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But while Scholz' musical endeavors seemed stymied, his electronic creations were taking off. One product, a device patented as "D.284580: Stringed Instrument Amplifier Or The Like," kept Scholz solvent throughout this time period. An electronic box - about the same size as an 8-track tape - contained an input for a guitar and another input for headphones. By plugging your guitar into this box, you could create guitar solos as intricate as your fingers would allow - and thanks to the headphones, only you would hear your performance. By adjusting a few switches on the box, you could recreate the guitar sound of dozens of rock heroes - as thick or as clear or as distorted as you could ever imagine. You could even rechannel the guitar output to sound like a violin or a pipe organ. This gizmo could make your guitar do all that, and more.
Tom Scholz called his new electronic device "The Rockman," and within weeks of its release, thousands of orders filled the Scholz Research and Development offices. Sales of the Rockman helped Scholz continue to finance his third album, and to hire entertainment attorney Donald Engel to get Boston's royalties released from CBS. Instead of writing songs, Scholz and Engel were writing legal papers.
Brad Delp kept himself busy, even singing on the soundtrack album of the 1983 low-budget motion picture Best Revenge. The soundtrack album was initially released only in Japan (although available since 1995 on Razor & Tie 2073-2), and one of the tracks, "Playing For Keeps," was a collaboration between Delp and Keith Emerson. "I was in Los Angeles, and someone was interested at one point in trying to hook myself and Keith Emerson together. They told me, 'Keith's going to be in town, maybe you'd like to meet him or something.'
"So I went to the studio. They told me somebody else had sung on this demo of "Playing For Keeps," and they said they weren't really happy with all the lyrics. So we reworked some of the lyrics and then I went into the studio and sang the revised lyrics. The whole thing took about an hour, and I took off. Before I left, they gave me a cassette copy of that which they were playing back, and they actually had some of the solo buttons pushed in on the recording - so the only copy I ever got of it was this quick cassette that they gave me before I left. In the middle of it, all of a sudden all the tracks drop out, except for one - which they were listening to and soloing up to find out of something was wrong with it. A few years later, I'm watching television and the movie was on cable. So I decided to tune in - and I heard bits and pieces of the song, but only instrumentally."
By 1983, the Third Stage album was still unfinished. Barry Goudreau, however, had finished recording a new album with his new group, Orion The Hunter. Singer Fran Cosmo, former Heart drummer Michael De Rosier and bassist Bruce Smith joined Goudreau in this new project, and Brad Delp added some lyrics to three songs on their new self-titled album. Orion The Hunter (Portrait 39239) sold respectably well - reaching #57 on the Billboard album charts, and the first single from that album, "So You Ran" (Portrait 04483), became an AOR hit. After a summer tour opening for Aerosmith, however, Orion The Hunter shut down operations.
Meanwhile, back at the recording studio, CBS and Tom Scholz continued their contract struggle. In August 1994, Scholz and his new attorney, Don Engel, worked out a new deal with another label, MCA Records, to get the Third Stage album released. Upon hearing of the deal, CBS demanded $900,000.00 from MCA (and 25 cents an album) before allowing Boston to join the new label. Then CBS slapped another lawsuit on the band, this time accusing Engel of voiding a valid Boston-CBS contract by negotiating with another record company.
It took months of litigation, depositions, memoranda and other legalese before the matter finally reached a judge. On April 23, 1985, New York Federal Court Justice Vincent L. Broderick shot down CBS' injunction. In his decision, Broderick said that CBS failed to prove that it would suffer "irreparable harm" if they could not release that third Boston album. He also said that when CBS demanded that $900,000.00 settlement from MCA, that effectively killed any negotiations between both companies.
"That, so far as I'm concerned, destroyed any argument of irreparable damage here," he said in his decision. "Before this litigation really got underway, CBS had already fixed its price."
Broderick also took exception to CBS' withholding of the deferred royalties. Once CBS withheld the royalties, they in fact had broken the recording contract, not Scholz. "I don't find anything that makes this money," said Broderick in his decision, "which was being held in a special account by CBS, as being subject to withholding on the grounds of some grievance CBS may think it has with respect to performance under the basic contract."
So Third Stage would be an MCA product, and they released a press release stating that they were excited about releasing the new album, which was - ahem - "almost finished." Actually, Scholz still wasn't finished with the disc, but things were moving faster. One track in particular, a sensitive ballad called "Hollyann," took over six years to write, record, finalize, adjust, fine tune and polish.
Finally, in September 1986 - eight years after the release of Don't Look Back - Boston's new album, Third Stage, was released. The songs on Third Stage were more interpersonal than those on previous Boston albums, as party songs and rockers gave way to ballads and excursions on relationships and adulthood. Other musicians had used Tom Scholz' Rockman products for their own albums and concerts; the inventor showed his students its full power on Third Stage, turning an electric guitar into chimes on "Amanda," into a violin quartet on "A New World," into an armada of axes on "Cool The Engines." "I wasn't ever worried," Scholz said to Rolling Stone about Third Stage's success. "I knew it was the best I could possibly do. But let's put it this way: I certainly would have been crestfallen if it came out and sold half a million copies and no one liked it."
Actually, it flew out of the stores. "You'd think they were coming off a No. 1 album based on the calls we've been getting from stores," said Norman Hunter, an album buyer for the chain of Record Bar stores, to Billboard writer Fred Goodman. In only its third week of release, Third Stage topped the Billboard album charts. The first single from Third Stage, the tender ballad "Amanda" (MCA 52756), raced up the Top 40 charts, hitting #1 on November 6, 1986. Third Stage even topped Billboard's Top Compact Discs chart, and received the first RIAA gold certification ever awarded for selling 500,000 CD's.
Subsequent pressings of Third Stage would later restore Sib Hashian's drumming credits to the album jacket, but it took a lawsuit to do so. "We went through a lawsuit with that, because when the Third Stage album came out, and I was on five songs, guess what - my name wasn't on the album. I had to go through a long suit, I actually had a judge order Tom to sticker the record so that when future records came out, it gave me some drumming credit. I didn't get any gold records or awards on Third Stage, until a fellow in Phoenix, Arizona, a fan named Richard Acevedo, he called up the record label, and the next thing I know I had five platinum albums at my door. I never met that guy, but he's a saint."
With Third Stage topping the charts (and, thanks to catalog sales, Boston and Don't Look Back returning to the album charts), Boston embarked on another world tour, beginning on June 20, 1987 with an appearance at the Texxas Jam Festival in Dallas. For Tom Scholz, returning to the road was a new beginning, a new chance to show audiences the new maturity of a Boston song. "We didn't have a great time on the road in the 1970's," said Scholz, "and it was because of the conditions of the people we were associating with, a lot of trouble with people doing drugs and so forth, and Brad and I both quit the road. It wasn't until the mid-1980's, when I started working around Gary Pihl a little bit, that we got the idea that maybe we could actually put a band together and a crew together that were decent human beings first, and secondly, good at what they did."
Gary Pihl, the former bass player for Sammy Hagar, made his Boston debut on the song "I Think I Like It," based on a song by John DeBrigard (DeBrigard, who performed under the name "Johnny Tomorrow" - and credited in Third Stage as "John English" - performed in many of the same clubs Scholz did during those early 70's formative years). After his contributions to "I Think I Like It," Pihl was invited to stay as a touring and performing member of Boston.
Opening for Boston on the Third Stage tour was a new band, Farrenheit. Although appearing on the Boston tour didn't make Farrenheit superstars, their songs did win Brad Delp over. "I thought they made a great record, and Charlie Farren, the main singer/guitar player with that band was tremendously talented. I always tell him there's a song called 'Impossible World,' which is a great song which probably nobody's heard, very few people have heard."
The tour also featured the entire Third Stage album - from "Amanda" to "Hollyann" - played in sequence. It allowed the audience to hear the Third Stage album as a complete concept - if not the equivalent of Tommy or The Wall, a step in that direction. "Besides eliminating what little tension there might have otherwise been over what songs would be played next," wrote David Wild in Rolling Stone, "this approach meant that the band played some of its weakest material back to back. That said, the live versions of the Third Stage material were a bit more hard edged than their sometimes claustrophobic vinyl counterparts."
But fans loved it anyway. Boston played to sellout crowds throughout America, and capped off their tour with nine sold out homecoming shows in the Worcester (Mass.) Centrum. The show broke Centrum records for performances by a single group and for gross ticket sales (nearly $2 million for 111,000 tickets sold, according to the Worcester Telegram).
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