Music Appreciation: Boston
Tom Scholz is a gifted practitioner of the music arts, and the original Boston album is his gift to all of us
Flashback: Late 1970’s. Unlike former president Clinton, I actually inhaled the smoke of wisdom. After some of the shitty weed1 we got back then, I would don the headphones, and spin some vinyl on my cobbled together stereo system, and just tune out.
One of my favorite tracks was side B, track 1 of the first Boston album. The song? Foreplay/Long Time2.
Starting with a slow jam that over about two and a half minutes builds to a crescendo, before launching into the song “Long Time”. At the time, for a band that was courting airplay on the FM band, that was a risky track to make a 7:49 track.
Didn’t matter, it fucking rocked. It rocked then, and it still gives me shivers in my spine today as I listen. I am transported into my darkened room, buzzed, with the best headphones my paper route money could afford.
The whole album is great, but this song, and “Smoking” are my two favs.
We were the ass end of the pot distribution world, so we got shake with tons of seeds and stems. Sure, we got high, but it was very tame by today’s standards…
Being like 13 years old at the time, I didn’t really grok what “Foreplay” was yet.
Boston is a terrific band. They were so overplayed in southern Ohio that I wasn't able to listen to anything by them until the early 2000s.