Songs About Bands Singing Those Songs

Before the Internet, it was harder to figure out what songs meant.

I've always been a sucker for songs with bizarre and complex lyrics.

In the pre-Internet days, I spent way too much time listening to Don McLean's "American Pie" and trying to dissect the various references. These days, all you'd have to do is go online.

But I've also always been a sucker for autobiographical songs, especially songs about how bands formed. Probably the best example is "Creeque Alley" by the Mamas and Papas, which namechecks various members of the Lovin' Spoonful, a club in the Virgin Islands, Roger McGuinn, Barry McGuire, and the various crushes between the various Mamas and Papas. (John Phillips, having turned down Cass Elliot's advances, was cruel enough to write a song where the overweight Elliot had to sing the line "no one's getting fat except Mama Cass.") These days, there's no need to learn the history or figure out the references when a quick Google search exposes you to the wisdom of a thousand obsessives who've poured over the song for you. (Embedding is disabled, so click here for the video.)

But my favorite rock song about a band's history is "Rock and Roll Band" by Boston. It tells the story of a scrappy band that toured up and down New England, building an audience one crappy gig at a time before getting signed to a big record company contract by a man smoking a big cigar at one of their shows.

The best part of the song? It's all made up. None of it happened -- at least not to the band Boston.

Instead, Boston was the brainchild of Tom Scholz, who worked as an engineer at Polaroid, built one of the first home studios in his basement (12 tracks of analog wonderousness), then wrote all the songs, recorded them himself (playing nearly all the instruments), and brought in singer Brad Delp to hit all those seemingly impossible high notes. The "band" got a deal with Epic Records based on Scholz's demos without once performing live. Epic added a few small overdubs, but the first Boston album was basically what Scholz and Delp recorded in Scholz's basement -- and arguably Scholz invented Arena Rock with that record (long before the "band" every played an arena).

It was only after the record came out that Scholz put together a band to go out on the road and play the songs. (Scholz would later invent a must-have small electric guitar amp that made him millions, which let him take a long time finishing future Boston albums and gave him the luxury of dragging out his various court battles with record companies for years and years.)

It's still a great song, but the lines "playing all the bars, sleeping in our cars," "playing for a week in Rhode Island," and "dancing in the streets of Hyannis" were all made up -- maybe because they sounded better than "spending months in the evenings in the basement after working at my day job."

And since the history in the song is all made up, who am I to say that the music wasn't really made by stop-action clay figures with guitars and a Lego drum riser?


(Note: Oops... as Kinky Paprika pointed out in the comments, it's Tom Scholz, not Tom Schultz. Clicks and Pops regrets the error.)