The Hidden Truth Of The Band Boston

There just aren't many bands like Boston. The group is objectively successful, it was highly influential on the arena rock scene that helped define the 1970s, and its hooky, guitar-driven, hard pop songs will be played on classic rock radio forever. And yet, despite setting sales records, filling venues, and cranking out hits for a decade, Boston is quiet and almost anonymous. One of the few major bands of the 1970s not yet inducted into the historically controversial Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Boston recorded indelible songs such as "More Than a Feeling," "Don't Look Back," and "Amanda." Perhaps it's because the band was content to take many years between album releases and so it slowly faded from the public consciousness, or maybe it's because its creative leader was a multi-instrumentalist who holed up in his home studio for however long it took to perfect his sound. For whatever reason, Boston isn't as celebrated in the 21st century as its bell-bottoms-era counterparts.

The lack of attention certainly isn't because there isn't a good story. The tale of Boston is rife with overnight stardom, artistic integrity, legal maneuvering, and spaceships. Don't look back, and drift away into the largely untold story of the band Boston.

After earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, Tom Scholz stayed in the Boston area and worked as a product developer for Polaroid. He played with many bar bands, but what Scholz really wanted to do was make technically perfect rock music, so he built a studio in his basement and recorded polished demos of original songs.

Scholz played keyboards and bass guitar in a band called Mother's Milk, where he met singer Brad Delp and guitarist Barry Goudreau. More demos recorded with the new individuals were rejected by more than 20 labels, prompting Scholz to quit the band and devote all of his musical efforts to studio work. He remade the demos once more, responsible for nearly everything on the homemade record himself, except for Delp's vocal tracks. Some labels showed interest, which reminded one of Scholz's Polaroid coworkers that he had promised to send in a tape to his relative who worked at ABC Records. When that demo played in the label offices one day, a rep named Charles McKenzie heard it and called up California-based record promoter Paul Ahern — they had an arrangement where if one of them discovered a band, they'd tell the other. Ahern got the demo into the hands of CBS/Epic Records, which had earlier passed on some Scholz tapes. This time, the label wanted Scholz's services, and it offered a contract.

Before Tom Scholz could move forward at CBS/Epic Records in 1976, the label wanted him and his cohort to perform a private concert for a panel of executives. But the act wasn't really a band — it was just Scholz and singer Brad Delp. To fill out the lineup, Scholz hired some of his old Mother's Milk bandmates and Boston-area musicians who had contributed to some of his earlier demos: guitarist Barry Goudreau, bass player Fran Sheehan, and drummer Dave Currier. The showcase, presented in a Boston warehouse borrowed for the occasion from Aerosmith, which used it as a practice space, was a success, and the album deal was made official. The band hadn't quite solidified, however. Without knowing the band had successfully navigated the showcase, Currier quit because Scholz wouldn't pay him for practice sessions. Past collaborator Sib Hashian auditioned and got the gig.

CBS/Epic then asked the group to head to Los Angeles and record their album with a new, label-picked producer. John Boylan landed the job, but he knew that Scholz didn't want or need to remake what was already a nearly perfect demo. He supervised some light recording sessions in California while Scholz secretly fine-tuned and re-recorded his work back in his home-built basement studio. Scholz then joined the others in LA and added a few things, like Delp's vocals, and the project was complete.

Cool band names often have the silliest origins, and Boston qualifies. Before he formed Boston, Tom Scholz played in some bands active in and around Boston in the early 1970s. After he recorded the demos that would populate the first Boston album, he hired some of his favorite collaborators to form a true band, but he still needed a name for the operation. Only he and vocalist Brad Delp were listed on the first contract with Epic Records, and Scholz blanched at calling the group any variation of Scholz-Delp.

But then both Epic house producer John Boylan and recording engineer Warren Dewey called out a simple if obvious idea: Boston, as that's where the musicians had first come together. Scholz didn't like that either, theorizing that it would sound like his band was cribbing the concept from the pop-rock band Chicago. He ultimately went with Boston, not because of the geographical significance but for its personal musical importance. Scholz grew up in Ohio, where his radio picked up a signal transmitted hundreds of miles away by the high-powered Boston station WBZ. He was introduced to so much music he loved from WBZ that he named his band Boston in honor of that city's rock station.

It takes most successful bands years to reach the milestones that Boston hit almost immediately. In 1976, Boston served as an opening act on concert tours by more established hard rock bands including Foghat, Black Sabbath, and Jeff Beck. Within months, following the release of its eponymous debut album and around the time it received a Grammy Award nomination for Best New Artist, Boston was headlining its own tour. The first time the band played in New York City, it did so to a sell-out crowd at Madison Square Garden — no act had ever done that on its maiden stint in the nation's biggest city.

As for the "Boston" album, it immediately entered the American musical firmament. It peaked at No. 3 on Billboard's album chart and went on to sell 17 million copies, the most ever for an artist's first album to that point. It stayed on that album chart for three years and generated three Top 40 hit singles in "More Than a Feeling," "Long Time," and "Peace of Mind." The "Boston" album proved foundational to "album rock" or "classic rock" radio — all eight songs from the LP have historically received regular airplay on the format.

Many album covers carry hidden meanings, including those that contained physical media made by the band Boston. When asked by Epic Records' product manager Jim Charney what he envisioned for the sleeve of his band's first album in 1976, leader Tom Scholz asked for a guitar to be incorporated in some way. Designer Paula Scher thought that such a choice was banal and overdone, so she and Charney came up with the idea of a spaceship that was shaped like a guitar. "The first spaceship cover idea we showed Scholz had a Boston invasion of the planet, but Scholz said that spaceships should be saving the planet, not attacking," Scher told The Atlantic in 2015. "So we came up with the Earth-blowing-up idea," Scher told The Atlantic.

That was the final design, and it was brought to life by illustrator Roger Huyssen. Look closely at the spaceship — the soundhole is in the foreground, churning out blue laser smoke, and the neck and headstock form the tail of the ship. Above it is the city of Boston enclosed under a dome. And then, confusingly, a half dozen or so other identical ships soar through a star- and planet-filled galaxy as Earth explodes. Spaceships became key to the visual iconography of Boston, with similar imagery used on every subsequent Boston album into the 2010s and as stage decorations at arena rock shows.

After completing a world tour in support of "Don't Look Back" in 1979, Tom Scholz decided to place Boston on a one-year hiatus, and he gave his bandmates his blessing to capitalize on their success as members of one of the hottest new rock acts around and pursue other projects. Guitarist Barry Goudreau enlisted drummer Sib Hashian and lead singer Brad Delp to contribute to his 1980 self-titled solo album. It spawned the very minor hit "Dreams," but it also aroused the ire of Scholz. According to Rock History Music (via Ultimate Guitar), print ads for the album stated, "Six million people have heard the sound of this guitar. We would like to introduce you to its owner." "Tom saw that as they were saying, 'Here's the guy behind Boston.' And he, obviously, was furious about it," Goudreau recalled.

In 1981, Scholz fired Goudreau, so he went on to form another band called Orion the Hunter. Its one and only album, released in 1984, featured Delp on backing vocals and in a songwriting capacity, and led to the rock radio smash "So You Ran."

Back before it released its first LP in 1976, Boston signed a contract with CBS's Epic Records promising to deliver 10 albums across the next six years. By 1982, Boston, led by musician and perfectionist studio wizard Tom Scholz, who liked to take as much time as it took to finish a record, had released just two albums, with a third only halfway finished. A frustrated CBS attempted to strong-arm Scholz into completing more music by holding back royalties on Boston's 1970s records. After Scholz noticed and demanded payments owed, CBS sued Boston for breach of contract for failing to deliver the albums on time. Scholz countersued; CBS requested and received an injunction that prevented the musician from using the Boston name in a professional manner. Scholz's attorneys got the injunction dismissed by 1985, prompting him to jump to MCA Records.

The original case stretched out for seven years, ending with a decision by a U.S. District Court jury in 1990 that found Scholz didn't violate his original contract, and that CBS wasn't guilty of conspiring to prevent other labels from signing Boston, a charge that had been lobbed by the band's leader.

After CBS sued Boston for not making its third album in a timely fashion, leader Tom Scholz took his band to MCA Records in 1985. About a year later, that label distributed Boston's third album, "Third Stage." Work on the album began in earnest around 1980, and by the time Scholz declared it ready for public consumption, and the legal issues preventing its release had cleared away, the rock world had monumentally shifted. "Third Stage" didn't sound like any of the most important rock bands of the '80s – not the slick, keyboard-driven mainstream rock, the roots rockers reminiscent of the storied Bruce Springsteen, or the hair metal acts.

Apparently, Boston was exactly what the record-buying public wanted in the fall of 1986. The return of Boston was surprisingly, monumentally successful. "Third Stage" topped Billboard's album chart, a feat that the band's mega-selling debut album in 1976 hadn't reached. It would ultimately sell 4 million copies total and would be the first album to ever be granted "Gold" status by the Recording Industry of America for sales of 500,000 units just in the then-new compact disc format. The lead-off single, the power ballad "Amanda," written in 1980, became Boston's biggest hit ever, landing at No. 1 on the pop chart. Follow-up singles did surprisingly well, too: "We're Ready" went top 10 and "Can'tcha Say (You Believe in Me)" went top 20.

The first two Boston albums have a particularly clean and precise harmonic guitar-rock sheen, and that hard-to-replicate sensibility was exactly the sound that Tom Scholz was after. To achieve that, he used commercially available musical gear and studio equipment that he heavily customized — he had a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after all.

He was after professional-level gear that would consistently and reliably give him the sound he needed, so he formed Scholz Research and Development in the early 1980s as a way to manufacture and sell guitar amplification and recording gear. The first product offered was called the Power Soak, which allowed players to change the volume of their guitar while maintaining all the effects of an amplifier turned all the way up. Scholz's company's next big development was the Rockman line. Borrowing the name in part from the Walkman, Sony's pocket-size tape players, the Rockman offered a small, portable, battery-operated guitar amplifier. With effects and quality befitting that of a full-sized amp, guitarists could plug in their headphones for practice sessions. It quickly became popular with even professional guitarists. Def Leppard recorded its 1987 album "Hysteria" with Rockmans plugged right into the studio mixing board. Scholz sold SR&D to gear-maker Dunlop in 1995.

Driven by his personal convictions to write a song critical of large companies' negative impact on modern life, Tom Scholz couldn't release such a work through his musical mouthpiece, Boston, or its massive record label. In 2002, Scholz embraced anonymity and guerrilla marketing to get the song "Corporate America" out into the world. In what was the early days of digital music and online distribution, Scholz made an MP3 of the song and posted it to the service MP3.com under the name Downer's Revenge. He hoped to get the song, which took four years to perfect, into the ears of receptive college students, one of the first to embrace digital music formats, particularly since his handlers told him that there was no interest at traditional or alternative rock radio stations for new Boston tunes. 

Presenting his work as that of a new, little-known entity and allowing the music to speak for itself, Scholz scored a hit. "Corporate America" reached No. 2 on MP3.com's progressive rock chart and stayed there for two weeks. Afterward, the track was confirmed to have been an intentional leak on the part of Scholz, and that it was really a song by Boston. "Corporate America" featured heavily on Boston's fifth album, "Corporate America," appropriately produced by the small label Artemis Records.

For many fans and for many years, Brad Delp was the voice and face of Boston. It's his soaring, powerful vocals that propelled nearly every Boston album. Tragically, he became the first member of the '70s and '80s juggernaut to die. He was discovered deceased at his home in New Hampshire in March 2007. Delp died by suicide, and he was 55 years old.

John "Sib" Hashian wasn't Boston's first drummer, but he was certainly its most impactful. He joined the group in the lead-up to recording its eponymous debut, and he'd play on that blockbuster LP as well as the follow-up, "Don't Look Back." After contributing to former bandmate Barry Goudreau's 1980 solo album, Hashian left major-label music but made a triumphant return in 2017 as the drummer for the supergroup in residency on "Legends of Rock," a themed cruise departing out of Florida. While out at sea and in the middle of a show, Hashian became a performer who died in front of their audience, suffering what appeared to be a heart attack. He couldn't be revived with CPR and died at the age of 67.

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