Boston should have played "Smokin' " right after the keyboard-driven sound effect, "The Launch."
That's the only complaint about the band's stop in Orem on Tuesday night. The shuffle hustle of "Smokin' " would have carried the audience's peaking expectation to a higher plane. Instead, the band anti-climactically stopped short and did the slow intro to the progressively blooming "Walk On.""Smokin' " would have fit perfectly. "Walk On" didn't. But after the song got rocking, things kept on rolling.
Yes, the melodic, hard-rock-guitar mother ship of Boston landed again in Utah. The band's crew - Captain Tom Scholz (guitars/organ), first mate Brad Delp (vocals/guitar), and crewmen Fran Cosmo (vocals/guitar), Curly Smith (drummer/vocals), David Sikes (bass/vocals) and Gary Pihl (guitar/vocals) - took about 4,000 classic-rock lovers on a time-machine journey through the past 21 years.
In fact, if you want to get technical, the band reached back into the 1800s with its take on "The Star-Spangled Banner." Better still, Scholz threw on a cape and delved even deeper in music's past and hammered out Bach's Toccata In D Minor on a massive pipe organ during the solo run of "Walk On."
But those tunes aside, the band's real music history reached back to 1976 with the breakthrough song "More Than a Feeling." The lesson wound up in the present with two new songs, "Tell Me," which was sung by Sikes, and "Higher Power," which was sung by Delp and Cosmo.
In between, and during the 2 1/2-hour show, the band threw out other choice bits such as "Don't Look Back," "Cool the Engines," "Feelin' Satisfied" 'and "Party."
Boston's million-dollar sound was intact thanks to Scholz and Pihl's clean melodic guitar leads, Delp's lung-bursting sustains and Cosmo's skyscraping high notes.
The reverent "Living for You" and the No. 1 hit "Amanda" were some of the power-ballads offered that mixed well with screamers such as "Rock & Roll Band," "Peace of Mind," "A Man Like Me" and the hand-clapping anthem, "Foreplay/Long Time."
A couple of nice surprises included "Hollyann" and "Surrender to Me," from the albums "Third Stage" and "Walk On," respectively.
While the visuals really took off during "The Launch" - the lighting rig appeared as a mobile rocket-launching, smoke-spewing starship - it wasn't until the encore when the audience heard the payoff crank of "Smokin'."
Although Scholz missed a couple of notes during his solos, the band covered easily and played one tight, predictable set. Just as the fans knew it would.