Engineering a Rock and Roll Life

It’s been quite a ride for Tom Scholz '69, SM '70, the creative force behind the rock band Boston.

By Elizabeth Durant

Tom Scholz '69, SM '70, never expected his passion for music to be much more than a hobby. After graduating from MIT, he worked as a senior product design engineer at Polaroid by day and spent his nights composing and recording demos in his basement studio and playing in local bands. But in the summer of 1976, he found himself in the limelight with the release of his band's self-titled debut album, "Boston." With hits like "More Than a Feeling" and "Long Time," it quickly became the bestselling debut album in history. Scholz soon quit his job at Polaroid to follow his bliss.

For the past three decades he has been the driving force behind Boston, as a composer, producer, engineer, and musician, playing lead and rhythm guitars, bass, piano, organ, and some percussion. The band has produced six albums with cumulative U.S. sales of 31 million, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The debut album alone has topped 17 million in U.S. sales, garnering the RIAA’s diamond award status (for sales over 10 million) and ranking 11th in the top 100 bestselling albums of all time. Of the remaining five albums, three have achieved multiplatinum status (sales of over two million), including "Don’t Look Back," (1978) and "Third Stage" (1986).

Scholz didn't become interested in pop music until he heard "powerful sounding" bands like the Kinks and the Who in the mid-1960s, and he didn’t pick up the guitar until he was a junior at MIT. "When I heard that music, it reminded me of really powerful Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky….It was the power of the music and those guitars that made me want to play." So, he began playing guitar with local cover bands with names like Middle Earth and, he admits with some embarrassment, Mother's Milk.

The transition from engineer to rock star was "bizarre," Scholz says. "The music side of it was great, because I had only dreamed that I might get to do that. The life experience side of it was a bit of a cruel joke. Finding out what people are like in the world of entertainment was really a scary experience….I had a very naïve expectation that people were basically intelligent and honorable, and all of that was completely destroyed once I got into the music business," he says.

He's seen his fair share of the dark side of the music industry—not the artists, he notes, but some of the people on the business side who are driven by drug addiction and greed. He weathered (and ultimately won) a series of lawsuits in the 1980s, including a $20 million claim brought by CBS, owner of the Epic label, because it was displeased with Boston's productivity. Through it all, it's Scholz’s love of music that has sustained him, as well as the devotion of fans.

Scholz's engineering skills have been an integral part of his success; to date, he has some 34 patents to his name. In 1980 he formed Scholz Research and Design (SR&D), an audio-electronics company that built signal-processing equipment for musicians. Two of his inventions, the Power Soak and the Rockman headphone amp, became widely used by other rock musicians. "I run into more people who want to talk to me about the Rockman guitar amp than about Boston albums," Scholz says with a laugh.

Scholz decided to close SR&D in 1995. Innovation was what inspired him, not maximizing profits, so he hated the emphasis on the bottom line and worrying about competition. These days he only toys with projects that are of interest to him, without regard to marketability, and they don’t all revolve around music. For example, as an avid freestyle skater, Scholz wants to improve current skate design, which he calls "basically walking boots from the 1800s with a steel blade stuck on them."

He's also involved with several charities, including the Sierra Club. During Boston’s summer 2003 concert tour, the band donated more than $170,000 in ticket sales to the environmental organization.

Still, music remains in the forefront of his mind. Scholz spent much of the spring in the studio working on a rerelease of Corporate America (2002), which had a "disastrous" release because its record label, Artemis, ran into financial troubles. This summer he's on a limited tour with the band. Even after all these years, he loves touring. "If I could, I'd pack a suitcase and a guitar, and I'd stay out on the road for the rest of my life," he says.

But he's got a good reason to stay close to his home outside Boston. Scholz's son, who he claims is "a lot smarter than I am," will be a senior at MIT this fall. And does he like his dad's music? "I think he does," says Scholz, "but he’s such a nice kid that he would pretend he did even if he didn't."