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It's official. Hubbard native Mark Boals is a Rock God.
The 1977 Hubbard High School graduate, who has played with Yngwie Malmsteen, Savoy Brown, Ted Nugent and dozens of other acts in a professional career spanning nearly 50 years, will be inducted into the Rock Godz Hall of Fame in Las Vegas at a Nov. 7 ceremony.
Before that, he'll perform Oct. 3 at the Robins Theatre in Warren as part of the Baldassarre Orchestra.
Boals got the call about his selection over the summer.
"I was flattered, of course, and surprised," he said. "I haven't gotten any of those (accolades), and I've been doing this for a long, long time."
According to Hall of Fame founder Cindy Landeen on its website, "Our mission is to acknowledge the contributions of a group of stunningly gifted musicians and professionals who flew under the radar while delivering to the world music that has orchestrated the soundtrack of many lives."
Other inductees for 2026 include Frank DiMino, lead singer of Angel; Eddie Trunk, historian, radio personality and host of "That Metal Show" on VH1; Flavor Flav of Public Enemy; and Cheetah Chrome, who died earlier this month and played in the Dead Boys with Girard native Stephen Bator, aka Stiv Bators.
Bators came to see Boals at the Youngstown Agora when he was in the band Lazer.
'Stiv Bators came to the show, and we had just made our first T-shirts," Boals said. "We had a box of T-shirts backstage. He stole them all. And the way we know he took them all is because we saw him on MTV after that, he was wearing one, but it was all ripped up and everything. I thought, 'Oh, now we're famous. Bators is wearing our T-shirts.'"
Boals has no shortage of stories, from opening for Rush on its first tour with Neil Peart as drummer, to playing the L.A. rock clubs in the mid '80s when the music scene there was exploding, and going from those clubs to playing massive festivals and arenas with Malmsteen.
It wasn't the musical path his parents expected ... or wanted.
Boals, 67, described his parents as musical and very church-going. His mother played piano at church; his father played trumpet. Boals was singing there by the time he was 6 and even at that young age started thinking it was something he'd like to do for the rest of his life.
He also was an avid AM radio listener, hearing everything from rock bands to the Isley Brothers to Tom Jones on WHOT. As he got a little older, he switched over to FM, where he first heard hard rock and heavy metal.
"It was new and exciting, and it incorporated a lot of elements, influences (of pop music)," Boals said. "I was into the real pop stuff, like the early Beatles, and the Beatles changed. They became psychedelic and heavy in their later albums and really experimental. And then these new bands that came out were taking it a step farther than they did. When I first heard Black Sabbath, I was like, 'What is that? It's so cool.'"
By the time he was 13, 14 years old, he was in a band called Jasmine. Everyone else was at least 18, and his bandmates had to sneak him in the back door of the bars they played. He started out as the bass player, because he was too shy to sing, but he started singing more as he got more confident.
His parents, especially his mother, were less than thrilled with his teenage musical pursuits.
"I'm sure they prayed for me a lot," Boals said. "I didn't agree with their opinion that I should only be doing Christian music, that there's no other kind of music, only Christian music. I said, 'Well, there's Christian rock,' and they said, 'No, if it's rock, it's not Christian.' So I said, 'OK, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.'"
Lazer, which started the year after he graduated from high school, got signed by Action Talent Agency and was working six, seven nights a week, playing all of the Agora clubs in Ohio and other regional venues.
Again, Boals started as the bass player. The band's original lead singer wasn't very good, but he had a PA system, and gear was expensive.
"That was his credentials," Boals said. "Eventually, I started singing almost all the songs and still playing bass. We had a really good following between '79 and '81."
Boals met UK blues rock guitarist Kim Simmonds, who hired him to play bass and sing in Savoy Brown and then joined Nugent's touring band for a year. He enjoyed being on the road, but life back in Ohio with his soon-to-be ex-wife was miserable.
"I wanted to move as far away from Ohio as possible. I thought LA, because that's the place, isn't it? It was the '80s, and everybody talked about it. So I moved to LA with $60 in my pocket, a couple bass guitars and a suitcase full of t-shirts and nowhere to stay really. I found a couple girls that put me up, and I auditioned for a few bands out there."
The LA clubs were the path to stardom for acts like Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue and Poison, but it definitely wasn't glamorous.
"The Whisky a Go Go is a dump. The Troubadour was another dump," he said. "Cockroaches everywhere, rats. But those were the famous places where all the bands played. I was in total shock by that. In LA, there was nothing in between arenas and stadiums and the clubs. The clubs were small and dumpy, but that's where everybody got signed."
Boals did some recording with the guitar player from Billy Squier's band and in 1985 was hired to be the lead singer for highly touted Swedish guitar player Yngwie Malmsteen.
Malmsteen had a $6 million record deal with Polygram. He also had a manager who pocketed most of it, according to Boals, as well as the tour support provided by the label.
"He was giving us all 500 bucks a week, which wasn't that bad back then, but we should have been making (more)," Boals said. "There was millions involved, and nobody did anything about it."
It soured him on the music business, but after a short break, he realized he still loved making music. Since then, he's released several solo albums and starred in long-running Las Vegas shows. He's toured or recorded with such acts as Dokken, Billionaires Boys Club, Foundry, Ring of Fire and Royal Hunt, with whom he played a tour of Japan earlier this year.
After more than a decade in Las Vegas (which he left because of rising temperatures and a growing population that its infrastructure can't handle), Boals returned to Ohio earlier this year and lives in Shaker Heights. Many days he records in his home studio, oftentimes for bands half a world away.
"I get files from overseas and send back my files," he said. "There's a couple bands (where) I've never met the people before, not in person anyway."
He misses the old ways.
"With Yngwie, we were in the studio for three months writing and recording, and it was an expensive studio too. I think we spent about $250,000 on studio costs. Nowadays, you don't get a budget that big unless you're in the top 1%. It's a shame because there's chemistry that happens when you're in the same room with other musicians, and you bounce things off of each other, and it's always better. It's just not available now, so we do the best we can, but it's not the same as being in the same room."
Living in Ohio makes it much easier to play with the Baldassarre Orchestra, a group founded by Ohio-based composer Carl Baldassare, whose past bands include Abraxas and Syzygy. Boals did some recording with Syzygy, which is how he met Baldassare, and he flew in from Las Vegas for the orchestra's 2025 show at the Robins. This time he only has a one-hour drive.
The concert Oct. 3 focuses on the classic rock era from 1965 to 1975. Boals said he gets to sing a couple of his favorites in the show, The Guess Who's "Undun" and The Who's "Love, Reign O'er Me."
"We have some of the best string players in Cleveland. They're all from the Cleveland Orchestra," Boals said. "I think the musicianship is fantastic, and everybody's great and really nice people. We have fun, and everybody likes it when the band is having fun."