Anyone with dexterous fingers can buy a Scholz Research & Development Power Soak and sound like a Boston guitar player, and many people, including some famous ones, have probably done just that. But only Brad Delp could sing like Brad Delp, and Scholz had to keep coaxing him back into the band for decades to do Boston tours, because even the control-freak bandleader knew that Boston was really Delp. (Journey continues on, too, but singer Steve Perry has left. Thus hardly anyone cares, and Journey has never had a hit without him.) Scholz may have written and recorded most of the music, but it meant nothing without Delp's high, sweet, loud, reedy, keening cry of a voice. Capable of notes higher than most reputable tenors can hit (even that final mountaintopper in "More Than A Feeling" is unassisted, according to John Boylan), supple and tireless, full of both put-on histrionics and genuine feeling, operatic yet unaffected: it's a strange, at times almost disturbingly high voice, the kind -- like Kurt Cobain's -- that doesn't seem like it could have been produced by human vocal chords. (Cobain, incidentally, acknowledged the influence of "More Than A Feeling" on Nirvana's chef d'oeuvre, "Smells Like Teen Spirit": he was trying, he said, to write an equivalent 1990s anthem; some of the chord patterns are actually the same.) Delp sang every vocal part on those Boston songs -- all the leads, all the harmonies -- and that's why they have a vocal purity to them. They're multitudes of Delp. Many singers do this multivoice studio tracking, but Delp's voice really seems to benefit from the overlay of his own. Not only does the strategy thicken his tone, his already faraway quality gets farther, higher, glossier. Boston songs are in an old-fashioned, uh-huh-and-oh-yeah, classic-rock mold, but they're capped by an ethereal, soaring instrument. It's like flying a condor over a lot full of Ford Mustangs. That is perhaps not the loveliest of images, but it's an arresting one.
I've watched clips on YouTube of Delp bouncing around in live performances while his techie bandmates stare down at their guitars (or, in the case of the awesome-looking Fran Sheehan, Boston's original and excellent bassist, pumping his head up and down like a man in a trance). Delp's the only thing, really, to watch on the stage. He's got that long, curly, black 1970s hair, the mustache, the guitar around his neck that he doesn't bother playing much. He's smiling, he's clapping his hands, he loves what he's doing and how he's singing. He loves Scholz's songs. But apparently he was inestimably, mortally unhappy.
Here's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, so much so that I can quote myself from a review I wrote that came out this week: "Beauty and wildness and anything that startles are usually destroyed. The brown and the plain, the common and weedlike, consumes everything in its path and thrives." I know, in the case of Boston, that Tom Scholz isn't common and weedlike, although the guitar technology he invented has made thousands of axe-men sound identical and commercial -- but that is really the corporation's fault, not Scholz's. (He didn't deserve all the jeers he got for naming Boston's largely Delp-free 2002 album Corporate America, although he probably did for making it. It's unlistenable.)
But Delp seems to be one of those delicate, odd creatures that couldn't live in this world, of a fragile, susceptible happiness, while the strong, dull, productive people persist: the guys who keep re-recording drum tracks or sue old bandmates for calling themselves Boston or form new bands that sound more or less like their old ones. I don't care what he does from now on or what he calls it, Tom Scholz will never make another Boston record. Goodbye, Bradley Delp.