Jeb: Going way back in time, I heard you started out playing keyboards.
Tom: I learned piano when I was a kid but I didn t do much with it. When I was in college, I started banging around for my own amusement. At some point I bought an electric piano and a little organ. I got in a band at the dorm. Being in the first band I was in is what inspired me to play the guitar. I knew what I wanted to hear the guitar player do and I wasn t hearing it. I went out and bought a twenty-five dollar really bad Japanese guitar. I started learning how to play and in a few months I was able to play rhythm guitar.
Jeb: You wrote and recorded the entire first album in your basement but it is not like you didn t have a bright future. Back when you were in your basement you had a nice job as an engineer.
Tom: I did. In 1974, I basically blew all of my money. I had been working for five years at that point and I took all of the money and spent it on recording equipment that was good enough to record the demos that landed the Epic Records deal. I had been bumming around playing in local bands that didn t have a future. I even started a couple of bands but they didn t play the music that became the music I wrote with BOSTON. I knew that I was going nowhere unless I started doing what I knew I could do and started doing it myself. I knew that all I would ever do was play once and a while in a club and have no one really listen to the music. I quit playing with bands at that point and I set up in my basement and I went to work. Out of that came "Peace of Mind," "Rock n Roll Band," "Hitch a Ride" and "Don t Be Afraid." It was completely done by my drummer friend Jim Masdea and myself. I played all of the instruments and by doing that I could finally get everything that I was imagining and hearing. I could experiment and find the sounds that I needed. I was never able to do that when I tried to work with other musicians. That was the turning point. It was the old adage, "If you want it done right then do it yourself." I knew that if it failed then I would have no one to blame but myself.
It was a huge gamble. I was married at the time and that money was supposed to be for a down payment on a house and I spent it all. It was very uncomfortable. I knew that Brad could do all of the singing and that he would do an awesome job. He did even better than I imagined. He came in after I had all of the instrumental tracks oddly enough I heard years later that Brad did not realize that when he was just singing to me playing a bunch of overdubbed tracks. He thought there had been a band. He wasn t there for the recording of the instruments it was just me and the tape deck.
Jim and I would work out the drum lines and then I would record. Brad did the same thing with the vocals. He would try different things and I would push the buttons. We finished it up the following year with "More Than a Feeling" and "Something About You" and that is when we got the deal. Five of those six songs were on the first BOSTON album. I think it is very hard for people to get their head around the idea that this band was actually some guys overdubbing in a basement. They like to think that a band plays together and hangs out and writes songs and gets a contract and goes into the studio and then they jam out in the studio and an album comes out of that. This was not like that at all. It was many, many years of long nights playing along with a tape deck.
Jeb: The record company wanted you to re-record everything.
Tom: And I did but the funny thing is that they thought that it was being re-recorded by a real producer in a studio somewhere. The only difference is that Sib Hashian played the drum tracks on those versions. I did the exact same thing, I went back to work and I played all of the parts myself. When you hear "More Than a Feeling" that is a couple of weeks of me relaying the guitar tracks down just the way I did on the demos. Brad did the same thing with the vocals. It was done entirely just like the original but the record company didn t know it. There was another producer named John Boylan. I have to give John enormous credit because I told him that the only way I was going to do this was if I could do it in my basement. I told him I was not going to LA and do it in some studio because I knew it wouldn t work. He was the chosen producer and he didn t want to lose the deal. He told me to record it in my basement and then bring it to LA and we will mix it. He said, "You do that and we will split the producer s royalty." I was ready to say yes before he said he would split the producers royalty I was just thrilled to be getting paid to do this.
Jeb: It had to be great handing it over to the record company knowing that you did it your way.
Tom: They still didn t know it then. They didn t know it until the CBS lawsuit a few years later. I think that was part of the misconception on their part. They thought they could force an album out before I was finished with it. They were trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. I am sure that they did not know that all those records they had released were made in my basement. They thought they were holding the purse strings to me for recording when the machine was in my basement [laughter]. I knew as long as I could keep the machines running and put tape on them and keep food on the table then I could record pretty much forever.
Jeb: During the court case were you still writing songs?
Tom: We had gone on a horrible tour in 1978-79. We played BOSTON songs and I loved playing on stage but it was horrible. It was long and when I got off the road I wasn t sure that I wanted to ever go on tour again. Brad told me that he didn t ever want to go on tour. I was going to hang it up and just record. I took a little time off after Don t Look Back. I was drained. I was more than drained, I was demoralized. I wasn t sure I wanted to be in the music business. I didn t like what I had seen. Brad and I had made a lot of money for a lot of people and I didn t like what they were doing. I began to feel guilty about enabling people to do things that I didn t approve of. I considered leaving music altogether and going back to being an engineer.
In the early 80's I realized that if I could do something and then channel money into hands that would do something good then that would be great. It was a revelation. I shouldn t quit. If I had quite then I knew that everyone who was into BOSTON or inspired by BOSTON I don t mean to toot my own horn but music was intended to be inspirational and to make people feel better in some way. I thought that I would lose that if I quit. I decided to try to make it as successful as it could be and I decided to do something good with the money. In the back of my mind that is when the idea for a charitable foundation started. The album came out in 1986 and was a huge success. The foundation was born. Eventually, I won the CBS case, which freed up an enormous amount of money.
Jeb: I heard they withheld your royalty payments during that time.
Tom: I basically got pennies on the dollar and they had most of it. I was living in a teeny little house. I was happy but I certainly was not well off. All of a sudden all this money came from CBS and the foundation did very well.
Jeb: Lesser men would have allowed the pressure to cave them in.
Tom: I am sure that is what they expected. CBS beat up on a lot of people back then. But that is me; I am stupidly rebellious. It is just like the whole Corporate Rock thing that started a few years later that really bugged me. Here is a guy that wrote songs and fought every record company he was ever with and fought ever manager he ever had and who didn t make a ton of money because he was trying to make some good records in his basement how can you slap a corporate label on him? How can you pick that band to put that label on? How can anybody who has been in so much trouble with so many giant corporations be called Corporate Rock?
Jeb: Set the record straight: Barry Goudreau made a solo album during the time the court case was going on. You have been accused of going to Epic and talking them into not to support the album.
Tom: Not true. That is ridiculous. Goudreau separated on reasonablely good terms with me at the time. There may have been some sour grapes because it really didn t happen for him. He made numerous albums and I was at odds with CBS for all of the albums so I don t think that excuse holds water. Knowing what you know about record companies back then I think you know there isn t a record executive on the face of the earth who would miss a chance to sell records from any source and make money.
Jeb: I heard you didn t like Don t Look Back.
Tom: The album wasn t done. I don t dislike the album; we play most of those songs when we go out on tour. The album was only twenty-nine minutes; it had to be the shortest album that was released in 1979. I think it was the record company and management working together. I drew the line at that point. I could see all these people around me making lots of money. I was putting in most of the time and recording most of the tracks myself. All of the BOSTON records have been done like the demos.
That really annoyed me. It is one thing to do most of the work I was engineering it, producing it, providing the studio, writing the songs and recording all of the parts. I wasn t necessarily getting paid for all of that. That was one thing but it was another thing to truncate my creative possibilities by deciding that we were going to stop now because they could make the most money if it was released now. It was not done. I made a mental note to self that said that I was not going to do this again.
Jeb: Changing the subject, back in the early days BOSTON used to get slagged about their live sound.
Tom: It wasn t that good. I think this tour will be the best one ever but I think it got progressively better every tour. It wasn t that great back in the day. It was thirty years ago and I don t think anyone was doing things as well then as they are now. I think back in the Seventies the audience was so stoned that they didn t know if we were even playing or not. We were following on the heels of "More Than a Feeling" and "Don t Look Back." We were just excited to be there live on stage because the songs were so successful.
In 87 we had Third Stage and that was much more difficult music. The entire band was on the album. We had turned a corner for performing at that point. We had some good vocalists and some extremely confident musicians on stage. It was the start of being technically really good live as opposed to being really good in the studio. I don t want to take anything away from the guys who recorded in the Seventies; they are all very good musicians but it was a different time. Nobody really paid attention to what the sound was like in front of house. You basically plugged in your amp and wailed away. Unfortunately, some of the tapes I have heard sound like that. There were some very good moments. By no means do I think it was a slacker of a job. We worked hard at getting ready for those shows. It is just that I have learned a lot over the last thirty years.
Jeb: Third Stage saw Gary Pihl come into the band as well.
Tom: He made a huge difference. To be honest with you, he is the reason there is a BOSTON today. I would not have gone out on the road again after Third Stage but Gary talked me into it. Brad and Gary pulled things together and reassembled a rhythm section by themselves. I showed up for the first rehearsal and they had already gone through the basics with them. At ebony porn that point my back was hurting really bad and there was only so much I could do physically.
That was an amazing tour. I have never seen crowds like that. We set record attendance at stadiums. We played shows at a venue near Boston and we set the record with nine shows in a row that were all sold out. We had a long set and we did all of the sounds that were on the album including all the harmonies and harmony guitars. We did it all and it was really neat. It was a technical and an artistic success.
Jeb: Was Third Stage about entering adulthood?
Tom: It is a lot more than adulthood. Adulthood is about being old enough to drink, have sex and get married. It is a different thing. I considered it the next step when you are supposed to get a better car and buy a house according to this plan, which isn t really what s important in life. The intent with the Third Stage message is when you cross over that point and really realize what is going on around you and that the rest of the inhabitants of the earth is what is important.
Jeb: Third Stage had to be satisfying for you as a come back.
Tom: Part of the whole trauma of going through that period of the 80's is that I had to beat an injunction to release an album. They tried to block the release of Third Stage. I had to beat the lawsuit to even see anything from it. I had run up incredible legal fees for the defense. It was an enormously high risk much bigger than using your down payment money to buy a house.
Jeb: I wanted to comment on Downers Revenge. You put out a song and didn t let anyone know it was BOSTON, instead saying the band was Downers Revenge.
Tom: Alternative was taking over the internet as the method of delivery. The song "Corporate America" is one of my few songs that has something to say that is critical to the point, and while it is not uplifting, it is important. I wanted to get that out there. It was shocking to see what happened. It was the number one download at the time. The album sold very poorly. Artemis [BOSTON S record company at the time] was becoming inept from their own problems.
I am in the process of, and have actually re-recorded and re-mixed some of the tracks. That is one of the songs that I am planning to re-release with the new album. I am going to have several of the songs on there from Corporate America. I am glad you mentioned that song because it is one of my favorites from the standpoint of the message. People in this country, and around the world, are starting to feel the effects of keeping their eye off of Corporate America. We had better start paying attention; it may be too late now.
Jeb: Last one: Has anyone ever told you that you are too damn smart for your own good?
Tom: I used to be very smart but I am not that smart anymore. I am just right now.
by Jeb Wright