95 Songs of Summer, #78 - "More Than A Feeling" (1976)

To this day, I think that Boston's debut album is one of the great debut albums in rock history - a fully realized masterpiece that the band would never match again in the course of its on again, off again, fairly short career.  But even though the creativity of Tom Scholz may have burst like a supernova, what a burst it was - layers upon layers of guitars (and no synthesizers, as the album cover proudly exclaimed) that sounded as if there were an entire orchestra hidden somewhere in the grooves of those songs.

The album was a hit for so long that I easily could have mined songs from one of two summers - 1976, when the album was released, or the following summer, when its songs were still in heavy rotation on the radio.  And I even had a little "Boston ritual" going on in the winter and spring of '77 - I was in a bowling league on Friday afternoons, and every Friday when we wrapped up I would plunk a quarter into the juke box and play "Smokin."  Man, I loved that song.

But I also loved this one, a song that I would argue is as majestic in its own way as something like Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long."  It's hard to imagine how much inner ear damage this song has caused in the 35 years of its existence.  I'm sure that most people would say it was well worth it.

Boston, "More Than a Feeling," from the summer of 1976.