Sep 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Dan Daley

In 1976, mainstream American rock was making the transition from blues-based proto-metal to what would become a decade-and-a-half's worth of power pop. It was an era when the recording of the pistons of rock - guitars and drums - made the transition from a crude craft to a true science, as guitar sounds began to receive the kind of data processing heretofore reserved for NASA telemetry.

"More Than A Feeling," the first single from Boston's eponymous debut album, hit the airwaves that autumn (making it to Number 5), and acted as a pivot in this transition, combining some of the ebullience of the rock era's early days with the precision and technology that would mark rock record productions from then on. That song and album also set benchmarks for the record business. Boston became the best-selling pop debut effort in history, a title it held for a decade before it was supplanted by Whitney Houston's first album. It ultimately sold 16 million copies in the process of creating a reference point for production values and studio technology that would stand for years.

Not surprisingly, the group's main muse - guitarist and songwriter Tom Scholz - was an interesting blend of Brian Wilson and Albert Einstein. The M.I.T. graduate was working for Polaroid when he hooked up with vocalist Brad Delp and his local rock band. Though Scholz signed on as a keyboardist, he also began learning guitar, and his quick mastery of the instrument soon allowed him to take full control of the band. Scholz's innate technical wizardry allowed him to build one of the first project studios, a 12-track Scully recorder/Dan Flickinger console affair where the band recorded demos that led to their signing by Epic in 1975 and which served as the basis of much of the first album's tracks.

When producer John Boylan was brought into the picture, "More Than a Feeling" and most of the songs on the debut record were just about completed. Boylan, who had previously produced records for Linda Ronstadt, Brewer & Shipley, Pure Prairie League and Roger McGuinn, was contacted by old friend Paul Ahern, who along with local promotion manager Charlie McKenzie, had recently formed a company to manage Boston and were in search of a deal. "The band had been turned down by several labels already, including Epic," Boylan recalls. "Up to that point, Tom [Scholz] had been sending tapes to record companies over the transom, sending them in cold. He needed someone who knew the business and was conversely known by it. Paul was an old friend I'd met through my connection with Linda, and I liked Charlie's flamboyant style of promotion - he would send telegrams to radio stations asking them to play his songs."

Boylan came to Boston and listened to Scholz's 12-track tapes. "I loved it and wanted to work with it," he says. "I knew what was wrong with the recordings immediately: Tom was an obvious genius, but he didn't know how to record acoustic instruments. The drums and acoustic guitars were amateurish, but the guitars sounded amazing."

Scholz's Scully 12-track had a linear-restoration circuit built in, which could restore the uppermost transient lost in the analog circuitry. It seemed to Boylan that some of the sharpness of Scholz's genius came from his own conflict with analog and digital audio technology. "Tom knew what digital technology was capable of," Boylan recalls. "The first Eventide sampler was out then, though it had a terrible sampling rate. But Tom would then invent analog devices to do what the digital boxes were trying to do. His first doubler was actually an analog bucket-brigade device."

Bringing Boylan to the project, along with management, completed the team that Boston needed to get a major-label deal, and the band signed with Epic, though not before the label, responding to rumors that the "band" was actually a mad genius at work in a basement, asked to see them perform. "They needed to see some bodies on a stage, and they quickly added a live drummer [Sib Hashian] and bassist [Fran Sheehan] to the core of Scholz, vocalist Brad Delp and Goudreau.

When Boylan arrived in Boston in early 1976, he found Scholz still working at Polaroid, deeply involved in a pet project for company founder Edward Land, developing an instant-movie camera, a project Scholz confided to Boylan that he felt would never work, and despite the millions of dollars that and threw at it, it was quickly decimated by the arrival of the VCR. But the fact that Scholz would stay on at Polaroid, even as he and the band were on the verge of the big record deal, underscored to Boylan Scholz's own insecurities - about money and his way of working. "Tom didn't want an outside producer; he wanted to do this all himself," Boylan says matter-of-factly. "He accepted me because he knew it was politically necessary. I looked at the situation and told Charlie and Paul in a meeting that this project will sound better if Tom gets to do it the way he wants. What I could do to help it is to make his acoustic sound better, and to run interference with the label while he works out of his basement."

Boylan recognized Scholz's talent, and had already formulated in his mind that once he had gotten Scholz on the right track with drums - achieved by flying in engineer Paul Grupp from Los Angeles to instruct Scholz in microphone technique ("Tom proved to be a very fast study," Boylan says admiringly) - his own hands-on involvement would center on recording the vocals and mixing. Scholz was relieved and agreed readily to that arrangement, Boylan recalls. But before he could get to that stage, Boylan had to orchestrate one of the most complex corporate capers in the history of the music business.

"I had gotten a budget from Epic [he estimates the amount spent in the end was just $28,000], but the more important question from Epic's admin. department was,`Where are you guys going to record?'" Boylan explains. This was a loaded question. Several years before, Epic, which is part of the Columbia Records corporate family, had signed a disadvantageous agreement with NABET, the union representing electrical and broadcast engineers. The agreement had a "featherbedding" clause that, according to Boylan, "would have made Karl Marx grin from ear to ear." Any recording done outside of a Columbia-owned studio [the company's facilities were in New York, Los Angeles and Nashville at the time] but within a 250-mile radius of one of those studios required that a paid union engineer be present, even if all he did was file his nails. Boston, where the band called home and wanted to work, is 211 miles from New York City.

Boylan's first imperative as producer was to put up a smokescreen, because the notion of a stiff union engineer sitting next to the compulsively controlling (and still Polaroid-employed) Scholz in the basement of his house on School Street in the lower-middle-class Boston suburb of Watertown was, alternately, too horrible and too comic to contemplate. "Can you picture it?" Boylan asks. "There's Tom working in his basement after working all day at Polaroid, sitting there recording his guitars through a Marshall and the prototype of his Power Soak, which at the time used a massive resistor taken from a theatrical lighting system and that was the size of a briefcase, while some guy from the union was waiting for him?"

So Boylan developed an elaborate ruse that involved flying the rest of the band to Los Angeles, where they were working on non-Scholz material, such as "Let Me Take You Home Tonight," while Scholz remained in his basement, safe from Epic's accountants. Boylan says he paid for the equipment rentals for Scholz himself to avoid tipping off Epic's auditors.

That spring, Boylan returned to Boston to hear the tracks, on which Scholz had recut drums and other percussion and keyboard parts. Boylan then hired a remote truck in Providence, RI, and had it come to Watertown, where it ran a snake through the basement window of Scholz's home to transfer his tracks to a 3M-79 2-inch 24-track deck, going from 15 ips on the one-inch 112-track tape to 30 ips on the 3M multitrack. The tapes were taken to Los Angeles, where Boylan, Scholz and Delp settled in for vocals.

"Brad was one of the easiest singers to work with that I've ever met," says Boylan. "He actually hits those high notes; there's nothing electronic helping him. And he did it fast." Singing into a Neumann solid-state 87, running through a Quad Eight console using the onboard mic-pre and EQ and an outboard Quad Eight limiter, Delp sang "More Than A Feeling" in Capitol's Studio C with Warren Dewey engineering the overdubs. One of the more remarkable vocal pyrotechnics on an album where Delp's singing gives Scholz's guitar work a run for its money is on the passage where Delp's ever-rising tenor rides into the first notes of the signature guitar solo, a move Boylan says was planned and executed flawlessly on virtually the first take. All vocals were double-tracked except the lead vocal, and all the parts were done by Delp in quick succession.

The rest of the band was less involved. "If Tom could have played drums, he would have; he was that compulsive about the control of the project," Boylan observes. "He was particularly so with Barry, who had taught him to play the guitar in the first place. But with Brad, Tom seemed to find his limit. He knew he couldn't sing like that. He just sat there and listened for pitch and tempo."

It was in the mixing of the song that Boylan found his only real confrontation with the autocratic Scholz. At Westlake Studios' now-gone 6311 Wilshire Blvd. location, in a three-position manual mix - unautomated since all the tracks were filled, leaving no room for the two tracks required by the studio's new and rudimentary API console automation system - Scholz handled the guitar tracks, Boylan the drums and Dewey rode the vocals, with Steve Hodge assisting. "It was a tug-of-war in the beginning," says Boylan. "I want to make sure any Joe Blow can hear the vocals, and Tom is pushing the guitars up in the mix unceasingly. I was also trying to get the backbeat back into the track; I put a gate on the snare to get the hi-hat out of there and give the snare more punch. Meanwhile, Tom loves nothing more than the crash of cymbals and loud guitars."

Boylan concedes that "More Than a Feeling" is a heavily compressed recording, but notes that its squash came not electronically but rather from what he calls "manual compression." "We were pushing everything on the board to the edge," he says. "The interesting thing is that Tom had decided he wanted it to fade in with the acoustic guitars, and that kind of fools radio station compressors into thinking it's a quiet song, so they don't latch on to it right away."

But aside from nifty, if unplanned tricks like that, Boylan says he also learned something more lasting from this mixing session. "And it's something which I put to good use to this day," he notes. "People, as they listen to a record, will always be able to find the vocals when they want to. I learned that the lead vocal is more apparent than you think it is when you're in the middle of a mix."

Boylan also honed his psychological skills working with Scholz. "He's a genius and he's autocratic - when it comes to opinions, with him it's either`my way or the highway,'" he says without judgment. "When you run into a situation where there is a difference of opinion, I had to remind myself that my purpose in this project was to give Tom the room to do what his vision demanded, but to keep him from shooting himself in the foot. So you use karate: you figure out which way he's going and you go in the same direction, all the while quietly, but seriously, manipulating the situation to move it where you want to go in the end. You never confront. You nudge. That's part of producing records."

That first Boston album would be only part of Scholz's legacy. In 1981, he formed Scholz Research & Design, Inc., a company founded to create high-tech music equipment. After first developing the Power Soak for DI recording, SR&D introduced the Rockman, a small, inexpensive guitar amplifier with headphones which, along with the Tascam PortaStudio, helped launch the project studio as a mass-market concept.

The Rockman, and later variants such as the Bass Rockman, would eventually make Scholz as wealthy from his business and technology pursuits as from his music. He would need it. He spent much of the 1980s in litigation with former bandmates - for instance, Boston guitarist Barry Goudreau sued him, asserting that he hindered Goudreau's professional career by taking so long to make follow-up recordings. Scholz's legendary pursuit of perfection - he is rumored to have re-recorded the drum tracks to one song 108 times - also put him at legal loggerheads with Epic, which also sued him. Boston's second album, Don't Look Back, took two years to make; the band's third and final LP, Third Stage, was not released until 1986, a decade after "More Than a Feeling" stormed the airwaves and on a different label, MCA.

The Mix Staff Members Pick Their Current Favorites Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks: Beat the Heat (Surfdog) Though they haven't recorded a studio album in almost 25 years, Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks have been out live, playing their summery, slightly psychedelic, kind of jazzy, country and swing since the late-`60s. Dan Hicks' music is sometimes mellow and light, sometimes bright and hopping, with pleasant rhythms and call-and-response vocals between Hicks and his female backing vocalists. The group maintains a devoted following, and this recording comeback features some of their most famous fans. Brian Setzer, Bette Midler, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello all perform and bring their own special ingredients to this delicious musical margarita.

Producers: Gary Hoey and Dave Kaplan. Recording engineers: Jim Wirt, C.J. Erriksson, Jeff Peters and Donat Kazarinoff. Mixing engineers: Jeff Peter and David Darling. Recording studios: 4 superscript th Street Recording, Hook Studios, Sonora Recording Studios, Kaufman Ranch and Windmill Lane. Mixing studios: House of Blues Studios. Mastering: Oasis Mastering.

Sinead O'Connor: Faith and Courage (Atlantic) If you're able to listen to Sinead O'Connor's gorgeous music without the distraction of her confused/confusing public persona - in a recent interview, she seemed to be in sort of a goddess/Gaia-Catholic-lesbian-celibate space - you will be richly rewarded. Faith and Courage continues in the vein of her most personal and confessional work, and is by turns brilliantly illuminating and maddeningly opaque. There are several incisive songs about relationships, an amazing bit of pure autobiography ("Daddy I'm Fine") and, yes, a few dollops of her puzzling (but never pushy) cosmology. This time out, O'Connor is working with multiple producers, but none of them overpower her or diminish her voice and songs; her vocals are always out front as they should be. (She also sang most of the backup vocals, which are very effectively layered throughout.) What surrounds her voice is a fascinating blend of natural instrumentation, some low-key programming work and, on several songs, lovely string accompaniment. This isn't just a singer-songwriter showcase, however; it's a surprisingly commercial-sounding record, with occasionally complex arrangements and unmistakable pop sheen on several tracks. Songs such as "No Man's Woman," "Jealous" and "If U Ever" show her maturity as a singer and writer, and display the remarkable combination of strength and vulnerability that have long been hallmarks of her best work. If you haven't checked in on O'Connor for a while, this is a good one to get you reacquainted.

Producers: Sinead O'Connor, Adrian Sherwood and Skip McDonald, Scott Cutler and Anne Previn, Dave Stewart, Wyclef Jean and Jerry Duplessis, Kevin Briggs, Brian Eno and John Reynolds. Engineers: Alan Branch, Adrian Sherwood (mixing), Andy Wallace (mixing), Ash Howes (mixing), Wyclef Jean (mixing), Scott Cutler, Jeff Turzo, Ken Andrews, Acar Key, Nick Addison, Andy Grassi, Clen Marchese, Graham Dominy, Steve Churchyard, Greg Koller, Alvin Sweeney, Kevin Briggs, Darin Prindle, John Reynolds. Mastering: Emily Lazar/The Lodge.

The Meters: Rejuvenation (Sundazed) Originally released by Reprise in 1974, this collection catches The Meters poised on the brink of a popular success that never quite materialized. Musicians had long been aware of the New Orleans funk quartet's prodigious output, both as a chart-topping R&B instrumental act and as backing musicians for such Allen Toussaint-produced artists as Lee Dorsey and Chris Kenner. But it was their sterling work on Dr. John's surprise hit album In the Right Place and Robert Palmer's Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley that introduced The Meters to a wider audience. Recorded around the same time as In the Right Place and its follow-up, the unaccountably overlooked Desitively Bonnaroo, Rejuvenation features a major dose of funky clavinet, New Orleans piano and chicken-scratch guitar, underpinned by George Porter Jr.'s sparely muscular bass and the unmistakable second-line drumming of Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste. Co-producer Toussaint makes the most of the often slight material, spicing it with stabbing brass and contrapuntal vocal arrangements and the album is, like the contemporaneous Dr. John records, faultlessly mixed and sequenced. (This Sundazed re-issue adds the fairly superfluous singles version of "People Say" and the Top 40 hit "Hey Pocky A-Way.") Unavailable on CD until now, Rejuvenation is a welcome addition to The Meters' CD catalog, which mainly consists of spotty compilations of the band's Josie material.

Producers: Allen Toussaint and The Meters. Engineer: Ken Laxton. Studio: Sea-Saint (New Orleans). Mastering: Al Quaglieri and Bob Irwin, Sundazed Studios (Coxsackie, NY).

B.B. King & Eric Clapton: Riding With the King (Reprise) I can always forgive Eric Clapton's forgettable whitebread pop hits because just around the corner there's usually a smokin' blues album that showcases what he does best. The last few years, Clapton has really put in some serious time exploring his blues' roots, so this outing with his one-time idol B.B. King fits neatly in his catalog. The two guitar greats mesh beautifully throughout this spirited affair, trading solos and lead vocals as they front a fine band that includes bassist Nathan East, drummer Steve Gadd, pianist Joe Sample (who is wonderful on most tracks), guitarists Andy Fairweather Low and Doyle Bramhall II and organist Tim Carmon. The repertoire is a nicely balanced selection of hardcore blues tunes in different styles ("Key to the Highway," the acoustic "Worried Life Blues," and several King tunes, the best of which are "Three O'Clock Blues" and the jump-blues "Days of Old"); more contemporary R&B-flavored songs, including the fine John Hiatt title track and the Memphis chestnut "Hold On I'm Coming"; and even a "standard" - Mercer and Arlen's "Come Rain or Come Shine." These are two artists who truly are getting better with age - the singing is quite astonishing in places and the guitar playing as passionate as you'd expect - and who've finally joined up to record at a perfect time for each of them.

Producers: Eric Clapton and Simon Climie. Engineers: Alan Douglas, Simon Climie (Pro Tools), Mick Gauzauski (mixing, five tracks). Studio: Ocean Way (L.A.)

Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys: Night Tide (Hightone) This group has been wowing the neorockabilly crowd since 1988 when they were Big Sandy & the Fly-Rite Trio. Since signing with Hightone Records in '94, Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys have slowly moved a little away from the rock 'n' roll part of their sound and closer to western swing, but they've always distinguished themselves with strong, sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous songwriting and Big Sandy's smooth, expressive singing. Their most recent effort features a new collection of great, danceable swing and rockabilly numbers and a couple of well-chosen covers, the loveliest of which is Roger Miller's "A Man Like Me." Check this band out live, too, but make room for the dancers.

Producer: Bruce Bromberg. Engineer: Paul DuGre. Studio: Paul & Mike's, Burbank. Mastering: Joe Gastwirt/Ocean View Mastering, Los Angeles.