BOSTON: THE BAND THAT BUILT A TIME MACHINE
Three Albums, One Unmistakable Sound, and a Rock ’n’ Roll Legacy
There are songs that take you back to a moment.
A first kiss. A car ride. A party. A summer afternoon. Somebody you loved.
And then there are songs that do something much stranger.
They take you back to all of it.
That is what happens to me when I hear the opening guitars of Boston's “More Than a Feeling.”
The air around me changes.
Suddenly it is summertime again.
Tube tops. Bell bottoms. Leg warmers. Feathered hair flaring out at the sides. Hair clips made out of actual feathers because apparently our hair did not have enough plumage on its own.
There are afternoons at the mall with friends, back when going to the mall wasn't an errand. The mall was the destination. There are drive-in theaters, cars, radios and long stretches of time when nobody could reach you because nobody was carrying a telephone in their pocket.
It isn't one particular summer.
It isn't one particular afternoon.
I don't have a story about the first time I heard “More Than a Feeling.”
That's the strange part.
The song doesn't remind me of something that happened when I was young.
It reminds me what being young felt like.
And I feel it in my bones.
That's the Gen X Reflex.
Sometimes the body remembers a moment.
Apparently, sometimes it remembers an entire time.
WHEN THE GUITARS START TO SING
Image: Boston. Source: guitar.com
There are plenty of bands whose music I recognize in a few notes.
Boston is different.
When those guitars begin to sing, I know where I am.
Nobody sounded like Boston.
There were louder bands. Harder bands. Bands with wild guitar shredding, enormous drum solos, pyrotechnics and enough explosives onstage to make you wonder whether the road crew had accidentally been replaced by a demolition company.
Boston didn't need any of that.
Their guitars were melodic.
They didn't just roar. They sang.
They climbed around each other, answered one another and stacked into this enormous sound that somehow remained clear enough for you to hear the individual beauty inside it.
We used to call that kind of thing a wall of sound.
And Boston built one hell of a wall.
But it wasn't a wall designed to knock you down.
It surrounded you.
Then came the harmonies.
And over all of it was Brad Delp.
Image: Brad Delp. Source: Wikipedia
Good Lord.
That voice.
A VOICE LIKE A SIREN
I am a singer, so there are certain vocalists who make something inside me sit up and pay attention.
Brad Delp was one of them.
He had a voice like a siren.
Not the thing screaming from the top of a police car.
I'm talking mythology.
That impossibly high, beautiful voice calling from somewhere above everything else, pulling you toward it.
Boston could surround Delp with this massive architecture of guitars and harmonies and he didn't disappear inside it.
He soared over it.
That's part of what made the sound so distinctive. You had Tom Scholz constructing this enormous musical environment underneath him, and then Delp gave the machinery a soul.
Image: Tom Scholz. Source: Guitar World.
And the machinery itself was extraordinary.
THE ENGINEER BEHIND THE WALL
Tom Scholz wasn't simply a guitar player who happened to enjoy tinkering with equipment.
He was an MIT-trained engineer.
That matters when you listen to Boston.
The precision wasn't accidental. Scholz approached recording with the meticulousness of an engineer, spending extraordinary amounts of time working and reworking the music until he got what he wanted. Years later, while making Third Stage, he described working mostly alone for six years, with Delp coming in for vocals and drummer Jim Masdea contributing at times.
You can hear that obsession.
But here is what fascinates me:
The music doesn't sound clinical.
With that much technical precision, it could have.
Instead, it flies.
All of that engineering serves the emotion. The layers create space. The guitars create movement. The harmonies create scale.
Boston didn't simply record songs.
They built places out of sound.
Maybe that's why the time machine works.
I KNEW THE SONG. I DIDN'T KNOW BOSTON.
“More Than a Feeling” seemed to be everywhere.
It still is.
Nearly fifty years after Boston released its debut album in 1976, radio stations can put “More Than a Feeling” into rotation and somehow it doesn't sound like somebody just dusted off an ancient artifact.
Image: Album cover, Boston. Source: Wikipedia
It sounds like “More Than a Feeling.”
Timeless.
But here's the funny thing.
For a long time, I knew the song without really knowing Boston.
There is a difference.
I knew that song because everybody knew that song.
Boston became something else for me later.
And it happened because of a DJ.
THIRD STAGE
Image: Album cover, Third Stage. Source: Discogs
My favorite DJ played Boston's Third Stage.
The whole album.
Remember when DJs could do things like that?
They could take you somewhere.
There was no algorithm quietly watching what you listened to and deciding that because you enjoyed one song, you obviously needed seventeen more songs that sounded vaguely like it.
A DJ could put on a record and essentially say:
Come with me.
So I went.
And Third Stage was a voyage.
It was beautiful. It was technical. It was melodic. It was unmistakably Boston.
I was already sold on the album.
And then we got to the last song.
“Hollyann.”
What the what?
That was it.
Sold.
I hadn't heard anything like it.
Everybody knows “Amanda,” and yes, it is beautiful. But if you ask me for the gem sitting inside Third Stage, I'm going all the way to the end.
“Hollyann.” Listen to it.
That's mine.
There is something about Third Stage that doesn't merely feel old or new to me. It seems to exist outside of either.
The first Boston album can send me backward through time.
Third Stage feels like an eternal time machine.
You can enter from wherever you happen to be.
THREE ALBUMS IN TEN YEARS
And this is where the Boston story gets crazy.
The Boston I grew up with is essentially three albums:
Boston in 1976.
Don't Look Back in 1978.
Third Stage in 1986.
That's it.
Three albums across ten years, with an eight-year chasm between the second and third.
Now, Boston didn't end there. There were later incarnations, later albums, tours and different musicians.
But that's not quite my Boston.
My Boston lives inside those three records.
And considering what was happening behind the scenes, it's almost remarkable we got them.
The first album itself had been years in the making. Scholz later said the process stretched from his earliest songwriting in 1969 through completion in 1976. Then, after the debut exploded, the pressure for a follow-up arrived. Scholz later said he felt Don't Look Back was rushed because the record company wanted another album, and he vowed afterward that commercial pressure would never again dictate his creative timetable.
Well...
He apparently meant it.
😂
Third Stage took six years to record.
Meanwhile, Boston and CBS Records were locked in a brutal contract dispute. CBS sued in 1983 over Boston's failure to deliver the required albums, royalties became part of the fight, and the legal battle lasted seven years before a federal jury ultimately ruled that Scholz had not breached the contract.
Boston had moved to MCA by the time Third Stage finally arrived.
And somehow, after all those years, all that fighting and an eight-year absence between albums...
people were still waiting.
Third Stage went to No. 1 and became a multi-platinum album.
The time machine still worked.
COULDA, SHOULDA, WOULDA
Boston is one of my great coulda, shoulda, woulda bands.
And I don't mean that as an insult.
Quite the opposite.
When I look at the talent, the vision and that extraordinary sound, I can't help wondering what might have been possible if things had gone differently.
What if there hadn't been the battles?
What if there hadn't been the long gaps?
What if the personalities, business relationships and circumstances had aligned differently?
What might Boston's catalog look like?
We'll never know.
In some ways, Boston seems to have wrestled with destiny from the beginning.
They fought to make it.
Then they fought after they made it.
The struggle just kept changing opponents.
And yet here's the paradox:
Boston could have been so much more than they were.
And they were already so much.
THE STRANGEST KIND OF ROCK LEGEND
Think about the bands we normally place among the giants.
Huge catalogs.
Decades of records.
Hit after hit.
World tours.
Different eras.
Reinventions.
Twenty albums sitting on the shelf.
Boston doesn't have that résumé.
Not even close.
And yet put Boston into a conversation about the great rock bands of their era and nobody asks:
Why are they here?
They're Boston.
They belong in the room.
That fascinates me.
Because it means longevity isn't always measured by how many times you show up.
Sometimes it is measured by what happens to the room when you do.
Boston created a sonic fingerprint so strong that you only need a few seconds.
Those guitars.
Those harmonies.
That voice.
Boston.
They planted the flag.
They didn't need twenty albums to make the sound matter.
They made it matter the first time.
WHEN THE SIREN WENT SILENT
Then came a loss that changed Boston forever.
Brad Delp died by suicide in 2007 at 55.
Image: Brad Delp. Source: Entertainment Weekly.
I remember when he died.
I remember the news, and then learning more about how he died.
It was devastating.
And perhaps some of what made it hit so hard for me was the contrast.
I knew this man through that voice.
A voice that seemed capable of soaring forever.
There was so much beauty in it. So much feeling.
I don't want to make the manner of Brad Delp's death the story of Brad Delp.
For me, the story is still the voice.
Put on “Hollyann.”
There he is.
The siren sings again.
HERE'S MY CHALLENGE
So I have a challenge for the rockers of today.
Especially the younger ones.
Maybe you know “More Than a Feeling.”
Of course you do.
That song apparently intends to remain on the radio until the sun burns out.
😂
But knowing “More Than a Feeling” isn't the same thing as knowing Boston.
So find the best headphones you've got.
Put on that first album.
Start at the beginning.
Don't shuffle it.
Don't skip around looking for the songs you recognize.
And for the love of all things holy, don't let an algorithm decide where you're going next.
Sit back and enjoy the ride.
Listen to the guitars sing.
Listen to the harmonies build.
Listen to Brad Delp rise above that wall of sound.
Listen to what happens when technical precision and raw musical feeling occupy exactly the same space.
Then, when you're finished, if you want a truly ethereal rock 'n' roll voyage...
Put on Third Stage.
All of it.
And when you reach “Hollyann”?
Don't say I didn't tell you.
We'll talk when you get back.
THE BAND THAT BUILT A TIME MACHINE
I started this story with “More Than a Feeling” because that song does something to me that very few songs can.
The guitars begin to sing.
The air changes.
And suddenly I'm not sitting here thinking about being young.
I'm there.
Summertime.
Friends.
The mall.
The drive-in.
Bell bottoms.
Tube tops.
Leg warmers.
Feathered hair.
And, yes, actual feathers in the hair, because apparently we needed additional plumage.
The whole world comes rushing back.
Boston went on after those first three albums. Different incarnations came and went. There were more recordings and more tours.
But the Boston that lives inside my time machine remains intact.
Tom Scholz builds the wall.
The guitars begin to sing.
The harmonies surround me.
Brad Delp's voice rises above everything.
For a few minutes, none of the lawsuits matter.
None of the disagreements matter.
None of the missing years matter.
None of the things that could have happened matter.
Brad isn't gone.
Boston isn't fragmented.
The band is whole again.
Maybe that's the greatest trick recorded music ever learned.
Life keeps moving.
People change.
People leave.
People die.
We get older.
Somehow, the record doesn't.
Drop the needle. Push play. Put on the headphones.
And there they are.
And somehow...
so are we.
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
What does Boston bring back for you? Is there a song that doesn't take you back to one memory, but to an entire time? And if you've never really listened to Boston beyond the hits, take the challenge. I'd love to know what you hear.
Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, remember, or immediately reach for an old album, share it with somebody who remembers too.
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
#RockNRollAngel #Boston #MoreThanAFeeling #ThirdStage #BradDelp #TomScholz #ClassicRock #GenX #GenXMemories #RockNRoll #DrAYHeath #MysticScribe
Sources
Los Angeles Times — “Patience Pays Off for Boston, Fans” (1987) — Scholz on the making of Third Stage, Boston's early recording history, the CBS dispute and his approach to recording.
Los Angeles Times — “Leader of Boston Wins Lawsuit” (1990) — outcome of the seven-year CBS contract dispute.
Los Angeles Times — 1986 record-industry retrospective — contemporary reporting on Third Stage reaching No. 1 and multi-platinum status.