ONE MAN'S VISION

Boston multi-instrumentalist Tom Scholz on the band’s first album.

With the first Boston album the band pretty much invented a new genre of AOR.

Well it’s not like I got into music and decided that I had to do this wonderful thing. I just tried to do the best that I could. But I thought I could bring something new to it. Not something earthshakingly new, but just my own twist on it.

I started out in the early seventies working with other musicians, but it did not produce the result I was looking for.

I never felt that I got what I was hearing in my mind for the songs. I found that instead of focusing on my imagination and where it would take me with the music, I was focusing on what the other people in the room were thinking about what I was doing. And I found that the interpretation by other musicians was changing the idea that I had, and it was not necessarily changing it in a good way. I hoped that it would add to it, but in fact what it did is it limited it.

It was at the end of 1973. I said to myself: I’m never going to play music with a band again for the purpose of trying to get people to hear it, because it doesn’t get presented the way it could and should be. I knew nothing about how other people recorded an album. But I said from now on I’m going to muddle on by myself.

You had Brad Delp singing on that album, but most of it was created by you alone. Why was that?

Meaning what?

When did you decide to go it alone?

I taught myself about engineering and producing slowly, built some recording equipment and I started in. And immediately the results were so much better. Within a year I had come up with the songs – and more importantly, the recordings of the songs – that would form the basis of the first Boston album.

Yeah, that was in the basement of my apartment house [laughs]. Not your ideal place to record the master for an album. But it was the ideal place for me to work.

Nothing! When I got the contract it was totally unexpected, because I’d had nothing but failure up to that point. But I made a promise to myself that this was what worked, this is what enabled me to create music that was worthy of being listened to, and this is the only way that I’m going to do it.

Oh no. The record company had very different ideas. I was going to be produced by their producer in a major studio, blah blah blah.

And I quickly nixed all that – with the help of John Boylan, who was their choice of producer. I actually made the record in my basement, the same way I had made the demos that got me signed, while John had a decoy of some people out in Los Angeles showing up at Capitol Records’ studios every day.

You did all of this in your home studio?

What changed when Boston signed to Epic Records?

Did the record company trust your instincts? But you did record one track for the album out in LA, with a full band line-up. Yeah, that was Let Me Take You Home Tonight. But the rest of that record I did alone in my basement, with Brad [Delp] coming in from time to time. Brad and I had an amazing musical connection. We were so tight after a while. And because of that, we tried enormous numbers of ideas and arrangements and vocal parts. He was also a constant comedian, so we had a really good time working in the studio. That song, like most of the songs I’ve written, is fairly personal. I’m not saying that all of my songs are about precise experience, but they are observations about life. Boston music has been my escape for a long, long time. And I always hoped that it was a sort of escape for people when they put that album on.

I never expected success, not ever. I got lucky. Brad was such a huge part of that album. His singing – on More Than A Feeling especially – was out of this world. There is so much emotion in More Than A Feeling.

Did it come from your own personal experience? You’ve also described this album, and Boston’s music in general, as escapism. And you ended up with what was, until Guns N’ Roses came along, the biggest-selling debut in the history of American music.