Album Review: "Boston" by Boston [Debut]

NOTE:  This article originally appeared in Tiny Mixtapes Gone to Heaven Boston self-titled CBS/EPIC, 1976 rating: 7.2 reviewer: rather ripped Listening to Boston's eponymous first album makes my mind rocket through a million pathways, a million different selves. Like other period pieces like The Beatles' Abbey Road or U2's Boy, it has the power to instantly propel me back to a once jealously guarded inner world rich with its own atmosphere, like a Lost World of the Self. One of the reasons I find this particular album, even in my most cynical moments, to be as awe-inspiring and uplifting as it is ridiculous, pompous and overblown, is that it is a completely blank slate. There's nothing thematically in it, either tonally or lyrically, that is patently disagreeable. Its universality, like an unmarked piece of paper, makes it a palimpsest for any listening ear, a screen on which the individual might project their deepest dreams and wishes if they chose. Or nothing at all. It's about freedom and its tensor opposite, the desire to be loved. It's about what Van Morrison called the inarticulate speech of the heart. And, in songs rich with perhaps unintentional irony that span an emotional spectrum from ecstasy ["Smokin'", Side 2, Track 2] to suicide ["Hitch a Ride", Side 2, Track 3], at the heart it's about getting stoned, getting laid, driving around in muscle  cars and playing in a rock and roll band. It's about the American Dream circa  1976, or the global capitalist dream of now. It seems unlikely at best to imagine anyone in our present day and age to expect  rock and roll music to elicit love ["Rock and Roll Band", side 2, track 1], much less going to a rock and roll concert expecting to find it. People no longer go to concerts to listen to church organs and be transported to some orgone plateau, or to have their mind expanded. Rather, they go to have their deepest prejudices confirmed. Perhaps this has always been the case, and anecdotal evidence to the contrary are representative of nothing more than nostalgia-saturated remnants of a bygone era that never was. Perhaps, to quote one veteran 30-something musician, "The past is just a retro version of the same old bullshit." But the way we felt was real. The feelings may have been adolescent, even pubescent, but they were genuine. It's easy to fake a memory of a chain of events, particularly to support a cherished ideal of a past self, but it's harder to fake an emotion. Somehow, inscrutably, this album manages to evoke those feelings. We laugh at the middle-aged golf club members on an episode of HBO's The Sopranos, getting down to "More Than A Feeling" [Side 1, Track 1], but we wince because we have done exactly the same thing, perhaps even turning it up on the car radio and rolling down the windows at red lights to let the world know. It's a felt-memory that transports us faultlessly back to our youth and as such brooks no shame or social remorse. The problems begin when I check in with others who share a history with this music, who report no feelings at all--that is if we're even on speaking terms. In fact,  most of them are just the kind of idiots I always hated and avoided in school and after. Maybe it's because at the time I was too young to get high, just old enough  to really dig and get inside the songs themselves; meanwhile, these other people were too stoned and/or stupid to feel ANYTHING deeply, other than (perhaps) an erection. The splendidly blank slate reflects nothing to a blank person. Conversely, many people whose opinion I respect claim in open discourse to have never liked this album, although I know for a fact that this is not the case in several specific instances. Either they no longer allow it to move them as they once did, or they refuse to admit that it still can. It instead lies consigned to the dubious honor of the much-touted "guilty pleasure", as if these songs were tantamount to such inexplicable Vaudevillian "entertainments" as Kiss, the Osmonds or the Village People. These same hypocrites are perfectly willing to admit to feelings of nostalgia for the music of Tom Petty, or even AC/DC--they merely deny feeling a connection to this particular album because it is decidedly within the "feel-good" oeuvre, and as such holds no truck with the bohemian pseudo-intelligentsia hipoisie. Pop music's deeply personal experiential qualities are self-evident to the point of cliché. It is the ultimate you-had-to-be-there generational experience, that is if you count generations like I do--not in blocks of 30 years, as in a pro-creational generation, but rather in blocks of 4 years, like high school, the average baccalaureate track, or a standard military tour of duty--the only measurement of time that matters to the young, at the time they formulate the part of their identity that responds to music. Therefore, for example, I perceive the Jam, the Clash, Elvis Costello, U2, Wire, and Black Uhuru to be the music of my generation; while Boston, Thin Lizzy, Bad Company and AC/DC are the music of the generation before me, and the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Oingo Boingo are of the generation after. And as we moved on to college, my generation embraced REM, the Meat Puppets, Husker Du, the Replacements, and the Soft Boys, while the generation behind us were struggling with Huey Lewis, latter-day Starship and Journey, and the generation ahead of us made do (quite admirably) with Prince, the Pixies and Sonic Youth. Eventually I found that my generation settled down with local bands no one had ever heard of, usually comprised of friends of theirs, that recorded one or two independent albums and then broke up; the generation behind mine settled down and enjoyed Robert Cray; and the one ahead seemed barely to distinguish between only slightly varying permutations of the next big thing. Perhaps one's perceptions of generations in front or behind become blurred with increasing age. It's only 4 years difference, but it's enough to make me think I'm cooler. Even if our record collections overlap as much as 75%. It could be what one might call the Older Brother bias. Boston was one of the cassettes that was blasted in my big brother's Ford Capri while we rocketed down the back roads of our grandparents' Southwestern Washington cow town, along with Steve Miller, Blue Oyster Cult, and Detective (featuring present day television actor Michael Des Barres, one of the bands that was signed to Led Zeppelin's ill-fated and well-named Swan Song vanity label). It was the soundtrack of a short period of naiveté and brutality in the aesthetic history of rock music and of America that is well catalogued in the inexplicable prolificacy of "Classic Rock" stations around the country, and is consistently denied, repudiated, pissed upon, and then slavishly crawled back to by succeeding generations of musicians. Johnny Rotten himself rebounded from driving the stake through Classic Rock's rotten heart with the Sex Pistols, to exhuming it shamelessly in such recordings as "Rise" with PIL and "The Animal" with Golden Palominos. It is a music that perhaps deserves derision as much as it deserves careful study. Boston's first album is perhaps the pinnacle of that era's exposition, with its melodic borrowings from Mozart, its soaring 50's doo-wop-inspired harmonies, and its brazen lyrical dedication to 70's mellowness: "I understand about indecision/But I don't care about gettin' behind/People livin' in competition/All I want is to have my peace of mind" ("Peace of Mind", Side 1, Track 2). Whether we rage against the machinery of such music or allow ourselves to be guided by its voice, we are both ways in its debt. 1. More Than a Feeling 2. Peace of Mind 3. Foreplay/Long Time 4. Rock and Roll Band 5. Smokin' 6. Hitch a Ride 7. Something About You 8. Let Me Take You Home Tonight