Boston, Boston
Epic, 1976: Tom Scholz (guitars), Brad Delp (vocals, died 2007), Barry Goudreau (guitar), Fran Sheehan (bass), Jim Masdea and Sid Hashian (drums)

Notable songs

Old Boston tix
Couldn't find my ticket stub from the Don't Look Back tour, and so I'm showing this image. www.stubgrinder.com/media-stubs/boston-ticket-stub-february-2-1979-1565-large.jpg.

In the span of the rock music era, this was probably the best debut album after Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin (1969) and before Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True (1977) and, of course, before Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction (1987). Rolling Stone does, in fact, have it's own list, The 100 Best Debut Albums of All Time. (I have to say that there is some strange music on the list.)

A few months after the album's release the record went gold (500,000) and then soon afterwards, platinum (1,000,000). Wiki now sets it at having sold over seventeen million copies--that's pretty good--second best debut album ever behind Guns N' Roses.

There is not a weak track on the album, and what is more amazing is the fact that the album was largely recorded in Scholz' home-made recording studio. He wanted nothing to do with any of the high expense studios in California. Great songs, great lyrics, great instrumentals, great solos. All of the cuts still get a lot of FM radio airplay today.

The second album, Don't Look Back (1978), was also pretty good, but Scholz has always claimed that he felt it to have been rushed by the record label.

Brad Delp, lead singer, committed suicide in 2007.

Boston's style has been criticized as "corporate rock," but Boston's first two albums were much, much better than anything ever produced by other alleged "corporate rock" bands, such as Journey, Kansas, Foreigner, Styx, etc. I think that it might be true to say that the band ushered in a wave of, shall we stay, studio-stylized rock. Punk--think Sex Pistols, Ramones, Blondie--would be a reaction to this.