Boston - Third Stage

My first radio gig came right around the time that Boston was getting ready to release Third Stage. For those of you not familiar with all things Boston, the band released two very successful albums in the seventies and then spent a prolonged period in legal battles with their record company. It took them eight years to finally release Third Stage (on another record label, of course) and people were extremely excited about it. It’s not terribly unusual for bands to wait for long periods of time before releasing something new, but 8 years back then meant that the band was pretty much done for.
The campus station…a weird blend of AOR and the then emergining “college radio” format…received an advance copy of the first single from Third Stage, “Amanda.” There was a playlist at the station, but people seldom followed it, choosing instead to play whatever the fuck they wanted. The big shots at the station (meaning the program directors, which essentially meant “the juniors and seniors”) attempted to curtail such shenangians and one such attempt came at the hands of “Amanda.”
You see, people…including college kids raised on classic rock…were totally stoked that there was a new Boston album coming out. So much that they played “Amanda” at least once on every shift. And since shifts usually were three hours in length, that meant that you heard “Amanda” every three hours.
Not on my shift (Sundays 9pm-12:00am). I didn’t play “Amanda” because it sucked balls. Instead, I began pulling a bunch of albums from my own collection and spinning them during my shift. So when I saw signs that read “NOTICE! PLEASE PLAY ‘AMANDA’ ONLY ONCE DURING YOUR SHIFT!” I ignored them.
Just like I ignored the rest of Third Stage.
Have I heard it? About a million times, hoss! Yes, the same people that got boners for “Amanda” also got hard-ons for the entire album. They bought it. They played it. I got annoyed. Third Stage is unmistakably Boston, if Boston intended to make a polished, bland album that attempted to remove itself from the hard rock direction of it’s first two albums. In other words, Third Stage shows the band (by then consisting only of Brad Delp and Tom Scholz) growing up and getting a bunch of new studio toys in the eight year downtime. The lack of a real “band” called Boston also neuters Third Stage from any humanity. The entire album sounds like it is the result of some newfangled Tom Scholz invention. It appears that not only did the time off strangle most of the humanity from Third Stage, it also strangled most of the band’s passion.
Boston’s third album was released on this day in 1986 and was the first album to post gold sales in both vinyl and compact disc sales.