Which is crazier: that trapped-in-time studio shut-in/guitar gizmo inventor Tom Scholz spent six years obsessively tinkering on this antique-on-arrival slab of arena rock atavism, kinda like a guy perfecting the telegraph in the age of rotary phones? Or the fact that said obsessively tinkered-over slab of arena rock atavism went to Number One on the Billboard Charts? Despite the fact that it’s a immaculately lacquered, lovingly polished dud?
Scholz invented a whole new genre—let’s call it technological power pop—with Boston’s eponymous American Bicentennial Year debut, and if you were a wholesome American kid living in a small town it was mind-blowing, a futuristic adventure in high-fi whose cover seemed to foretell exactly where music was headed—namely into space on a guitar-shaped rocket ship with a snow globe on top, inside of which could be found the entire city of Boston.
Boston was sonically streamlined, supermodel-airbrushed, and sounded like a multi-billion dollar product of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I was stunned to discover years later that it only took several thousand dollars to produce. In fact, a rumor went round in my teen social circle that Scholz had to place a sticker on the album saying the guitars were real, because they sounded so like they’d been produced by robots or synthesizers or guys in Level 4 biocontainment suits. That said, I’ve never seen said sticker and I suspect it was just urban legend.
Boston was, we thought, the future of rock, but by the time 1978’s Don’t Look Back came out punk and new wave had changed everything and everyone I knew was humming “Turning Japanese.” Don’t Look Back did just that—it was a glossy AOR representative of an extinct species, and to make matters worse only the title track lived up to the standard of the three songs that made up side one of band’s debut.
And by 1986, when Scholz finally condescended to let Third Stage see the light of day (and I’m guessing the label had to stage a studio invasion to seize the master tapes) Boston was ancient history, their once state-of-the-art guitar rocket ship rusting away in a massive hangar in Area 54. Scholz had gone from H.G. Wells to Marcel Proust, isolated in a cork-lined room, fussily trying to recapture the past.
Third Stage was a rehearsal for Axl Rose’s Chinese Democracy—an indefensibly protracted foray into irrelevancy. And in both cases—and there are others, like the Stone Roses—anti-climax was built into the lengthy timeline. Nothing short of another Pet Sounds could have justified the time expended. In the case of Third Stage, the quality of the songs is in inverse protection to the time it took to produce them. One can only imagine how bad this album would be if he’d spent twice the time producing it.
Third Stage is a toothless foray into bland AOR mediocrity. You won’t find a “More Than a Feeling” or “Peace of Mind” or “Don’t Look Back” on Third Stage. What you will find are soggy power ballads and a few rockers that lack the forward thrust that propelled the ditties on board that guitar spaceship on the cover of Boston into indispensable staples of classic rock radio. There’s a bit of power and some lowest-common-denominator pop but there’s no power pop and nary a single bong-ready, high-quality teen anthem. Love it or hate it, Boston’s debut was a touchstone of seventies youth culture—how “More Than a Feeling” didn’t make it onto the Dazed and Confused soundtrack is beyond me. Listening to some albums is work, and Third Stage comes dangerously close to having a day job.
“Amanda” was the album’s only hit, and no wonder—a power ballad this archetypally bland had no choice but to climb to the top of the charts. Brad Delp’s multi-tracked vocals, the band’s trademark intermixture of acoustic and electric guitars, the big electric guitar crescendo, and the undeniably pretty melody have that “Boston sound” but none of that Boston punch, and what you’re left with is a Right Coast equivalent of Jefferson Starship’s corporate yawn-inducer “Jane.”
“We’re Ready” is a subpar stab at the power pop of songs like “Don’t Look Back,” but it works too hard—it has too many stops and starts to build up a head of steam, and too many wussified moments to pack a solid punch. Like the Raspberries, Boston (at their best) united Beach Boys harmonies and hard rock guitar crunch, but on this one they don’t quite get the formula right. Great power pop songs sound effortless—you can practically smell the perspiration on this one.
The tripartite “The Launch” is an abortive attempt to reproduce Boston’s “Foreplay/Long Time,” with its progressive rock intro followed by the hard-rocking second part. The trouble is that “The Launch” is a lead-up to nothing, unless you count “Cool the Engines,” which we’ll get to in a moment. Part A, “Countdown,” is a poor piece of sustained theater organ do-nothing and a waste of a minute of your life. Part B, “Ignition,” is neo-classical heavy metal guitar grandiosity, Wagner for drug-addled teens and a bad parody of Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend.” As for part C, I’ve yet to find it, but I suspect it’s the very brief and very spacy coda, which is undoubtedly the reason Scholz listed “unidentified flying objects” on his list of contributions to the album (along with “ignition” and “thunderstorms”!).
“Cool the Engines” is the LP’s only certifiable hard rocker, and that tells you everything you need to know about the album’s failure. And by Boston’s early standards “Cool the Engines” is but a slightly above average (at best) hard rocker, and totally devoid of the anthemic value that keep people coming back to songs like “More Than a Feeling.” Cool the engines? How’s a red-blooded teen, bursting to explode, supposed to relate to a fuddy-duddy sentiment like that? It’s something your mom would say. “Go All the Way,” now there’s a sentiment a teen could get on board with. Scholz may as well have called the song, “Now Let’s Take a Moment and Think a Moment Before We Do Anything Rash, Kids.”
“My Destination” is electric piano ballad dreck, and Scholz’s electric guitar stylings and Delp’s deep feelings can’t save it. “A New World” is thirty-six seconds of electric guitar/organ bombast and an introduction of sorts to the infernal shlock und dreck of “To Be a Man,” which is basically Dan Hill with metal guitars.
“I Think I Like It” is a decent cut, but despite its likeable melody and on-and-off sonic crunch it doesn’t quite make the classic rock radio cut. The sentiment’s timeless enough—it has the same emotional vapidity that didn’t stop “More Than a Feeling” from becoming a classic—but despite it’s relative lightweight construction it never quite takes flight. If that monstrous guitar-shaped spaceship can travel to distant solar systems with Beantown on its back, why can’t this one?
“Can’tcha Say (You Believe in Me)/Still in Love” is supersized, pompous and anthemic, and the more I think about that “anthemic” could well make it the best song on the album, because unlike “Cool the Jets” its cliches have a universal appeal and it packs an emotional punch, and emotions are all Delp brought to the table. Heartfelt, that was the guy’s superpower, and he sounds it on this one. The song finds a middle ground between power ballad and power pop, which is to say it’s too sprightly to be a ballad and not powerful enough to pop.
Which brings us to the unobjectionable power ballad “Hollyann,” which boasts a gorgeous melody and sounds like The Beach Boys on steroids. It’s your basic Boston formula—quieter acoustic guitar passages give way to monster guitar riffs which give way to bombast, and then back come the acoustic guitars while Delp pours out his heart like maple syrup on a stack of pancakes. The problem with the song is it never develops any momentum, and sounds seriously over-thought. Simplicity is the lifeblood of great power pop, even if the simplicity is pure slight of hand. You get the sense Scholz labored over this one for, well, six years.
If Third Stage “mattered” to diehard classic rock fans with rearguard tendencies who never got the memo, the truly amazing thing is that 1994’s Walk On, which ALSO took six years to hit the record stores and didn’t even have Brad Delp on it, also “mattered” to said fans (it made it to No. 7 on the Billboard charts). Which just goes to show you that there are those who remain true to their school (which is kinda heartwarming) long after they should have dropped out and gotten real jobs. My friends and I truly thought Boston were the future of rock. But then we thought the same thing about Devo, Elvis Costello, and hardcore. When all along the future of rock was Von Lmo!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
