No Seriously, Tom Scholz: Cool The Engines

I overlooked this little gem of an article that mentioned how Boston’s Tom Scholz has threatened a fan site with a cease-and-desist order if they don’t remove the offending material related to Scholz. I totally overlooked this story just like Tom Scholz overlooked the fact that Brad Delp isn’t alive anymore, so what the fuck is he doing touring as Boston?!
It reminds me of a conversation I had last year with a guy who’s around my age at work. I hate telling people who I like when they “So what kind of music do you listen to?” 99% of the time they go, “Who’s that?” when I tell them, so I just say “The Beatles” or “Bob Dylan” and be done with it. Everyone’s heard of them and the answer probably isn’t that far from the truth anyway.
So this guy notices that I drum all the time on my desk, a habit that thankfully nobody has really harped on me about, even though everyone has noticed. He’s seen me do this countless times, assumes that I’m a “rocker”, and proceeds to tell me that I should check out the concert that he and his wife are going to for the weekend. Apparently, Boston was playing at some nearby fair and I had no idea they were even touring.
“Isn’t that kind of hard to do, considering their lead vocalist killed himself?” I asked without a hint of sarcasm.
He made up some excuse how it was for his wife and stopped pressing the issue.
More recently, a guy who happens to be an admitted Boston fan started a couple of websites devoted to the band. I say “a couple” because the first one was shut down because Tom Scholz didn’t like that one either. If you’re a member of Boston, you’ve got a lot of time to Google your own name during the downtime.
The guy starts a second site and a few fans immediately begin to badmouth Scholz and his treatment of Delp. This leads to Scholz hiring a lawyer and then the whole threatening prospect begins again. The website is called Cool The Engines, and its proprietor is one George Gouldsmith. Mr. Goldsmith recently replied to the accusations on the Musicradar website:

“I am frankly tired of Ms. Parenteau's (Scholz’s lawyer) inaccurate remarks, which she chooses to spread around the Internet about me and my group. Ms.
Parenteau has yet to detail what remarks my private, invitation only group (
> 20 people) made which were "malicious untruths". She says I took pleasure
in making "defamatory remarks about Mr. Scholz" which is completely absurd. Our
group had unmonitored, open discussions about many Boston topics, unlike the
other Boston fan boards, which are heavily monitored by those in the Boston
camp.Instead of Mr. Scholz strong arming small fan boards to close, because he
doesn't like what they post, why doesn't he focus on creating new music,
releasing a boxed Boston DVD/CD set and making peace with the prior bandmates?”

Valid points, and the entire thing points to the fact that Tom Scholz sounds like a complete asshole. If he gets so worked up about such things, you tend to wonder if there isn’t some truth behind the words he’s trying to conceal.

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.

Brad Delp

I never wrote about Brad Delp’s suicide because I didn’t think it was my place to. To put it another way: I was so burned on anything Boston that I feared my words would sound insincere.
In some kind of silent memorial to him, I finally purchased Boston’s first album. In the thirty years since it was released, I’d only made a very primitive copy of it (by placing a cassette recorder against one speaker of a fairly pathetic portable record player) and I’d never actually owned a Boston album.
Many friends did own their debut or the follow-up Don’t Look Back but I don’t recall ever hearing either one getting played, probably because nearly every fucking song on those first two albums received constant airplay on A.O.R. radio stations.
I was actually working in radio at the time Third Stage was finally released. I was curious as to what it sounded like, but not to the point where some were fanatical about it. Seriously: the Program Director actually put a handwritten note on the album informing all airstaff members that they could only play one track from Third Stage per airshift. I listened to it, determined it was a piece of shit, and played Tommy Bolin’s “Post Toastee” instead.
Incessant airplay aside, there should be no question about Delp’s enormous talents and critical importance to the formula that was Boston’s textured studio-induced rock. While Tom Scholz seemed hellbent on perfection and countless takes to achieve it, Delp had such a gift that he rarely needed multiple takes to get Scholz’s desired results.
Brad Delp was born on June 12, 1951.