"Power Soak: Invention, Obsession, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Sound": https://tinyurl.com/p348sjr9

1

Where were you the first time you heard "More Than a Feeling"?

Probably driving around in your car listening to FM radio. This was 1976, the first Ramones LP came out that year, but it took decades for it to go gold. The Stones were changing guitarists. McCartney had followed up 1973's "Band on the Run" with 1975's "Venus and Mars," but he never reached this peak again.

As for Led Zeppelin... 1975 was the year of "Physical Graffiti," 1976's "Presence" was a disappointment.

In other words, the old guard was stumbling, but the new guard?

Now you've got to know, by 1976, the sixties hangover was over. The war was finally wrapped up in '75. What we had in '76 was a nation where the power of music was acknowledged, the surprise of Woodstock was seven summers before. And every market had an FM station that dominated the conversation within its signal range.

It wasn't quite the monoculture of the MTV eighties, but there were a slew of hits on FM that everybody in the nation knew. Frampton came alive. Steve Miller came back with "Fly Like an Eagle." Aerosmith cemented their legacy with "Rocks." Bob Dylan was mainstream with "Desire." Hall and Oates followed-up their breakthrough RCA debut with "Bigger Than Both of Us," with the ubiquitous "Rich Girl." Genesis showed us they could triumph without Peter Gabriel with "A Trick of the Tail." Joni Mitchell released "Hejira" and Boz Scaggs "Silk Degrees." And 1976 was the "The Year of the Cat."

It was a cornucopia of riches. Disco was on the horizon, but it hadn't gone mainstream. And Stevie Wonder capped his incredible run with "Songs in the Key of Life."

But there was a song by a new act that emanated from the car speakers that was undeniable, that you got on the very first listen, that has not faded over the years, that is not only still played today, but still sounds fresh.

Of course, that song is "More Than a Feeling."

You didn't have to be known. You didn't have to slug it out in clubs, never mind on the internet... If you had the goods and they were exposed on FM radio, you could go from zero to hero literally overnight.

Like Boston.

To tell you the truth, I never loved "More Than a Feeling." I actually like it more today than I did in the seventies. But there is one song on that album that is positively indelible, that utilizes the Led Zeppelin trick of going from electric to acoustic and back again, "Long Time," with its ethereal, jazzy intro "Foreplay." When "Foreplay" ended... It was like a space captain pulled back on the controls, held the ship steady, and out of the blue there was this singing guitar and...I get goosebumps just writing about it.

That was forty nine years ago,

And it was very different from today.

2

Same as it ever was. That's what I keep hearing people in the business say. But nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact, Daniel Glass told me recently he wasn't exactly sure what a record label was anymore. But back in the seventies...

There were six and the men who ran them were titans. And the records they released were cultural fixtures that exceeded the power of not only television, but movies too. As great as the movies of the seventies were, the decade ran on music. It was a veritable victory lap after the explosion of the sixties. All kinds of genres. A zillion publications. Everybody knew the hits, and everybody knew Boston.

Sounds quaint, I know...but it wasn't.

First and foremost because the second side of that debut LP was just about as good as the first. Opening with "Rock & Roll Band" and then segueing into "Smokin'" and then my personal favorite, "Hitch a Ride." This was an album you could play over and over and never get sick of, and I did, and many others did too. It was the best-selling debut album to date. The internet tells me it ultimately sold 20 million copies (in the pre-SoundScan era everything is up for grabs...or as Jerry Heller told me about "Straight Outta Compton," "My company, my number!")

But word was that the second album, "Don't Look Back," was rushed out against Tom Scholz's wishes and ultimately there was a third LP, "Third Stage," and the complete story is told in this book, "Power Soak," which was the name of the original incarnation of the Rockman.

3

Today everybody's sophisticated, they're more knowledgeable about the business than their instrument. And anybody can record and release their material. However, in the old days, the seventies, you had to get a record deal... And you would sacrifice, sign anything, just to have an album on a major label.

Which is exactly what Tom Scholz did. And as bad as the production deal he made with Paul Ahern was, Ahern changed it thereafter to his further benefit, making one of every four LPs royalty free to CBS. Scholz got screwed so bad...

And Scholz had agreed to split the royalties equally with the band. Even though they were Johnny-come-latelies... This was not today, when you didn't have to tour, you needed a band...

And when Tom was tinkering in the studio, what was the band to do?

"Power Soak" tells the complete story.

Critics hated Boston, called it corporate rock, which it is anything but. For the critics your backstory had to be poverty, crawling from the gutter to deliver insights the bourgeoisie needed to hear. So something polished, from an MIT graduate from a rich family who worked at Polaroid? That was a nonstarter. But the public, the public devoured Boston, it was exactly what people wanted.

4

Now this guy I do not know, Brendan Borrell, e-mailed me to tell me he'd written a book about Boston, the inside story. Well, how much is left to tell? I've even gotten e-mail from Scholz setting the record straight.

And I prefer reading fiction to nonfiction, I like to be taken away, but trying to close out my e-mail, two nights ago, long after 11 PM, I pulled up the PDF Borrell sent.

Wow. This was not the typical rock book. Slapdash, printing the myth instead of the truth. "Power Soak" is deeply researched. All the agreements, the court records, Borrell studied them.

And the Boston story is here. Scholz does not have a warm and fuzzy image, and he doesn't come across as a saint in this book, but he is first and foremost an artist (after being an engineer!). He wanted to do it his way.

And he didn't think Paul Ahern was on his team. And Walter Yetnikoff was until he wasn't.

You see Boston was CBS Records' biggest seller. Walter wanted more. So he told Tom he could call him at home. It was all warm and fuzzy, until Tom kept missing deadlines, not delivering a new album, and then Walter held back royalties and ultimately sued Scholz.

This was a big story back then. But there was no internet for fans to marshal support for Scholz, the record companies had the ultimate power, which they no longer do. They could not only make your career, they could break it.

So you get the ins and outs of Scholz's record-making and legal issues, but the most fascinating part of the book is when Tom's lawyer, Don Engel, shops a new record deal...

This is when we get David Geffen, in cahoots with Walter Yetnikoff. A deal was hammered out but Geffen could never seem to sign it, Walter was supposed to go to Warner, a deal Geffen was brokering, and David wasn't going to put pen to paper until the deal was done.

But Myron Roth told Engel that Irving Azoff would sign the same deal. And Irving did. And ultimately, years later, "Third Stage" was released and sold millions.

5

So who runs record labels today? They may be more well known than movie studio heads, but both of these categories of people used to be titans known by all. They lived above the hoi polloi, they were all powerful, and they were guiding the success of artworks that truly defined the nation.

That's been lost. That era is gone.

Now in the earlier part of this century, everybody who'd been in the business pre-internet started to say it was no longer fun. "Power Soak" is about the era when it was fun, when it was peak fun, when the money was raining down... Warner records built the Warner cable system. Nothing scaled like music. Sure, album budgets were going up, but the costs were de minimis when spread over millions of records sold. And the labels and execs got rich... The acts? Sometimes. Oftentimes they had bad deals, maybe the manager made real money, but not the musicians.

"Power Soak" delineates the way it was. The shenanigans, the successes, the personalities. If you were around back then, every note of this book will ring true. It was not today's music business, where #1 might not even be known by most of the public...this was an era of giants, who were dominant, on both sides of the deal.

Now you can buy a digital copy of this book on Amazon for $2.99. And you should. And it's only 87 pages and you'll whirl right through them. But the feeling you'll get when you read them...it's a peek inside the gold mine, into a past era, the way it used to be, when the acts were bigger than they ever were before and are still much bigger than almost all of the acts today. They do call it "classic rock."

And Borrell doesn't do it like Fredric Dannen and "Hit Men," he's not out to get anybody, you can tell he's a fan. He just wants to get it right.

And we get it right about so few of our heroes.

You need to buy this book. The barrier to entry is incredibly low, like I said, $2.99. Or you can pay $9.99 for a paperback.

Forget the autobiographies, forget most of the writing about this business. "Power Soak" is the real story, and if you want to know the way it was, you need to READ IT!


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