![]() "And its color scheme of many warm colors certainly enhanced the lighting of the bong.”īut does the image have more resonance than the band and the song it accompanied? The cultural significance of the art for Boston lives on: Just last year on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, when host Peter Sagal did a bit about the earth blowing up and space ships leaving the planet, he made the connection: "You, know, like the Boston cover.” "Surely one could read just about anything into it," he said. "It allowsed you to imagine what and who was behind the music." Kaye concurred. “There was something special and risky about albums that did not show the band," said Joe Butler, the drummer for The Lovin' Spoonful. To rockers at the time, the ambiguity of the design worked in its favor. ![]() This is my dream life-to have enough money to play rock'n'roll full-time."Don't Look Back" (1978), "Third Stage" (1986), and "Greatest Hits" (1997) (Epic Records/MCA) "Like everything else in my life, I have had to work hard-and practice. "I was always resigned to failing in this," Scholz philosophizes. He still drives an unheated Pinto and clearly looks more at home in his Harvard Square chic-frayed jeans, ski parka and "last year's sneakers"-than in the flashy getups he affects onstage. Tom and Cindy have recently moved into what he puts down as an "El Cheapo" home in the upwardly mobile Boston suburb of Wayland. Of the second LP in the works Scholz deadpans, "I'll just worry about the music and won't be disappointed if it only sells two million." Tom modestly allows that the breakthrough was "dumb luck." Still, his cool, controlled lab-rat detachment from his heavy rock has led to cynical rumors (which he denies) that he programmed a computer full of hit melodies and wrote the LP cuts from the printout. Their music, which Scholz shamelessly says is a "direct descendant of at least 30 other groups," is a benign blend of overdubbed harmonies and swirling guitar duets. The resulting track Tom made with four friends (though he himself plays guitar, bass, organ, clarinet and percussion) has become the most famous Basement Tapes since Dylan's. In the classic Tin Pan Alley cliché, Tom finally poured everything into one last effort. ![]() Even the local clique of musicians in Boston looked down on me." "But Cindy always went along with the whole crazy thing," Tom adds. "Can you imagine the cause for a divorce being a used 12-track tape recorder?" he jokes dryly. Instead of buying a new house, Tom and his wife, Cindy, 29, a former horticulturist, fed $30,000 into his electronic gewgaws and demo tapes. Though his R&D job was "rewarding," Scholz's real passion was developing "rock gadgets" in his duplex home in middle-class Watertown, Mass. It was a slide rule-not a slide guitar-that Scholz took to Polaroid, where he worked on a supersecret instant movie film system. He played basketball and built contraptions like a radio-controlled plane with a four-foot wing span "that could beat the crap out of anyone's." But while other rock stars of the future were paying dues, Scholz paid tuition-earning a master's at MIT with a 4.8 in a 5.0 grade scale. Scholz grew up (to 6'5") in Toledo, the son of a prefab home designer. So far Boston's grateful Epic label has paid over an initial $300,000 royalty check, offered to renegotiate the group's contract and kicked in $25,000 as sweeteners for each of the bandsmen.Īll this is happening to a whiz kid who once thought "heavy metal" meant Plutonium. He has since quit, blowing $5,000 in severance pay. Before the group went on the road last fall, he was so uncertain about their future that he cautiously asked Polaroid for a leave of absence in order to retain his medical benefits. "It's nice it happened so fast," says Scholz. Though Boston had scarcely played together a year ago, they're now headlining a 50-date cross-country tour. The two singles mined from the album, More Than a Feeling and Long Time, are smash hits. The Boston LP that Scholz masterminded and then released with four musician friends last August has quantum-leaped to the fastest debut in rock history, selling an astonishing 2.7 million copies in six months. What he eventually came up with was rock's newest supergroup, Boston, possibly the biggest thing to happen to that name since cream pie. So while the 29-year-old MIT graduate was working days as a $25,000-a-year product designer for Polaroid in Cambridge, Mass., he spent nights at home fiddling with a 12-track tape recorder. Like any mechanical engineer, Tom Scholz likes to putter around in his basement.
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