Sixties nostalgia is a curious thing—make-a one man weep, make another man sing. Tom Scholz—the guitarist/mastermind/evil genius behind Seventies arena rock behemoth Boston—is one of those people for whom the Sixties never quite ended. I mean, yeah, he can see all of us with our turbo rocket backpacks and Martian girlfriends and such, and recognize it’s not 1967, but in his mind, it’s the Summer of Love, year-round, every year.
Eight years elapsed between Boston’s second and third albums—a longer period of time than the span between Please Please Me and Let It Be—and fans of Scholz and company were left to wonder what Tommy and his band of merry New Englanders were up to. Rumor had it that Scholz had joined a hippie commune and had spent the fortune he’d earned from music trying to discover the best way to rotate marijuana and rutabaga crops in upstate Massachusetts. In reality, though, he had spent the time in various other, non-hippie-related pursuits, namely a) litigation with his record company, b) developing a way to cram a Marshall stack into a box he could wear on his belt, and c) making fun of his contemporary Meat Loaf, who had gone from Bat Out of Hell to Loaf Out of Luck in just eight short years.
Alas, the period of quietude was certain to end, and end it did, in 1986, when Scholzasaurus and the mighty Boston Rawk Party finally managed to crap out Third Stage. Now, the band’s first album had been introduced to an unsuspecting world by “More than a Feeling”—a tremendous, anthemic song, don’t you agree? Don’t Look Back came out of the gate with “Don’t Look Back”—another tremendous, anthemic song. Third Stage—eight years in the making—opened with none other than “Amanda,” a tremendously schmaltzy, limp-wristed ooze of a ballad.
Boo.
Hiss. (more…)
Ever since Senator Edward Kennedy died on Tuesday, there’s been a movie playing over and over in my head.
This one’s for the ladies. And the men who enjoy dressing up like ladies.
During their late ’80s/early ’90s heyday, Tribe were arguably as big as the Pixies with the hometown crowd. They frequently sold out shows at the legendary club Avalon (recently converted into a House of Blues, ugh), and would outrank some of the biggest bands in the world in the year-end polls conducted by local modern rock station WFNX. When Tribe scored a record deal with Warner Bros. imprint Slash and convinced noted producer Gil Norton to shepherd their first album Abort (I always wondered if the Pixies had a hand in that), the general consensus was that the band, armed with killer lead single “Joyride (I Saw the Film),” was about to jump to the next level. It never happened. And I’m still not sure why.
The career of a music writer certainly does have its perks. While it very often lacks in financial reward, it occasionally compensates with rewards of a more soul-satisfying sort. Last week was a perfectly good example. Over the course of three nights, I was able to see two of America’s most outstanding and individualistic musicians, in settings as disparate as a small rock n’ roll bar in Asbury Park, and a prestigious concert hall in Boston.
