BOSTON (band) - We Found It In The Trashcan, Honest (1975)

Demos for BOSTON's debut album.

1. Rock And Roll Band
2. Life Isn't Easy (Something About You)
3. More Than A Feeling
4. Don't Be Afraid Of Love
5. Peace Of Mind
6. San Francisco Day (Hitch A Ride)

Incl. front and back covers


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_%28album%29:

By 1973, the band had a six-song demo tape ready for mailing, and [M.I.T. Engineering graduate Tom] Scholz and his wife Cindy sent copies to every record company they could find. The group received rejection slips from several labels--RCA, Capitol, Atlantic and Elektra among the most notable--and Epic Records rejected the tape flatly with a "very insulting letter" signed by company head Lennie Petze that opined the band "offered nothing new." The tape that received the most attention contained embryonic renditions of future songs that would appear on Boston's debut album. Financial reality encroached the dream for Delp, who departed shortly thereafter because "there just wasn't any money coming in."

Boston was primarily recorded at Scholz's own Foxglove Studios in Watertown, Massachusetts in "an elaborate end run around the CBS brain trust." Epic wanted a studio version that sounded identical to the demo tape, and Scholz decided he could not work in a production studio, having adapted to home recording for several years, stating "I work[ed] alone, and that was it." Scholz took a leave of absence from Polaroid, and was gone for several months to record the band's album. "I would wake up every day and go downstairs and start playing," he recalled. Scholz grew annoyed reproducing the parts, being forced to use the same equipment used on the demo. The basement, located in a lower-middle-class neighborhood on School Street, was described by Scholz as a "tiny little space next to the furnace in this hideous pine-paneled basement of my apartment house, and it flooded from time to time with God knows what." There was a Hammond organ and a Leslie speaker stuffed in the corner of the room alongside the drums; whenever it was time to record the organ parts, they would tear the drums down and pull out the Leslie. Boylan felt that while Scholz's guitars "sounded amazing," he did not understand how to properly record acoustic instruments, and flew in engineer Paul Grupp to instruct him on microphone technique.

Boylan's own hands-on involvement would center on recording the vocals and mixing, and he took the rest of the band out to the West Coast, where they recorded "Let Me Take You Home Tonight". "It was a decoy," recalled Scholz, who recorded the bulk back home in Watertown without CBS's knowledge. While Boylan arranged for Delp to have a custom-made Taylor acoustic guitar for thousands of dollars on the album budget, Scholz recorded such tracks as "More Than a Feeling" in his basement with a $100 Yamaha acoustic guitar. That spring, Boylan returned to Watertown to hear the tracks, on which Scholz had recut drums and other percussion and keyboard parts. He then hired a remote truck from Providence, Rhode Island to come to Watertown, where it ran a snake through the basement window of Scholz's home to transfer his tracks to a 3M-79 2-inch 24-track deck. The entire recording was completed in the basement, save for Delp's vocals, which were recorded at Capitol Studios' Studio C with Warren Dewey engineering the overdubs. All vocals were double-tracked except the lead vocal, and all the parts were done by Delp in quick succession. When Scholz arrived in Los Angeles for mixing, he felt intimidated and feared the professional engineers would view him as a "hick that worked in a basement." Instead, Scholz felt they were backwards in their approach, and lacked knowledge he learned. "These people were so swept up in how cool they were and how important it is was to have all this high-priced crap that they couldn’t see the forest for the trees," he said. Boylan found his only real confrontation with the autocratic Scholz during the mixing stage, in which Scholz handled the guitar tracks, Boylan the drums and Dewey the vocals, with Steve Hodge assisting. Scholz pushed guitars too high in the mix, rendering vocals inaudible at times.

The entire operation has been described as "one of the most complex corporate capers in the history of the music business." With the exception of "Let Me Take You Home Tonight," the album was a virtual copy of the demo tapes. The album was recorded for a cost of a few thousand dollars, a paltry amount in an industry accustomed to spending hundreds of thousands on a single recording. By 1975, Tom Scholz was finished with the club scene, concentrating exclusively on the demo tapes he recorded at home in his basement. Scholz was renting the house and spent much of his funds on recording equipment; at one point, he spent the money he had saved for a down payment on a future home on a Scully eight-track. He called Delp to provide vocals, remarking "If you can't really afford to join the band or if you don't want to join the band, maybe you'd just want to come down to the studio and sing on some of these tapes for me." Scholz had given the Mother's Milk demo to a Polaroid co-worker whose cousin worked at ABC Records (who had signed one of Scholz's favorite bands, the James Gang). The employee forgot to mail the tape out and it sat in his desk for months until Columbia began contacting Scholz, after which he sent the tape to ABC.

Charles McKenzie, a New England representative for ABC Records first overheard the tape in a co-worker's office. He called Paul Ahern, an independent record promoter in California, with whom he held a gentleman's agreement that if either heard anything interesting, they would inform the other. Ahern had connections with Lennie Petze at Epic and informed him--even though Petze had passed on the original Mother's Milk demos. Epic contacted Scholz and offered a contract that first required the group to perform in a showcase for CBS representatives, as the label felt curious that the "band" was in reality a "mad genius at work in a basement".... In November 1975, the group performed for the executives in a Boston warehouse that doubled as Aerosmith's practice facility. Mother's Milk was signed by CBS Records one month later in a contract that required ten albums over six years....


http://www.bandboston.com/html/news_html.html:

"In my mind, [Tom Scholz] started the record-at-home revolution because he recorded that first Boston album at home in his basement. And once that news came out, every other musician said, 'You mean I don't have to spend $125 an hour to record an album?' So he was the first to record a hit album at home. All the recording equipment manufacturers picked up on that and said, 'Wow, we can sell to all musicians as opposed to just selling our products to recording studios," said [guitarist Gary] Pihl who was hired by Scholz to demonstrate his gadgets at industry trade shows, and eventually became an employee of not only Scholz, but a member of his band.

"We have had many musicians tell us how much they used the equipment. We used to tell people it was like an A to Z of the industry; from Alabama to ZZ Top used to call us to say they were using The Rockman on their new record. Def Leppard sent us a gold record because of how much they liked the technology. Joe Satriani, Joe Walsh, Jeff Beck, the list just goes on and on for people who have used that little [Rockman] device that Tom invented to help him record at home."