According to Scholz, bassist Fran Sheehan and drummer Sib Hashian, two of the "Johnnies-come-lately" he so disdained, sided with CBS in a bid to force him out of the band. "Presumably," he wrote on Boston.org, "they would get to pick the spoils after the kill and capitalize on the name Boston without me. The apparent zeal with which they testified to help CBS end my career, knowing that I had found them struggling in North Shore bars and handed them this opportunity, was devastating."

After much bickering and maneuvering, Sheehan and Hashian went on to file a suit in the late '80s, claiming they owned 20 percent of the Boston brand. Scholz was livid. As he says now, "These guys came out of nowhere and got taught how to play the songs and they're filthy rich and now they're suing?" Eventually, Scholz settled out of court with his ex-bandmates, who are no longer involved in the music business.

At around the same time Scholz was fighting what he saw as Sheehan and Hashian's plot to hijack Boston, he also had a dispute with guitarist Barry Goudreau who, in 1980, either left the band or was forced out, depending on whom you ask. Either way, Goudreau's departure was a blow for Scholz. The two had attended Led Zeppelin concerts together. Once, when he was between apartments, Goudreau slept in Scholz's dining room for six weeks. They were buddies.

As with many subplots of the Boston melodrama, the details of this one are murky. The contretemps began after Goudreau released a self- titled solo album. Goudreau says Scholz had originally okayed his album but then, when CBS marketed it as a Boston spinoff, aggressively lobbied the label to get it pulled. Scholz says Yetnikoff told him CBS gave up on the disc when it failed to catch fire. Inevitably, litigation followed.

"After about six months, I hadn't heard from Tom and he wasn't return ebony porn ing my phone calls so in order to get things sorted out, I brought a lawsuit against him," says Goudreau, who continues to pursue a relatively low-key musical career. "Looking back, with 20/20 hindsight, I would probably have done things differently. The group was not only my career, it contained my best friends as well."

For his part, Scholz seems to genuinely miss Goudreau, with whom he recently established contact for the first time in roughly 20 years. The legal tussle between the two, he says, stemmed from the fact that "I didn't really want him to go."

SITTING IN HIS Waltham rehearsal studio, surrounded by banks of the equipment he built, Scholz seems a far cry from the man in the mirrored shades photographed on the wing of Boston's branded jet. The white jumpsuits are gone. His hair, while still long, lacks the feathery bounce it had in 1976. A vegetarian, he leads what he calls a "drug-free, natural lifestyle." He seems like a straight-up guy, more so when he talks of the time-consuming meticulousness that so upset his record company.

"There's something in me that drives me to perfection," he says. "I don't know what it is. I don't know why I'm like that. It can hold things up." This bout of introspection fails to impress a disgruntled former colleague. "Paranoia," he says. "Tom's afraid people are trying to take advantage of him financially and in other ways." For his part, Scholz insists he simply refused to be bullied and manipulated by music execs the "cunning and ruthless" people who care more about money than art.

Even as a boy, Scholz harbored a mistrust of men who wield wealth and power. He'd spent most of his childhood in a blue-collar Toledo neighborhood, until his father hit it big in prefab homes. Then the Scholzes moved into the world of prep schools and private golf clubs. "Living in those surroundings," he says, "I realized I had a strong dislike of businessmen. After getting to know some of them, they seemed to have a lack of compassion and were so disingenuous that I developed a dislike of business. It just brings a trembling sneer to my lips."

His experiences with Boston can't have done much to improve Scholz's opinion of businessmen. The pressures piled on him by his record company during nearly a decade of litigation played havoc with his nerves and his finances. By withholding royalties during the protracted legal battle, CBS's Yetnikoff had tried to wear his opponent down. But Scholz who has implied that Yetnikoff's beef with him was "personal" proved to be a scrappy opponent, and a resourceful one.

Scholz has always been a tinkerer. At Polaroid he devised a recording module for cameras. For Boston, he built the device to expand the tonal characteristics of his guitars. His geeky streak paid off when he founded Scholz Research & Development to market some of his sonic gadgets. The most lucrative of these was the Rockman, a portable amplifier that packed the Boston guitar sound into a Walkman-sized box. Musicians bought tens of thousands of them, helping Scholz pay legal bills in the war with CBS that totaled more than $1.7 million.

In 1990, Scholz finally trumped CBS when the breach of contract suit Yetnikoff had brought against him was settled in Scholz's favor. "Goliath lost in a surprising upset," he crowed on Boston.org, "and all who placed their money on the giant lost." But by then he'd already had the ultimate revenge: a big-dollar bonanza with the album Third Stage released in 1986 by his new record company, MCA.

As he'd vowed, Scholz took his time making Boston's third album more than five years but once released it soared to number one and stayed there for four weeks. The single "Amanda" gave the band its first chart-topping hit. Third Stage rapidly joined Boston in the annals of record-sales history, becoming the first compact disc to go gold and eventually selling 4 million copies.

THREE DECADES AFTER their debut album was released, it seems absurd to describe Boston as musical innovators. Punk, grunge, hip-hop, and a slew of other styles have come and gone. Next to the music of, say, Radiohead, the big guitar sound Scholz pioneered sounds kind of hokey. The band's last CD, 2002's Corporate America released eight years after its previous album sold only 138,000 copies.

But one thing has remained constant: the antagonism between Scholz and CBS Records, now owned by Sony. In March, Scholz learned that Sony had remastered Boston and Don't Look Back, adding live tracks from a 1977 radio broadcast, with an eye to re-releasing them. "The albums' sound was horrible," he says. "The live tracks sounded horrendous."

So Scholz made a deal with Sony: He would digitally remaster the original tapes himself, and the record company would remove the live tracks before they were re-released. Nonetheless, a few weeks after we first spoke, Scholz got in touch by e-mail and then phone saying Sony had reneged on their deal and put out "the abortions that they call their reissues of Don't Look Back and Boston." A veteran Sony insider, meanwhile, downplays the incident, describing it as the result of "some miscommunication."

Scholz isn't buying that explanation. "How ironic that the thing most people associate CBS and Boston together with is a huge lawsuit that dragged on for years when they were trying to break me," he
says. "What a fitting way to celebrate the 30th anniversary. Let's start the hostilities up again!"

By Ted Drozdowski

Originally published in Boston Magazine, July 2006.

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