When the news broke a couple weeks ago that Boston lead singer Brad Delp had committed suicide, I suggested to the Beachwood Elders that a look back at the band’s monster debut album might be in store. Our fabulous TV writer Scott Buckner answered the call, but his antipathy toward the record surprised me. I think it’s a classic. Here’s Buckner’s take followed by my own. If you’d like to weigh in yourself, use this contact form and we’ll publish the responses.
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Like 16 million everyone elses and their ugly cousin, I bought Boston when it came out in September 1976, when I was starting my junior year in high school. We just thought it was an incredibly great album on so many levels, and it ended up breaking new ground that few other bands – or albums — manage to accomplish.
With the help of FM radio, the album accomplished something else incredibly amazing, even before the end of its two-year run on the charts: It managed to cause a major portion of us 16 million to become so sick of hearing it that we basically ignored anything else the band put out afterward. Putting out two other albums that sounded the same as the first one we were already sick of didn’t help, but still. This is why, along with anything by Elvis Presley and The Beach Boys, there are three individual songs I can identify in two notes that will have me bolting for the radio exit door: “The House of the Rising Sun,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and Boston’s “More Than A Feeling.”
However, since Brad Delp passed away and it’s just good karma to be charitable to the dead, I thought I’d give Boston another listen. Yeah, even to the dreaded “More Than A Feeling” because really, there’s no such thing as having too many good karma points.
So I listened to it again. Fuck karma points. I’m still sick of it. It’s not just parts of this album I’m sick of, either; it’s the whole thing. It’s not because it reeks of yellow Firebirds with T-tops and bottles of Richard’s Wild Irish Rose and Annie Green Springs. I really liked high school, and Firebirds and cheap wine that did nothing for your girlfriend except make her puke all over you colored a lot of that enjoyment. No, it’s because of the same basic flaw we noticed in 1976: Not a single song could make up its mind whether to be a ballad, a balls-out rocker, or an experiment into re-creating Emerson, Lake & Palmer without actually being as pretentious as Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
But even there, the decidedly un-rock two-and-a-half intro that was the “Foreplay” part of “Foreplay/Long Time” and the instrumental of “Smokin'” gave even the most un-musical geeks something to occupy thire time locked in their bedrooms doing Lord knows what: air Leslie keyboards.
This is not to say that I don’t like or appreciate Boston. First (but not foremost, given the existence of Brad Delp), guitarist Tom Scholz – who played all the instruments on the album and fucked Epic/CBS by cutting the whole thing in his basement instead of some California studio – layered multiple heaps of guitars and vocals to define the soaring-guitar Boston sound. Sure, bands like Queen were putting out vocal/production masterpieces like A Night At The Opera, but Scholz engineered Boston in such a way that seemed far more accessible and straightforward to everyday high school punks like us. He came out of nowhere in the middle of pussy rock ballads like “Hitch a Ride” and “Something About You” to plop the loud in our lap. Queen’s studio work gave us miracle-like opera from beginning to end; Boston gave us one of the best high school dances you could possibly buy for around ten bucks.
And unlike masterpieces like “A Night at the Opera” featuring guitar virtuoso Brian May, the masterpiece that was Boston gave some hope to high school kids just learning to play guitar. Jesus Himself would find it hard to cop May’s guitar parts; if you stuck to it for as long as your phonograph needle held out, you could probably cop the leads of Scholz or bandmate guitarist Barry Goudreau. But if you didn’t have that much patience for lead guitar, “Smokin'” and “Something About You” (which could easily have disintegrated into something from Styx’s worst last days) showed that rhythm players could carry a song.
The same could not be said for anyone even attempting to match Delp’s unique voice, which some would argue were even more instrumental than the Scholz/Goudreau guitars in defining Boston’s unmistakable sound. Try to match Delp’s high-pitched wails in “Long Time” and “Rock ‘N Roll Band” and you’d be in store for some serious voice damage.
If nothing else, though, it would be worth keeping copy Boston in the car as a self-defense measure. If there’s anything that has the power to outduel that voompa-voompa nonsense four cars back rattling your rear-view mirrors, it’s Brad Delp and Boston.
– Buckner
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The news that Boston lead singer Brad Delp had committed suicide – and that he had been a lonely soul – could only spur memories of one of the monster debut records in rock history. Of course, it didn’t take tragedy to spur the memory – you can still hear anywhere up to a half dozen tracks from that first Boston record on classic rock radio or just wafting about the air in the culture’s general sonic wallpaper. But still . . . who’s mind didn’t flash not just to the tunes but the indelible cover art of spaceships shaped like guitars on a liberation mission from rock central?
True, Boston helped usher in an era of overly-produced, fairly anonymous, corporate rock bands that finally sanded away all rough edges in a grand act of cultural gentrification that stripped away all meaning and threat in favor of only the most controlled feedback in service of cheap surface thrills. It’s not like the band ever produced anything else worth listening to – “Amanda”? That’s a permanent black mark as big as the sky.
But that first record still rocks – and if it reminds you of hanging out at the Emporium, all to the better.
Boston was one of those records that hit from start to finish. Just consider the lineup:
1. More Than A Feeling
2. Peace Of Mind
3. Foreplay/Long Time
4. Rock & Roll Band
5. Smokin’
6. Hitch A Ride
7. Something About You
8. Let Me Take You Home Tonight
Those are eight songs you know and like.
“More Than A Feeling” was the big opening single and signature song, but “Foreplay/Long Time” and “Peace of Mind” are the classic rock classics.
“Rock & Roll Band” and “Smokin'” are secondary songs, but still classic rockers in their own right. And “Hitch a Ride,” “Something About You,” and “Let Me Take You Home Tonight” are ballady but not too saccharine to be pussy songs.
It’s true that Boston’s songwriting, while grand and operatic, and sometimes clichéd, was also fairly sophisticated for all the parts it pieced together in the service of melodic rocking. Scholz’s production was at times Spector-like for its wall of sound – leading Billy Corgan to famously note once that when a Boston song came on the radio of a carful of Pumpkins, no one rushed to change the station.
Of course, Buckner is right – everything that came after that first record was aggravating as hell. Boston had one killer record in them and they made it in 1976. Music is a gift we get to keep forever, and while Delp is gone, the gift he left behind with Scholz’s help is a record that came out of nowhere to land a place on the life soundtrack of millions of teenagers smoking cigarettes in the woods, shoplifting Twinkies, and partying through another stupid summer blowing shit up and chasing chicks. That’s not an achievement to be slighted.
– Rhodes
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READER COMMENTS
1. From Tim Howe:
Steve’s take is closer to my own. And he touches, without elaborating on, just why.
Boston did show that merely moderately talented musicians could make a record that blew you away by the sheer force of its production values. In that respect, that first album was unique but of a certain pattern.
If the vast majority of music (not just modern music, or rock, or whatever additional descriptive you d like to add) is derivative, and I happen to think it is, there remain some works that mark such a radical departure from what went before that they deserve recognition for that fact. This is not necessarily to say they are revolutionary, but that they put the stuff that came before into a distinctly separate context.
The Beatles stole liberally from a wide variety of sources, yet their music was different in a way that we all understood. The Sex Pistols, of course, stole a fair chunk of DNA from The Kinks and The Who, but still birthed punk as what was perceived as a new form. Don t misunderstand: I’m not saying that Boston is on par with The Beatles, or even The Sex Pistols. What I am saying is that the first in any given genre is entitled to some props. And you shouldn’t blame them for what followed in its footsteps. So don’t blame Boston for Toto, for example.
In this respect, when you (meaning, of course, I) hear that first Boston album, it resonates because you recall that when you heard it for the first time you were clearly hearing something you had never heard before. It is in this subjective analysis that this record retains an important place in rock history.
Posted on March 27, 2007