The story of Boston

Basement dreams

Donald Thomas Scholz was born on the tenth of March 1947 in Toledo, Ohio, and grew up in the suburb of Ottawa Hills. His father Don was a homebuilder who made his fortune designing prefabricated luxury houses. Young Tom studied classical piano, tinkered with go karts and model airplanes, and played varsity basketball. In 1965 he went to MIT to study mechanical engineering, and he was so sure he would flunk out that he applied to transfer after one semester. Then his grades came back near the top, and he stayed. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1969 and a master's in 1970. His thesis, a simple hoist for putting up prefabricated homes without a crane, became his first patent. After that he joined Polaroid as a product design engineer.[1] [2] [3]

Music came surprisingly late. Scholz barely touched a guitar until he was about twenty, partly because his older brother guarded his own Fender Stratocaster. Playing keyboards in a dorm band at MIT, he got frustrated that the guitarist would not play the sounds he heard in his head, so he bought a cheap twenty five dollar guitar and taught himself. In 1969, as an MIT student, he sat at a Wurlitzer electric piano and wrote his first piece of music ever. It later became Foreplay, the opening of Foreplay slash Long Time. He wrote late at night in a fourth floor apartment in Allston, and he later joked that the three nurses living below felt every chord through the ceiling and never once complained.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scholz played keyboards in local bar bands with names like Freehold and Mother's Milk. There he met two men who would matter enormously, guitarist Barry Goudreau and drummer Jim Masdea. Scholz and Masdea shared a vision of the perfect rock band, with crystal clear vocals over crushing guitars. Mother's Milk went through a string of singers until Brad Delp walked in. Delp was born on the twelfth of June 1951 in Peabody, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, and grew up in nearby Danvers. By day he worked in a factory making electrical coils. At night he sang in cover bands. He tracked the group down at a club called Jojo's in Revere Beach, auditioned that week, and won the job by singing Joe Walsh's Rocky Mountain Way.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then came years of rejection. Scholz and his wife Cindy mailed demo tapes to every record label whose address they could find on the back of an album. RCA, Capitol, Atlantic and Elektra all passed. Epic sent back a letter saying the band offered nothing new. Money ran so short that Delp had to step away for a while. Scholz decided the only way forward was to do it all himself. He spent the money saved for a house down payment on a professional Scully tape machine and set up a studio in the basement of his apartment building in Watertown. It sat next to the furnace, and it flooded. There he played every instrument except the drums, which Masdea handled, and called Delp back to sing.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The deal and the decoy

By 1975 the final demo tape held six songs, including More Than a Feeling, Peace of Mind and Rock and Roll Band. Scholz told Delp that if nobody bit this time, he would join a bar band and give up. The tape found its way to Charlie McKenzie, a regional rep for ABC Records, who heard it in a colleague's office. McKenzie called his friend Paul Ahern, a promotion man, and the pair became the band's managers. Ahern took it to Epic, the same label that had rejected it. Epic producer Tom Werman later recalled stopping the tape halfway through the second song, stunned. He promised a deal if the band could play the music live. Ahern then admitted Epic was his last stop, because every other label had passed.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There was one problem. There was no band. The contract would be signed by only two people, Scholz and Delp, but Epic wanted to see a live showcase. So they quickly recruited Goudreau, bassist Fran Sheehan and a drummer named Dave Currier. In November 1975 they played for label executives in a Boston warehouse that Aerosmith used for rehearsals, and passed. Currier soon dropped out. Sib Hashian, a drummer and Army veteran who had played with Goudreau since high school in Lynn, took his place. Jim Masdea, who had drummed on every demo, was not part of the new line up, and the reasons are still argued about. The deal that followed demanded ten albums in six years, which would soon become a very big problem.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Epic insisted the album be recorded again professionally, partly because of a union rule about engineers. Producer John Boylan was brought in. Boylan had helped put together Linda Ronstadt's backing band, the one that turned into the Eagles, and he quickly saw that Scholz's tapes were already great. So the two men hatched a plan. Boylan took the rest of the band to Los Angeles, where they recorded one new song, Delp's Let Me Take You Home Tonight, while the label believed the album was being made there. Meanwhile Scholz stayed home in his Watertown basement and recut almost everything himself. Boylan even agreed to split the producer's royalty with him. Scholz later called the Los Angeles sessions a decoy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The details of the caper are wonderful. In Los Angeles, Boylan charged a custom made Taylor acoustic guitar for Delp to the album budget, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Back in Watertown, Scholz was recording More Than a Feeling on a hundred dollar Yamaha acoustic that belonged to Delp. When the basement tracks were done, a mobile recording truck parked outside and ran a cable through the basement window to copy them. Delp sang his vocals at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. Hashian played most of the drums, but Masdea's original drum track survived on Rock and Roll Band. The group still had no name until Boylan and engineer Warren Dewey suggested Boston. Delp thought it sounded ridiculous at first, then came around.[1] [2] [3] [4]

1976: out of nowhere

Boston came out on the twenty fifth of August 1976, wrapped in a cover of guitar shaped spaceships escaping a dying planet. The idea was Scholz's, a picture of escape, and it was designed by Paula Scher. The album broke first in Cleveland, and within a week hundreds of stations were playing it. Scholz was still working at Polaroid. One day a colleague ran into his back room shouting that his song was on the radio in the drafting department. He raced over and caught only the end. The album went gold within weeks and platinum by November, and it had sold two million copies by January 1977. Only when sales passed two hundred thousand did Scholz realize, as he put it, that he was in the music business.[1] [2] [3] [4]

More Than a Feeling led the way, peaking at number five. Scholz spent about five years on it. He has said it was inspired by the Left Banke's Walk Away Renee, and one chord change even echoes that song. The guitar solo borrows decorative trills from baroque music. On AM radio the second verse was cut to save time, while FM stations played it whole. Next came Long Time, which reached number twenty two, and Peace of Mind, which reached thirty eight. Peace of Mind was about Scholz's colleagues at Polaroid and his lack of interest in climbing the corporate ladder, and he said the people there knew straight away it was about them. The album peaked at number three and stayed on the chart for one hundred thirty two weeks.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The band that had never played a real gig was suddenly on a ten month tour. It began in Midwest clubs, where Delp was amazed that crowds already knew every word. Then came support slots with Blue Oyster Cult, Foghat and Black Sabbath. Delp worried Sabbath fans would hate them, but Ozzy Osbourne's band skipped soundchecks and let Boston play as long as they liked. The Foghat dates ended abruptly when a Milwaukee disc jockey introduced Boston, not the headliner, as the best rock band in the world. By 1977 Boston were headlining arenas, with Bob Seger opening for them in Detroit. Their first ever New York concert was at Madison Square Garden, which made them the first band to debut in the city there.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Boston was nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist. They lost to the Starland Vocal Band, and Delp admitted he was relieved, because winning would have meant walking up on national television. At the ceremony he turned around and nervously said hello to Ella Fitzgerald, who was sitting right behind him. Readers of Rolling Stone voted Boston best new band. In the years since, the album has been certified seventeen times platinum in the United States. It now ranks as the second best selling debut album in American history, behind only Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction. Nearly every song on it still plays on classic rock radio.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Don't Look Back and the long road

Epic wanted a second album fast. Scholz moved into a new twenty four track home studio he called Hideaway and got to work. The title song Don't Look Back was the last one written, and he never even made a demo of it. He worked out the chords, melody and arrangement and put it straight onto the master tape. He also made more than sixty edits to Hashian's drum track to get the performance he wanted. The album was going to be called Arrival, until someone noticed that ABBA had already used that title. Don't Look Back was released in August 1978, sold a million copies in about ten days and went to number one. The title track reached number four.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scholz was not happy. The album ran only about twenty nine minutes, and he felt the label and management had pushed it out before it was finished, especially side two. He made a private vow never to be rushed again. There are still treasures on it. A Man I'll Never Be is a slow, heavy ballad that Rolling Stone compared to Stairway to Heaven, and its piano had to be recorded at another studio because Hideaway was too small for one. The short instrumental The Journey was Scholz's own favorite from Boston's early albums. Used to Bad News was written by Delp alone. The album went on to sell about seven million copies in America, less than half as many as the debut.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The tour that followed lasted close to two years and took Boston to Japan and Europe for the first time. Sammy Hagar opened many of the shows, and on that tour Scholz met Hagar's guitarist Gary Pihl, a fellow home studio fanatic. The stage set included a giant pipe organ reported to have cost about one hundred thousand dollars. At the Boston Garden, Scholz put on a cape and played Bach's Toccata on it, like the Phantom of the Opera. During a stop in Atlanta, Delp, Goudreau and Hashian even sang backing vocals on Hagar's cover of Dock of the Bay. The last leg reached London in October 1979. Classic Rock reported that those were the only shows Boston ever played in Britain, and the last the original five played together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the scenes, Scholz was drained. He hated the drug use he saw among some of the road crew and felt guilty making money for people whose behavior he disapproved of. He seriously thought about quitting music and going back to engineering, and Delp told him he never wanted to tour again. Meanwhile the managers Ahern and McKenzie split up, and Ahern kept Boston. Then Scholz found a clause in an old agreement that gave Ahern a share of his future songwriting. The two men went to war in court. Around Christmas 1979, Scholz gathered the band and told them he would not be making a record for a while, and that anyone with a solo project in mind should go ahead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The lost years: lawsuits and a broken band

Barry Goudreau took up the offer first. His 1980 solo album featured Delp and Hashian, a singer named Fran Cosmo, and John Boylan helping to produce. The trouble was the marketing. Epic's parent company CBS advertised it by linking Goudreau to the sound of the Boston guitar, heard on millions of Boston records. Scholz, who had played most of those guitars himself, was furious. After a meeting with Scholz in 1981, Goudreau was out of the band. Delp, who was at that meeting, objected and said he was quitting too, though he would still finish the next album and tour. Goudreau went on to form Orion the Hunter with Cosmo, scored a rock radio hit with So You Ran, and opened for Aerosmith in 1984.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

With Delp's future uncertain, Scholz tried something secret. In late 1980 an anonymous ad appeared in Rolling Stone, offering a rock singer a guaranteed fifty thousand dollars for the first year. About three thousand people sent tapes. Scholz chose Mark Dixon, who sang in a cover band in Niagara Falls, New York, and flew him to the basement to record A Man I'll Never Be. In the finished tape, Dixon and Delp alternated line by line. Scholz played it for CBS boss Walter Yetnikoff, who could not tell them apart, approved the plan and told him to keep it quiet. Dixon was on the payroll for about a year. Then Scholz called to say Delp was coming back. Dixon said he was paid only about half of what was promised.[1] [2]

CBS ran out of patience. The contract called for albums every year or so, and the third one was years late. In 1982 the label froze Boston's royalty payments, and in 1983 it sued Scholz for breach of contract, with figures reported from twenty to sixty million dollars. Scholz countersued for his royalties and signed with MCA. In April 1985 a federal judge refused to block the deal and criticized CBS for withholding his royalties. His legal bills reportedly ran past three million dollars. Worst of all for him, Hashian and Sheehan sided with the label and testified for CBS. Hashian had already left the sessions, and Sheehan was fired partway through, though he kept a writing credit on Cool the Engines.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

While the lawyers fought, the engineer in Scholz found another way to survive. In 1980 he founded Scholz Research and Development. Its first product was the Power Soak, an attenuator based on his own patents that let a guitarist get a cranked amplifier sound at a sane volume. In 1982 came the Rockman, a small belt clipped headphone amplifier whose name winked at Sony's Walkman. Orders poured in, and the profits paid for the third album. Rockman gear shaped the sound of the eighties. Def Leppard used it on Hysteria, Joe Satriani on Surfing with the Alien, Megadeth on their first album, and Journey's Neal Schon and ZZ Top used it too. Manufacturing ran from a plant in Woburn, Massachusetts.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The recording itself was a battle with the elements. Hideaway flooded whenever it rained, until a ditch was dug around the inside of the basement. The power failed, and one tape of Cool the Engines stuck to the machine and had to be freed with an experimental solvent. The Los Angeles Times reported that he put in twenty to fifty hours a week for six years, mostly alone. In 1984 a rough tape of a new ballad called Amanda leaked to radio through a satellite feed and became the most requested song on stations that played it. In 1985 Gary Pihl joined. Hagar had just joined Van Halen, and Pihl flew straight from Farm Aid to Boston to help finish the record.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Third Stage: the comeback

Third Stage finally arrived in late September 1986 on MCA, eight years after Don't Look Back. It hit number one in its third week and stayed there for four. It was also the first album certified gold on compact disc. Amanda went to number one on the Hot 100 for two weeks that November, the band's only chart topping single, and it did it without a music video. Amanda was not a real woman, and the name was simply chosen because it sang well. We're Ready reached number nine, and Can'tcha Say reached twenty. Scholz described the album as being about growing up past the stage of wanting a better car and a bigger house, and realizing what really matters in life.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The credits told the story of the lost years. Goudreau was gone. Jim Masdea, the drummer from the original demos, was back and played on most of the album, while Hashian was heard on only a few tracks from the early sessions. When the record came out, Hashian's name was missing from the sleeve, and he went to court until a judge ordered a sticker crediting him. He said he never received awards for it until a fan in Phoenix phoned the label, and five platinum albums turned up at his door. Delp later said the long wait had a silver lining. His daughter was born in 1980, and he got to spend years watching her grow up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scholz had sworn off touring, but Pihl and Delp talked him into it and built a new band and crew around bassist David Sikes and drummer Doug Huffman. Scholz later said Pihl was the reason Boston still existed. The 1987 tour played all of Third Stage in order, with Masdea coming out to drum on Rock and Roll Band. The homecoming was huge, nine sold out nights at the Worcester Centrum and around one hundred eleven thousand tickets. In 1987 Scholz also set up the DTS Charitable Foundation, which funds animal protection, vegetarian causes, homeless shelters and food banks. Scholz, Delp and Pihl were all longtime vegetarians, something Scholz called one of the ties that held them together.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1990 the CBS case finally reached a jury. Scholz and CBS chief Walter Yetnikoff both took the stand, and after a six week trial the jury ruled unanimously for Scholz, awarding him his withheld royalties plus punitive damages. His lawyer Don Engel summed it up by saying an album is not a load of coal you can order delivered in two weeks. But victory came with a loss. After the Third Stage tour, Delp committed to Barry Goudreau's new band, RTZ, named after the Return to Zero button on a tape machine. Delp said Scholz hugged him and wished him luck. RTZ's album came out in July 1991, and the ballad Until Your Love Comes Back Around reached number twenty six.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Walk On, new voices and Corporate America

To replace Delp, Scholz hired Fran Cosmo, the singer from Goudreau's own Orion the Hunter, so in effect the two guitarists had swapped singers. Scholz finished Walk On in December 1993, but MCA held it until June 1994, wrecking a planned spring tour. It reached number seven and went platinum, and I Need Your Love was a rock radio hit. Scholz called it his favorite Boston album, the one time he felt he got everything right. The booklet ended with eight pages against domestic violence and animal cruelty. That same year the old fight with Paul Ahern went before a federal jury, and Scholz postponed touring to fight it. The case was still being argued on appeal in 1996.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Cosmo was nervous about singing the old hits, and RTZ had run out of steam, so Scholz called Delp. In December 1994 Delp walked on stage at two benefit shows at the House of Blues in Cambridge, where Scholz handed out five thousand dollar checks to two Christmas charities. On the 1995 tour Delp and Cosmo shared the vocals, with Delp saying Cosmo took the really high parts that gave him trouble. The new drummer was Curly Smith, formerly of Jo Jo Gunne. In 1995 Scholz sold the Rockman line to Dunlop. A 1996 tour with Cheap Trick was cancelled after Scholz hurt his hand playing basketball, his lifelong passion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A Greatest Hits album followed in 1997 with three new pieces, including Higher Power, a song for people fighting to quit drugs and alcohol, and a Scholz arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner. Delp, meanwhile, found joy in a side project, a Beatles tribute band called Beatlejuice. From 1996 it played more than fifty shows at Johnny D's in Somerville, and every one sold out. Friends at the club said Delp had an uncanny way of becoming Lennon, McCartney and Harrison in turn. Delp also stayed close to Goudreau, who was his brother in law, since their wives were sisters. In 2003 the two released an album together as Delp and Goudreau.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In early 2002 Scholz quietly uploaded a new song to MP3.com under the made up name Downer's Revenge, to see how young listeners reacted without the Boston label attached. Called Corporate America, it attacked unchecked capitalism in the age of Enron, and it climbed near the top of the site's progressive rock chart. The album of the same name came out that November on the independent label Artemis, with Boston's biggest line up yet. It included guitarist Anthony Cosmo and Kimberley Dahme, the band's first female member. It stalled at number forty two. Scholz sued Artemis for failing to promote it, and the album has been out of print for years. He later called it a disaster.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Losing Brad Delp

Brad Delp's last concert with Boston was at Boston's Symphony Hall on the thirteenth of November 2006, at a show honoring the football star Doug Flutie. Four months later, on the ninth of March 2007, he took his own life at his home in Atkinson, New Hampshire. He was fifty five. His fiancee Pamela Sullivan found him. He had lit two charcoal grills in a sealed bathroom and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He left several notes. In one he wrote that he had lived with depression and thoughts of suicide since he was a teenager, and he ended by calling himself a lonely soul. The next day the band's website went black except for one line, calling him the nicest guy in rock and roll.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The grief quickly turned into a public fight. The Boston Herald ran gossip columns by Gayle Fee and Laura Raposa quoting Delp's former wife Micki, who said he had been upset by lingering bitterness from the band's breakup and by recent changes in the group. One front page headline blamed a pal's snub. Scholz felt the stories accused him of causing Delp's death, and he sued the Herald and Micki Delp for defamation. In court, his side argued that Delp's private troubles explained his despair. Court papers revealed that in late February 2007, the younger sister of Delp's fiancee had found a hidden camera that Delp had placed in her bedroom, nine days before he died.[1] [2] [3]

The lawsuits dragged on for years. In 2011 a judge threw out the case against Micki Delp. In March 2013 Judge Frances McIntyre ruled for the Herald. She wrote that despite powerful evidence about Delp's state of mind, nobody could prove what caused his suicide, because that secret went to the grave with him, so any view about it was opinion. In November 2015 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court agreed and ordered Scholz to pay the Herald about one hundred thirty two thousand dollars in costs. In June 2016 the United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. Scholz also said that no member of the current Boston line up had even been told when the funeral was.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

On the nineteenth of August 2007, Delp's children organized a tribute concert called Come Together at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston. Extreme, Godsmack, RTZ, Orion the Hunter and Beatlejuice all played, and the night closed with Boston. Goudreau and Sheehan joined Scholz on stage for the first time in more than twenty five years, and the original members played Don't Look Back as the final song. Stryper's Michael Sweet sang, and so did an unknown fan from North Carolina named Tommy DeCarlo. That October, Goudreau released Rockin' Away, the last song he and Delp wrote together, with Brad telling his own musical life story. It became a rock radio hit early in 2008.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The fan who became the voice

Tommy DeCarlo was born in Utica, New York, on the twenty third of April 1965, and fell in love with Boston at twelve. His early life was hard. He dropped out of school, washed dishes at a Pizza Hut, and for a time lived in a homeless shelter before earning his diploma at night school in Florida. By 2007 he was a credit manager at a Home Depot near Charlotte, North Carolina. After Delp died, he recorded a tribute song and some Boston covers, and his daughter helped him post them on MySpace. The link reached the band. Scholz walked past his wife's computer, asked which of their live shows was playing, and was told it was a stranger. He said he could not tell it was not Brad.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

DeCarlo had never been in a band. The biggest crowd he had ever sung for was about forty people at karaoke in a bowling alley, and his first real gig was the Delp tribute in front of five thousand. In 2008 he and Michael Sweet shared lead vocals on a summer tour with Styx, fifty three dates in twelve weeks. That same year Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign used More Than a Feeling, and Goudreau played it at rallies with Huckabee's band. Scholz, a Barack Obama supporter, wrote an angry open letter saying Boston had never endorsed anyone and pointing out that he, not Goudreau, played the guitars on the song. Huckabee stopped using it. Sweet left in 2011 to focus on Stryper.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Boston's sixth album, Life, Love and Hope, came out on the third of December 2013 on Frontiers Records. Scholz had started it back in 2002, and it included four songs with Delp's vocals. Scholz said he never doubted using them, because Brad knew he was recording for Boston and would have been upset to be left off. One of them, Sail Away, was written after Hurricane Katrina. The album used five lead singers, and on Love Got Away Scholz sang lead for the first time ever. It entered the chart at number thirty seven, and reviews were mixed. Scholz even rejected the first vinyl master because of clicks and dropouts, though a limited vinyl edition appeared a year later.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Boston toured most summers from 2012 to 2017, with Pihl, bassist Tracy Ferrie from Stryper, drummers Curly Smith and Jeff Neal, and multi instrumentalist Beth Cohen. In 2016 they celebrated their fortieth anniversary with their first full shows in their namesake city since 1994. The 2017 Hyper Space tour, with Joan Jett opening, was their last, as of 2026. That spring brought sad news. On the twenty second of March 2017, Sib Hashian collapsed and died while drumming on the Legends of Rock cruise in the Caribbean. He was sixty seven, and he was playing Boston songs beside his friend of fifty years, Barry Goudreau. His daughter Lauren later married the actor Dwayne Johnson.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

In 2024 Scholz told MIT Technology Review that his all analog studio sat idle because almost nobody nearby could still repair the gear, though he was still writing. In September 2025 Tommy DeCarlo suffered a sudden brain bleed, and surgeons found melanoma tumors on his brain and a lung. He died in North Carolina on the ninth of March 2026, aged sixty, exactly nineteen years to the day after Brad Delp. Gary Pihl had hoped for a tour marking fifty years since the debut. Instead, as of 2026, Scholz marked the anniversary by announcing an expanded edition of the first album, due in 2027, with his long lost basement demos restored.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Boston

Tom Scholz and Brad Delp. They were the only two people who signed Boston's first contract, and Scholz always said the band was really the two of them. Scholz built the music alone and Delp layered the voices, able to stack dozens of perfect harmonies. They were opposites, Scholz calling himself outspoken and rebellious and Delp the most passive person he knew. Delp left twice and came back twice. Scholz called him the most talented singer he ever knew, and they called themselves work friends.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Brad Delp and Barry Goudreau. Goudreau and Delp were more than bandmates. They married sisters, Micki and Connie, which made them brothers in law. When Goudreau was pushed out of Boston, Delp objected, sang on his solo album, wrote for Orion the Hunter and joined his band RTZ. They made a duo album in 2003 and wrote one final song together in 2006, Rockin' Away, released after Delp's death.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tom Scholz and Barry Goudreau. Goudreau played lead guitar on the earliest demos, before Scholz took over the guitar parts himself. After the 1980 solo album row he was out, and the bitterness lasted decades. Scholz complained that Goudreau kept collecting royalties on songs he never played on. In 2008 Goudreau campaigned for Mike Huckabee with More Than a Feeling, prompting Scholz's angry public letter. They shared a stage again only at Delp's 2007 tribute.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Scholz and Jim Masdea. Masdea was Scholz's first real musical partner. They once worked on a dirt floor basement in Jamaica Plain, and Masdea drummed on every demo Scholz sent out. His stories of playing bar gigs in Hyannis inspired Rock and Roll Band. He missed out on the original deal, but Scholz brought him back to drum on most of Third Stage and on stage in 1987.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Scholz and Paul Ahern. Ahern and his partner Charlie McKenzie got Boston signed to Epic after everyone else had passed. After the partners split, Ahern kept Boston, but Scholz discovered a clause giving Ahern a share of his future songs. The dispute froze work on the third album from 1979 and ended up before a federal jury in 1994, with appeals into 1996. Ahern later managed RTZ, the band Delp joined after leaving Boston.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Scholz and John Boylan. Boylan was the producer Epic sent to keep an eye on the debut, and instead he became Scholz's accomplice. He let Scholz make the record in his basement, kept the label happy with a Los Angeles decoy session, split the producer's royalty and named the band Boston. He then joined Epic as an executive and worked on Don't Look Back.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Scholz and Walter Yetnikoff. Yetnikoff ran CBS Records when Scholz blew past his deadlines. In one meeting he warned Scholz that CBS could be very nasty when it wanted to be, yet he also approved the secret plan for a second singer. CBS froze Boston's royalties and sued, and the two men finally faced each other in court in 1990, where the jury sided with Scholz.[1] [2] [3]

Tom Scholz and Gary Pihl. They met when Pihl was in Sammy Hagar's band opening for Boston in the late 1970s and bonded over home studios. When Hagar joined Van Halen in 1985, Scholz called at once. Pihl became Boston's guitarist, an executive at Scholz's company and, by 2026, his partner in restoring the original demos. Scholz said Pihl was the reason Boston went back on the road at all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Scholz and Tommy DeCarlo. A Home Depot credit manager and lifelong fan, DeCarlo was found through MySpace after Delp's death, when Scholz mistook his voice for Brad's. He sang with Boston from 2007 until his death in 2026. Scholz said the band's performances with him were the best they ever had, and DeCarlo said that for him, Boston simply was Tom.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sib Hashian and Barry Goudreau. They started playing together at Lynn English High School, and Goudreau called Hashian his musical partner of fifty years. Hashian drummed on Goudreau's 1980 solo album, they played together in Ernie and the Automatics, and Hashian died mid set on a 2017 cruise with Goudreau beside him on stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom Scholz and Micki Delp. Micki was Brad Delp's second wife and the mother of his two children. After his death she told the Boston Herald that the band's old bitterness had helped drive him to despair. Scholz sued her and the paper for defamation. The case against her was thrown out in 2011, and The courts ruled against him in both cases, and in 2016 the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sib Hashian and Dwayne Johnson. Hashian's daughter Lauren, a singer and songwriter, met the actor Dwayne Johnson in 2007, and the two married in August 2019, two years after Hashian's death. That makes the drummer on More Than a Feeling the grandfather of the two daughters Lauren shares with Johnson.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Boston

• Before Boston, Tom Scholz held about eleven patents from his work at Polaroid, mostly on audio recording. At Polaroid his main job was creating audio tape for the Polavision instant home movie system, which ended up being sold without sound. Nearly all his Polaroid patents involved recording and playback.[1]
• Scholz's very first patent came from his MIT thesis, a hoist for building prefabricated homes. His master's project was a pair of simple A frame hoists that let builders assemble prefabricated homes without a crane. It became his first patent in 1972, fitting for the son of a prefab homebuilder.[1] [2]
• Scholz spent the money saved for a house down payment on a tape machine. Around 1974 he used his savings for a professional Scully tape recorder. Most of the demos that landed the Epic deal were made on it, on one inch tape rather than the two inch tape used in real studios.[1] [2] [3]
• More Than a Feeling was recorded on a hundred dollar Yamaha acoustic that actually belonged to Brad Delp. At the same time, producer John Boylan was charging a custom Taylor acoustic for Delp to the album budget in Los Angeles, at a cost of thousands of dollars.[1] [2]
• To bend a note in the organ solo on Hitch a Ride, Scholz slowed the tape reel with his finger. Hitch a Ride began life as a song called San Francisco Day. The warped organ effect in its solo was made by pressing on the spinning tape reel by hand.[1] [2]
• Epic's early slogan for Boston was Better Music Through Science, and Scholz despised it. He felt the tagline made the band sound like a lab experiment and downplayed the music in favor of his technical wizardry.[1]
• Boston's first ever concert in New York City was at Madison Square Garden. They were the first band to make their New York debut at the Garden, playing three sold out shows there during their first headlining tour.[1] [2] [3]
• Boston lost an opening slot with Foghat because a DJ praised them too much. A Milwaukee disc jockey introduced Boston, the support act, as the best rock and roll band in the world. They were soon off the Foghat tour.[1] [2]
• Don't Look Back was originally going to be called Arrival. The band changed the title after discovering that ABBA had released an album called Arrival two years earlier.[1]
• Don't Look Back was one of the first albums ever issued on compact disc, then pulled. It appeared when the format launched in 1983, but because of the legal fight between Scholz and CBS it was withdrawn after a small run and did not return on CD until 1986.[1]
• Three members of Boston sang backing vocals on Sammy Hagar's cover of Dock of the Bay. During a tour stop in Atlanta, Delp, Goudreau and Hashian joined Hagar in the studio as a lark, credited as the Bos Tones. Steve Cropper, who played on Otis Redding's original, played guitar.[1]
• Third Stage was the first album ever certified gold on compact disc. It reached five hundred thousand CD sales, the first title to earn that certification, on its way to four times platinum in America.[1] [2]
• Amanda reached number one without the band ever making a music video for it. It is a rare Hot 100 chart topper of the MTV era with no performance video. A leaked rough demo had already been the most requested song on rock radio in 1984.[1]
• The Rockman headphone amp's name was a nod to Sony's Walkman, and you could plug a Walkman into it. Its auxiliary input let guitarists jam along with their cassettes through headphones. It clipped onto a belt and promised to replace thousands of dollars of studio gear.[1]
• Def Leppard's Hysteria was recorded using Rockman gear. Scholz's devices also turned up on Joe Satriani's Surfing with the Alien and Megadeth's first album, and were used by ZZ Top and Journey's Neal Schon.[1] [2]
• Scholz's first commercial product was the Power Soak, launched in late 1980 for about ninety dollars. It let guitarists drive an amplifier to full distortion without deafening volume. He had first needed it to record screaming guitars in a basement without angering the neighbors.[1] [2]
• Scholz once hired a secret replacement for Brad Delp through an anonymous ad in Rolling Stone. Singer Mark Dixon, picked from about three thousand hopefuls, spent roughly a year on the payroll as a backup Delp, sworn to secrecy, before being let go.[1] [2]
• The title track of Corporate America was first released under a fake band name, Downer's Revenge. Scholz uploaded it to MP3.com in 2002 to test it on young listeners without the Boston name, and it rose near the top of the site's progressive rock chart.[1] [2] [3]
• Scholz sang lead on a Boston song for the first time in 2013. On Life, Love and Hope he took the lead vocal on Love Got Away. The album used five different lead singers, including Delp from earlier sessions.[1] [2]
• Delp's posthumous song Sail Away was written in response to Hurricane Katrina. Scholz said the song was about sailing away to a better place in your mind. It even opens with a female rapper, which Scholz admitted no Boston fan would have predicted.[1] [2]
• Scholz has said the last album he listened to all the way through was the James Gang's Rides Again from 1970. He deliberately avoided new music so it would not influence his writing, hearing it only at the gym or the ice rink.[1] [2] [3]
• Brad Delp joined Mother's Milk partly because they had already made a demo, something none of his cover bands had done. He tracked the band down at Jojo's in Revere Beach. Until then, none of the bands he had sung in had ever set foot in a recording studio.[1]
• Delp's Beatles tribute band Beatlejuice sold out every one of its more than fifty shows at one Somerville club. The band played Johnny D's from 1996. Delp dedicated All You Need Is Love to the couples in the audience at every show.[1]
• Tommy DeCarlo's biggest crowd before joining Boston was about forty people at a bowling alley karaoke night. His first real show with a rock band was the Delp tribute concert in 2007, in front of five thousand people, and there was not even time for a soundcheck.[1] [2]
• Tommy DeCarlo and Brad Delp died on the same date, the ninth of March, nineteen years apart. Delp died on the ninth of March 2007. DeCarlo, who replaced him, died of cancer on the ninth of March 2026, at sixty.[1] [2] [3]
• Fran Sheehan produced an early demo for the Boston rock band Extreme. In 1985, after leaving Boston, Sheehan produced a four track demo for the then unknown local band. Extreme later played the Brad Delp tribute concert.[1] [2]
• Boston's bassist Tracy Ferrie is a national roller skating champion and an assistant minister. Before joining Boston in 2012 he played in the Christian metal band Stryper. He serves at a church on Cape Cod.[1]
• Kimberley Dahme was Boston's first female member, and she had once played in a Boston cover band. She joined in 2002, learned bass for the gig, and sang lead on several songs, including the band's heavy Christmas carol, God Rest Ye Metal Gentlemen.[1]
• Scholz once said he invented his own figure skating jump. He took up freestyle skating in middle age and asked for ice time on tour. He also plays extreme croquet and designs high speed radio controlled planes.[1] [2]
• A radio controlled jet Scholz built in 1972 flew for fifty two years before crashing in 2024. He called the red delta wing plane his favorite invention. It broke up in flight, and he joked that he was crushed, and so was the airplane.[1]
• Scholz grew up in Toledo listening to Boston's WBZ radio at night, which made the band name easy to accept. He heard British rock bands on the distant station as a teenager, so when someone suggested naming the band after the city, he agreed at once.[1]
• Boston played nine sold out nights in a row at the Worcester Centrum in 1987. The homecoming run sold about one hundred eleven thousand tickets and set records for the arena.[1] [2]
• Smokin' was originally called Shakin', and the early version had a different meaning. A 1973 recording from the Mother's Milk sessions shows the song in an earlier form. After September 11 it landed on a list of songs Clear Channel suggested stations avoid.[1]
• Rock and Roll Band is, by Scholz's own admission, pure fantasy. Boston never played bars or slept in their cars before being signed. The song came from Jim Masdea's stories of playing in bands in Hyannis and dreaming of discovery.[1] [2]
• Sib Hashian had to sue to get his name on Third Stage. A judge ordered stickers crediting his drumming. His platinum awards arrived only after a fan in Phoenix, whom he never met, phoned the label on his behalf.[1]
• Walk On's booklet ended with eight pages against domestic violence and animal cruelty. The section listed contacts for groups including the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Humane Society.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.