Post by Admin on Feb 18, 2018 18:29:53 GMT
Boston was famously recorded in Scholz’s basement, in a home studio the MIT grad cobbled together himself. “The idea of making a recording at home was unusual because when I first started writing and trying to record my ideas, the recording process was extremely expensive,” he explains. “It would cost in late ’60s and early ’70s dollars $500 a song for a decent multi-track recording, and that was only eight tracks. That was a month’s salary for a lot of people. It also put you in a position where creativity was curtailed — you had people hanging around the studio, technicians. I found that I really had to get away from all that if I was going to be free. I had to get away from the other people in the studio, I had to get away from the studio time clock, and I actually also had to get away from all the other musicians. I tried it that way and I was never happy with the results.”
Fortunately, Scholz was uniquely equipped to take on the challenge of home recording. He’d been playing classical piano since he was a kid, and was employed as an engineer at Polaroid before becoming a full-time musician. “Finally in 1974, I spent literally my last dollar and all the money I could borrow and built, out of crude, obsolete, used equipment, a studio capable of making an actual record master. Using that, I, on my own (with the help of a drummer) recorded all of the instrument tracks and went looking for a singer. Fortunately I found Brad Delp, who did an excellent job interpreting the songs, and made these recordings from the ground up, one track at a time, in the basement of my apartment house.”
That debut — one of the best-selling of all time — was the product of an elaborate end-run around the record label. “After the deal was made, CBS wanted a real producer to make the record in a real studio, and I knew that wasn’t gonna happen.” Scholz essentially re-tracked the record in the same basement that he’d cut the demos in, running cables out to a mobile board to get the masters, all while reassuring the label through an intermediary that he was in fact working in a “real” studio. “They never knew that the record was all recording over again in the same studio where I’d done the original demos,” he laughs now. The final record and the demos, as a testament to Scholz’s skill with his basement set-up, are virtually identical. Delp’s sky-high vocals were the only thing that weren’t tracked in the basement.