By Scott Longman
One of the primary missions of Field Ethos is to tell magnificent stories of people doing epic shit, both for the sheer entertainment value of their acts, and, perhaps more importantly, to inspire all of us reading about them.
Those stories are often of things like facing a charging cape buff, duking it out with a barracuda, damn near hammering in with a racecar, or barely surviving a bunch of Nazis doing their best to kill you. Those are all arenas that are, understandably, likely to produce pretty good stories.
Well, what if there was some guy who didn’t do anything even remotely like any of that, but through his single-handed force of implacable will, he created a stand-up-and-cheer story?
He did it by spending six years in his basement.
Back to the Lab Again
This guy so believed in himself that he mostly invested his earnings in his dream, to exclude taking his wife on vacation. Although that doesn’t seem like an auspicious start, it’s probably on the short list of best returns-on-investment ever.
His name was Tom.
He’d been hyperbright from childhood, graduating from the much-vaunted Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then also earning himself a master’s degree there. He then landed an engineering job at Polaroid, which at the time was huge. But he didn’t care at all about that, except for the paycheck.
Instead, he had a burning, obsessive passion to write, play, and produce his own music.
And that’s just exactly what he did. To further add to his prodigy legend, he taught himself to play guitar, then bass and keyboards. And he grandmastered them all.
Necessity is a Mother
Good as he was, he was not yet satisfied with the sound. He had aural visions of sound that had never been created. So, using his engineering skills, he invented extensive, first-ever equipment to bring his dreams to reality, which he integrated into his full-on recording studio. Given his ability to record multiple tracks and edit them together, he played almost all the instruments himself. He did later farm out drums and vocals, but otherwise, he conceived, wrote, played, and produced an entire album.
As so often happens with emerging talent, it was all but impossible to get noticed: conventional avenues went nowhere. He would later learn that unsolicited demo tapes, sent without an agent, would often be reviewed, if at all, by a receptionist or intern, rather than any recording label executive. He kept at it and kept at it and then some more, all to zero avail.
All of Tom’s incredibly focused years-long work was dead in the water. He was ready to admit defeat and simply be done with it … except. Except he had a Polaroid co-worker who thought what he was doing was cool. And that guy had a cousin who worked in a record store warehouse. That cousin happened to be jamming to Tom’s demo tape one day when a promo man from ABC Records walked by and heard it.
More Than A Feeling …
What followed was a whole bunch of complex business dealings, but with one funny story. The label that would ultimately sign the deal insisted on a live performance first. Hilariously, even though he had a completed album in hand, Tom Scholz now had to go out and invent a band to play it. He did, and the label signed.
What resulted was the smash release in 1976 of Boston: Boston. It very shortly became one of the best-selling debut albums of all time. It took only seven weeks to go gold, and only four more to go platinum. That record included such legendary hits as “More Than a Feeling,” “Long Time,” “Peace of Mind,” and “Rock and Roll Band.” Those songs still get plenty of airtime even half a century later. Overall, the band has sold 75 million albums. There are reports asserting that at the time of this writing, Tom’s personal net worth is $100 million.
All because he had an implacable force of will and went down into his basement. Enough to inspire all of us to keep at it.
