Take a lesson from Tom Scholz. Toms first album Boston was primarily recorded at Scholzs own Foxglove Studios in Watertown, Massachusetts in an elaborate end run around the CBS brain trust.[3] Epic wanted a studio version that sounded identical to the demo tape, and 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.[5] Scholz took a leave of absence from Polaroid, and was gone for several months to record the bands album. I would wake up every day and go downstairs and start playing, he recalled. Scholz grew annoyed reproducing the parts, being forced to use the same equipment used on the demo.[5] The basement, located in a lower-middle-class neighborhood on School Street, 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.[5][6] There was a Hammond organ and a Leslie speaker stuffed in the corner of the room alongside the drums; whenever it was time to record the organ parts, they would tear the drums down and pull out the Leslie.[5] Boylan felt that while Scholzs guitars sounded amazing, he did not understand how to properly record acoustic instruments, and flew in engineer Paul Grupp to instruct him on microphone technique.[6] Boylans own hands-on involvement would center on recording the vocals and mixing,[6] and he took the rest of the band out to the West Coast, where they recorded Let Me Take You Home Tonight.[7] It was a decoy, recalled Scholz, who recorded the bulk back home in Watertown without CBSs knowledge. While Boylan arranged for Delp to have a custom-made Taylor acoustic guitar for thousands of dollars on the album budget, Scholz recorded such tracks as More Than a Feeling in his basement with a $100 Yamaha acoustic guitar.[2][3][7] That spring, Boylan returned to Watertown to hear the tracks, on which Scholz had recut drums and other percussion and keyboard parts.[6] He then hired a remote truck from Providence, Rhode Island to come to Watertown, where it ran a snake through the basement window of Scholzs home to transfer his tracks to a 3M-79 2-inch 24-track deck.[6] The entire recording was completed in the basement, save for Delps vocals, which were recorded at Capitol Studios Studio C with Warren Dewey engineering the overdubs.[5][6] All vocals were double-tracked except the lead vocal, and all the parts were done by Delp in quick succession.[6] When Scholz arrived in Los Angeles for mixing, he felt intimidated and feared the professional engineers would view him as a hick that worked in a basement.[5] Instead, Scholz felt they were backwards in their approach, and lacked knowledge he learned. These people were so swept up in how cool they were and how important it is was to have all this high-priced crap that they couldn’t see the forest for the trees, he said.[5] Boylan found his only real confrontation with the autocratic Scholz during the mixing stage, in which Scholz handled the guitar tracks, Boylan the drums and Dewey the vocals, with Steve Hodge assisting.[6] Scholz pushed guitars too high in the mix, rendering vocals inaudible at times.[6] The entire operation has been described as one of the most complex corporate capers in the history of the music business.[6] With the exception of Let Me Take You Home Tonight, the album was a virtual copy of the demo tapes.[3] The 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.[2]
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 22:48:17 +0000