I loveI love weird stories from the music business. Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson is also an airline pilot: he flew Boeing 757s as a captain for a British charter airline, and on the Flight 666 tour he sat in the cockpit and flew the band, the crew and the gear himself, from one continent to the next. Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello has a degree in political science from Harvard, and his first job after graduation was in the office of a US senator. Offspring singer Dexter Holland was working on a PhD in molecular biology when Smash came out in 1994 and became the best-selling independent record of all time. He put the thesis in a drawer, went back to the lab almost twenty years later, and got his doctorate in 2017, with a dissertation on HIV.
Still, there are weird stories, and then there is another level of weirdness. The one I want to tell you is the utmost level. And it says something about the world we live in, which is fast, prototype-driven, and convinced that one of the best predictors of success is the capacity to execute quickly without thinking too much. Ship it, fix it later. This story is exactly the opposite.
In the late sixties there was a young engineer with an MIT degree called Tom Scholz. Bachelor’s and master’s in mechanical engineering, then a job at Polaroid as a product designer, working on instant movie cameras. He was also a guitarist, and he had a problem: he could hear the record he wanted to make, and nobody around him could make it. So he built a studio in his basement, a tiny space next to the furnace that flooded from time to time, filled it with gear he mostly designed himself, and started recording after work. He would record for hours, then erase, then record again, then throw the tape away. He once admitted, “I’ve spent six months making a recording of a song that I’ve thrown out.”
Six years went by like this. Six years of demos, mailed to record companies and mailed back. According to the legend, RCA, Capitol, Atlantic and Elektra all said no. At some point he spent the money he had saved for the down payment on a house on a used twelve-track tape machine. Then, in his words: “I had enough money for one last demo and sent it off to 24 companies, then figured I’d sit back and wait for the rejection letters.” That last demo is the one that worked. Epic reconsidered, and in 1975 he got a contract.
The story could end here, but the best part comes next. The label wanted the demo re-recorded properly, in a real studio in Los Angeles. Scholz refused, because the demo was the record. So the producer, John Boylan, arranged what has been described as one of the most complex corporate capers in the history of the music business. The singer and the second guitarist went to Los Angeles and recorded vocals and one song at Capitol Studios, so that the label had something to visit. Meanwhile Scholz stayed in his basement in Watertown, Massachusetts, and rebuilt the entire album from scratch, playing most of the instruments himself, with the same method and the same equipment as the demo. The whole thing cost a few thousand dollars. A comparable record at the time cost hundreds of thousands.
That basement tape is the first album by Boston, released in August 1976. Gold in three weeks, platinum in three months, seventeen times platinum in the United States, something like twenty million copies worldwide. For years it was the best-selling debut album in American history, until Appetite for Destruction passed it. More Than a Feeling, the song you have heard a thousand times in bars, films and stadiums, was recorded on a hundred-dollar Yamaha acoustic and a Les Paul, in a room next to a furnace. Six years of work for a demo, and the demo went to number three on Billboard.
Now, albums can take a long time. Def Leppard’s Hysteria took forty-three months, with a drummer who lost an arm less than a year in and a producer, Mutt Lange, who built every part one layer at a time. Hotel California took most of 1976, two false starts at the Record Plant in Los Angeles and then Miami, take after take, and the title track alone was stitched together by the producer with thirty-three edits on the master tape. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk took more than a year, in a studio built for the occasion, and cost about 1.4 million dollars, the most expensive rock album ever made at the time, marching band included. But these are stories of perfectionism when you already have a label, a budget, a studio, a producer, and a hit on the radio. In all those cases we are speaking of bands already capable of selling out arenas and stadiums. Scholz did his perfectionism at the beginning, for six years, on a demo, as an unknown, with a day job, while the letters kept coming back with a no. That is a different animal. By the way, when he finally had the label and the budget, he did it again: the third Boston album arrived eight years after the second, in 1986, with a twenty-million-dollar lawsuit from CBS in the middle, because he would not hand over a record he was not happy with. He won the lawsuit. And the record went to number one.
So why the demo? Endless procrastination? The MIT approach, where nothing leaves the lab before the tolerances are right? Probably a bit of both. And I love this story very much, maybe because I see a little bit of myself in him, despite not having an MIT degree and not being an engineer. It reminds me of an old Chinese saying, the kind you hear in every martial arts school: “one minute on the stage, ten years off it”. Nobody should see you practice. You train in silence, for years, in a room where nobody claps, and one day you show up and people think you were born like that. Scholz did his ten years in Watertown, with the door closed. Then he showed up with More Than a Feeling.
Today the rule runs backwards. People who cannot play or sing post their videos on Instagram and Youtube every day. Startups take orders for products they have not built yet, and some of them get funded on the strength of a landing page created with Claude. I understand the concept: you get market feedback, you get delivery, you ship. And I am aware of the fact that every lean manual tells you that this is the only sane way to work. But Scholz would have failed every one of those tests. Six years without a customer, without a launch, without a single reel. What if the truth were the opposite? What if the years nobody sees are the product, and the reel is just the receipt?
We are told that speed wins. Most days it does. But somewhere in Massachusetts there was a man who spent six years alone in a basement, next to a furnace, listening to the same eight bars until they were right, and fifty years later people are still singing them. Attention has its own economics, and it pays slowly.
P.S. There is an added part of the story I find most lovely, and it is about awareness. Like me, Scholz loved using 100-watt Marshalls at ear-splitting volume. The difference is that I love the feeling of my jeans shaking in front of the cabinet, and he did not. He loved the sound, and he hated the ear-splitting part. So, being an engineer, he built a box. He called it the Power Soak: a device that sits between the amp head and the speaker, soaks up the watts, and lets a Marshall run flat out while the room stays livable. He founded a company to sell it, and a couple of years later followed it with the Rockman, a headphone amplifier the size of a Walkman that Jeff Beck bought, and Mutt Lange used all over Hysteria (yep… the album I mentioned before). It is often said that the engineer who spent six years on a demo ended up making more money from that little box than from his own records. What a cherry on top…
