Boston was the brainchild of MIT alum Tom Scholz. Scholz was a prodigy engineer who worked days at Polaroid (when Polaroid was a huge company) and spent his nights laboriously recording and re-recording the parts for songs he'd written on guitar and organ in a tiny basement, along with singer Brad Delp and an occasional drummer. Scholz's demos were turned down by every record company in the country, twice, before being grudgingly picked up by Epic Records in 1975. The label suits demanded that the meticulous demos be re-recorded in a real studio; Scholz and his label-assigned producer fooled them by having Scholz re-record his parts in the same basement and then copying his master tapes off to a mobile van, while Delp and a quickly-assembled touring band (Scholz's buddy and the closest thing to a true third member of the original Boston, Barry Goudreau on guitar, bassist Fran Sheehan and Sib Hashian, owner of the greatest white-boy Afro in history, on drums) went to LA and recorded all the vocals and one additional song ("Let Me Take You Home Tonight") for what would become the most successful debut album of all time (at least until "Appetite For Destruction") with over 20 million copies sold.
Boston went out on the road as an opening act, but when the debut record went platinum almost immediately they were bumped up to a headliner. With only one album's worth of materiel Scholz was forced to add two to-this-day still-unreleased songs, "Shattered Images" and "Television Politician" to the set list, along with " "A Man I'll Never Be," which would appear on the follow-up record "Don't Look Back" a couple of years later. Here's a great recording from one of the band's earliest headline shows, at Cleveland's legendary Agora Theater in 1976:
"Don't Look Back" was considered a disappointment, "only" going quadruple-platinum within a year (it's since totaled over 7 million copies). The band went out on the road again, including the following 1979 concert, which is the only known filmed show the original lineup ever performed. The original Boston never played together again as a band after the "Don't Look Back" tour. In between this tour and the release of "Third State" in 1986, Scholz sued or was sued by almost everybody involved in the original album, and along the way fired all the band members except Delp.
Boston went out on the road as an opening act, but when the debut record went platinum almost immediately they were bumped up to a headliner. With only one album's worth of materiel Scholz was forced to add two to-this-day still-unreleased songs, "Shattered Images" and "Television Politician" to the set list, along with " "A Man I'll Never Be," which would appear on the follow-up record "Don't Look Back" a couple of years later. Here's a great recording from one of the band's earliest headline shows, at Cleveland's legendary Agora Theater in 1976:
"Don't Look Back" was considered a disappointment, "only" going quadruple-platinum within a year (it's since totaled over 7 million copies). The band went out on the road again, including the following 1979 concert, which is the only known filmed show the original lineup ever performed. The original Boston never played together again as a band after the "Don't Look Back" tour. In between this tour and the release of "Third State" in 1986, Scholz sued or was sued by almost everybody involved in the original album, and along the way fired all the band members except Delp.
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