Albert Strikes Back! or The Revenge Of ReImaginos

Ha! And here you thought I was done with Imaginos, but no, I'm not! And neither is Albert Bouchard. When last we saw Bouchard in my write-up for the rejiggered version of Blue Öyster Cult's Imaginos, he was suing the band and manager Sandy Pearlman for, essentially, stealing his work from underneath him, without sufficient recognition or recompensation. The whole thing was his baby, and Pearlman's, whose supposed betrayal Bouchard took especially bad. But time heals all wounds, or so they say, and time did chip away at the grudges that separated Bouchard from his ex-band and his ex-manager. In the 2010s Bouchard began to join BÖC at some gigs for a couple of songs (and for a fynny cameo - more cowbell! - in BÖC's video for "That Was Me". And finally, he made peace with Pearlman, though - again, somewhat cliché but are you going to do -  that only came about when Pearlman suffered a stroke in early 2016 that left him with diminished mental and physical abilities. Bouchard visited Pearlman in the hospital, and to cheer him up promised to bring out the original Imaginos tapes he had worked on with Pearlman in the early 2016., in a remixed or remastered form. 

It's unclear whether Pearlman was even together enough to really understand what Bouchard was teling him, and he died a couple of months later. But Bouchard had promised to go back to the Imaginos project and fully intended to do so. The original tapes from the early 80s had disintegrated to the point that they weren't particularly salvageable. So Bouchard went to the next best idea: re-recording the whole shebang. Thus ReImaginos was born.  

ReImaginos is trimming away a lot of the excesses of the original early 80s production, ReImaginos is at least partly close to an unplugged record with less cluttered and dense production. partly no doubt to get rid of the bombastic sounds of its time, but also to accomodate an older singer with an older voice (more on that in a moment). Some of these songs are almost totally transformed. "The Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein's Castle At Weisseria" is almost unrecognizable, when it starts on what sounds like a conga beat. One of the heaviest, if not the heaviest number, on the original, it now choogles rather than thrashes along, which has the advantage of making out the lyrics much easier than on the shouty, almost hair-metal original (that had guest vocals by Joey Cerisano). 

"Astronomy" is another song that benefits from its more acoustic arrangement, and overall these changes give ReImaginos a good reason for existing other than Albert's revenge and dream project come true. They really bring something to the table that the 'originals' (if we can call them that, given how things went down) don't, so this is not just an exercise in nostalgia. Bouchard at the time was outraged that on top of the overdubbing, reworking and lack or recognition of his work, the finished BÖC album deleted two of his songs from the Imaginos cycle, the acoustic "Gil Blanco Country" - dating back to the earliest recordings of the band as Soft White Underbelly/The Stalk-Forrest Group - and the truly odd "The Girl That Love Made Blind", with its second part invocations of the protagonist's "Christmas Of My Life" and the sing-along "Christmas! Christmas!" chants which make it sound like, well, a Christmas song. Difficult to align that with agent of evil Imaginos' mission of manipulating manlind, so you can see why it was left off the album in 1987. I include it here to not dash Albert's belated triumph, but it remains a weird ass song and an odd fit into the album. He also added a new original song, the o.k. but rather unremarkable "Black Telescope". 

All's well that ends well, right?! Well, not quite. There is a catch to this belated fulfillment of a dream. If Columbia executives shelved the album indefinitely because of Albert Bouchard's weak lead vocals some 40+ years ago...well, let's just say that what was already a serviceable rather than particular great voice at the best of times hasn't aged like fine vine. Bouchard's vocals are fragile and weedy, clearly the weak spot of this endeavor. On one hand it is touching, even a little bit moving, to see an old man return to the obsessions (and follies?) of his youth, on the other it's obvious that age and/or bad habits have done a number on poor Al's pipes. So you have to take the slightly wobbly performance for what it is. The wise decision to go with a softer, more acoustic sound is also explained by the limitations of Bouchard's voice, which simply could not work in a hard rock environment. 

Bouchard of course could not resrist overegging the pudding, mainly because he dreamt of issuing three double albums making up the Imaginos saga in the early 80s, so when ReImaginos became a surprisingly good seller, he got the money and cache to do the other two parts, that started to look more and more like an undiscriminate sausage factory for BÖC covers. But again, that is another story. 

So, if you're ready for another, unexpected tour through human history alongside Imaginos, follow old man Albert for a surprisingky attractrive trip down memory lane...