Boston

The group was formed in 1971 in the city of Boston by guitarist Barry Goudreau but was kind of taken over by hired-as-keyboardist Tom Scholz, who learned guitar and built a studio in his basement where most of what would be the first album was recorded. It was released in 1976 with fairly little alteration or overdubbing to the original demo tapes, and for ten years held the record for best-selling pop debut album.

Scholz was a huge perfectionist and wouldn't have released Don't Look Back in 1978 if the record company (Epic Records) hadn't forced him to. He refused to release another album until he was satisfied with it, which is why the third album took eight years. By this time Goudreau and all other members but Scholz and singer Brad Delp had left the band; Goudreau sued Scholz for supposedly damaging his solo career. Epic also sued for a contract violation by the band taking so long to release the third album, but Scholz/Boston won.

Delp had left the 'group' and recorded as Return to Zero with Goudreau by the time the fourth album came out, which may explain why, without the recognizable vocals, the fourth album got so little attention. Brad Delp was found dead in his New Hampshire home on March 9, 2007.

Source: the Boston entry at www.allmusic.com

My northern pines are good enough for me,
But there's a town my memory uprears --
A town that always like a friend appears,
And always in the sunrise by the sea.
And over it, somehow, there seems to be
A downward flash of something new and fierce,
That ever strives to clear, but never clears
The dimness of a charmed antiquity.

Bos"ton (?), n.

A game at cards, played by four persons, with two packs of fifty-two cards each; -- said to be so called from Boston, Massachusetts, and to have been invented by officers of the French army in America during the Revolutionary war.

© Webster 1913.