When Albert Bouchard Launches Bombs Over Germany or What Imaginos Did On His Summer Vacation...

 

When last we checked in with Albert Bouchard, the man had finally realized his dream and putout Imaginos the way he wanted to...or at least as closely aspossible. His version of Imaginos was an interesting lesson in less is more and power through restriction. With the album being a low-budget production that Bouchard started with his music students, then mainly worked on it with David Hershfeld, plus an honest evaluation of the state of his never-that-great-to-begin-with-voice led him to reimagine Imaginos as a more relaxed liste than the hair metal extravaganza his old band ended up turning it into.

But of course, if luck favors the bold, hubris favors the successful. Re-Imaginos was not only a dream project come true, it was also a real success. Given the low front-end investment, it was – according to Bouchard – the first album that made him money, so of course he more or less immediately began work on a sequel. He had planned, or says now that he planned three double albums covering the adventures of Imaginos and incorporating most of Blue Öyster Cult's songs. That sounds like a lot, it also sounds a lot like bullshit.

Just saying : In the mid-to late 80s, no one was giving Albert Bouchard, fuck-up ex-drummer of Blue Öyster Cult - who themselves were swirling down in terms of record sales and critical esteem - that even that band didn't want back, money to record one double album, let alone three, all chronicling an impossible-to-follow storyline about an evil alien-created shapeshifter leading mankind to its doom. These albums only ever existed in Bouchard's mind, or maybe in fever dreams. But a funny thing happened in 2020. Buyoed by the succes of his Imaginos, Bouchard finally found himself in a position to make that crazy dream come true. Because, hey, who was going to stop him this time ? These Imaginos albums are essentially private press releases, all coming out on Bouchard's own Rockheart label. So, even with the most minute of sales, Bouchard will be in the Red And Black.

But here's the thing. Man, is Bouchard overegging the pudding, and that is before he really goes mad in part three. Ostensibly about how Imaginos influences Germany into starting World War One, Imaginos II starts to just put various Blue Öyster Cult songs seemingly at random in its purported storyline, but since that storyline is all but imposible to follow anyway, and the alien-powered title character can just more or less wave everything away with a 'it's magic/Alien/whathavewe' power, it's probably just as well. Except that the One Buck Guy will not stand for all this bloat. A song like “7 Screaming Diz-Busters”, with the diz being a part of the male anatomy (I let you guess which) has no discernible link to Sandy Pearlman's original Imaginos cycle, though since he might've sprinkled a line or two from his poetry epic into it, you can probably construct a very loose, very shaky case if you wanted to.

But I don't. I just look at the remakes of BÖC numbers and decide whether this new version brings something new or interesting to the song or not, and throw it off if the answer is no. And so Imaginos II goes from a slightly overstuffed 14 numbers to a vinyl-era album appropriate ten songs and 46 minute album length, with “OD'd On Life Itself”, “The Red And The Black” and “Cities On Flame (With Rock'n'Roll” being the survivors from the BÖC songs, plus “Quicklime Girl” from the pre-BÖC era. The original songs – like the singalong “Independence Day” or the surging (sub) title song, that Bouchard made sound as much like a lost BÖC tune as possible - are actually pretty neat.

There was also a major piece of surgery I performed. The opener “When War Comes” had some production problems and poorly recorded vocals, belying the modest production budget, and at sevn and a half minutes was not a great start to the program. So I did quite a bit of editing, mainly keeping the (faux) orchestral parts with foreboding military drum march and bits of the song ending, so that it will serve as an overture for the spectacle to come without overstaying its welcome. As is, the streamlined Imaginos II runs much smoother and better than the unwieldy (wait 'til we get to part three...) original. If you really want the whole shebang, you can do so at the usual sources, but as a primer on both the story and sound of this sequel, this should do nicely.

So, if you never bothered to ask what exactly happened to Imaginos once he quit the 19th Century, boy, does Albert Bouchard have some stories to tell you. Here's the slightly abridged second chapter...

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 surprisingly attractrive trip down memory lane...