How an MIT-Trained Engineer and Rock Star Took On His Record Label — And Won

New excerpt published at Core Memory

Check out the latest excerpt from Power Soak about Tom Scholz’s guitar gadget company, Scholz Research & Development:

Tom Scholz would have to decide whether to retreat or dig in, but he was prepared for anything. Quietly, almost without notice, he had been building a war chest. In a small shop above a hardware store near his home, he’d been spending sixty hours a week, working on a series of devices he had originally made for himself and his bandmates.

Some of these devices were meant for the studio; others were meant to help reproduce those studio sounds on stage. But circumstances had a way of escalating with Scholz, particularly when a soldering iron was involved.

In the summer of 1982, he brought a prototype of one of his devices—a little black box that could fit in the glove compartment of his Datsun—to the National Association of Music Merchants’ annual expo in Atlanta. Booth #9042 was otherwise empty save for seven large Styrofoam letters painted to look like concrete: ROCKMAN.

Read the rest over at Core Memory