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That much about the early formation of Boston is undisputed. Things get tricky, however, when we try to calculate the contributions of Barry Goudreau, Fran Sheehan and, to a lesser extent, drummer Sib Hashian. Scholz, in all our interviews, has steadfastly held the position that their input was negligible, and that even the parts they played on the first Boston album were exact replicas of the demos he, Delp and Masdea constructed. (This is also Tom's position in his court cases.) Scholz refers to the other three members as "the players that went out with Brad and me on the live dates," or the "touring band." Fran Sheehan flatly dismisses that characterization, particularly with regard to Goudreau: "Barry was heavily instrumental on that first album, a big force. Barry had done all the guitar work on the early tapes, and I think Tom, more than he'd admit, might've listened to Barry and tried to copy some of the things he was playing. That's why the two of them played all those dual harmony leads so well together. They were better than anybody I've seen at that. We were the city boys' Allman Brothers."
Goudreau's supporters also maintain that Scholz was primarily a keyboard player at the outset, and that most of the guitars on the early demos were done by Goudreau. On that score Goudreau himself cryptically notes, "I will say that 'Tom had not been playing guitar very long when we began playing together." Scholz admits that Goudreau was present on some of the earliest demos, but that "those didn't work out too well. I later decided to just stick with Jim and me getting the music together. I wish I hadn't had to do all the instruments myself, it was never my intention to form a band and be the central figure and have to do it all. All I wanted was to play guitar. I don't know whether I just didn't run into the right musicians along the road, or what happened. My only other choice would've been to accept other people's interpretations of the songs I was writing and I guess over the years I didn't hear a lot of interpretations that I liked."
Sheehan says he had input in the demo days, too: "I was working with them once in a while. They would keep asking me to join the band permanently, but they weren't playing out. All they were was another band doing demo tapes in Boston. So I'd go and work with them, doing different things, coming up with bass lines, singing vocal backups, stuff like that. And Sib was in the band for a while too. We all contributed ideas about what was good, what wasn't, how this was better, how the mix sounded .... "
Sheehan and Hashian have begun litigation over their respective rights to Boston income, so their accounts of the formative days like--like Scholz's--have to be taken in that legal light. Certainly Sheehan's consistent use of "they" implies two circles, an inner circle close to Scholz and an outer circle of pick-up musicians that the inner circle bounced ideas off.
When the demos landed a management deal in late 1975 and a band had to be assembled, a major blow was dealt to the inner circle when Jim Masdea was not included. At issue was the chops faction Sheehan points out: "Masdea just wasn't cutting it. He had just kind of stopped playing drums and wasn't in very good practice or anything. He wasn't really even interested in the drums anymore, he wanted to play keyboards. So I was in charge of getting a drummer, and I went out and got a guy by the name of Dave Curtier, who was the best young drummer in the city of Boston back then. But Curtier quit, after we had gotten the CBS contract! His exact words were, 'Something doesn't feel right in this band. There's something drastically wrong here.' We all kind of knew what it was, but it was just a thing of, either we act grown-up about the thing and just roll along with it--and let whoever's going to act weird act weird and the rest of us go about our work like professionals---or it wouldn't have happened at all."
The original Boston management deal with Paul Ahern and Charles McKenzie only signed Scholz and Brad Delp, as did the record deal Ahern Associates negotiated with CBS. Only a few months later were the other three Boston members written in for equal shares in the LP's performance royalties and tour income. Scholz also received half of a separate producer's royalty and most of the publishing income. Sources in the Scholz camp say that the partnership was expanded because Scholz wanted a collegial atmosphere, despite the fact that when Boston finally went in to cut their debut in 1976, Scholz recorded ninety percent of the LP's instrumental tracks. Sib Hashian's recent suit against Scholz claims an oral partnership that dates back a year, to 1975. (That appears to contradict Sheehan's statement that Hashian joined only after Curtier quit in early 1976. ) Sheehan, too, says there were oral agreements making the three hired hands part of Boston, but assigns to Scholz a different motivation than the pure benevolence with which Scholz's own people credit him:
"When it finally came time for a band," Sheehan says, "Tom really had to get the best musicians he could. And he couldn't get them because...he's a little tough to work with, let's say. Plus, they couldn't make any money playing out, and it's tough to get really good musicians to play with you unless you're gonna make some money or something. So when we all joined the band, before we got the CBS deal, it was an all-equal thing. He was going to get the kinds of guys he wanted."
Still, as Scholz oversaw cover art and liner photos in preparation for the release of his music, one thing rankled: the sacrifice of his old pal Masdea, which Scholz says he was unable to prevent. Scholz drew from that an important lesson about control: "Frankly, I thought the whole thing was completely unfair. He had worked on my music for years, did a great job, in my opinion, and got pushed out of the band. He got little credit and no royalties at all. At that point, I was powerless to stop it, but eventually I said, 'I'm not going to let that happen. Nobody is going to do that again."'
"Hindsight is 20/20," notes Fran Sheehan, but ten years after its release, it's easy to see how Boston achieved its colossal sales. There's not an original musical idea on the record, but it's assembled with a wonderful ingenuity and hardly a parsec of dead air. A constant parade of scene changes, stunts and segues accompanies Brad Delp's passionate invocations of love, peace and understanding, groovy rock 'n' roll bands and the joys of picking up foxy ladies. The opener, "More Than A Feeling," became a top five single and a certified FM classic. Overall, the record seemed a tribute to one of Scholz's central working principles: "I listen to these songs thousands of times, which would make you sick of most songs. My rule is that if I'm working on something and I really don't want to hear it again, if it gets going through my mind and I can't stand it, I throw that song out. Not one song on the albums has failed that test."
Success hit Scholz, Delp and company like a firestorm. Accountants told them they were rich, although they noticed there wasn't that much money around. Scholz bought a modest home in the western suburbs of Boston and moved his recording gear into the basement to create Hidaway Studios, where he's recorded everything since. As the royalties poured in, the band's tax accountants set up a deferred payment arrangement for some of their album royalties: CBS would invest the money they'd already earned and pay each band member a fixed yearly income. A second so-called "Deferral Agreement" was established after the second album as well. These agreements later play important roles in our story.
The band embarked on a series of well-executed tours and press blitzes. The fiction that Boston was a real band was carefully nurtured at all times. "It would always be that for the benefit of the band, you'd have to lie about things to the press," recalls Sheehan, who handled most of the publicity efforts. "Tom would say, 'You can't say this, this can't go this way, you have to tell an untruth."' For the most part, these untruths involved minimizing Scholz's musical primacy. Sources in the current Scholz camp suggest he felt the Boston audience would not accept the idea the music was over-dubbed, and because he feared embarrassing the other players.
There is some evidence that Scholz did not take well to touring--the perfectionist in him found the small compromises required in playing live too onerous. Says Sheehan, "It's tough, even for guys who had been full-time musicians playing out on good days and bad days. Tom wasn't really at that advantage. I'd gone through a four-month slump, playing in front of people when my head wasn't together and still kept my confidence through it. But for Tom it was real tough, because all of a sudden the thing had accelerated beyond what any of us had gone through. He didn't have much experience to fall back on."
A source who was with Boston around this time gave this picture of Scholz on the road: "He's an eccentric genius. The guy has a very difficult time sleeping, he's always thinking ahead of himself, and he ends up in a semi-paranoid state. Unless he has a bunch of people around him going 'Yeah Tom, yeah Tom, yeah Tom,' things aren't very comfortable."
A few months after the tours subsided, Scholz started in on a second album, working in much the same way as he had recorded the debut. But now there was more pressure to accommodate other band members' ideas. Several sources insist the title cut of the next LP, "Don't Look Back," was written by the full band, and a greater attempt than before was made to find little solo spots for each member. But one witness to the process felt Scholz was unreceptive to musical input, calling his attitude one of "How dare you give me an idea?" "Close. It was close to that," sighs Sheehan. "He had a hard time hearing other people's ideas, other than something he could use for himself. He would take each idea and go over it. If it didn't really catch, it went in the wastebasket."
Epic Records began looking for the follow-up LP about a year after the first, and as the months ticked into 1978 and the band sat around waiting for Scholz to finish it up, a general anxiety settled in. Actually, by his standards, Scholz had done pretty well--a whole side in about eighteen months. And it was not a bad half-record, more musically adventurous than the first album, and less prone to repeating ideas. And it sold as well as the first half of Boston did, four million. The second side dropped off a cliff. It was a Boston recording about two drafts before we usually see it. "Don't Look Back was questionably received because it wasn't complete," says Scholz now. "That album had one side finished and it was virtually forced out of my hands." A subsequent Scholz legal memorandum claimed he "succumbed to pressure from [manager Paul] Ahern and CBS." Having delivered the second Boston album in July of 1978, the band hit the road again, adding a' European leg. "The group was on tour for more than a year," continues the memorandum, "ending about November of 1979, at which time the group was 'burned out."' But the real fires were only beginning.
Scholz was becoming embroiled in a legal tussle with manager Ahern; some legal papers allude to the fact that Ahern owned a piece of every song Scholz would write, which made Scholz less than eager to write songs. Sources in the Scholz camp admit that in 1979 Scholz called a meeting of the band and told them to work on any solo project they wanted during the next year, because the suit with Paul Ahern would delay the album. Later Scholz said he felt that encouragement had created a "Frankenstein monster." It came at a time of growing resentment within the band over songwriting. A particular sore point was Scholz's decision to try a couple of songs by outside writers, bypassing the band members' ideas. "That was a touchy thing," notes Sheehan. "We worked for hours and hours rewriting these other people's material, and some of the guys were a little unhappy. They had songs themselves." Barry Goudreau finally announced he would be doing a solo album. "The only reason Barry's album was done," Sheehan relates, "was out of frustration."
Meanwhile, Scholz decided to change the way he had been trying to create music for the previous three years. After all, he felt his most productive time had been back when he had a day job and did music on the side. So Tom Scholz got himself a day job. "Yeah, that was the main reason for starting Scholz Research & Design," laughs Scholz. "I definitely needed a job. I didn't like this thing of trying to go to a studio in the morning and write songs because that was your job. In 1976, the day after I quit Polaroid, I thought music was a great job. But it's lousy. It's a terrible job and a terrible way to try to create. How can it be something you're excited about if you're doing it because you have to do it? Music has to be something special to me. I got into it because it was a hobby. It was great fun. Well, it's not particularly fun to go into a room and think of how to put chords together."
Scholz rented a small office space near his home and went to work mornings. His first product was something he used to get his screaming Marshall guitar sound, a giant electronic sponge that connected between an amplifier and a speaker cabinet. As you cranked up your amp, getting a thicker tone, you could keep your real volume at the same level. It was called the Power Soak, and within two years, Scholz made and sold ten thousand.
In 1980, Barry Goudreau's album appeared, and it contained a rude surprise: Lenny Petze, the P&R man who brought Boston to 'CBS, had asked Brad Delp and Sib Hashian to be on the record. When Fran Sheehan declined, they found another guy named Fran and put pictures of all four on the cover with only their first names. Whether or not this was intended to be Boston-in-exile, the CBS promotion machine certainly was marketing it that way. An ad campaign trumpeted Goudreau as "the guitar sound heard on twelve million Boston records." This last really rankled Scholz, and he nipped it in the bud. But the way the LP had been passed off as Almost-Boston started a running argument in the band. It must have been especially uncomfortable for Scholz to be hoisted on his own P/R petard: Having been fed the image of a democratic band for years, why shouldn't the public view eighty percent of Boston as a rump majority? Scholz saw this as a direct threat to his primary influence over the Boston name, the vessel for all his past labors.
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