Six Degrees of Boston
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.
The Album
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Boston belongs to a select group of album-rock era behemoths that has grown so ubiquitous that I don't think I've actually seen a physical copy of the record in about ten years. It has ascended, along with Led Zeppelin IV and Rumours, to the great FM-rock Heavy Rotation in the Sky: no matter where you are in the United States, you can be assured that you can find a station playing "More Than A Feeling" at that exact moment. As far as things to depend on during roadtrips go, it's right up there with finding a McDonald's near the off-ramp. And yet, the the power of the anthem hasn't dimmed at all every time those fingerpicked acoustic guitars drift in, I inevitably reach to crank the volume. And as it turns out, loving "More Than A Feeling" puts you in some good company in our little corner of the music world. Chuck Eddy, in his eMusic review of Boston, points out that Kurt Cobain's anthemic riff on "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is just "More Than A Feeling" in a minor key, and he's not even the first to acknowledge the debt the first person was, in fact, Kurt Cobain, who wielded the song's similarity to "More Than A Feeling" as a bludgeon to rock critics when he grew weary of discussing his own hit single. Call The Doctor-era Sleater-Kinney were known to bust out a dead-earnest cover of the song in live sets, with Carrie Brownstein striking unironic guitar-hero poses. There's no mystery as to why: "More Than A Feeling" is maybe the most goofily sincere, earnest guitar-rock anthem ever, and the freshness and innocence of its spirit refuses to date itself. That (more than a) feeling derives from the fact that Boston is not the work of a team of corporate-rock hacks, but the home-recording project of Tom Schulz, who wrote and recorded almost the entire album in his basement. This DIY spirit, combined with a burning need for guitar-rock bombast of the highest and most majestic order, makes Schulz a clear spiritual cousin to Rivers Cuomo, and anyone who loves The Blue Album will find tons to love about Boston. The joys of Boston only begin with "More Than A Feeling," but let's not move on from it just yet. The lyrics! Such a brain-tickling blend of the stupidly obvious ("I looked out this morning and the sun was gone/Turned on some music to start my day") the soaringly universal (haven't we all seen our Marianne walk away at one point? C'mon, who's with me?), and confoundingly nonsensical what the hell does it mean for something to be more than a feeling? That guitar solo! It's like a noodly reworking of Bach's Art of the Fugue crossed with the flight music from Top Gun! That moment at the end, where singer Brad Delp's voice hits a note so high that it becomes indistinguishable from the soaring guitars! The HANDCLAPS! Oh yeah, the rest of the album. It's here! And it's a surprisingly complex, diverse collection of keyboard-mashing prog (conservatory pianists could warm up to the scalar runs on "Long Time,") straight Bachmann-Turner Overdrive boogie-rock ("Peace Of Mind"), and disarmingly fey, power-poppy bounce that could be mistaken for The Raspberries ("Rock and Roll Band.") Below, we take a look at a number of bands whose earnest guitar-rock majesty is a direct update on the Boston template.
The Grunge Torchbearers
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Foo Fighters came onto the scene, as Boston did, with a bunch of home-recorded demos that yearned to be stadium anthems. Dave Grohl, freshly jobless after the death of Kurt Cobain, decided that this was the time to air out the contents of his notebook, which was overflowing with songs Kurt had deemed too generic or poppy to pass muster for Nirvana. Lacking a band, Grohl recorded every track guitar, bass, drums, vocals, everything of the Foo Fighters' self-titled debut himself, and released it to the world, having no idea what the reaction might be. When "I'll Stick Around" and "Big Me" became Buzz Bin hits, the Foo Fighters were elevated from "the grunge Wings" into a successful pop act in their own right. Foo Fighters had a few telltale bighearted pop moments "Big Me" chief among them but a lot of it, unfortunately, lingered in a thrashy post-grunge kiddie pool, with screamy, formless songs like "Watershed" signifying "punk cred" to no one in particular. The follow-up, The Colour and the Shape, is the one that clarified where Dave Grohl's heart really lay, and it's the one that most belongs in a lineage that begins with Boston. Like a lot of post-grungers after him, Grohl just didn't see anything wrong with loving cheesy FM-rock, and he enfolded this history in a big bear hug on The Colour and the Shape, easily the Foos' best album. "Doll," the cooing opening ballad, takes up where "Big Me" left off, and then we're off into "Monkey Wrench," a grinning joy-buzzer of a power-pop anthem that sets the tone for the whole record. And Grohl isn't hiding behind fake-Cobain lyrics anymore, either. No more "Fingernails are pretty/ Fingernails are good" napkin-poetry for Grohl: "Tonight I'm tangled in my blanket of clouds/ Dreamin' aloud," he croons on the disarmingly gorgeous "Walking After You." And then there's "Everlong," one of the greatest guitar-pop songs of the post-grunge era, a brooding storm of cascading drums and Shudder-To-Think atmospherics that explodes into a chorus that is still startling in its abandon. "The only thing I'll ever ask of you/ You gotta promise not to stop when I say, when," Grohl gasps, a mission statement if there ever was one. Somewhere, Marianne is hesitating for a second, glancing back over her shoulder.
The Next-Generation Bar Band
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The Hold Steady were "just another bar band from Minneapolis," just like Boston's "just another bar band" from, well, "Boston"...except they had an acerbic fan of Bukowski's poetry as a frontman instead of Brad Delp crooning towards the blue sky. Craig Finn's tales of dissolution and yearning in small towns gave the Hold Steady's bar-boogie a hefty boost into transcendence, and Stay Positive is, as The Colour and The Shape was for the Foo Fighters, their best and most earnest grab for the brass ring of classic-rock glory. What separates Stay Positive from previous landmarks, like Separation Sunday? The first Big Difference: Craig Finn is singing. Not muttering wise cracks, not yelling deranged street-hobo prophecies (well, okay, there's a little of both still, but we wouldn't want it any other way): he's going for it the same way his band has always gone for it, refusing to undercut the forward thrust of the music with sidelong witticisms. He's hardly gone cheeseball "Sequestered in Memphis," the album's most anthemic number, still includes the lyrics "In bar light, she looked all right/ In daylight, she looked desperate," but there's a grim determination to not tear everything down this go round. "We are our only saviors/ We're gonna build something this summer," Finn repeats over and over again on "Constructive Summer": it's the sound of a former punk-rock-kid feeling his heart grown ten sizes or so in an instant.
The Cooler Cousins
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Cheap Trick and Boston worked the same gray area between bar band and arena band, with the same subtly subversive spirit. Both split the difference between bouncy Beatles popcraft and Monster-Truck-rally-sized guitars. Both sold boatloads of albums in the '70s. The difference? Cheap Trick retain a patina of "cool," whereas Boston do not. Part of this is probably just history: Cheap Trick were massive, yes, but they never quite hit supernova the way Boston did. Consider: until Whitney Houston's debut album topped it in 1986, Boston remained the highest-selling pop debut of all time. That level of ubiquity has a corrosive effect on "cool." Also, Robin Zander, Cheap Trick's frontman, kept the subversive elements of his music hiding in plain sight: in "Surrender," we hear about a soldier's penis falling off due to some "Indonesian junk that's going 'round." And that's before the son comes home to see his parents getting it on with his KISS records out. Boston's music, by contrast, is pretty wholesome and inoffensive; you have to do a little digging before you discover that realize that Tom Schulz was an obsessive perfectionist who kept fans (and, more crucially, record executives) waiting for two years an eternity in the LP era, and even more so considering the monumental pressure to follow up on the meteoric success of Boston while he worked and reworked his second record, pointedly titled Don't Look Back, and that he endured a several-year long court battle against Epic over creative control. Either way, Heaven Tonight and Boston are twin pinnacles of the '70s arena rock, and the sense that they are unusually invested in the urgency and majesty of their (call a spade a spade) cock rock has a lot do with their staying power.
The Drunken Uncle
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Robert Pollard began as an arena-rock dreamer recording air-guitar symphonies in his basement, just like Tom Schulz: the difference is that Pollard pushed his songs into the world almost as soon as he could finish writing them, a never-ending torrent of wobbly, barely-together mini-anthems. This level of quality control would probably cause Schulz, a meticulous stonecutter for whom four years between albums was a breakneck pace, to break out into hives. But while the method couldn't be more different, the madness is the same. And on Isolation Drills, Pollard finally managed to make a record that sounded as slick, shiny and clean to the rest of us as I am sure his earlier records already sounded in his head. He had tried this trick before to clean up without selling out with the mostly disastrous, Ric Ocasek-produced Do the Collapse, and he succeeded only in sounding anonymous. Isolation Drills works because Pollard wrote "radio hits" as he knew them: as they existed in 1978. He stated outright in interviews that he was writing Drills "for the radio," but in 2001, the "radio" Robert Pollard was speaking of no longer existed; like all the things Pollard truly loves, and this includes his fondness booze, it was an artifact from his rock-and-roll youth. He was writing "Glad Girls" and "The Brides Have Hit Glass" and "Chasing Heather Crazy" for Tom Schulz's version of rock radio, and in that day and age, they would have been massive hits. Today, they fall into the waiting arms of his modest throngs of faithful.
The Young Turks
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The connection between the Gaslight Anthem and Boston is more about spirit than sound. Gaslight are a Jersey pop-punk band at heart, a product of the Bouncing Souls and Against Me! and the instinctual Bruce Springsteen love common to all red-blooded Jersey citizens. On the rock and roll family tree, that's more than a few branches away from Boston. But man, the title track's trembling coda "Ain't supposed to die on a Saturday night," lead singer Brian Fallon sings huskily, in a moment straight out of The Outsiders sure would sound awesome on the radio after "More Than a Feeling." And it might be a coincidence that the song also shares the same chord progression as the chorus to "Peace of Mind." It might. In any case, the same sense of grandeur that suffuses Boston makes Gaslight Anthem arena-rockers in spite of themselves.
