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The record is late. In my-dog-chewed-it-up tones, Scholz runs down all the delaying factors, from his twenty-four-track's self-destruction, to a basement flood." As far as calculated, best times to release an album for career and money and all that garbage, I figure I passed that three or four months ago. I would think people would be sick of [the first album] by now."
But, if anything, there has been yet another wave of sales and airplay for Boston. Only this time disc jockeys no longer play "Long Time" without punning ... or chastising the nonappearance of a follow up. So Tom Scholz no longer listens to the radio. He has watched all his other tardy peers slip past him: Springstein, the Stones, Dylan, Tom Petty, Foreigner, Seger.
"We could have put out a decent album last fall" Scholz contends. "It would have had two or three good songs on it, but I didn't want to do that .A lot of people were kind of waiting in the bushes to see if we were going to do that"
Waiting in the bushes? Some suggest Scholz' pressures are self-imposed, pointing to the many time-consuming responsibilities he has chosen to assume in his life-from"" producer/bandleader to business overseer/husband. Scholz stares downward, not answering, and Cindy Scholz appears at the doorway to announce she's taking Tom out for a steak dinner.
Sprightly and friendly, Cindy is enormously popular among those who work with her husband . She is totally supportive, right down to lending the hand claps on Boston records. "He was just asking me about the pressures of being a husband," Scholz informs her. "Don’t tell him about the mirrors in the bedroom."
"They both giggle and exchange rapturous smiles--, their eight-year marriage is a notoriously happy one-,,. "Anyway, we'll go out in just a minute." According to one of the Scholz' few close friends, "Tom has a very definite order of opinions that he trusts. First is' himself. Second is Cindy, whom he often listens to over himself. And in far-descending order, next is the band and then [producer] John Boylan. Then Ahern. And no one else in the music business."
Staring at his menu at the family steakhouse, Tom Scholz looks enormously happy to be out of his basement. I wonder if it is still any fun down there. He becomes Annie Hall for a moment. "Ah ... uh ... uh ...no. Lately it's been a hassle, with lawyers and garbage like that' Fun is when you're writing a song and you're trying a rough shot at a demo and ... it works. That's when it's fun. After that, it's work." just as the waitress has arrived, he blurts, "I'll tell you. This was all the right bunch of people at the right time... and luck. Lot of luck. Wanna know what the most fun of all was ... ?"
"Two steaks, medium" inserts Cindy.
"Getting the contract," continues Tom. A quiet engineering student, he had traveled to MIT from hometown Toledo "by way of a'55 Chevy and Route 90 ' " Young Scholz left behind a home that had also served as a showcase, for his designer/builder father. "I was tired of people coming through all the time," he recalls. "I saw a lot of people I didn’t want to be' "
He graduated MIT with a masters and immediately threw himself into the musical aspirations he'd been harboring since hearing "You Really Got Me" on his transistor in Toledo. "Whenever I was at a show I really liked," he recalls, "it was always just plain old rock & roll, like the James Gang. I've been in bands that wanted to play nothing but Zeppelin. I wanted to be in a band with great songs ... no dinosaurs.,," recalls Barry Goudreau: "I was in my last year of high school and Tom had just graduated MIT. My band needed a keyboard player and placed an ad in the local paper. Scholz answered the ad. He was just starting to play guitar, too, the first month we were together. He'd say, 'Why don't I play guitar on this one.' We'd say, 'Oh, Tom, don't play the guitar, just play keyboards.' One month he was learning how to play guitar. The next month he was unbelievable. It wasn't long before it turned out to be his group-and we were doing his material."
Scholz stood by the material he was writing, songs like "Long Time," "Smokin," "San Frasisco Day." (later Hitch a ride ) and " Rock & Roll Band". He became obsessed with finding permanent players, even though it was a cold period in Boston. "The most important thing was to find a singer I really believed in and to stick to him like glue. I also knew that if I wanted to get signed, you should make your own record. And I knew that, if nothing else, I had the ability to work on tape until it fell apart. I've done it many times. So Scholz developed the habit of recording his own release quality demos. It was only when he couldn't afford it anymore that he took a top secret development post at Poloroid engineering.
Besides money, the job provided the built in intrigue of a mini-CIA. Projects were given code names to avert corporate spies. Scholz was putting in eight hours ("Well, maybe seven") a day developing the Instant Movie cameras and their second generation, sound-system hardware. By night, he commuted to a cut-rate studio an hour and a half out of town. He later purchased his own four-track and set it up in the basement of his apartment house. Adding an unconventional twelve-track, Scholz was set to begin Boston.
"I was blowing a lot of money' " he remembers. "Cindy and I hadn’t had a vacation in eight years. We were living in this little apartment. I decided I couldn’t do it anymore. I was gonna stop. It was getting too crazy .... I'm not the kind of person who can stay up all night or exist on four or five hours of sleep. I imagine I would have continued to write them, but it would have been a leisurely hat it was, which was ... a rat race."
The break would come from the engineer who sat next to him at Polaroid. The engineer's cousin worked in the ABC regional warehouse. Scholz ran off a copy of the tape for him, as he did for most anyone else he thought could help. The engineer took it and put it in his desk, where it remained for weeks.
One day Scholz' phone rang. Columbia was interested in the demo. Scholz yelped. The fellow engineer came over to find out what the commotion was, and Scholz told him. The engineer took the tape back out of his desk ... you know, maybe he should send this to his cousin after all.
The Columbia tape didn't pan out. The other one, however, caught the ear of Charlie McKenzie, then working at ABC. McKenzie first took Scholz around town for a flashy display of clout, introducing him to local stars like the James Montgomery Band and Duke and the Drivers. I was only impressed," says Scholz, "that he knew someone in L.A .... namely Ahern." Scholz and the band signed on with Pure Management-Ahern and McKenzie.
There were some classic rejection stories in the begining, like one from then-Capitol Records executive Al Coury, (whose family lives in New England): "This is great! I'd love the trip to Boston, but I don't think I can sell, this." But when the tape found its way to Epic (a subsidiary CBS) A&R man Lenny Petze, formerly Epic's Boston promo man, he wanted to release the meticulously crafted demo as it was. (It is available as a rare bootleg called Honest. I Found It in the Trashcan.)
The still-unnamed group presented a showcase performance in November 1975, renting Aerosmith's warehouse and ragtag equipment. They barely made it through the show, but still passed the audition. Most of the album was finished at this point. "But," says, Scholz, "we didn't let anybody know, because CBS rules required that a union engineer be present for all the sessions."
But Scholz arrived with the completed tracks within two weeks and the higher-ups at Epic and CBS were allowed to thinking the whole album was recorded in Los Angeles. Their reaction was, "Jesus, you work quickly!"
Scholz had also just finished the demo for "More than a Feeling," a simple ode to daydreaming featuring a guitar solo reminiscent of "Telstar" ("Only two people noticed that," says Scholz). "My initial feeling," Scholz swallows earnestly, "was that it would be my best single shot. Then I listened to it, decided it wasn't a single at all and got very depressed about it. But Ahern liked it. I couldn't figure out if he was just telling me that to make me feel good 'cause he knew I was upset about it." Ahern was sincere: "It starts off' sweet and then gets heavy, which does not disqualify it from housewife airplay time, he explains excitedly." With 'More than a Feeling' I knew we'd get twenty-four-hour-a-day airplay ... and airplay was the key to it all ' "
So sure was Ahern that at the next CBS convention, just after Boston was signed, he took to charging quantities of filet mignon and Grand Marnier to the company president every day.
"Nobody," many recall him saying, "will be upset when the record comes out" In the time between first hearing the demo and the release of the first album, Ahern and McKenzie had poured it on. They had played the tape for all of CBS and virtually the entire music business. People would hide their stereos when they saw Ahern coming.
In September 1976, it all paid off. The album broke out of Cleveland first, and by the next week had been added at 392 stations.
"I was pessimistic about it until it sold 200,000 copies Scholz says. He has trouble looking me in the eye, and has turned to face his twenty-four-track machine completely. "And all of a sudden I realized I was in the music business. I got word on what the sales figures were while I was still at Polaroid full time. It wasn't easy staying there two more weeks."
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