I looked out this morning and the sun was gone

Continuing my trip back through the 1977 album charts.

27/02/77 : Boston - Boston

I don't really know much about Boston - I'm obviously aware of "More Than A Feeling" and I can only assume the rest of their stuff doesn't stray too far from the formula, but I guess I'll find out.

Well, there's a lot more Hammond organ than I was expecting giving it a bit of a proggy feel at times, but it's mostly good old US rawk.  All perfectly fine if you like that sort of thing and they certainly delivered what a lot of people over there wanted - and more people over here than I remembered, it appears.  But "More Than A Feeling" is definitely the high point.

This week we're at #11 in the charts on their eleventh week of an eighteen week run, with this being as high as it got - it also came back for a couple of weeks in '81 for no obvious reason.  The top five this week were The Shadows best-of, Pink Floyd, the Heartbreakers 60s compilation, Leo Sayer and Evita with the highest new entry being Bryan Ferry (#17)

Wikipedia has loads on the album (183 milliPeppers) but that's because there's actually an interesting story involved.  Tom Scholz who is the driving force behind the band had pulled together a demo tape over many years and sent it round the labels until Epic signed him.  They told him he needed to re-record it professionally in LA but for it to sound exactly the same - Scholz was having none of this though and, with the assistance of John Boylan who'd been assigned to produce the "new" album, he took a leave of absence from his job at Polaroid and just redid the demo tapes more carefully in his home studio.  It involved an amazing amount of deception including Tom pretending he was in LA when he wasn't, but everyone was happy with the results in the end.  As I previously mentioned, it did surprisingly well over here but that's nothing compared to how it did in the US - getting to #3 and selling SEVENTEEN MILLION copies!

"Customers also listened to" Kansas, Styx, Foreigner and Journey - all of which I don't really know a lot about.  Which is also very much true of Boston - this kinda gently rocked passed me and I find it unlikely I'll ever revisit it, but it wasn't unpleasant and there's no denying that "More Than A Feeling" is a classic example of the genre.

20/02/77 - In which I fail to form an opinion
06/03/77 - An odd album

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