By Chuck Miller
Goldmine

"It often is a merit of an ideal to be unattainable. Its being so keeps forever before us something more to be done, and saves us from the ennui of a monotonous perfection." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

The summer of 1976 is winding down, and the radio stations have just added a new song to their playlist. The intro fades in, with chord progressions that sound like the James Gang's "Tend My Garden." The bridge to the refrain echoes the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie," and the lead guitarist threw in a few licks of the Tornadoes' "Telstar" in a guitar solo. And the lead singer is hitting high notes usually reserved for Frankie Valli, for Robert Plant, for Annie Haslam.

This previously unknown group, whose members alternated between bar bands and intricate studio demo tapes, have just released "More Than A Feeling," the first single from their debut album. More than twenty years later, that debut album - Boston - is one of the biggest selling LP's of all time, with over 17 million copies purchased. That first single, "More Than A Feeling," is still a classic rock staple, as are many of their other songs - "Peace of Mind," "Don't Look Back," "Amanda," "Rock and Roll Band" - the list goes on.

The story of Boston is a band whose dreams came true against impossible odds. The dream that some homemade demo tapes could become a multiplatinum album. The dream that stayed alive, despite lawsuits from record companies, managers and former members. The dream that the profits from these albums could go to charities of conscience, rather than to line a recording industry fatcat's pockets. The dream that hundreds of rock bands can increase their versatility, thanks to the inventions of electronics genius / lead guitarist Tom Scholz.

Boston's story actually begins long before that debut album - to the late 1960's, when Donald Thomas Scholz left his home in Toledo to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Having problems programming a VCR? By the time he earned his Master's Degree, Tom Scholz had the knowledge to custom-build you a VCR out of spare parts at the Radio Shack, and that VCR might last longer and work better than any made today.

In 1970, Scholz applied his degree to a product development job with the Polaroid Corporation. By night, he played keyboards for some bands in the Boston bar and club scene. And when not performing or inventing a new device for Polaroid, Scholz spent his free time composing intricate melodies. He later collaborated with another club musician, a keyboardist/drummer named Jim Masdea, and the two built a small studio in Watertown, Mass. to record their musical dreams.

Masdea and Scholz were not "full-time" musicians in 1970. They had talent, they liked to play, and they shared a concept of the perfect rock band - with crystal-clear vocals and bone-crunching guitars, and melodies that had more hooks than an angler's tackle box. "When Jim and I started working, we really enjoyed the music," said Scholz in an interview with Musician. "Jim wasn't a 'practice-eight-hours-a-day' drummer. He's a part-timer. Like me. We were both just very happy to be there doing it for hours and hours. And that was a lot of how those original Boston recordings came to be."

Scholz and Masdea later joined a band, "Mother's Milk," with guitarist Barry Goudreau. Before long, Scholz went from keyboardist to lead songwriter for Mother's Milk, as the group vied for recognition over the various bar bands and frat bands and club bands in the Boston music scene. Scholz still developed products for Polaroid in the day; but his nights were now split between performing for audiences and recording his tapes. Songs would be recorded - and re-recorded - and erased and re-edited and discarded and retrieved from the trash can and recorded again - all in an effort to create a perfect song.

Mother's Milk went through dozens of lead vocalists before Bradley Delp came into the picture. A former factory worker at an electric coil company in Danvers, Mass., Brad Delp spent his nights and weekends in a cover band, one of many he had played in since high school. "The band I was in," said Delp, "we rehearsed, 2-3 times a week, and we never got any work up to that point. So one day, the drummer from that band told me that he knew of a three-piece band that was playing not far from us, whose singer had just left town or something. He told me there was a group that was looking for a singer, and he actually encouraged me to go down to see them, realizing that the band we were in just wasn't doing anything."

So Delp drove down to Jojo's, a little club in Revere Beach. Playing inside the club was Barry Goudreau on guitar, Jim Masdea on drums, and Tom Scholz alternating between Hammond organ and electric bass. "When I walked in the club, they were playing covers like the Grateful Dead song 'Casey Jones,' and 'Green Onions,' the old Booker T. and the M.G.'s song. Their singer had left, so I don't know who the original guy was. The thing that impressed me about them, talking with them after the gig, was the fact that they had been in a local studio and actually done a demo. In all the bands I had been in, I had never been in a studio up to that point. They said, 'Yeah we did these tapes, and we're thinking about going back in in a couple of weeks. Would you like to audition?' I just thought that was the greatest thing."

So Delp auditioned for the group that same week. "I got the gig, my recollection is because I could sing 'Rocky Mountain Way' like Joe Walsh, and Tom was a big James Gang fan. I really wasn't familiar with the James Gang, but I knew that song."

With that, the Mother's Milk demos were re-recorded, this time with Delp's voice as lead vocals. He learned the new songs - "Mother's Milk Shake," "San Francisco Day," "Shattered Images," and a new track Tom Scholz wrote when he heard of Jim Masdea's experiences performing in various bar combos, "Rock and Roll Band."

In 1973, Mother's Milk had a six-song demo tape ready for mailing. "On the early demos for what was to be Boston, Barry played on all the lead guitar work," said drummer Sib Hashian. "Eventually, Tom took up the lead guitar, more or less putting Barry in the background."

Scholz and his wife Cindy sent copies to every record company they could find. They looked on the backs of record albums, searching for addresses to send a new tape. Despite their best efforts, the tapes always came back, sometimes with form letters taped to the boxes. Sorry, RCA's not interested. Neither was Capitol, or Atlantic, or Elektra.

"Some of the form letters actually had check-off boxes," said Delp, "and there'd be three options down, 'needs more work,' or 'OK,' one of those things, and they'd be checked off. Guitars 'not bad,' or 'try something else.' These form letters would come back, but there'd be a name on them, 'From The Office of so and so,' so we'd work on some other songs and then we'd send them back. And they'd send us a letter and they'd say, 'Well this is pretty good, but we don't like this so much. Send more.' So it was a gradual process. To be honest, I don't think we were paying a whole lot of attention to them saying 'this needs work' or 'that needs work.' We were just kind of going in our own direction. But most of them would say, 'Not what we're looking for at this time, but do you have any more.' And we got rejection slips from everyone."

"I sent tapes out to two dozen record labels," said Scholz. "The one that got people interested had four songs on it which ultimately later appeared on one of the first two Boston albums. Our tapes were rejected by most - three labels were very interested. It was A&M and two others. Epic rejected it flatly with a very insulting letter signed by Lennie Petze saying we offered nothing new and they weren't interested."

At one point, Scholz even gave a tape to a Polaroid co-worker, because that co-worker's cousin worked at ABC Records, the recording label for one of Scholz' favorite bands, The James Gang. The co-worker took the tape, promised to mail it out ... then left it in his desk and forgot all about it. A few months later, when another record company called Scholz at Polaroid and showed some interest in the recordings, the engineer remembered the tape and finally mailed it to ABC.

Although Mother's Milk had high hopes for their music, financial reality was encroaching the dream, and Brad Delp had to take a sabbatical from the group. "There was a period when I had to leave the band, because there just wasn't any money coming in, and there were two local guys who wanted to manage the band. They couldn't afford to pay us, and they weren't getting us any paying gigs. But I had a wife and I had rent to pay and that kind of stuff. So I had to leave the band at that time, and I didn't hear from them until maybe almost a year later, I got a call from Tom. He said, 'Look, this didn't work out with these managers and nothing really happened. So I've gone back in the studio. If you can't really afford to join the band or if you don't want to join the band, maybe you'd just want to come down to the studio and sing on some of these tapes for me.' And at that time, having been out of it for a year, I was jumping up and down that he would call me to do some more tapes."

By 1975, Tom Scholz was finished with the club scene, concentrating exclusively on the demo tapes. Whatever he could afford for his studio, he bought; whatever he couldn't afford, he invented or built from scratch. "A lot of the professional studios in the area were 8-track studios," said Delp, "which was a big deal at that time. Tom felt we could do the same stuff in our own studios. I remember we had two old Roberts reel-to-reel stereo tape decks, it was the first time I remember recording in Tom's house. We set up this thing and we started bouncing tracks back and forth, I don't even remember there even being a mixer at the time. We put them on one machine, and we'd fly in another vocal part and put them back and do it that way. At one point in time Tom had an opportunity to purchase an old Scully 8-track - it wasn't old at that time - but it was a considerable amount of money, and at the time he was renting a house and he was thinking about buying a house, and he took the money that he was saving for a down payment on the house and bought the Scully tape deck. And that's where most of the demo tapes wound up being recorded. Eventually he replaced the 8-track heads with 12-track heads, but it was done on 1-inch tape, and of course in the real studios at the time the standard was 2-inch tape."