{"id":5199,"date":"2014-05-23T12:30:38","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T17:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5199"},"modified":"2014-05-23T13:58:56","modified_gmt":"2014-05-23T18:58:56","slug":"rethinking-the-seventies-boston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5199","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking The Seventies: Boston"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s one of the driving forces behind radio station formatting; people tend to become most attached to the music that they heard in adolescence – from about 12 to the early-mid 20s.\u00a0 That’s the time of one’s life when hormone-addled emotions grab and internalize emotional markers for the rest of peoples’ lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Music is, of course, one of the most emotionally immediate art forms.<\/p>\n

And so for the past sixty years, radio stations have banked their economic futures on playing music that resonate with each succeeding demographic group’s musical emotional markers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you’re one of the first wave of Baby Boomers, then, the Beatles were Top Forty radio when you were in your teens and twenties; as you moved through your thirties and forties, they became “classics”.\u00a0 And as you slide toward the tail end of your big-money earning years, they become “Oldies”.\u00a0 And in 10-15 years, you’ll start seeing “nostalgia” stations playing sixties music.<\/p>\n

Presuming music radio still exists, of course.<\/p>\n

But as I’ve noted in this series – at least in re yours truly – there’s a separate emotional motivation – the one that leads to staking out one’s own identity.\u00a0 In my case, it involved seeking out music that everyone at Jamestown High School wasn’t already listening to – at that time, the punk, new wave, and other non-top-40 stuff that was starting to make waves by the mid-late seventies – and eschewing the stuff that was <\/em>popular at the time – the Linda Ronstadts, the Bee Gees, Barry Manilows, Andrew Golds, Eagles, Olivia Newton Johns,\u00a0 Kisses and Bad Companys and Seals and Croftses and whatever else dominated the charts during that post-Watergate, post-Beatles, pre-Reagan era.<\/p>\n

And at the intersection of those two emotional drives was Boston.\u00a0 Or at least their first album.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On the one hand – it was the most perfect example of “corporate rock” of the seventies.\u00a0 You look up “overproduced” in the dictionary, you see a drawing of Tom Scholtz, the group’s founder \/ guitarist \/ keyboarist \/ songwriter \/ dictator \/ superego \/ producer \/ electronic research engineer \/ sole remaining original member.\u00a0 There was not a spontaneous bit of music, or an unaltered natural sound, anywhere on 1976 debut album.\u00a0 It was the product – in both senses of the word – of Scholtz’ manic vision and Epic Records’ marketing plan.\u00a0 And that was the stuff that teenage punks were supposed to eschew up and spit out<\/p>\n

On the other hand?\u00a0\u00a0It was the most perfect<\/em> example of “corporate rock” of the seventies.<\/p>\n

To a generation of kids, discovering the big wide world and out-of-town radio and girls is inextricably\u00a0tied in with Tom Scholtz’ shimmering acoustic guitar; with Barry Goodreau’s\u00a0mega-multi-tracked guitar pyrotechnics; with Brad Delp’s every-bit-as-enhanced-as-Kim-Kardashian’s-butt vocals; above all, with the overall sound, which is no more spontaneous than a meal cooked by a\u00a0molecular gastronomer…<\/p>\n

…and no less\u00a0gloriously perfect.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n