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-THE BORACAY ISLAND LIFE-
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TUNES FOR THE POST APOCALYPSE

On this day in 1977, Boston’s self-titled LP debuted on the UK Albums Chart at #35 (February 5)
Here’s the remarkable story of how it happened…
In the late 1960s, Tom Scholz began attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he began writing music.
While attending MIT, he joined the band Freehold, where he met guitarist Barry Goudreau and drummer Jim Masdea, who would later become members of Boston.
After graduating with a master's degree, he then began working for the Polaroid Corporation in the product development division.
With the money he earned from his job at Polaroid, Scholz designed and built his own recording studio in an apartment basement on School St, in Watertown, Massachusetts in the early 1970s, primarily using devices he invented himself.
The basement was described by Scholz as a "tiny little space next to the furnace in this hideous pine-paneled basement of my apartment house, and it flooded from time to time with God knows what."
Scholz began recording demos in his home studio while working at Polaroid, working for hours on end, often re-recording, erasing and discarding tapes in an effort to create "a perfect song".
By that time, Scholz, Goudreau, and Masdea were playing in the band Mother’s Milk when they auditioned a lead vocalist called Brad Delp, a former factory worker at a Danvers electric coil company, who spent much of his weekends singing in cover bands.
By 1973, Scholz had a six-song demo tape ready for mailing, and he and his wife Cindy sent copies to every record company they could find.
The songs on the demo were "More Than a Feeling", "Peace of Mind", "Rock & Roll Band", "Something About You", "San Francisco Day" (later changed and renamed "Hitch a Ride") and "Love" (later changed to "Don't Be Afraid").
They received rejection slips from several labels - RCA, Capitol, Atlantic and Elektra among the most notable - and Epic Records rejected the tape flatly with a "very insulting letter" signed by company head Lennie Petze that opined the band "offered nothing new".
He spent years unsuccessfully submitting demos to record companies…
Eventually Epic reconsidered, contacted Scholz and offered a contract that first required the group to perform in a showcase for CBS representatives, as the label were worried that the "band" was in reality a "mad genius at work in a basement".
In November 1975, the group performed for the executives in a Boston warehouse that doubled as Aerosmith's practice facility, and as a result, Mother's Milk was signed by CBS Records one month later in a contract that required 10 albums over six years.
For their first album, Epic wanted a studio version that sounded identical to the demo tape, but Scholz decided he could not work in a production studio, having adapted to home recording for several years, stating "I work[ed] alone, and that was it."
Scholz took a leave of absence from Polaroid, and was gone for several months to record the band's album. "I would wake up every day and go downstairs and start playing," he recalled.
John Boylan came onboard as producer, and it was him that suggested the band change their name to Boston.
Boylan's own hands-on involvement would center on recording the vocals and mixing, and he took the rest of the band out to the West Coast, where they recorded "Let Me Take You Home Tonight".
“It was a decoy," recalled Scholz, who recorded the bulk of the album back home in Watertown without CBS's knowledge.
Scholz recorded such tracks as "More Than a Feeling" in his basement with a $100 Yamaha acoustic guitar.
That spring, Boylan returned to Watertown to hear the tracks, on which Scholz had recut drums and other percussion and keyboard parts.
He then hired a remote truck from Providence, Rhode Island to 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.
The entire recording was completed in the basement, save for Delp's vocals, which were recorded at Capitol Studios.
Scholz wrote or cowrote every song on the first album (with the exception of "Let Me Take You Home Tonight," written by Delp), played virtually all of the instruments and recorded and engineered all the tracks.
The entire album was recorded for a cost of a few thousand dollars, a paltry amount in an industry accustomed to spending hundreds of thousands on a single recording.
The album was released in 1976 and became the biggest-selling debut album by any artist up to that time, and the single "More Than a Feeling" has become a rock classic.
Chart-wise, the album peaked at #3 in the US and Switzerland, #4 in Germany, #7 in Canada, #11 in the UK and the Netherlands, #16 in Australia and Sweden, #24 in Japan, and #26 in New Zealand.
The album's other singles, “Peace of Mind" and "Foreplay/Long Time", also went on to become Top 40 hits, and radio staples.
The album is now the second best-selling debut album of all time in the United States, after Guns N' Roses's “Appetite for Destruction”, and it is the joint eighth best-selling album in US history.
The album was also ranked #43 on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "Definitive 200" list.
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