In August 1976, Epic Records launched Boston’s self-titled debut album with a bold advertising slogan: “Better music through science.” Tom Scholz, the group’s leader, guitarist and songwriter, thought that was bullshit.
Scholz was no ordinary rock musician. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was still employed as a product design engineer for the Polaroid Corporation when the Boston album was released.
Scholz had created the album in a basement studio that he had built himself, using new recording technology that he had invented. He worked mostly alone, obsessing over every detail in the music. And he did this for more than five years before the album was complete.
What Scholz had created was a groundbreaking album: hard rock elevated to a new level of melodic sophistication and state-of-the-art production. But he hated that slogan.
“I thought it was a terrible reflection on the album,” he said. “I can’t argue that I put my technical background to work when I was trying to make the record. But the music itself had nothing to do with science. Music was my escape from that world.”
Scholz wanted the ads pulled and made this clear in a heated exchange with Walter Yetnikoff, then President of Epic’s parent company CBS Records International. It was the first shot in a war between the two men that would lead to a courtroom battle in a landmark case for the music industry.
More Than A Feeling, the hit single from the first Boston album, is one of the most perfectly crafted rock’n’roll songs ever recorded: beautiful, uplifting, complex and unique. Powered by this hit, the album sold eight million copies in two years. But in the wake of that success, the pressure was intense.
Scholz was a hippie, a vegetarian and a sensitive soul who put art before commerce. Walter Yetnikoff, by his own admission, was a hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting tough guy who liked to play hardball. For all the money that Boston was making for CBS, the pair butted heads. “He told me from time to time that I could go f**k myself,” Yetnikoff said of Scholz. “He’d complain about the colour of the sky, all sorts of things.”
This hostility came to a head over the band’s second album, Don’t Look Back. Following the success of the debut album, Yetnikoff leaned on Scholz to get the next album finished as quickly as possible. In fairness to Yetnikoff, Boston’s contract with Epic – signed by Scholz and the group's singer, Brad Delp – was reportedly for 10 albums deliverable in six years, which was industry standard in the 70s.
Reluctantly, Scholz finished Don’t Look Back in time for a 1978 release. But as he said: “I’ve certainly not hidden the fact that it was released, in my opinion, before it was complete.”
Don’t Look Back sold four million copies – by any normal standards, a huge hit. But it was only half of what the first album sold.
Scholz vowed that he would never again be forced into releasing an album before he felt it was ready. The result was a standoff between him and Yetnikoff. And if Yetnikoff believed he was an irresistible force, what he met in Scholz was an immovable object.
By 1983, five years after Don’t Look Back, Yetnikoff and CBS were still waiting for a third Boston album as Scholz tinkered endlessly at his new home studio (in a basement, of course). The guitarist was notified that Boston’s royalty payments from the first two albums were to be suspended.
Scholz made his position clear in a letter to Yetnikoff: “Apparently some people at Epic feel I should be punished for my refusal to sacrifice quality and deliver a record that’s compromised by haste. In fact, I will never foist a second-rate record on the public to fill CBS’s pockets or my own.”
CBS sued Scholz and the band for breach of contract. But it was the guitarist who emerged victorious.
“It was a landmark case,” Scholz recalls now. “I never set out to be any sort of crusader when it came to cleaning up the record business, but somehow it ended up happening.”
Boston’s Third Stage album was released in 1986 on a new label, MCA. The album went on to sell four million copies and yielded a US No.1 single in Amanda.
If ever an artist stuck it to The Man, it was Tom Scholz. And he has remained outspoken in his loathing for the music industry ever since.
“Of all the entertainment businesses, including television and movies, the music business is the worst of all them,” he said. “It attracts the lowest form of life in many cases.”
