Don't Look Back

Boston’s public career began with “More Than a Feeling.” It was the first track on their debut album, and their first single. It introduced Tom Scholz’s state-of-the-art production, as well as his utterly distinctive guitar tone. In fact, the opening passage of that song offers all three sides of Scholz as a guitarist and arranger, with its clean, acoustic intro, the almost unbearably catchy lick by Barry Goudreau that fills the space between the verse and chorus, and the bombastic boogie riff that runs underneath the chorus.

But Brad Delp does just as much in that sequence as anyone else, and maybe more. His delivery of the first stanza—“I looked out this morning and the sun was gone/Turned on some music to start my day/I lost myself in a familiar song/I closed my eyes and I slipped away”—is hushed until the final line, when he goes up and holds the final syllable just long enough to make way for the guitar heroics. On the chorus, Delp’s voice is as clear as crystal and as sharp as glass, a perfect complement to Scholz’s bright tone. The lyrics don’t really even make sense—it’s exactly a feeling he’s describing—but the image of pop music as a fantasy interrupted by the memory of a fantasy girl is an ideal metaphor for Boston. Few bands have ever been as insulated, or as obsessed with technique and the fantasy of rock ‘n’ roll, as Boston was.

All their hits sketch out the mythology of pop music. They’re almost never convincing—who could believe the story of the band’s rise from the bars to stadiums in “Rock and Roll Band”? It was written before the band was even signed, for one thing, so the success of the band in the song is obviously a fantasy. It’s an exercise in arena rock, a form that “Rock and Roll Band” itself helped to invent. Fit your head around that. (And admire Scholz’s unashamed embrace of fake crowd noise.)

Or “Don’t Look Back,” the title track from their second album—as in “More Than a Feeling,” the lyrics don’t mean anything. It’s a thumbnail of the road song; the words hint at a kind of joyous, defiant optimism, but Scholz and Delp do all the work. The music, and Delp’s vocals, layered and in harmony with himself on the chorus, say everything that the words don’t.

There were other good singers in 1970s arena rock. Paul Rodgers, Lou Gramm, even Steve Perry, as bad as his taste and judgment generally were. But all of them relied on a gruff, gritty approximation of soul. They weren’t pure singers the way Delp was. Jerry Lee Lewis has said that there have only been three great stylists in all of music: Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers and Jerry Lee Lewis. Delp doesn’t fit in that company, but he’s by God a stylist. It’s his voice, the blinding confidence and joy in the sound of it, that counts.

So the vague revelations of Delp’s suicide notes—“Mr. Brad Delp. J'ai une ame solitaire. I am a lonely soul,” he wrote—are all the more heartbreaking considering how little of himself he had ever disclosed in his art. Delp left two notes, one on the door from his garage into his house, another at the top of a staircase inside. In the second, he wrote that he had lost the will to live.

What do you say to that? There’s no sense to be made of it. It’s fucking sad. He had a gift, and a few years ago he was in total control of it. It’s irrelevant whether he meant any of it or not, or even whether they were his words in the first place; it’s not the emotion expressed that matters. It’s the expression itself.