"Foreplay" and "Long Time"--three words rarely heard in the same sentence, much less right next to each other. When they are heard together, it's usually in the form of a request, not a statement of fact. That's what I imagine, anyway. I've never heard those words uttered by anyone other than DJs on the radio. You would think that anyone who would use three words as the title to a song would have an overblown ego and fancy themselves as the world's greatest lover.
But you'd be wrong. It turns out Tom Scholz is a pretty down-to-earth guy--at least for a guitar hero/keyboard hero/engineer. That's according to the NPR/NOVA folks that put together this exposé on "The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers." (Shhhh! Don't tell anyone I'm a rock star! I don't want the word to get out or my career as a scientist and/or engineer will be ruined!)
While Tom Scholz is an amazing composer, musician, and engineer, he stinks as a marketer. I imagine that most men, if they could buy a pedal that would sustain the sounds of "Foreplay" indefinitely, they'd pay pretty much any price for it. And they'd probably want two or three of them.
Of course, the way that pedal would sustain the sounds in a highly controlled studio setting wouldn't necessarily be the way it would work live. And it's the live performance that would really matter with this particular pedal. It's kind of like the difference between hearing a song on a record played on the home stereo and hearing that same song played live. Sometimes the songs sound better and are a lot more exciting when played live--like every Billy Joel song at every Billy Joel concert I've attended. But sometimes the live performance sounds a lot worse.
While Brad Delp's singing in the video above is pretty bad compared to the recorded version, I have to admit that the record could never convey the sheer magnificence of the drummer's fro! It is a fro for the ages! Surpassed in fro-glory only by that of Billy Preston's peerless head of hair.
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| Sib Hashian--Secret love child of Gabe Kaplan and Billy Preston? |
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| I once had a bubble-gum card with this man on it. I was going for a full set of Sweathogs cards, but Bill's store stopped carrying them. Damn you, Bill! Fortune and glory could have been mine if it weren't for the vagaries of your candy shelf! |
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| Billy Preston--a fro so big it can't all fit in one picture. |
In the interest of fairness, I have to revisit the topic of Tom Scholz's character. The NPR/NOVA interview makes him come off looking like a saint. But if you look at all the lawsuits brought by and against Tom and his Boston bandmates, including one by Sib Hashian, you'd think Tom's a real douchebag. In fact, he sued (and lost) Brad Delp's widow for defamation when in a Boston Herald interview she blamed Brad's 2007 suicide on the stress brought on by conflict with Scholz. You've got to have a shriveled heart to go after the widow of a guy that helped make you a multi-millionaire before he offed himself. That's a pretty damn cold way to treat the family of a former bandmate, regardless of how many times Delp's voice failed to hit the right notes during their live performances.
Interesting Sib sidebar #1--Sib's daughter, Lauren, is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's girlfriend, and they had a daughter together. The girl is 1/4th Sib. The other 3/4ths is an inseparable mixture of baked halibut and steroids.
Interesting Sib sidebar #2--Sib died while playing the drums this year (March 22, 2017) on a legends-of-rock cruise ship tour--a very Spinal Tappy way for a drummer to go.
Anyway, you must be wondering why this song is on my list. It's because I distinctly remember hearing this song after my mission as I came out of the Pocatello welcome-to-downtown-from-under-the-railroad tunnel and drove past the First National Bar, which was partly owned by our old psychology professor, Coke Brown (talk about your freaky hairdos!). I hadn't heard "Foreplay/Long Time" for...well...a long time, what with the mission thing lasting over two years followed by a year of studying at Ricks that involved very little listening to rock stations on the radio. The next day I went to Budget Tapes and Records and asked if they had a tape of Boston's first album--which was conveniently titled "Boston"--with that song on it. They didn't. They just had "Third Stage," which I already had. Apparently, the owners of Budget Tapes and Records were the ones on a strict budget. They couldn't even afford to have a single copy of all of Boston's albums for sale at the same time. But I did find an RTZ (Return to Zero) tape featuring Brad Delp as lead singer, so I bought that instead. It wasn't as good as a Boston album, but it sounded enough like Boston to make me satisfied I hadn't been completely ripped off.
Why my brain has chosen to remember a First National Bar driveby and that tape purchase over so many other things I've done in life is a mystery to me. Yet that's what pops into my head every time this song is played. And for some inexplicable reason, I like that memory--in much the same way as I like Sib and Billy's bearded fros and Gabe's mustache. It's all weird, but kind of tickley-fun.
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