boston 2

As soon as I scraped together a little money, I went into town (Traverse City, 20 miles away, was the closest thing we had to civilization up there – and it wasn’t that close) and bought my first two rock albums: this first Boston album, and the first Peter Gabriel solo album – bought less out of fondness for his previous band Genesis, who I knew nothing about, and more (or rather, solely) because his keyboard player was Larry Fast, the man behind Synergy, the person entirely responsible for opening my ears in the first place and making me want to hear music on my own terms. In truth, it was probably the fact that I bought the Peter Gabriel at the same time as Boston that kept me from drowning in the glossy guitar hero/pop/rock river that was claiming so many of my friends. But that first Boston album is still one of my most treasured discs.

Although putatively a band (and one with something like four guitar players), Boston was the brainchild of Tom Schultz, an engineer and guitarist who invented a device called the Rockman that gave the electric guitar the clean and warm soaring sound evident on the album. Working by himself, he constructed most of the tracks on the album, then got a singer to come in and lay down those falsetto vocals that were inexplicably the rage in the 1970s. The 12-track demos were so great and so well produced that he got immediate interest from a label. He assembled a band and did some rerecording, but what was released was largely the demos he had painstakingly constructed in his basement studio. The album was released and immediately took the world by storm, setting a record for fastest selling debut and eventually moving almost 20 million units, catapulting them from unknown to arena headliners overnight.

The album starts with the hit More Than a Feeling, a love song of sorts to the power of music and the memory of a summer love. More Than a Feeling utilizes an unusual conceit. The fade out at the end of a song is an overused cliché and musical cheat (how do you do it live?), but More Than a Feeling fades in to the track already in progress. It’s an odd way to start a song – equally artificial as the fade out (and just as impossible to pull off live), but it does help the mythic sheen of the album, sounding like the sun rising on a brand new day, or like a parade approaching from the distance. The same effect has been used on a couple of other albums, like U2’s planet-swallowing Joshua Tree album, or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for that matter, but it’s still quite rare. More Than a Feeling perfectly encapsulates the band’s sound, with its interplay between clean acoustic guitars and even cleaner electric guitars, its obsessively layered production, its soaring orgasmic chorus, and its stratospheric vocals (one can only wonder if vocalist Brad Delp still has all his original equipment, if you know what I mean). This album in general, and More Than a Feeling in particular, almost single-handedly created the “arena rock” genre and saved hard rock from the disco doldrums it was slogging through in the mid-1970s. Not only that, but Kurt Cobain once admitted that Nirvana’s breakout song Smells Like Teen Spirit, the track that kicked open the doors of grunge, was based in part on More Than a Feeling. If you doubt me, listen to the chorus of both songs and you’ll hear an eerie similarity.

The rest of the album is just as strong – or nearly so. I would be perfectly happy if the album ended after the second track on side two (remember when albums had sides?) and we didn’t have to wade through Hitch a Ride, Something About You, and Let Me Take You Home Tonight, but I usually stop listening at this point anyway. The first side is absolutely flawless, and the first two songs on side two are right in line, ending with the scorching Smokin’. Not only does it lyrically invite the listener to light up with my favorite recreational drug

but the music practically begs it as well, with the extended, almost baroque middle instrumental section featuring faux harpsichord and noodly organ pyrotechnics over a driving rhythm guitar section, exploding into swirls and screeches of electronics, stopping on a dime, and then kicking into overdrive for a (you’ll have to excuse me) smokin’ ending. No wonder everything on the album after this track feels anticlimactic.

For me, the best track on the album is the last track on side one, or rather the last two tracks, Foreplay and Long Time. Like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and A Little Help from My Friends, or XTC’s Summer’s Cauldron and Grass, or even Pink Floyd’s Time and Breathe Reprise, Foreplay and Long Time are separate songs in title only, the two will forever be played together because of the way they’re married on the album. Foreplay is the most classical sounding piece on the album, a beautifully wrought, virtuosic instrumental full of sound and fury and, well, you know the rest. Somewhat reminiscent of Bach’s famous Tocatta and Fugue, the piece marries intricate organ lines with fire-breathing guitars and thundering drums and crashing cymbals. For all that’s going on in the track, it’s remarkably clear – that’s one of the hallmark’s of Tom Schultz’ sound. He can load seemingly thousands of overdubs and harmonies on to a track and never let it sound swampy.

A couple of years after my discovery of this album, Mel and I went to catch a movie at a local drive-in. We were sitting in the car, chatting and listening to the radio and waiting for the sun to go down, when Foreplay/Long Time came on. She wasn’t really listening, so when I enthused that “I love foreplay”, she shot me a peculiar look. I let her sit for an uncomfortable moment before pointing out that that’s what was on the radio, and a strange mixture of uncertain relief and disappointment crossed her face. Since Mel and Karl and Lenore and I had all recently stumbled out of the certainty of childhood into the murky waters of puberty, a lot of this kind of innuendo was floating around (e.g., in the halls of our junior high, Mel once yelled out to me, “hey, wanna screw?”, and I spun around (along with a hundred of my startled classmates) to see her grinning and holding a screw between her thumb and forefinger). It was funny, these little jokes, but it was also somewhat unsettling. Hormones were twisting our relationships all out of shape and suddenly making us all question things that we had previously not even considered. Unfortunately, the strain it put on our relationship started fraying it around the edges and, when I abandoned my friends to the local public high school so I could start attending the Arts Academy, they came unraveled for good.