More than a feeling, or how a geek became a rock star and a guitar hero.

The uncanny relationship between being cool and playing air guitar

A few years ago, I took guitar lessons for two whole years. I have always liked music, and after spending a long time listening to and admiring my favourite musicians, I decided I would really enjoy playing a musical instrument.

If someone likes music, I guess he will be unable to resist the temptation of playing some air guitar.

This is, of course, one thing that few people are willing to do in public. The explanation for the private nature of this practice is because, unless your name is Robert Plant or Freddie Mercury, playing air guitar in public is one of the fastest ways of losing your cool.

As Stephen King wrote in an old article “cool is not a way of life; it’s a state of being.” Being cool is not a matter of personal election. No matter how much you try, you cannot be cool consciously. In fact, the first thing that happens if you try to do so, is that you will lose whatever level of coolness you may have. And, if you lose it, that cool is gone. It may come back, although the chances are quite slim. Quoting Stephen King one more time: “the meaning of cool is beyond definition. And, as I said, beyond modification. It just is man.”

I do not know if I am any way cool, but I am sure that if I ever attempt to play air guitar in public I will either cease to be or lose any chance of ever becoming cool.

Accepting truth: I stink at playing guitar

Therefore, I started taking guitar lessons, with a cool teacher. I found out that I stink as a musician. I have no sense of pitch and even less sense of rhythm. And you need both abilities to play guitar.

So, after a couple of years of trying to start the path towards becoming a guitar hero, I sold my guitar and amplifier. My teacher had long ago lost any hope of turning me into a decent guitar player but never said anything. That would not have been cool.

It was cool to silently admit that truth without making any fuss about it. I spent the money recovered with the guitar sale to acquire a digital Micro 4/3 camera with a few lenses and a tripod. And I found out that I could produce some really cool photographs instead.

The origins of my air guitar obsession

Going back to the practice of air guitar, the first time that I was tempted to fall and embrace that practice was when I was 16 years old. A friend of mine had a cool elder brother who happened to have a sizeable collection of vinyl records. Before you arrive to a wrong conclusion, let me say that vinyl was not cool back then. CDs were.

But vinyl records were far more available. Sometimes, scarcity is cool. But not always.

Among my friend’s elder brother collection of 60s and 70s classic rock albums, there was one that caught my interest immediately. The album’s cover featured a fleet of spaceships shaped like electric guitars traveling through outer space. The spaceship located at the front of the fleet was blasting an earth like planet into oblivion, using some kind of electric blue energy beams, which were emitted from where the guitar mic pickups would be placed. This spaceship had a transparent dome on the top. The skyline of a city formed by skyscrapers was silhouetted beneath the dome. The guitar shaped spaceship front side had a label with a name written in golden characters. The name could be either the name of the band, the name of their place of origin, or the name of the album: it was all three of them.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

Boston’s first album was released on August 25, 1976. The release of a hard rock album in 1976 was not a particularly cool achievement. 1976 was the year before the punk explosion. Rock music was quickly losing its appeal to the younger public as progressive and classic rock groups became associated with the status quo. The next year, stablished bands such as Queen, Eagles, Wings, and similar groups composed of sophisticated musicians would fall out of popularity with the younger generation. Their music would become the object of disdain for punk rock newcomers such as the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, Patti Smith, the Stooges and The Clash.

Rock had become disassociated from musical innovation and was considered as an exercise of self-indulgence as musicians adopted a higher-class style of living usually associated with excess, thus alienating themselves from their fans. The less rebellious music fans had switched their preferences to disco era stars such as ABBA, KC and the Sunshine Band, the Bee Gees or Donna Summer. The first rappers and hip-hop artists started their first attempts at becoming part of this generational and musical transition.

So, 1976 was a year of profound changes in the music scene. And these changes were definitively not welcoming to new classic rock groups.

Guitar hero

Which brings us to the unexpected hero of this story: Donald Thomas Scholz.

Donald Thomas Scholz was born on March 10, 1947, in Toledo, Ohio. His father was a homebuilder who became wealthy thanks to his designs of prefabricated luxury houses, which he marketed through his company Scholz Homes Inc. The company employed nearly ten thousand employees and, over time, sold tens of thousands of houses to the inner-city dwellers that were moving into the suburbs of the USA.

His mother was a classical music connoisseur, and she would take him to the Toledo Museum of Art to classical music concerts. He grew up listening to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff compositions. And as it was a common practice in 50s and 60s middle to upper class families, he studied classical piano between his seventh and ninth grade years.

However, he had additional interests that set him apart from his peers: he was an avid tinkerer. Anything he could get his hands on was taken apart, just so he could understand its inner workings and construction. Whether it was go-karts, radio-controlled model airplanes, hi-fi sound systems, or television sets, he was constantly disassembling, designing, and constructing various gadgets. He excelled academically and, due to his height, was also a member of the school’s basketball team.

At this point of the story, most readers will have realized that Tom Scholz (he had ditched his definitively uncool first name in his high school years) was a cool geek way before being a geek became cool. Perhaps he was the first cool geek.

A 70s MIT geek, but cool

After graduating from Ottawa Hills High School in 1965 he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he obtained a scholarship and received both a bachelor’s degree (1969) and a master’s degree (1970) in mechanical engineering.

Scholz found out that MIT had pianos available for the students in most of the common areas. Although he had not played piano since his childhood, he started to practice on them and soon was able to play music by ear, mostly simple pop songs. During his stay at MIT, he joined a ”really bad“ ( Scholz’s dixit) rock band where he played keyboards. The band performed covers of tracks from hard rock groups of the 60s, such as Steppenwolf’s” Born to be Wild”.

After participating in some jam sessions, he found out that the guitar player was not good enough to make justice to the music. So, he decided to learn to play guitar by his own (he remembers thinking “how hard it can be?”)? He was 21 years old at that moment. He bought a second-hand electric guitar with an amplifier, started trying to learn some songs and quickly realized that playing the electric guitar was a challenge.

And, while learning guitar by himself, he fell in love with guitar-based rock. He became a fan of groups like the Kinks and the Yardbirds and of guitar players like Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

After graduating from MIT by the end of 1970, he got married to Cynthia Hartford, his college girlfriend, in 1971.

His years of double life

He soon joined the Polaroid Corporation as a product design engineer.

Since its creation in 1937, Polaroid had become known as an innovative company that released disruptive products. Founded by a physics Harvard dropout called Edwin Land, who held the position of company’s CEO for nearly 40 years, Polaroid became successful by developing products based on the use of polarized light and filters.

During WWII, Polaroid became an army supplier of hi-tech products like polarized sunglasses (Yes, those cool sunglasses used by WWII era air crews were not Ray-Bans, they were Polaroids), gun sights, viewfinders, cameras, and other optical devices with polarizing lenses.

After the war, the company’s revenue source was based on the growing instant camera market. The first model of a series of cameras marketed under the “Land Camera” brand was the 1948 Model 95.

Polaroid achieved tremendous success with these series that became iconic like the 430 Land Camera and others that were released in the 50s and 60s.

The instant camera design reached its peak in 1972, with the SX-70 folding camera, a really cool device that became a symbol of that era.

Scholz fit into the organization easily. Polaroid stimulated personal creativity, and all the people that worked at R&D was allowed to obtain patents for their creations. Polaroid paid them extra bonuses to compensate for the use of their patents.

This working environment suited perfectly Scholz interests since he had fully embraced music playing by that time. He was particularly pleased when he received ?a new task: designing the audio interface of a new instant movie film system that was being developed by the company. That was a lucky strike, because, while working on the assignment, he could learn all he needed to know to do multitrack recordings in the recording studio that he was building in his basement.

He started to live a double life: working as a senior design engineer at Polaroid by day and practicing electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and bass by night.

If you are alone, use multi tracking

Since he played alone, learning how to do multitrack recording was mandatory. He found out how to use multitrack tape recorders, carefully splitting and joining tapes to create the music that he had in mind. After reaching a guitar playing level that he considered adequate, he started to learn to play the drums. He did not know then, but he was becoming one of those talented multi-instrumentalists from the 70s and 80s (like Stevie Wonder or Prince) that created masterpieces in the solitude of their home studios.

According to Scholz, he was able to afford this double lifestyle because he had to work only 40 hours per week at Polaroid, while at MIT he had to dedicate between 80 to 100 hours to complete his academic tasks. He managed to stay up to date in his work within the required 40 hours per week, so he ended up having a lot of free time. And his salary as a senior engineer was around 25000 USD annually, or 150000 USD in today’s money.

So, he had cash to spare. He remembers thinking that “It looked like they were paying me an absurd amount of money for what I was doing at Polaroid.”

And he enjoyed the time he could dedicate to his music, because initially he was simply trying to have some fun. Then he began to give away homemade demo tapes with music that he played, recorded, and mixed. Those tapes started to circulate among his coworkers, who supported him, and quite a few of them suggested he send the tapes to recording studios.

The 70s demo tape scene

Recording demo tapes was a common practice in the music industry in those years: amateur bands without recording contracts saved money to pay for recording and sound engineering support time. With these resources, eventually they managed to produce a demo tape with 4 to 8 songs, which was sent to recording studio’s executives and started to circulate among them. If an executive’s interest level was raised by a specific tape, the corresponding band was contacted and offered to record a demo in the company’s recording facilities. That recording time was paid by the company who registered this expense as a payment in advance of future record sales.

Most demo tapes failed to raise the interest of any executives. The few that generated enough interest? for a demo recording contract usually could not catch the public attention. But every once in a while a song managed to produce interest, especially if a popular DJ chose to play it on the radio. If this process were successful , and with some additional luck, the group’s single could become a local hit.

The path to success in the music industry was extremely difficult, ?and most bands usually dissolved well before producing that elusive first hit single.

Demo tapes recorded at garages usually had terrible quality. The audio cassettes used for this task were designed for voice recording. Their performance in music recording would not improve at least until the 80s, when advances like Chromed tape and digital noise reduction filters like the one developed by Dolby Laboratories entered into the market. Professional recording equipment, like reel-to-reel tape recorders, was expensive enough to be inaccessible to bands without a contract.

But Tom Scholz had time to spare, a reliable source of income that was enough to finance his hobby and the knowledge required to understand the music recording process, even for multitrack recordings. After spending a few thousand USD in recording studio time, he realized that for the same amount of money he could assemble a recording studio in his own basement.

Building a home studio

He built the studio with the features he considered necessary for him to record the music he was composing. The process consisted in recording a rhythm section where he played the bass and then the drums. Over this base he recorded himself playing layers and layers of electric and acoustic guitars. Afterwards he mixed the multiple tracks into a stereo multitrack master tape, which he had been sending to every recording company he knew.

But nobody seemed to notice his music. He realized that the carefully recorded demos were instrumental. For him, instrumental music was enough. But some close friend suggested he add some vocals to the songs.

He decided to write the lyrics by himself. By this time, he was known as a sort of perfectionist, willing to spend whatever amount of time it may be necessary to transform into actual music whatever sounds he had in his mind. The lyrics issue brought to light a new problem: he discovered he was no singer.

After spending time with fellow musicians of the Boston music scene, (his demo tapes had acquired mythical status in the Boston rock community and he was widely known in this environment) he decided to join efforts with a local lead vocalist called Brad Delp, who was introduced to him by a rhythm guitar player, Barry Goudreau, who had been collaborating with him on some new songs.

His voice had a range of 4 octaves

Bradley Edward Delp was born in 1951, his parents were French-Canadian immigrants. He had an incredible vocal range: his voice had a range of 4 octaves (G?2 - E?6) and sang with a tenor voice that was described as “flawless” and” effortless.”

Delp has been listed among the top ten classic rock vocalists of all time by distinct publications. But until he was contacted by Scholz, he had never had the chance to record his singing voice in a studio.

They worked for some months adding the new lyrics to the songs until the recordings matched Scholz’s expectations. He started the process of delivering copies of the demos to the growing number of music industry executives he already had approached.

5 years

At this point, Scholz had spent 5 years recording his music without any success. He decided that this last set of demos would be his final effort. If he did not obtain a reply it was ‘game over.’ He would stop with the music and refocus on his career and his growing family: Cynthia and he now had their first son. So far, Cynthia had been extraordinarily supportive to his endeavours. But he knew that this would soon change.

NYC guy

Enter John Patrick Boylan.

John Patrick Boylan is a record producer, musician and songwriter born in New York in 1941. The first of six sons of a renowned physician and NYC university professor, he spent his childhood in Brooklyn, where he became deeply interested in music after getting in contact with the vibrant musical scene that characterized New York in the 50s.

After two years living at Cambridge, England, he graduated at the famous Bard College with a Theatre and Arts major. Other notable artists that also studied in Bard are two friends that ended up playing sophisticated jazz fusion in the late 70s: Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, better known as Steely Dan.

Afterwards, Boylan moved to Greenwich Village where he became involved in the bohemian/folk community that embraced that neighbourhood in the late 50s and early 60s. After a couple of songs of his authorship achieved some success, he moved to Los Angeles, where he became friends with folk star Linda Ronstadt who asked him to produce her next record. He contacted session musicians Glenn Frey , Don Henley, and Stone Canyon Band bassist Randy Meisner. The three musicians worked so well together that they left the album’s tour before it ended to form a new band named Eagles. He managed to recruit other session musicians, and the band could complete the tour schedule.

Then he helped Ronstadt to sign a better deal with Asylum records and started his own production company.

This company, called Great Eastern Music, produced several records of local country and folk bands in the middle 70s with relative success.

Things were going to change soon, though. ?? ?

One day, his close friend Paul Ahern, brought him a demo tape from an unknown band from Boston that had caught his attention due to the recordings' notable good audio quality. He arranged a meeting with the band’s leader, a young guitarist called Tom Scholz.

The fast artiste

After listening to the demo tape, he instinctively knew that this was a one in a million event. So, Boylan knew that he had to act fast.

He took over the position of the band’s producer that was shared with Scholz and started to negotiate a contract with Epic Records. But the company had doubts about the band’s authentic talent and requested that they re-record the songs in an Epic owned studio.

Epic Records’ lack of trust was understandable; since the demo had come to light, the company had only been able to contact Scholz and Delp. They wanted to watch the band perform before committing to a contract.

After acknowledging the fact that Scholz did not have an actual band, Boylan suggested Scholz re-recording the album in his basement studio. Meanwhile he managed to assemble a mock-up band that could be able to tour the album and took them to a recording studio in LA that belonged to Epic Records, effectively teasing the company by pretending to be re-recording the album.

At the same time, Scholz re-recorded the songs as he liked: in his basement studio, which now had a name: Foxglove Studios, Watertown, Massachusetts.

Finally, they decided to release their first single, a song with ?unusual rhythmic transitions and featuring both an incredible complex arrangement of multi-layered electric guitar playing by Tom Scholz and an astounding vocal performance by Brad Delp. The song’s name was “More than a feeling.”

Boylan took the task of distributing the single among Boston’s radio DJs and visited the building from where the legendary Boston WBCN FM Radio transmitted. He contacted one of the radio station DJs and asked him to play the single. After being asked which was the band’s name, Boylen remembered that Scholz and Delp had been playing around with possible names. They currently were thinking calling the band “Mother’s Milk.” He thought quickly and answered: “Boston” he said, ”the band’s name is Boston.”

I sincerely do not know if this anecdote is true. But I find it so cool that I very much wish it could be.

The “More than a feeling” single, a shortened version of the album track (3:25 vs 4:45) was put in heavy rotation at WBCN. And people loved it. Curiously, Scholz was unable to listen to his song on the radio until a week later. All the previous times he had been called by a coworker and when he finally reached them the song was already in the final fadeout.

In any case, the song became omnipresent. It was being played everywhere. across the USA.

Leaving Polaroid

Scholz was still working at Polaroid, but he now was sure that the project he has working on, the instant movie film system, was a money dump without any chance to deliver a viable product. Furthermore, in 1975 Sony had released the Betamax home video system and in 1976 JVC had released the competing VHS system. Polaroid’s system, which was going to be released that same year under the name Polavision, was going to get to the market too late.

Polavision was an expensive failure that produced an 89 million USD loss for Polaroid, and Edwin Land would resign as CEO in 1977 and leave the company in 1980. After Scholz left, nobody the company continued his work in the Polavision sound recording interface and the products never had sound support.

But Scholz did not leave Polaroid due to product developments issues. In the process of recording Boston’s first album, he used his knowledge of electronics to design a variety of pedal effects for electric guitars. In Boston’s first album Scholz employed pedal effects in al the guitars. Every little bit of guitar sound is processed. Scholz did not need to use synthesizers. He simply figured out how to create the sounds he wanted by adding another pedal effect to his guitar setup.

Scholz Research & Development Inc.

After hearing Scholz perform, many guitarists asked where they might? obtain those cool pedal effects. Many? asked Scholz? if he could build something similar for them. He started to build? pedal effect boxes for guitars and other sound effects. Each time he developed another guitar gizmo, he methodically patented it. After leaving Polaroid, he founded Scholz Research & Development Inc. to market his patented electronic effects boxes for guitars.

The current? list of Scholz patents for musical instruments contains 53 different patents. His most successful creations are the Scholz Power Soak and the Scholz Rockman. He sold thousands of them.

A bittersweet mix of success and tragedy

The song “More than a feeling” became a huge hit; it was followed by three more singles that propelled the album to peak at number three of the Billboard 200 chart and remained on charts for 132 weeks. Eventually, the first Boston album would become one of the bestselling records in history, reaching 17 million copies sold in the US and an astounding total of 20 million copies worldwide.

The band would release more albums over time, but none of them could capture a slice of time and become as much a generational memento as the first one. The band continues to perform occasionally, but although Tom Scholz looks like a guy in his early 50s he is in fact 77 years old.

Brad Delp passed away on March 9, 2007, after committing suicide at the age of 55. He suffered from deep depression.

Success wears out overtime.

The huge success of Boston’s first album was not repeated in scale by the second and third albums, but ?neither Scholz nor Delp had to worry financially.

Boston’s second album titled “Do not look back” was released in 1978. Scholz always ?maintained that this album ?was released in a rush and ?required more work. In any case, it sold 7 million copies in the US.

The third album, titled “Third Stage”, released in 1986, featured the band’s only other number 1 hit: the ballad ”Amanda”. The album sold 4 million copies in the US.

A nice guy

Scholz married his second wife in 2007. He has been a vegetarian for more than 30 years. He is focused on charitable activities through his non-profit DTS Charitable Foundation. This organization’s work includes animal protection, promote vegetarianism, provide help in famines, create shelters for the homeless, create animal sanctuaries and advocate for children’s rights.

Which is the Boston edition to listen:

• Over the years, several editions of the Boston album have been released. The original pressings of the 1976 master are the most sought after.
• The Japanese pressings are high quality but rare and expensive.
• The first CD edition was rushed, it is universally hated.
• There is an SACD edition from 2000. Fans are divided about this edition. Half of them argue that it sounds harsh and ugly. The other half say that it is heaven on earth.
• Tom Scholz remastered the album for CD in 2006, and he believes this is the edition to own.
• Personally, I listen to music streamed through Tidal using the JRiver Media Center software and a Audioquest Dragonfly DAC and this setup sounds glorious. The Tidal files are 24-bit, 192 kHz flac files - a very personal issue.

My favourite parts of the Boston album:

• “More than a Feeling”: the transitions between Brad Delp high notes that are continued by Tom Scholz guitar give me goosebumps. Additionally, in the last intervention of Delp in the song you can hear him maintaining the same note for 20 seconds. He was superhuman.
• “Peace of Mind”: Scholz playing with stereo effects. Brad Delp high notes. The pause near the end.
• “Foreplay/Long Time”: ?Tom Scholz solos are amazing, especially when he slides his fingers over the strings from below upwards. The sound he obtains is indescribable. Brad Delp harmonies with himself. The clapping transitions between the solos.
• “Rock & Roll Band”: the closest you will ever be to experiencing a live Boston performance.
• “Smokin”: this is the ultimate banger. The Hammond organ solo is so amazing.

Why I wrote this article:

If you are wondering why I spent the last days of this year doing the research to write an article about a song that achieved success 48 years ago and was composed by a graduated MIT geek, my first answer would be : Listen to the music.

And I mean listen to it loud: using a stereo equipment with the speakers properly separated and with the audio volume high enough to make you feel the drums and bass instead of just using your ears.

If that is too expensive, then try to use a good pair of decent headphones, preferably a set of over-ear Headphones (also known as circumaural).

The intricate story of Boston’s first album fascinates me because it is a story of an underdog that finally succeeds? in his endeavour. At first sight there is nothing as far from a rock band’s guitar hero than an academically awarded MIT engineer. But Tom Scholz is both.

And he demonstrated an enormous amount of self confidence in his creative abilities and in his willingness to keep on learning new things to make his dream come true.

There is a frequent prejudice about people that work on STEM related jobs: they are usually considered unable to excel in non-STEM activities. And Tom Scholz used his STEM background to create a musical masterpiece, while at the same time developing the techniques that nowadays allow thousands of musicians to create music in their DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations).

Finally, he was able to use his engineering expertise to create art. And that is a concept that truly blew my mind when I realized that.

Because that meant that the creation of beauty depends not only on personal talent, but also on intellect.

Although my attempts at playing music were not successful, the process taught me a great deal about the mechanics of music. This knowledge has enhanced my appreciation for the music I enjoy, allowing me to experience it in new and different ways. I now understand why I am drawn to the particular music I prefer.

And learning new things feels great. And cool.

Another year goes by

In the course of this year, I achieved a couple of milestones that I would like to share with you:

This small newsletter has reached 1500+ subscriptions after 86 editions. That number may not seem to be too high. But, ?given the rather obscure and niche topics that I write about, I think is an actual achievement.

And that is an achievement reached by the subscribers as well as to my writings.

Therefore, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to all of you for your support.

I look forward to reconnecting with you all in 2025 and hope that this newsletter has been valuable to its readers.

Wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

PS: Whether my arguments have convinced you or not, for your convenience here is the Spotify link to the first Boston album:.

Link to Boston's first album on Spotify

Mirko Torrez Contreras is a Process Automation consultant and trainer. He has a wide range of interests: from Explosion Protection techniques and methods to Industrial Communication Networks and Computer based Asset Management.

He also enjoys tinkering with computers, particularly for digital photography, digitally enhanced coloured pencil drawings, and digital audio. To keep things balanced, he also indulges in roller-skating, outdoor photography, and occasionally dives into the world of papercraft.

Finally, over the course of this soon-to-end year, he has actively participated in a Writers' club and a Debate group. Boredom is only an option if you allow it.

Phoenix Contact sponsors this article. The opinions exposed in this article are strictly personal. All the information required for and employed in this article is of public knowledge.