More Than a Feeling: Talking Les Pauls with Boston's Tom Scholz
Tom Scholz’s metamorphosis from rock and roll dreamer to living the rock and roll dream is legendary.
Toiling long and hard in his basement on funky used recording gear he’d stitched and bolted together, Scholz, primarily with the help of his friend and singer Brad Delp, crafted the Boston album during nights and weekends off from his engineering job at the Polaroid Corporation.
Tom Scholz’s metamorphosis from rock and roll dreamer to living the rock and roll dream is legendary.
Toiling long and hard in his basement on funky used recording gear he’d stitched and bolted together, Scholz, primarily with the help of his friend and singer Brad Delp, crafted the Boston album during nights and weekends off from his engineering job at the Polaroid Corporation.
The lanky six-foot-six MIT grad had nearly gone broke after years of making tapes and having them rejected by record labels.
“I had enough money for one last demo and sent it off to 24 companies, then figured I’d sit back and wait for the rejection letters,” Scholz says today. “Lo and behold, three major labels were interested. I couldn’t believe it. Nobody knew who we were, so I wouldn’t even say we were struggling. It was groveling.”
Scholz signed with CBS Records, and when radio stations began playing “More Than a Feeling” and Boston was released on August 8, 1976, the album―which its breathtaking sonic architecture and hopelessly romantic lyrics―became the feel-good cure for a nation suffering the hangover of Vietnam and Watergate.
“Suddenly,” the Les Paul wielding frontman says, “we were ’70s superstars.”
Fast forward to 2008. Boston remains the best-selling debut rock and roll album in the history of Billboard’s charts, at 17 million copies. Four more Boston studio discs and a greatest hits set have followed in its wake, racking up more than 30 millions albums sold worldwide. But the yin of Scholz and Boston’s success has been countered by the yang of divisiveness and lawsuits, and, most tragically, his friend Delp’s suicide in 2007.
This summer Boston is reconvening for the first time in four years to celebrate the group’s triumphs. There will be a North American tour built around its musical cornerstones: “More Than a Feeling,” “Don’t Look Back,” “Smokin’,” “Peace of Mind,” “Hitch a Ride,” “Long Time,” “Amanda,” and other tunes stitched into the lives of many who came of age in the classic rock era.
The tour, which starts on June 6 in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and ends August 26 in Syracuse, New York, sports a surprise: singer Tommy DeCarlo. The North Carolinian was plucked from his job at a Home Depot when Scholz heard DeCarlo’s Delp-like pipes on his Myspace page, where DeCarlo had posted his own version of Boston tunes in tribute to his late vocal idol.
Less surprising is Scholz’s choice of guitars. That’s because he’s used the same pair of 1968 Les Paul Goldtops both on stage and in the studio throughout Boston’s entire history.
For an inveterate inventor and tinkerer who created his own Rockman line of electronic amps and effects and is always tweaking Boston’s sonic arsenal, Scholz’s unshakeable devotion to his Les Pauls’ dependability is astonishing. So when we spoke recently, we opted to talk guitars.