Author Brendan Borrell’s book, Power Soak: Invention, Obsession, And The Pursuit Of The Perfect Sound, is available now.
Description: In the 1970s, Tom Scholz built Boston’s sound in his basement, fusing engineering precision with soaring melody to create the clean, explosive style that made “More Than A Feeling” a hit. His studio inventions spread to Journey, Def Leppard, and The Cars, bringing his signature guitar tone to many of the defining albums of the time.
But when Scholz refused to hand over his own record, Third Stage, until it met his exacting standards, CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff declared war. Royalties were cut off. Lawsuits piled up. The band splintered. And Scholz sank further into isolation. Then two rival power brokers—Irving Azoff and David Geffen—entered the fray, racing to pry loose Boston’s long-awaited album, which would become one of the last blockbusters of the classic-rock era.
Power Soak reveals the full inside story of this battle for the first time. Drawing on thousands of pages of court filings, internal CBS documents, and new interviews, journalist Brendan Borrell reveals how Scholz pushed back against the major-label power structure and helped arm artists with new tools in their struggle for creative control.
American analyst and critic, Bob Lefsetz, said in his review, “Forget the autobiographies, forget most of the writing about this business. Power Soak is the real story.”
From The Author:
I. The Dungeon
The trees around Boston were bare sticks scraping at the gray sky. The ground was frozen and brown. The weather outside didn’t matter much to Tom Scholz as he ducked his lanky frame into his underground studio in the city’s western suburbs and was met by a familiar whiff of mildew and lead solder. His studio was a dim warren of compartments: one for the workbench, another for the drums, a third for the mixing table. His wife Cindy called it his “dungeon.”
Scholz’s long, straight hair hung past his shoulders, framing a face as controlled as his music. At thirty-three, the founder of the band Boston didn’t move like a rock star, more like a lab tech: always adjusting, always listening. He picked up his guitar, a Gibson Goldtop Les Paul Standard, and eased into a chair in the control room. His fingers rode the frets. Scholz never felt entirely comfortable with the instrument. Piano had come first, and it was only in his twenties, while studying mechanical engineering at MIT, that he became determined to teach himself guitar—and to create a sound all his own.
Even if you don’t remember Boston, you likely know the band’s smash hit, “More Than a Feeling.” It’s hard to resist. The handclaps start, the power chords kick in, and suddenly you’re drumming the air and belting out the words of the chorus. Scholz’s brand of hard rock was more melodic than Led Zeppelin, less menacing than Black Sabbath, and was driven by a guitar tone so pure it sounded like it had been born inside a star.
Laying down track atop track during six years of toil, Scholz invented a sonic toolbox that shaped a new breed of late 70s arena-rock stars. The band’s self-titled album, Boston, released on August 26, 1976, became the best-selling debut in history and the biggest geyser of cash Scholz’s label, Epic Records, a division of CBS, had ever seen.
After the hurried release of a follow-up, Scholz sank under the weight of superstardom. He had problems with his band, problems with his label, and problems with himself. Two years had passed since that second album, and it wasn’t yet clear when he would emerge from his creative hibernation, or if he ever would.
Scholz plugged in his guitar and flipped on his Marshall amplifier, which fed into a homebuilt device with a volume knob in front: his Power Soak. This was an electric muffler that allowed him to max out the amp and create the distortion he wanted without waking the neighbors or wrecking his ears. Nothing like it existed on the market—or at least nothing that worked.
Scholz strummed a few chords from a new song called “Tomorrow” and then stopped cold. Whether the hang-up lay in the chord progression or the bridge or something else is uncertain. He has only described his frustration during this period in general terms. He would change it up and try again. Struggle with it for hours. And hours. And hours.
Songwriting was like safe-cracking for Scholz. Every false note was a failed combination. Scholz was so wrapped up in this process—the complexity of it all—that some songs he recorded in the studio couldn’t be reproduced live.
As a boy, Scholz had been drawn to Rachmaninoff, the Russian composer known for his technically challenging pieces, who once fell into three years of silence he compared to a stroke. Scholz knew that kind of paralysis. The music floated in his head, whispering just beyond his consciousness, but he couldn’t get the notes or words right. Math and physics had been easy for him; art, not so much. Maybe that’s why he kept pursuing it.
He set his guitar down, defeated. Only the amp’s low hum broke the silence. A mess of cables lay coiled on the floor.
Scholz wanted his music to be upbeat and inspiring, and he knew there was no way he could pull it off in this sorry state. The thing that undid him was all the paperwork he had signed years earlier, contracts that let someone else stand between him and his own royalties and that locked Boston into a commitment that he had no hope of ever fulfilling.
Scholz thought he understood the depth of the hole he was in. What he didn’t realize that snowless winter of 1980, was how long he would spend digging his way out.
Fourteen years later, at noon on May 6, 1994, he took a seat under the fluorescent lights of a conference room in Boston’s financial district. He was there for a deposition, reliving the wreckage of the worst decade of his life. His hair still fell long and dark, but his face had aged. His crow’s feet and the deep bags under his eyes told the story better than he could. Across from him sat his attorney, Don Engel, who had been through it all with him and whose own hair had turned white along the way.
A lawyer—yet one more lawyer hired by CBS—asked the questions. “What is your occupation, Mr. Scholz?” the lawyer asked.
“Songwriter, part-time musician, and engineer,” Scholz said.
“You’re more modest than some. I saw a contract the other day signed by Ozzy Osbourne. He described his occupation as ‘rock god.’”
“I am only a disciple,” Scholz replied.
The lawyer then mentioned Walter Yetnikoff, once considered the most powerful man in the industry and the president of CBS Records when Boston signed its first recording contract. “How would you describe your relationship with Mr. Yetnikoff during that period of time?” the lawyer asked.
“You mean what did I think it was, or what was it really?”
“What did you think it was?”
“I thought he was my closest friend in the music business.”
“That changed when he sued you?”
“You could say that.”
