of them up in my basement studio, and I had to cart them back to LA and dub them in on a two-inch from another analog tape, which was pretty unusual back then."

The whole effort was an elaborate end run around the CBS brain trust. With the exception of "Let Me Take You Home Tonight," the entire album was a virtual copy - if not a complete clone - of the demo tapes. "We didn't actually tell them that we were transferring the tapes," said Delp, "what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. We told them we were working on the album with Boylan, that was all true - Tom still had stuff to do back home. A lot of bands were signed and get put in with a producer, and then all of a sudden it's the producer's project. Before you know it, it doesn't resemble anything of what you were doing. We were very fortunate that that didn't happen to us. Boylan had the ears to know that Tom knew his way around a studio. We gave them a complete tape, and they thought, 'Man, these guys work fast.'"

Of course, how could Epic have known that "Foreplay," the extensive introduction to "Long Time," was actually a four-minute musical excursion Tom Scholz composed in 1972? How could they have known that "Hitch A Ride" was originally called "San Francisco Day," and was the first song Brad Delp re-recorded when the original Boston vocalist left? How could they have known that one of the special effects of the organ solo on "Hitch A Ride" - bending the note on a Hammond organ - involved Tom Scholz slowing down one of the recording reels with his finger? How could they have known that "Rock and Roll Band" still had Jim Masdea's drums on the track? And how could they have ever guessed that the man they didn't think was qualified enough to produce his own band's album figuratively duplicated seven songs from his own Scotch 206 reels?

It didn't matter. On August 25, 1976, Boston's debut LP Boston (Epic 34188) was released. And it flew out of the stores like the spaceships on its front cover. The first single from Boston, "More Than A Feeling" (Epic 50266) became a smash hit both on AM Top 40 stations (with its second verse deleted for time constraints), and on FM "AOR" stations (with the second verse left intact). "I was at Polaroid when I first heard 'More Than A Feeling' on the radio," said Tom Scholz. "I was listening to somebody else's radio. The first week the album came out, it did better than I expected, because I really had no expectations for it. I was just doing something that I liked. I really didn't expect anybody else would find it appealing. Pleasant surprise, eh?"

Pleasant surprise indeed. The entire Side 1 of Boston, including "Peace of Mind" and "Long Time," hit the Top 40 charts. "The people at Polaroid knew immediately that 'Peace of Mind' was about them," Scholz said to Rolling Stone. "The ones I worked with were cool about it. I had to leave a lot sooner than I thought when the album took off, but I never did want to climb the corporate ladder and become a manager. If you find something that feels as good as sex and you can make a living at it, what else can you want?"

A short six-week promotional club tour through the Midwest got longer - and longer - until Boston found themselves on a nationwide tour that lasted ten months. "We started playing the Agoras in Cleveland and Columbus," said Brad Delp, "500-1000 seat clubs. The response was great, I was amazed that people were singing along with all the songs. It really impressed upon me the power of radio, the fact that wherever we went, they were just playing the record and people just came, and it was great."

There were the nights when everything didn't fall in place - the time one of the amplifiers exploded, or somebody nearly was electrocuted because of a faulty wire. In one of their earliest shows, three guitarists had to use a single Marshall amplifier because the other amps malfunctioned. Some of the bands they opened for were less than enthusiastic about this new opening act with the monster hit album. At one point, they were opening for Foghat - "which was really cool," said Delp, "because one of Tom's favorite songs when we were working on that first record was 'Slow Ride'" - but lost their gig when a Milwaukee disc jockey introduced Boston, not headliner Foghat, as the best rock and roll band in the world.

"I was a little apprehensive about opening for Black Sabbath," said Delp, "because I figured their fans would be fanatical, they're not going to even want to know about us. But the record was doing so well that crowds knew who we were and they were responsive. The great thing about Black Sabbath was that they didn't do soundchecks. So we were afforded all the time we wanted on stage, Ozzy Osbourne would say, 'Ahh, you wanna go up and play some songs, go ahead.' They couldn't have been nicer."

Meanwhile, the album continued to sell. Two months after its August release, Boston sold 500,000 copies - gold record status. It sold anther 500,000 copies within 30 days - platinum record status. By January 1977, the debut disc sold two million copies, one of the fastest selling debut albums in rock history. "It was happening so fast," said Brad Delp, "It would have been different had we done the record and we're home reading the paper about this. But being on the road, we were doing interviews and we were doing in-stores, which was very big then - Peaches was the big store that you went to, and that kind of stuff - we were having fun. But I wasn't really grasping the magnitude of it. The crowds were getting bigger, and they knew all the words. We would get a telegram from the label saying 'Congratulations, you just sold 2 million records.' That was a big number, but it was just that, to my mind, it was a big number. It didn't have the same meaning as seeing the faces out there."

In his home, Tom Scholz hung a gold record next to the framed Epic rejection letter of so many years ago. He also went back to his job at Polaroid for a few weeks to finish up some loose ends. "I left Polaroid after the first little tour we had," said Scholz, "and actually went back and worked for them for a little while after the tour. You can't be too careful about these things, now."

Epic Records was pleased with their new acquisition - Boston and another new band, Wild Cherry, were among Epic's biggest success stories of 1976. "The whole company was charged up about [Boston]," said Epic president Ron Alexenburg to Variety writer Frank Meyer. "We know what FM radio can do and we have respect for it, but this one was playing on AM and FM ... It's a lot of fun when something like this happens. There's a buzz in the company. People were waiting for a new artist from us. Certainly there's pressure on them and on us. We want more singles from the first album and we're planning for the second album. Their dates have to be the best, so we want it all to be right."

While on tour, Boston received more accolades. The readers of Rolling Stone voted Boston as "Best New Band." Time praised the debut album as one of the top 5 releases of 1976. "I sold out arenas with this group in four cities from Lincoln, Nebraska to Louisville, Kentucky," said concert promoter Bob Bagaris to Billboard. "I've never seen such universal penetration of key secondary markets by any major group. Even the biggest acts usually don't do so well in every market."

Then came a Grammy nomination. Along with four other groups that had some modicum of success in 1976 with their debut discs - Wild Cherry, the Brothers Johnson, the Starland Vocal Band and Dr. Buzzard's Original "Savannah" Band - Boston was nominated for Best New Artist of 1976. "The Beach Boys were on stage reading the Grammy nominations," said Brad Delp, "That was exciting enough. We go into the theatre, sitting right behind us was Ella Fitzgerald. I turned around and actually said hello to her, because I was starstruck. The next aisle over, a couple of rows back, Ringo Starr's there, with Paul Simon, and then the Beach Boys were reading the nominations. Boston, Wild Cherry, Starland Vocal Band... I think I was almost afraid that we were going to win, because that would have meant I would have had to go up on national television."

Delp didn't have to worry. The Grammy for Best New Artist went to the Starland Vocal Band, based on the strength of their hit "Afternoon Delight." "The guy who happened to be our tour manager at the time used to work with Starland Vocal Band, and I guess they were John Denver's backup band for a long time, so they had kind of paid their dues in the business. I was a little bit relieved when they ended up winning. So I'm certainly not begrudging of that."

Boston continued to tour, but now they were headlining shows. Within a one-week span, they sold out four Southern California concert halls. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band opened for Boston in Detroit. On their swing back to the Northeast, they sold out two nights in the Philadelphia Spectrum - and in their New York City debut, three sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. Meanwhile, Boston sold six million albums, 8-tracks and cassettes by December 1977.

Then came the inevitable question - if the debut album could sell six million copies, what would the second album sell?

While the other members of Boston bought cars and other baubles with their profits, Tom Scholz sunk his share of record sales into a new house and basement recording studio, and began work on the second album.

But things were different. Now there were expectations - would the next album break new ground, or would it be commercially "safe"? And could the second album elevate Boston above an advertising tagline CBS initially used to sell the debut album - "Better Music Through Science," a slogan Scholz despised because it downplayed the music at the expense of technical wizardry.