A Career, Nope, A Century Of Evil: Imaginos Re-Imagined

Some alternate albums I've planned on doing for along while, some I more or less stumble into. It can be the fault of Amazon's algorhythms, or, you know, pure dumb luck. While looking through my Blue Öyster Cult collection in preparing another possible item for One Buck Records - a rarities comp - I stumbled, on an existing comp called Rarities (natch!) on Stephen King's spoken opening for Imaginos, the album that ended Blue Öyster Cult's run with a major record label in the late 80s. 

"Imaginos, performed by Blue Oyster Cult. A bedtime story for the children of the damned" begins Mr. King's foreword (taken from the text on the back cover of the record), and then very briefly lays out the narrative concept for the album to follow. Excpt that intro never made it onto the album, instead it was attached to the single edit of the lone single "Astronomy", which makes no sense whatsoever. It thus dutifully became a rarity and accidentally a starting point to this re-imagined version of Imaginos, simply out of the idea that I should do something with this intro. So I did. A couple of you probably know the relatively complicated backstory to the album, but in case you don't, here's a short(ish) rundown of how things went down. 

Imaginos followed two expensive but artistically and commercially disappointing albums - The Revölution By Night and the much reviled Club Ninja, though the former isn't really much better - that showed the Cult drifting and floating, not sure whether they should hitch their bandwagon to the burgeoning hair metal movement or be a tougher-edged Foreigner. So the hard rock sound, almost heavy metal sound of Imaginos felt like a return to the glory days for many a BÖC fan. Yet the album is also in many ways not even a Blue Öyster Cult album. The labyrinthine credits already tell as much: Imaginos was a solo project by ex-BÖC drummer Albert Bouchard, who had created these songs with a ton of sidemen, and producer Sandy Pearlman. Pearlman was of course a pivotal figure in the story of BÖC, managing the band (and giving them their arty, hippie-esque stage names that everyone hated except Donald Roeser, henceforth known as Buck Dharma), writing the lyrics for a major part of their early albums and heavily influencing the aesthetics and style of the band. 

Pearlman had created a related series of poems and writings in the mid-60s called The Soft Doctrines Of Imaginos, a H.P. Lovecraft-influenced tale of aliens called The Invisible Ones using a superpoered humanoid undercover agent named Imaginos to manipulate world events to test humankind's resistance against the lure of evil. These writings were cannibalized by the band for a ton of songs on the trilogy of albums that opens their discography, but Pearlman and Albert Bouchard had always hoped to record an entire album dedicated to the story of Imaginos. The band had written all Imaginos songs throughout the 70s (and demoed a couple of them), and after being fired by the band in the early 80s, Bouchard got to tried to turn these demos into his first solo album, recording 12 songs in 1982 with im on guitar and lead vocals. The BÖC members guested on recordings and Bouchard filled out the ranks with a small army of guest musicians including Robby Krieger and Joe Satriani. Persistent complaints of Columbia Records about the quality of Bouchard's lead vocals had him try out other singers on some songs - that actually made it onto the finished album - but finally, in 1984, due to the perceived lack of commercial prospcts and Bouchard's wobbly leads the project was shelved indefinitely. 

What else was shelved indefinitely two years later? Why, it's Blue Öyster Cult. So Pearlman convinced Columbia execs that the only way to have a BÖC product in the foreseeable future  was to revive Imaginos as a band project. He got some monye to remix the album and overdub lead vocals by Eric Bloom and Donald Roeser onto the record, while Albert Bouchard is almost entirely erased, save for some shared lead vocals on "Blue Öyster Cult" (the song!). Bouchard felt that his work was stolen from underneath him, while BÖC, at that time strictly a touring band, half-heartedly inserted three of the Imaginos track into their set lists, but it idn't matter: Imaginos failed to sell after receiving no promotion by Columbia Records whatsoever. Shortly thereafter, Bouchard sued Pearlman and BÖC, settling out of court. And this is were the story could end, but Albert Bouchard would take his revenge and have the last word on Imaginos. But that is a,nother story for another day. 

Now, what is going on on this OBG-imagined version of Imaginos? For one thing, a new, 100% original opening track, built around the King intro which was mostly playing over the beginning of "Astronomy", so I looped that melody to create a little overture, most elegantly dubbed the "Astroverture". A minor point of discussion and discord at the release of Imaginos was that the album's songs didn't follow the storyline, which was already hard to follow as is, so a sleeve note - essentially a big cop-out - stated that all the depicted events happen simultaneously. Uh-huh. Sure, Jen. So the first idea for the album, other than the new opening track, was to sequence the whole shebang chronologically in terms of the story being told and see what that would give us. And it worked...well, almost. There were two problems of clusters of songs being too similar. The two heaviest tracks on the album ("I Am The One You Warned Me Of" and the hilariously titled "The Siege And Investiture Of Baron Van Frankenstein's Castle At Weisseria" - oof, I just got a year older typing all that) were back-to-back, which was not ideal, and on what would have been side a three of the poppiest songs were stuck together, including two with similar shouted backing vocals ("Imaginos!", "Del Rio's Song!"), exposing the soft white underbelly of that section. 

Happily, a minor tweak was enough to make the album work, contrary to the original album's seemingly arbitrary sequencing that seems to have been randomly drawn out of a hat, by an evil monkey of course. Merely switching two tracks, "Imaginos" (originally track 3) and "I Am The One You Warned Me Of" (originally track seven) solved both problematic sections. And the rest, as they say, is history...the hidden history of mankind, as manipulated by Imaginos. Technically, I also worked on the flow by eliminating all the dead space between tracks and creating a couple of transitions between tracks when the occasion arose. 

So, Imaginos, as imaginosed imagined by ol' One Buck Guy. Curtain raise, and enter Mr. King, please...