The man behind 'More Than a Feeling' took on the industry that tried to own him.

By Brendan Borrell
Published Dec. 8, 2025
Boston Globe

Brendan Borrell is a journalist and the author of "Power Soak: Invention, Obsession, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Sound."

The pop charts today are crowded with the musical equivalent of junk food: hook-forward structures and pitch-perfect vocals honed in songwriting camps to satisfy the algorithms. With AI-generated tracks now proliferating across streaming platforms, it can feel as if music has finally completed its march toward full automation.

I've been thinking about this phenomenon in light of the approaching 50th anniversary of "More Than a Feeling," the most enduring hit from the rock band Boston. Not long after that single took over the airwaves in August 1976, critics started deriding it and the rest of Boston's musical output as "the apotheosis of corporate rock." The band's music was too clean, the guitars too perfectly stacked, and the lyrics seemed designed to offend no one. "A wet dream for an accountant," cracked Elvis Costello. "As exciting as a plate of tripe."

In retrospect, Boston was anything but corporate -- and it was powered by a kind of radical independence that artists today might do well to emulate.

The band's founder, Tom Scholz, was a tinkerer with an engineering degree from MIT, who built his sound in his basement and spent a decade fighting an industry that tried to own him. "Songwriter, part-time musician, and engineer" is how he described himself during a deposition in May 1994. When a lawyer quipped that Ozzy Osbourne had once listed his occupation as "rock god," Scholz didn't miss a beat: "I am only a disciple."

While other musicians were burning through record-label budgets in LA studios, Scholz was soldering wires in his rented home in Watertown. He built his own equipment from salvaged parts from his day job at Polaroid in Cambridge, glued carpet to the walls for soundproofing, and wired up a homemade device he called the Power Soak, which allowed him to crank his Marshall amp to full distortion without destroying his ears.

The result was the best-selling debut album in history -- a title it held for nearly a decade. But instead of celebrating, Scholz became resentful. He had one of the worst record deals in an industry famous for bad ones. Buried in an attachment to his contract was a clause that let his manager treat one out of every four records as a freebie -- and not pay him for it. The band, meanwhile, was on the hook to deliver eight records to his label, CBS Records, in just five years.

Scholz balked after album No. 2. He wanted to make music that mattered, and he wanted to take his time to do it. By 1982, CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff was turning on him. "CBS can be a real prick when it wants to be," Yetnikoff had warned him early on, and he wasn't bluffing. The label froze Scholz's royalties, cutting off the money he needed to pay his band and finish the album. Then it sued him and the band for $20 million.

Scholz responded by building a business. Above a hardware store in Waltham, he opened Scholz Research & Development, a skunkworks for musicians. The Power Soak became a commercial product. Then came the Rockman, which packaged the trademark growl of Boston's guitars in a device that could fit in your hand--no amplifier stacks required. Journey, Def Leppard, The Cars, and Joe Satriani all used it on their albums over the years.

In a way, Scholz had created the hardware of anticorporate rock: gear that let players record and experiment outside a studio system that had turned creativity into debt with its onerous contracts. Meanwhile, his legal battle stretched on for years. But Scholz refused to cave. He financed his lawyers with profits from his inventions and kept recording in a basement, perfecting a ballad called "Amanda" and a slow-burn anthem, "To Be a Man."

"I worked very hard to get here and nobody's going to take it from me," he said later.

He eventually won the right to deliver the album "Third Stage" to another label, and it was racing toward platinum-level sales as soon as it landed on store shelves in 1986. In three weeks, it surpassed Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen on the pop charts, reaching the No. 1 spot at a pace only matched by six other albums in the previous five years. "Push a button and it's 1978 all over again," read an article in Spin magazine. "Punk never broke out, rap never made it out of the city, disco never died and came back again."

By then, Scholz had gotten rid of his Jaguar and was driving a rusty Datsun -- and he started donating a good chunk of his earnings to the animal rights groups he believed in. In 2002, he offered one of his most political songs, "Corporate America," which railed against industry for desecrating the earth: "You can take your bottom line and shove it."

Today, Scholz's music -- and his inventions -- have outlived the label heads who once lorded over him. Earlier this year, MXR released a new version of his classic device the Rockman X100, rebuilt in pedal form. It delivers the same polished tone that once filled stadiums, but its real stage today is between your guitar and your laptop.

Scholz's long fight still resonates because the only thing more important than the track is the human story behind it. That's something that the algorithms can never compete with. As for "More Than a Feeling," it has more than a billion listens on Spotify, at least five times as many as anything put out by Elvis Costello.