The Tapes Archive

Marc Allan: I guess the first question, or the most obvious one is, where is the new album?

Brad Delp: I don’t know. Where’s the new album? It’s in the, it’s in Tom’s basement right now and that’s, there haven’t been too many delays outside of, you might’ve heard about the flooding that, that occurred over the winter. We’re doing the whole album in Tom’s basement.

Marc Allan: As was the

first album, is that right?

Brad Delp: Yeah, actually about, probably about 75, 80% of the first one was done there. And the only reason we finished it out in LA was to keep the record company happy. So this one, they’re happy from the last album so we can do, they let us do the whole thing here. The only problem we had during the winter was when the snow melted, Tom’s basement flooded, and that happened more than once. So just as we would kind of get rolling, we’d have to yank everything out and wait. So, so that caused maybe two or three weeks delay anyway. Then we had a couple of incidents with bad tape. He ordered like a gross of tape and something happened. When he got it, it wasn’t right, he had to send it back. So we’ve had a few delays along that line. And outside of that, we’ve just been kinda taking our time making the record. We knew it, it wasn’t gonna be real fast when we finished the first one. Because the first album really, if you count all the time we spent putting demo tapes together, some of the songs on the first album were recorded once, you know, a long time ago and re-recorded again. When it came down to making the album, we were quite familiar with the songs. So, it was quite a long process putting that one together and we knew it was going to be quite a long time.

Marc Allan: So it was due to be released a month and a half ago.

Brad Delp: We had hoped that it, well we hoped that it would be out right around now or maybe a couple of weeks earlier. And now it doesn’t look like it’s gonna be out for about another three to four weeks. We haven’t put the vocals on yet. Everything else is about finished.

Marc Allan: The last thing I read about it in Rolling Stone is Tom Scholz said he hadn’t done anything as far as the album. He hadn’t written any songs, he hadn’t recorded anything.

Brad Delp: Oh well, we’ve got, yeah we, I forget when that article was, but we’ve got more than enough material, and we’ve been working up material, but we had two or three songs before we even got off the road that we did in the live set that hadn’t been recorded. One of them is A Man I’ll Never Be, it’s kind of a ballad-type thing, and we knew were gonna use that. And there’s another song that we used to play called Don’t Be Afraid, and that’s gonna be on there, and we had to work out most of the other tunes. As it stands now, I think there’s gonna be between seven and eight songs on the next album. And we must have about, I think there’s nine or 10 that are viable songs, so we’re gonna have a few extra to fall back on. And most of those have been weeded out now, so actually Tom is just wrapping up the lead parts. What happened was, we recorded say these nine or 10 songs all the way through with singing, maybe we do like one verse just to get how the thing was gonna go. And then we listened to that, and then we went back and re-recorded the whole thing. So I think when Tom said he hadn’t started on it, the fact of the matter was we probably had a copy all made, but it wasn’t the, it wasn’t the keep tracks. So now we go back and, and do it again. And that’s, we’re kinda in phase two right now.

Marc Allan: That’s a lot different frame of reference. The way he thought of, not starting and you have started.

Brad Delp: Well technically we hadn’t started the record, but once you put it down once, then it’s just a matter of going through it again and getting it, you know, we, we kinda, I guess we do things maybe a little differently than a lot of bands do. When Tom gets an idea, it usually goes down on tape first and then we hear it on tape the way he has it, and then we go and rehearse it. We rehearse in Cambridge at the Music Complex, Cambridge Music Complex. And then after we rehearse it, we go back and try some other things on tape. Then when we’re happy with that we, we do the record. So it’s a, it’s a long process, but it’s the way Tom likes to work. He’s very, you know, particular about what, what goes down on the record and he wants to make sure that everything is just right. And it gives us an opportunity to become more familiar with the material rather than just kinda putting it down.

Marc Allan: What does the record company have to say about, well the first album came out, it was in August ’76?

Brad Delp: Yeah, yeah.

Marc Allan: Around that time?

Brad Delp: I guess it was. It’s been a long time.

Marc Allan: What does the record company have to say about the fact it’s been almost two years since the last album?

Brad Delp: Yeah, well had the first album not done as well as it did I’m sure we’d either be fired or we’d have three albums out by now, ’cause they would have been very concerned. As it is, having done so well, which kinda surprised everybody including us that it did that well, they’re just more or less letting us do it in hopes that the next one will be equally successful. If it is then, then they don’t have any problem. They’ve been, they’ve been very good about it overall. I personally, because when Tom was working that doesn’t leave me with that much to do, so I’ve had a lot of spare time, and I’ve been working on some things on my own, but I’d kinda like to be out on the road right now myself. You know, I kinda wish the album was out, but we just, you really can’t rush them, you know? So we’re all just kinda waiting. We wait for the word and then we go in, and everybody does his own, you know, part kinda individually.

Marc Allan: He writes the songs and produces the record?

Brad Delp: He’s written, yeah, he wrote the bulk of it as he did with the last one, although Tom and I collaborated with probably a little more on this one, as far as the lyrics go. I think I wrote the lyrics to two or three of the songs or wrote the lyrics to two and helped out on another one. But the, the bulk of the music is Tom’s.

Marc Allan: How surprised were you about the success of that first album?

Brad Delp: Very surprised. Well personally, I can’t speak for the whole band, but I, like I say, some of the material on the record was five or six years old before it came out. So we had heard it and I had heard it so much before that, that I couldn’t really be, I lost all objectivity of it. I couldn’t hear it as a, as a brand new record anymore. It was just, you know, those songs that I’d been hearing over and over again. So I really just had no idea how other people would take to it, but I always go, or always went by the assumption that if I was involved in it, then it probably wasn’t very good. So I was very surprised when that happened, you know? I just can’t picture myself being in anything successful. So I was extremely surprised, maybe more than the other people. I thought that Tom did a, did a very good job on the record. And, but I wasn’t too pleased with the singing on it. I thought I coulda done a better job on it. We went out to California to do all the vocals and the weather out there really kinda wreaked havoc with my throat. I’d never been out there before, and it’s so dry that I had a, a real bad time out there trying to sing. I thought that the, the stuff that we did on the demo tapes before that, that the singing on that in a lot of cases, was probably a little better, but I guess I was satisfied overall, but I, you know, I just.

Marc Allan: I think it’s like you said, it’s hard to be objective about your own material.

Brad Delp: Yeah it was a really–

Marc Allan: ‘Cause I think the vocals are great.

Brad Delp: Well thank you.

Marc Allan: I think it’s the best part.

Brad Delp: I guess it’s yeah, you get so close to something and you record it over and over again. The more you record it you just keep hearing what’s wrong with it. ‘Cause you know what’s right with it, so you’re always listening for what’s wrong. And when you get finished, maybe if you got 90% of it you’re happy with, but there’s 10% that you just, you couldn’t get that’s, that’s what I hear.

Marc Allan: Tell me something about the history of the band. How did you get involved with the band?

Brad Delp: Well, I was playing with various groups around the North Shore area. I’m from Danvers originally, but I used to play around Salem and Beverly and in that area as did Franny, our bass player. And I was playing in a band with him when a friend of his told me about these other two guys who had a group together, and that was Barry and Tom. So the, the stuff that I was doing with Fran was all top 40 stuff. I’d never been in a band that did any original material, and I went down to see what they were doing and they played me two songs, one of which was Hitch a Ride. Although it wasn’t called Hitch a Ride at that time, but it was called San Francisco Day. Tom played me that and said they were going in the studio to do some work and they were looking for a singer. So it was kinda like a golden opportunity for me, I’d never been in a studio up to that point. This was around ’71, and that was something I always wanted to do, and get in a band that was doing some original material. So I left the band with Fran and joined up with Barry and Tom. And we went through a number of bass players. We, we played, oh just mostly local things, like we well, we played for BU and we played different colleges and stuff, and a couple of small clubs and things like that. But mostly we spent recording. We did some recording at Tom’s house, which at that time was, he had a Roberts tape deck, like a two-track, and he hooked it up to something else. So we had like four tracks that we could work with, and we did some recording in local studios around town. So Tom spent a lot of time trying to develop himself as a kind of engineer/producer, and eventually, the equipment got a little more sophisticated. And when we’d play out, we did about like half original material and half cover stuff, like that.

Marc Allan: What kind of covers would you do?

Brad Delp: Oh a lot of rock and roll. Tom really likes the James Gang, you know the, like James Gang Rides Again and stuff like that, so we did Tend my Garden and we did Funk #49 and stuff like that. And we did Space Truckin‘, you know, and a lot of Led Zeppelin stuff, Communication Breakdown, and a lot of Rolling Stones, Brown Sugar, and all that stuff. It was mainly stuff without any harmony, and it was a lot different from what I was used to doing. Because the stuff that I was doing, I was like a Beatles, you know, fanatic. So all the groups I was in, we used to do a lot of Beatles stuff with like, you know, four and five part harmony and stuff like that. And that’s what I was used to doing. I didn’t really like front the band, you know, I just was this one of like three or four singers. So when I joined the band with Tom and we started doing, getting into stuff that was a little heavier maybe, you know, featuring vocalists like that, it was kind of a new, a new thing for me. So I kinda learned a lot from doing that, from playing that stuff. We went through a number of bass players during that time too. Just, people just kind of came and went until finally Fran was someone that I knew, and it turned out that he had also played with Barry previously because they’re both from the Lynn area. So he was kind of a natural to, to kind of fit in with the band seeing as he knew everybody. And he was also familiar with the material because when we were making tapes, when Tom, Barry and myself were making tapes, I, Fran and I would still keep in touch. So I would come over to his house and kinda let him in on what we were doing. So he fit in very well as did Sibby. Sibby was a, another friend of all of us, you know, before he actually joined the band. But he, he had been hearing the tapes and he was kinda into what we were doing, even before he officially joined the band. So it kinda happened oh, over a period of years. But originally, originally it was Tom and Barry, and then it was me, Tom and Barry. And then the other two guys kinda came in.

Marc Allan: How did you get signed with Epic?

Brad Delp: How did we get signed with Epic? We had, like I say, when I first met Tom back in ’71, first thing we did was go into the studio, Great Northern it is now, in Maynard. We made a demo tape with about, I think there were four songs on it. We sent that out to record companies and we just kinda found the, the addresses on the back of albums, you know, and just sent it and, and usually it didn’t get through. But we’ve been doing that since ’71, making tapes and sending them and sending them. Eventually, they get through to somebody, and the first person that got through to I guess, who got back to us, was Charlie McKenzie, who was from Boston, and he was working for ABC at the time. We didn’t send it directly to him, but he heard it in somebody else’s outer office. And so he, being local and knowing that we were local, took an interest in what he heard. He had a friend down in California, Paul Hearn, who was working, I think he was doing independent promotion at that time, working with Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. And he had established himself working with them as a, as a promoter. He had been pretty successful. So Pauly knew, knew Charl, and Charlie knew Paul and Charlie took the tape to Paul. They both liked it, decided they wanted to go in on it together. Charlie knew a lot of people in New York. Steve Popovich, who was at that time with Epic and Ron Alexenburg, neither one of them now who are with Epic, but they were at the time. So he arranged to have someone come down. And then we did a, a demo set down in Aerosmith’s studio at the warehouse. We rented that and, and did a set for, for those people who came up. And it was probably equally on the strength of the demo and on the strength of Paul and Charlie’s recommendation that we got the contract. I mean, no matter how good the tape was, unless we had somebody to bring it there personally, like them no, it never woulda got listened to. After it got to them they were impressed by the quality of the demo tape. We, we kinda had a quick rehearsal get together for the, for when they came up to listen to us and it wasn’t very good. We weren’t too happy with it, but it was good enough I guess, to get signed.

Marc Allan: And what kind of deal did you get?

Brad Delp: You know, I don’t know to this day what kind of deal we have, we’ve got all kinds of people that are going over contracts and things, but I guess it was just a standard five-year contract with whatever, you know, for a beginning group. It was no special I mean, it wasn’t a big thing. Nobody in the company, I don’t think, thought it was gonna turn out the way it did, and we certainly didn’t. So it was no, it was just a, whatever anybody else gets. And then when the record first come out, I think it sold like 40,000 the first week and we wanna sell 40,000. I figured well it must’ve peaked, you know, that was it. You know, and then it would sell like, you know, 110,000 or something. I go, “Well, this is when it must be going down.” None of the singles, oddly enough, when gold, More Than a Feeling, I think sold maybe around eight, 850, 900,000 copies. I think that did the best of all of the singles. The album sold 6 million. The singles, they obviously helped, helped the album sales, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t, or didn’t seem to me to be like the big single, you know. I think the biggest selling point for us was that they were playing most of the album on, like on the FM stations, they were playing almost every cut.

Marc Allan: Some people have said that your early live shows were somewhat less than good.

Brad Delp: Yeah, I can think of quite a few. The first two in, in Boston as a matter of fact, were pretty horrendous. The first two at the Music Hall, actually before that we played in Waltham. And that was pretty horrendous too. Part of the reason for that, and I think a good part of it was that we didn’t have a crew together. We didn’t have a sound man who was with us all the time. We kinda picked up people as we went along. Things happened so quickly that we just didn’t have that part of it together, and I think that’s a real, you can’t underestimate that part of a live show. And when it’s not, one, when it’s not your show, you have to rely on, on the other people’s sound system and whatever, but you have, at least you have your own sound man, which we didn’t have at that time, we were still kind of experimenting. We didn’t get that together until, until really we went out, we went out to the Midwest for a couple of weeks. And I think when we came back, we had that a little more together than, than previously.

Marc Allan: How’d you find other bands treated you when you were on, you were third on the bill?

Brad Delp: Well, usually they treat you pretty good if you’re third on the bill. The first big shows we did, 13, 14, 15,000 people, we were opening for Black Sabbath down South. We did about two weeks with them and they were among the nicest people that we, that we met on the road, they were just great. But the first date that they, that we played with them was their first, first time they played in a couple of years or something. They just all, they were all in England. They got together, hadn’t even seen each other or something, and they didn’t want to do a sound check. They just said, “Oh, go ahead, do what you want.” They never did sound checks so things went very smoothly for us and, and they were nice people.

Marc Allan: How do you react to something like what Elvis Costello said and, and the fact that it was Newsweek?

Brad Delp: Yeah well, I can only speak for myself. I can’t speak for the rest of the band, but personally, it hurt me. I suppose when you read a bad review, even if, say a critic, you know, writes a bad review. Even if, even if you don’t feel it’s true, you know, even if you feel, maybe you did a good job that night. ‘Cause plenty of times we’ve gotten good reviews when we felt we weren’t so good, and terrible reviews when we thought that we really sounded good. But even if you don’t believe it, those things still, they’re talking about you. So it still registers, you know? And the fact that, like I say, I like his records, and I never met him and I never saw one of his shows, but yeah, it kinda hurt to have somebody say. It’s too bad he feels that way. I guess there’s not too much I can do about it really.

Marc Allan: That’s pretty good, you take it pretty well. Because you coulda, you could on the other hand say, “Well we sold 6 million records “and this guy only sold 300,000.”

Brad Delp: Well I’ll tell you, to me, it really doesn’t matter if we sell six records or 6 million. And now that’s not easy for me to say, because I’ve already sold them, so anybody can say, “Oh yeah, sure he can say that,” you know? But I didn’t expect to sell 6 million records, but I can’t apologize for it. It’s not my fault that we sold that many either, you know? I don’t have any hostility towards anybody. But like, we play with Rick Derringer. Now the first time we played with Rick Derringer, he was opening for us, and the only thing I could think of was, “There’s no justice.” I mean we, it doesn’t matter how many records we sold. We should be opening for him because he’s, he’s paid his dues. He’s been around so long. He’s, he’s been an innovator, you know he’s, we naturally have a lot, some of our music, a portion of it at least had the derive from Derringer because, you know, he was right there, while we were learning. So it’s, you know it’s not fair, and he probably knows it’s not fair either, but he knows that that’s the way it is if somebody’s quote, commercial. So that’s nice when you meet people like that, that really know, understand that, that it’s not always, it’s not always fair, you know, in the record business and, and someday it’s not gonna be fair for us either. You know, maybe we had more than our share now, and maybe some other time, maybe we’ll feel a little more deserving and won’t get it. You know, that’s possible. But, but if that happens, I mean, I think you have to take that in stride. You know, it’s crazy. I just have to take things when they, as they come, you know? If the record didn’t sell, you know, I’m not going to go over and shoot myself or something. And by the same token, I hate to feel like I should go shoot myself now because it did sell.

Marc Allan: So people have accused the album, the first album with being sterile-sounding because of overdubs and things like that. How many overdubs were done, and how much time was put into the final process?

Brad Delp: Well it’s hard, it’s hard to say how many, how many overdubs were done. Because when we, when we put an album together we do, we do everything kind of one at a time. So anyway, it took us a while to get the album the way we wanted it to, but it, but the sound on the album was based on one, the idea Tom originally had was recorded, and two, we all played it together to see how we, what we could add to it by playing it live. Then we went back into the studio and tried to put those together. Sometimes it’s nice to make a, it’s nice to have an album with a kind of loose feel to it, you know, or maybe have some guitar parts that are maybe not quite in tune, you know? And sometimes, maybe that adds to, to you know, the feeling of the record or something, you know, the first take. We don’t, we don’t do a lot, a lot of stuff isn’t like first take. It usually took a few takes, but Tom wanted, he wanted something that was, was a statement of what he had envisioned, so he wants to get it right. And then we get a chance to interpret it when we go out on the road.

Marc Allan: What kind of an audience do you think Boston attracts?

Brad Delp: We were surprised when we went out because it was really quite a wide range. Anywhere from like 13 to our age, 24, 25, 26. So either there was a lot of, I talked to a lot of college people at the shows and I talked to a lot of kids younger than that too. I never gave it much, much thought or figured out why, but it, it struck me kind of funny that the Beatles were like 21, 22 years old when I was buying their records, I was 12. You know, I don’t know what the, what the correlation is or why. And now we’re, you know, I’m 26 and people 13 are buying the record. And I remember about the Beatles too on AM radio, that they used to play all the cuts from their album when I was about 12 years old, when they came out. And I liked music, I liked Elvis up to that point really. My oldest sister used to collect all his records, and I used to listen to them. And I really liked Elvis, even when I was 7, 8, 9 years old. I wanted to play music but I was always kind of withdrawn, you know, kind of shy in school and like that. So when the Beatles came out, it just really took over my life, you know? And just, the music really meant a lot to me hearing it. I just liked it from the start, and I made it a point to know everything about them. So then I’d like go in to school, and nobody even knew which one was which, you know? So I liked, then that would get me talking to people, and then I met some people that played music through that. I got in my first band and we naturally played all Beatle material. So the Beatles really got me into music, or at least I had always liked music up to that point, but they kinda loosened me up enough to, to go out and play. I actually used to play around the North Shore, and that was like, our big forte was doing Beatles stuff. We used to do Magical Mystery Tour and Hey Jude, you know, with six part harmony. I was real big on, on doing stuff with harmonies, and you know, that’s why when I first met Tom, they weren’t doing any of that. None of, none of the rest of the guys were singing. So it was a real different thing for me to be doing like, you know, Rolling Stones stuff. I wasn’t really used to that. So it was good, it was kinda like a learning experience for me. You know, I took it that way.

Marc Allan: Is the band a democracy?

Brad Delp: Hmm, well it is, insofar as that we all have input and that there’s, we all decided that if there’s something that’s questioned, as far as the music goes, that it goes up before the whole band. If, if most of the band doesn’t want it in, it won’t go in. So in that sense it’s a democracy to the, up to the point where, of course Tom writes all the material, well most of the material, and that’s only because he’s got, he’s got it all together, you know? I mean, I’m gonna have at least one song on the next album, ’cause I wrote one, you know? The other guys have some material and everybody likes it. We’ll put that on too. If he writes the material, he knows best how it, how it should go. So he puts, he has the main input as far as that goes. And also he’s the only one that, out of the band, that knows his way around the studio. The rest of us just don’t have the, the knowledge. So we leave that to him. And when he, whenever he writes anything down or if he plays something, if he puts it down on tape he’ll play it for us and he’ll say, “Well, what do you think of this part?” Or, “How do you like this?” If we don’t like it, he’ll get rid of it. He’s, he’s real easy to get along with that way. If he, if it’s something that he really feels strongly about, he’ll try and, you know, explain why he did it. And usually, usually we, you know, we’ll go along with something like that. But it’s, it’s pretty, it’s pretty democratic, you know. It kinda, it doesn’t give that appearance I suppose, to people who really don’t know the band figure, “Well, it’s just Tom and then these other, “these other guys,” you know. But the fact is that most of us have been playing together in one band or another for quite a few years. So we’re not, it’s not like the droids that he picked up or something and said, you know, “Play this.” It doesn’t work that way.