Man, I am so colossally bummed by this news: Brad Delp, the lead singer of the rock band Boston, was found dead in his home on Friday. The cause is still unknown; Delp was a far-too-young 55.
It seems to me that Boston doesn’t get much respect these days; the hipper-than-thou types, no doubt tired of hearing “More Than a Feeling” on the classic rock stations every five minutes, tend to lump the group in with Styx, Kansas, Bad Company, and other “soulless corporate rock bands” (whatever that means; I must confess I’ve never fully understood that epithet, or known what’s wrong with liking music that’s polished and well-marketed), or else they simply sniff at the band’s has-been status, make a crack about dinosaurs with ‘fros, and go back to downloading their favorite indie band with the ironic name and an audience of about 12 people. But as far as I’m concerned, the reason you still hear “More Than a Feeling,” “Peace of Mind,” “Foreplay/Long Time,” and “Don’t Look Back” so often is because they’re damn good songs.
I was introduced to Boston — as I was to so many of my adolescent touchstones — by my friend Kurt Stephensen, who lived with his dad and grandpa two houses up from mine. We were 14 or 15, and it seems like it was around this time of the year, early spring, a bright and beautiful Saturday afternoon. Kurt had wandered over to see what I was doing, and we ended up hanging out in my back yard, talking about girls or maybe fantasizing about what kind of car we were going to get when we got our licenses in a year or two. (I remember lusting after my mother’s ’73 Mach One, while Kurt, as I recall, had his heart set on a Trans Am like his older brother Tracy’s.)
We were listening to the Block Party Weekend on Rock 103 through the tinny speaker on my handheld transistor radio. This was way before Clear Channel imposed nation-wide programming uniformity on radio, but I think most cities probably had a Block Party Weekend, or something like it: basically, the DJ would play three or four songs in a row by the same band starting on Friday afternoon and running through Sunday night. It was a great way for young, unemployed guys who were still trying to discover what was out there to sample a band without wasting our allowance on an LP that might turn out to suck.
At some point, Kurt had a brainstorm and asked if he could use my phone. He was going to call the radio station — this was back when there were actual human beings at radio stations who would take requests from their listeners — and ask for a block of Boston.
“Boston?” I asked. “Who the hell is Boston?”
“They’re cool,” Kurt said, “I think you’ll like ’em.”
Well, we had to wait quite a while before the DJ finally played Kurt’s requested block, but he finally did, and my friend was right: I did like ’em. I still do… even after all these years, I still think the band’s self-titled debut album is an amazing piece of craftsmanship. There isn’t a bad track on the disc.
I love the rock-guitar hook and regretful tone of the chorus in “More Than a Feeling,” the bombast of “Peace of Mind” and “Foreplay/Long Time,” the irresistable rhythm of “Smokin’,” “Rock and Roll Band,” and “Something About You,” and, finally, the mellow longings of “Hitch a Ride” and “Let Me Take You Home Tonight.” It’s one of the few albums I can put on and let play all the way through without getting bored or distracted.
The follow-up disc, Don’t Look Back, didn’t hook me in the same way, although the title track is a classic, and I loved the cover art that combined my two big geeky loves, rock and roll and awesome starships.
The band’s third album finally debuted about a decade after the other two, just in time for my senior year of high school; I can’t hear the big single from that one, “Amanda,” or its follow-up “Cantcha Say You Believe in Me” without remembering the sharp smell of photographic developing chemicals in the yearbook room, or the feel of the warm summer sunshine pouring through my old T-Bird’s windshield as I ranged farther and farther from home, exploring the landscape of the Salt Lake Valley. (My muscle-car fantasies aside, I never did drive that Mach One much…)
As the band’s lead singer, Brad Delp was the primary sound of Boston. I like how Ben Wener makes the point I’ve been building up to:
…Some people never tire of [Boston], I realize, and for them, this is a case of one of the voices of their youth dying. Brad Delp was certainly never a rock god like Robert Plant; he wasn’t even Steve Perry, really, in terms of stature. But he was every bit as popular at a certain time in pop music history. His voice became a major element of the soundtrack to millions of people’s lives – and at a very specific time in their lives.
And what an indelible, tremendous voice it was. Listen to the sweet clarity and mellow crispness with which he nails those inhuman high notes and carries those melodies on “Boston”: It’s unquestionable that the number of people capable of replicating that can probably be counted on a hand, two at most. Keep in mind: Yeah, Tom Scholz, the brainiac behind the band, was a master DIY production whiz. But this was 1976. The Age of Analog, not pitch-perfection computer sorcery.
It is a positively staggering performance, when you put down the beer or get out of the car and really stop to think about it.
Tom Scholz has some nice words on Boston’s official website and there’s a good write-up on what Delp has been up to in recent years (and why you probably wouldn’t have known his face if you bumped into him) here.
In the end, though, no piece of writing really captures what was significant about Brad Delp or why he mattered to aging rock ‘n’ rollers like myself, which was the sound of his voice. So I ask you now to flick your Bic and have a listen to that voice as Brad performs Boston’s signature hit:
Oh, yeah, that takes me back. I find myself wondering what my old pal Kurt is up to these days, and if he ever bought himself a Trans Am…
