Oaxaca: When The Blue Öyster Cult Became The Grateful Dead...For A Psychedelic Minute...Or Two

Some rock bands are born fully formed, but most aren't. A ton of them flail around for a couple of years, in terms of finding their proper style, their finalized line-up, hell, ven their band name. Blue Öyster Cult did all this, cycling through band names, band members and decidedly different styles from the dumb-but-smart hard rock that defined the band from at least Secret Treaties (1973) onwards. Even the band's first two albums, the self-titled debut and Tyranny And Mutation, show the band still finding themselves, with the debut still closer to their roots as a psych-folk outfit, while Tyranny shows them making major strides towards their sugnature sound from Secret Treaties on. But for years the future Cult was searching for the right fit in sound and style, leaving some interesting artifacts behind. Hey, folks, anyone up for some acid rock from the future Blue Öyster Cult? 

First off, the name: Oaxaca was the band's name when they recorded these demos, so we'll stick with it - not to mention it sounds way more psychedelic than The Stalk-Forrest Group ('By the way, which one's Forrest?'), under which these demos were finally issued in 2001. Having started out as White Soft Underbelly, the band had recently lost original lead singer Les Braunstein, to be replaced internally by Eric Bloom - and recorded the songs on this album as Oaxaca, essentially rerecording these tracks, as a first recording was done with Braunstein. Oaxaca - still with Andrew Winters on bass instead of Joe Bouchard - then went into the Elektra studios in Los Angeles to lay down a ten track demo. This is that, plus the short track "John L. Sullivan" that is from around the same time, and was issued on the BÖC Rarities album, which itself quickly became a rarity, in an ironic twist the band would surely appreciate. 

Overall, this is a fascinating look at the Cult and the road not taken. A year later they remixed or re-recorded some of these a year later in New York to nudge them closer into their burgeoning hard rock direction, by that time the band had been the Stalk-Forrest Group for a while. These are the original recordings of the proto-Blue Öyster Cult, as a full-fledged, Grateful Dead-inspired acid rock/ psych rock band. If you go into another fascinating direction, go the whole way. 

Some of the Imaginos stuff is already rearing its head in this very early stage: "Curse Of The Hidden Mirrors" - the opening track here - later gave an otherwise unrelated BÖC album its name, and Albert Bouchard integrated it into its own take on the Imaginos myth, while "Gil Blanco Country" was left off the album in 1987, much to Bouchard's unhappiness, and he put it onto ReImaginos. There is also a very early version of "I'm On The Lamb".

Bloom's lead vocals on these tracks are much more subtle, and in many ways sweeter, than his showman growling on later Cult numbers. So we get the sweet psych folk-rock of the aforementioned "Gil Blanco Country" and during the opening of "St. Cecilia", which then turns into a Gateful Dead-type acid rock instrumental workout. You can almost guess the sound of later BÖC in the driving "Donovan's Monkey", on which Bloom approaches his later vocal stylings. "Arthur Comics" mixes acid/garage rock with blues licks, while "Bonomo's Turkish Raffy", which they dropped from the new demo/album configuration a year later is pure psych guitar pop. Very far from real BÖC, and all the better for it. 

Some of it sounds well of its time. "Raggamuffin Dumplin'" with lines like "I'm the magic man with the magic plan" for example, or the weirdness of "Quicksand", which unwisely was a year later chosen as a try-out single that unsurprisingly stiffed. And in some ways, while this is interesting mimicry, the future for these New York area-wise asses didn't lie in Southern Californian acid rock, even if they give it their all, as in fully psyched-out closer "A Fact About Sneakers". But this is not only interesting for historical purposes, ior as a piece of juvenilia from a band that would go on to be bigger and better, it's a genuinely good listen if you're into late 60s acid rock. Which I'm normally not, but I'm digging this, and so should fans of the genre. 

So, didn't think you'd ever hear Blue Öyster Cult dress up as The Grateful Dead and doing a good job of it? Then think again and hear what Oaxaca is all about...and dig it, maaaaaaaan!

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... 

Blue Öyster Cult cause a ruckus...as they damn well should...

Unlike our first group of musical hooligans causing a ruckus at the movies, Blue Öyster Cult weren't quite as busy or involved in providing music for movies. The one huge exception is of course their signature tune "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" which has shown up - credited or uncredited - in about three dozen different films and tv shows. So obviously the Ruckus At The Movies: Blue Öyster Cult edition opens with "Reaper". But since everybody already has (or bloody well should have) that one, I decided to include the re-recording the band did for Cult Classics, an album directly inspired by the public's renewed interest in the band after "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was so effectively used in the opening of the 1994 The Stand mini-series. Which, incidentally, was also my first brush with BÖC. 

But the band's other film adventures were more modest in nature and sometimes not entirely successful. They were for example asked to provide some songs for the movie Teachers in 1984, which the band dutifully did, writing three relatively Neanderthal-ian shool-themed songs, rhyming rebel with devil etc. I guess they were the knuckleheads of their class. Anyway, somehow the deal fell through and BÖC weren't featured on the soundtrack that had, among others 38 Special, ZZ Top and...uh...Joe Cocker (?!). The three demos the band recorded for Teachers are of course featured here.and, as said, they're pretty good in a 'dumb but fun' way. Probably about as good as the BÖC were gonna be in 1984 - and the fact that they are only demos probably worked out for the best, as they escape the hideous overproduction of The Revolution By Night and Club Ninja. 

This was, in many ways, the second time the band had invested time, money and effort writing and producing music for a film that then...turned out differently. They had written a couple of songs with the hopes of seeing them included in Heavy Metal - The Film, but none of the specifically prepared songs were picked. Instead, the producers chose "Veteran Of The Psychic Wars", a superb sci-fi song. The rest of the songs landed on Fire Of Unknown Origin and form a sort of mini-album within the album. I included the one most obviously made for Heavy Metal: "Vengeance (The Pact)", which recounts the adventures of one of the main stories of the film, Taarna, which is probably and ironically what got it axed in the first place. Oh, also: it is absolutely kick-ass, one of the best of the Cult from the 80s, when the pickings began to get slimmer. 

And finally, there is the BÖC's one time where they were completely in control of a film's music. Unfortunately it was for a complete turd of a film, a cheap Charles Band sc-fi flick called Bad Channels. Fortunately, the band provided not only two heavy metal song to the soundtrack, but also the entire score. Unfortunately, it was almost all incidental music, broken up into often very short bits and thus not a particularly good listen. Fortunately, the One Buck Guy is not gonna let that pass, so I picked what I thought were the best moment of the score and edited them into three suites extravagantly called "Bad Channels Suite". These should be much more satisfying listens.  

So, it was time to get some BÖC on this here blog, and why not with a listen to them causing a ruckus at the movies...