Goodwill Hunting: Boston

essay by matthew webber

Boston Wins Pennants, Records, and Hearts

Pennants

Long before Manny, Big Papi, and Varitek, Boston won it all with a lineup of these guys: Delp. Scholz. Hashian. Sheehan. And finally, The Axe Man, Barry Goudreau, whose velvety blazers were as red as his stirrups. (Further, when Barry “was wearing the collar,” he really was wearing the collar, ya heard? Next to the guys from, say, Kansas or Chicago, Barry stood out with his sharp sense of style. Next to the guys from Boston, he’s shiny.) They formed, like Voltron, to vanquish their foes, actually inspiring that 1980s icon. (Citation needed.) Red Sox Nation embraced them as brothers, and so did a nation starving for heroes, especially those with otherworldly powers – or at least those heroes with spaceship iconography. (Fact: Single-word rock bands were really into aliens.)

And heroes they were, these native sons of Boston! In the year of our lord 1976, the two-hundredth year of America’s independence, these players, these warriors, were re-writing history, reeling off hit after hit after hit, as seen by men in sold-out stadiums and heard by boys on portable radios and cheered by women – and little girls, too – in awe of their mustaches and Hashian’s Afro. (Look at his picture! The thing was magnificent!!) For the first time in decades, since the great Babe Ruth was traded, the standings in the paper showed Boston in first – the city humming like rookies of the year, the nation spinning along with their records – ahead of all other cities, states, and city-states.

Success was like Foreplay; it had been a Long Time. But Boston’s domination gave their fans some Peace of Mind. And Boston was all like, there’s Something About You, so let me Hitch a Ride and enjoy it for awhile. The shared adoration was More Than a Feeling. The players said, “Let Me Take You Home Tonight.” The fans said, “A'ight. It's key party time!” Just another band out of Boston? Ha! The Rock & Roll Band called Boston was Smokin’!

If you don’t believe me, listen to the record!

Or better yet, look: Those spaceships are guitars!

Records

Boston’s Boston is one of those albums: scorned by critics, hipsters, and babies; beloved by disc jockeys, older brothers, and triceratops; and memorized by you without your even knowing it, thanks to its ubiquity at summertime activities, car rides to nowhere with all the windows down, and countdowns with names like the Labor Day 500.

If you’re younger than thirty, it’s always been everywhere, like Red Sox fans in your local (non-Boston) sports bar, or YouTube videos of Red Sox players dancing. If you frequent establishments with jukeboxes, you’ve heard it. If you live in the Midwest, you awkwardly got conceived to it. It’s massive, it’s a juggernaut, it’s a giant leap for rock blocks.

But don’t take my word for it, listen to the record!

I know I’ve heard six of its songs on the radio; I truly believe I’ve heard all eight. To date, it’s been purchased more than seventeen million times, as fans exchange their eight-tracks for microchips and holograms. It remains, where it might remain for all time, as the number-one best-selling debut album ever, millions ahead of your favorite band’s debut. (Fact: Its closest competitor, Rowling & West’s Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Dropout, is millions of fictional album sales behind it.)

Seventeen million?! Listen to the record!

It’s a classic by weight of its sheer popularity, as well as for the grandiose statements it makes. On the back of the record, beneath the obligatory publicity shot of the five grizzled band dudes (well, four plus the nattily attired B. Goudreau) looking all stoic and bad-ass and stuff, is an origin story worthy of a comic book, or the spoken-word intro to a concept album by Rush. What begins as a biography of the band – but really of songwriter, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, founder, leader, and obvious control freak Tom Scholz – quickly degenerates into a don’t-believe-the-hype diatribe, straight from the Rock & Roll 101 textbook, equating virtuosity with virtues like Truth. Like, how the band started doesn’t really matter, where the members come from doesn’t really matter, and who they are as people? Well, that matters even less, ‘cause the only thing that matters is the music, man. The music! These guys – er, this one guy – can really, truly play. With recording equipment he built himself! So disregard everything you’ve previously heard, and “listen to the record!” Now. Posthaste!

This phrase, this command, gets repeated like a chorus, one, two, three, four overwrought times. It’s fun to imagine a kids’ choir singing it: “Listen to the record! Listen to the record!” Or maybe a robot who sounds like Brad Delp. (R.I.P.) Or maybe these things are only fun to me. But what about a chorus of little kid robots?

But anyway, whatever. Listen to the record!

Here’s one sentence from the back of the record, describing Boston’s music to those who haven’t heard it:

“What distinguishes Boston’s music is although it’s by definition heavy rock & roll, it evidences a greater concern for melodic and harmonic flow than practically any band you can think of working the same general territory.”

Is this how bands gained fans before MySpace? Is this how critics padded their reviews? The italics are mine, because really, WTF? Were Scholz and his P.R. staff the Kanyes of their day? And what do they mean by “territory”? New England? “Melodic and harmonic flow?” Um-kay. And where’s the empirical evidence for this?

Ah, right. Their record sales. Q.E.D.

Boston’s Boston is the greatest! My bad.

Hearts

Boston’s Boston is also one of these: an album of songs I seldom need to listen to, because of how often I’ve heard them in the past, over and over on classic-rock radio, which plays the same songs by the very same bands, before I was born, till after I’m dead, or often enough to strip them of feeling, turning old anthems to standards, to backgrounds, making me forget how they used to mean the world, not just to millions – but also to me.

Knowing, as I do, their every well-placed beat and pitch-perfect scream and overdubbed strum, these songs can’t possibly surprise me anymore, much less excite me or stop my constant searching. Especially these songs, as processed as they are, without human error, or maybe human touch. Math rock, science rock, computer rock, space rock. Full of sound, lacking in fury, they signify nothing much.

And yet, and yet, when I take the band’s advice, when I actually put this record on and listen, as if I’m listening for the very first time, long before DJs ran this ship aground, I’m reminded, as I often am, of how much, yes, I love this: not just this album, and not just this band – which, believe me, is far from my favorite – but all the most played-out classic rock in general, all the most un-hip, un-ironic songs, all the stuff that got me through high school and beyond, in between grunge – whose players chose suicide – and golden-age hip-hop – whose players chose murder – and other fads and genres I fancied for a spell.

But this stuff, the old stuff, the corny stuff, whatever, sounds like my high school weekends and summers, driving from work to the house of my girlfriend, the first girl to like me for more than a month, the girl who, despite our post-Boston ages, listed this album, the decades-old Boston, the one with the spaceships and “More Than a Feeling,” as her all-time, number-one, most-favored favorite, ahead of Van Halen or Journey’s Greatest Hits, some of whose songs she could play on piano, ‘cause Boston was it, boy, The One, the platinum standard.

She was the cutest Boston fan ever.

I liked her so much, I maybe even loved her, even more so for this heartfelt confession, which never seemed silly until I got older, until I read magazines and tried to be a critic – a synonym for “skeptic,” “cynic,” and “jerk store” – ‘cause back in the day, such feelings were simpler, and choices like these weren’t choices at all, and I could just love things because I, like, loved them, just as she loved Boston’s Boston, and I loved things like Aerosmith’s Big Ones. I just loved; I didn’t think. I just loved; I didn’t doubt. I just loved; I was just a kid. I just loved. And that was enough. That was all I had to do.

I loved it all to pieces.

It’s hard for me, now, with actual people, but easy for me with albums and songs, even though music can never love you back, or otherwise get messy, entangled, or real. Music is life, man. It never breaks your heart.

It also never warms you up.

As always, it’s hard to know what I mean.

But even old records I didn’t use to love, even old records I’d previously dismissed, remind me of a time when I wasn’t scared to love, when even old music seemed new to me, and magical, before these old songs seemed tired and ancient, before I seemed ancient to even myself, alone in my apartment playing records and reviewing them, alone in my apartment, alone in my apartment...

And sometimes a song you haven’t played in years, a song you skip when it comes on the radio, a song whose lifeblood you thought you’d sucked dry – a song like this can take you back in time – and maybe, in a spaceship, to a different, radder world – especially one like “More Than a Feeling” – its beautiful intro, its fist-pumping chorus, its lyrics of sunshine and music itself – and seven other songs that, yes, sound the same – which isn’t a knock, ‘cause they all sound so good, technically proficient and climate-controlled – and all you can do is tip-tap this gibberish – em-dash run-on tangent delete (?) – or sit there in silence imagining the girl, until the song ends and you type the word “essay,” something undefinable to everyone but you, someone whose memory surely isn’t right, and then you start typing as fast as you can, to get it all down and discover the truth:

It isn’t really Boston. It’s more. It’s a feeling. It’s comfort rock, like comfort food. It’s youth. It’s love. It’s life. You know?

The shortest thing I’ve written yet. The simplest thing I’ve meant to say.

It’s hard to be objective, when artwork never is.

But Boston’s Boston is fucking amazing.

That’s what I feel when I listen to the record. That’s what I know, or just what I remember, or possibly just what I think might be happening.

And that, I know, is worth recording here, in the year of our lord 2007, eight years into my independent twenties, when Boston players are dancing jigs, when St. Louis boys are listening and writing, thinking of girls they used to know, closing their eyes and slipping away.

This is my history I’m trying to write. This is my soundtrack I’m trying to share. A thousand words are never sufficient. Eighty minutes are never enough.

This could be me or the aliens talking.

Visit the author's website at www.matthewwebber.net