Imaginos

Sandy Pearlman and The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos The concept and the character of Imaginos were originally created by the young Sandy Pearlman for a collection of poems and scripts called The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos (sometimes reported as Immaginos), prior to 1971, during his formative years as a student of anthropology and sociology at Stony Brook University, Brandeis University and The New School. Pearlman combined cultural references learned in his studies with elements of gothic literature and science fiction, and created a secret history about the origin of the two world wars. Pearlman himself declared his predilection for the American weird fiction author "H. P. Lovecraft and other writers of that ilk", Established by 1967 as a critic for the seminal US music magazine Crawdaddy!, Pearlman was also the mentor, manager and producer for the band Soft White Underbelly, which, after various name changes, became Blue Öyster Cult, a term taken from the Imaginos script. The adapted and amended rhymes of Pearlman, along with his friend and colleague Richard Meltzer's arcane writings, were used as lyrics for most of the band's early songs; musician and writer Lenny Kaye recalls in his introduction to the re-mastered edition of their first album that "the band kept a folder full of Meltzer's and Pearlman's word associations in their rehearsal room, and would leaf through it, setting fragments to music". Fragments of the Imaginos script are scattered out-of-context throughout the songs of the first four albums, where the original meanings are lost to listeners unaware of the larger picture. The resulting mystery feeds fan fascination for the music of Blue Öyster Cult, and is responsible for their reputation as "the world's brainiest heavy metal band". Much fan speculation centers around lyrics' relationship to the Imaginos storyline, while Pearlman's deliberate reticence and misleading in revealing his sources only augments the obscurity of the matter. to the point that notes on the cover of their 1974 album Secret Treaties referred to the secret history conceived by Pearlman, while its songs "Astronomy" and "Subhuman" contained lyrics fully dedicated to the Imaginos plot. The band sought to separate creatively from Pearlman in the late 1970s; they avoided his lyrics and concepts and refused to record an album entirely dedicated to Imaginos, but eventually returned to his material for the lyrics of "Shadow of California" (from The Revölution by Night of 1983) and "When the War Comes" (from Club Ninja of 1985). Pearlman and Albert Bouchard hoped to record such an album, and as far back as 1972 had begun to write songs directly inspired by the Imaginos story. and a series of Platinum and Gold discs in the following years, placed pressure on the band as their label, Columbia Records, expected them to repeat these successes. Despite good sales of the album Fire of Unknown Origin in August 1981 the conflicts and the stress accumulated in more than ten years of cohabitation led to the firing of drummer Albert Bouchard, a founding member and an important contributor to the songwriting and sound of the group, allegedly for unstable behavior. The relationship between the former band mates remained tense in the following years. Old feuds resurfaced during a short reunion tour with the original line-up in 1985, with the result that no one in the band accepted Bouchard back in Blue Öyster Cult. However, Bouchard still hoped to be reinstated in the band through his work done for Imaginos. Albert Bouchard's departure started a rotation of personnel in the formerly stable band roster, which by 1986 left only Eric Bloom and Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser as original members. Allen Lanier left in 1985 during the recording sessions for Club Ninja, unsatisfied by the music and annoyed at the presence of Tommy Zvoncheck as his replacement, while Joe Bouchard quit soon after that album's release to pursue different career opportunities, play other musical genres, and settle in his family life. The release of two expensive studio albums in 1983 and 1985, which received generally bad critical response and sold poorly, ruined the relationship with their demanding record label and left the band with little support and very few ideas on how to go on with their careers. Pearlman's and Steve Schenk's managerial efforts were rewarded when Blue Öyster Cult were hired for some gigs in Greece in July 1987. After a nine-month layoff, the band returned to activity and Allen Lanier re-joined. The European shows were a success, and the reformed line-up of Bloom, Roeser, Lanier, Jon Rogers and drummer Ron Riddle worked well together on stage. but without a new album to promote, until the release of Imaginos. ==Concept and storyline==

Imaginos was envisioned as a rock opera to be published as a trilogy of double albums, with a storyline encompassing about two hundred years of history, from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of the 20th. and is followed in this section, the narrative progression is scarce and the content often difficult to decipher for the casual reader. the concept behind Imaginos is what Pearlman described as "an interpretation of history – an explanation for the onset of World War I, or a revelation of the occult origins of it", The nature of Les Invisibles is left unclear, although it is hinted that they may be extraterrestrials, by some fans suggests that the star Sirius is of particular astrological significance to Les Invisibles, with clues identifying it as their place of origin; with the birth of a "modified child" Imaginos is of particular interest to Les Invisibles, who begin granting him with superhuman abilities while he is young. Imaginos joins the crew of a ship traveling to the Yucatán Peninsula, but while passing through the Gulf of Mexico, the ship encounters a freak storm of which his visions failed to warn him ('''"Del Rio's Song"'''). The ship sinks with most of its crew, and Imaginos, half dead, washes ashore and is left for dead by the other survivors. As he lies dying "on a shore where oyster beds seem plush as down", Imaginos is addressed by a symphony of voices who identify themselves as Les Invisibles. Imaginos' true nature is revealed to him, and he is informed that the circumstances of his entire life have been manipulated to bring him to that specific moment in time. Having explained themselves to him, they offer him a choice – die as a human, or live as their servant ("Blue Öyster Cult"). Through shapeshifting, Imaginos lives as both a man and a woman, using the name Desdinova for his female persona who at some point takes the office of foreign minister. , similar to the construction built around the 'Magna of Illusion' By 1892, Imaginos is living in a mansion in Cornwall and has a nine-year-old granddaughter. Having by this time spent several decades studying mysticism and astrology, has short and elusive lyrics apparently detailing the escape of Imaginos from Texas to Arizona. The other song, "The Girl That Love Made Blind", is an Albert Bouchard composition which explains that Imaginos' powers include the capacity of moving "in and through time", assuming different identities in every moment of history. ==Production==

Albert Bouchard's solo album Albert Bouchard began writing music for Imaginos following the release of the band's first album in 1972. All of the songs had been written by 1977, with the participation of various band members, and on adapted and rewritten Pearlman lyrics linked by the Imaginos storyline, is reflected in the working titles: Act I: Imaginos, although some fan opinion holds that Columbia Records had intended all along that the recordings would result in a new Blue Öyster Cult album. and at The Boogie Hotel, a studio owned by the boogie rock band Foghat and located in a large Victorian mansion in Port Jefferson, New York. At the same time and in the same facilities, Blue Öyster Cult were recording the album The Revölution by Night with producer Bruce Fairbairn. Helen Wheels), guitars and arrangements, • Jack Rigg (David Johansen Band) and Phil Grande (Peter Criss and Ellen Foley session musician), guitars, • Tommy Mandel (Ian Hunter Band, Bryan Adams), keyboards, • Kenny Aaronson, bass, • Thommy Price (Scandal), drums. The guitar solos by The Doors' Robby Krieger, who had played live with Blue Öyster Cult on Extraterrestrial Live, and guitar parts by Aldo Nova and the late Kevin Carlson, guitarist of the Aldo Nova Band, should also be ascribed to these recording sessions. who had already played with Clarence Clemons, Public Image Ltd and The Dream Syndicate. An almost-finished product that comprised more than ninety minutes of music and whose thirteen tracks included re-arranged versions of "Astronomy" and "Subhuman" (retitled "Blue Öyster Cult"), "Gil Blanco County", the ballad "The Girl That Love Made Blind" and a couple of chorales, was presented to Columbia Records executives in 1984. They rejected the album and decided to shelve it, officially because of Albert Bouchard's vocals While struggling with the long, complex and expensive production of the Blue Öyster Cult's album Club Ninja, Pearlman associated himself with Daniel J. Levitin, A&R director of the local punk label 415 Records, with whom he shared academic interests in neuroscience. In 1986, Pearlman leased Studio C of San Francisco's Hyde Street Recording Studios, and dubbed it Alpha & Omega Studios. Pearlman and Levitin produced various bands there, and Pearlman sub-leased the studio to other producers. and the group disbanded, the lack of new material from the band for the foreseeable future prompted Pearlman to propose Imaginos to Columbia Records as a new Blue Öyster Cult album. Similarly, thrash metal guitarist Marc Biedermann, whose band Blind Illusion was recording at Hyde Street Studios, mixed the album The Sane Asylum at Pearlman's studio in exchange for his collaboration. Biedermann declared in a 2008 interview that he "played more lead guitar on that album than Buck Dharma". who was in the studio in early 1988. Donald Roeser later summed up his and Bloom's late involvement in the making of the album by saying "Imaginos was our parting of the ways. That was something that Eric and I agreed to do, sort of, out of respect for Sandy and his effort that he made with Imaginos". The as-imagined album and the as-released album bear little relation to each other. The final version of Imaginos is almost forty minutes shorter than the first version of 1984 and has two fewer songs, but as Pearlman explained, "we ran out of money and couldn't do the whole thing". Critics and fans point to elements of progressive rock also present in the music, which create a dark and "ominous" ==Packaging==

used for the album cover Artist Greg Scott, who had supplied the cover art for the Blue Öyster Cult albums Fire of Unknown Origin, Extraterrestrial Live and The Revolution by Night, worked with Sandy Pearlman for several months in 1984 to prepare paintings inspired by the Imaginos saga for the gatefold cover of the expected double album. "And none of that was ever seen, because it was shelved", Scott remarked in an interview with Canadian journalist Martin Popoff. They based the cover art on a fin de siècle image of the Cliff House, a restaurant perched on the cliffs just north of Ocean Beach on the western side of San Francisco, California, built with the architectural style of a Victorian château and destroyed by fire in 1907. The back cover is a maritime landscape, modified to appear as the continuation of the picture on the front and similarly tinted in sinister black and grey colors. The inner sleeve, besides the credits and Sandy Pearlman's lengthy notes on the Imaginos story, sports a large black and white photo by landscape British photographer Simon Marsden of Duntrune Castle in Argyllshire, Scotland. The credits printed on the sleeve of the first release were largely incomplete and made no distinction between the recording sessions of 1982-84 and those of 1987-88, apparently validating the false assumption that the original line-up of Blue Öyster Cult had reunited for the making of the album. Aside from the list of band members, the credits reported only some session musicians and other members of the so-called Guitar Orchestra of the State of Imaginos, and omitted other personnel who had contributed to Imaginos. ==Release==

Imaginos was mastered at Precision Lacquer in Los Angeles by Stephen Marcussen The first single extracted from the album was an edited version of "Astronomy", which was released as a 7", as a 12" and as a CD single. American author Stephen King recorded the spoken introduction to the radio edit of the song, a reading of the lines written on the back cover of the LP. The 12" contains various mixes of "Astronomy", including one sung by Albert Bouchard. The CD single "In the Presence of Another World" was issued later only for promotional purposes, Pearlman stated that "there was actually no intention on the part of Columbia Records at all to promote it. (...) Basically the people wanted to work it and they were told not to work it". Imaginos fared better with CBS International, which distributed the album abroad and produced a music video for "Astronomy" in the UK, which aired in coincidence with the European tour dates of 1989. The video clip does not feature members of the band, but begins with the spoken introduction by Stephen King and focuses on the storyline narrated in the album. Albert Bouchard had been completely excluded from the retooling of the album for contractual reasons, Imaginos was re-issued only once, through Sony BMG sub-label American Beat Records in December 2007. The 2007 reissue was remastered to adjust the volume levels and included a CD sleeve with corrected, but not complete, credits. A new remastered version of Imaginos is included in The Columbia Albums Collection boxed set, issued by Sony/Legacy in November 2012. ==Tour==

Blue Öyster Cult interrupted their schedule of US shows only just before the album release in June 1988, Blue Öyster Cult visited Canada in January 1989, France in February, the United Kingdom in March, and concluded their European tour in Germany in April. During the following US tour, the new management of Columbia Records, which had been sold to Sony Music in 1988, terminated Columbia's almost 20-year relationship with Blue Öyster Cult because of their low sales. This left them without a recording contract for the next ten years. Eric Bloom stated that "in general, CBS was straight with us, when we had fans working inside the company", but after "3-4 different Presidents of the company came and went" the commercial appeal of Blue Öyster Cult had disappeared for the new management. A review of their performance at The Ritz in New York on January 6, 1989, highlights the good shape and musicianship of the band, but remarks that the new songs were played with considerably less enthusiasm than the rest of the show. Although the band continued to tour regularly, the songs from Imaginos had already disappeared from their shows by the end of 1989, never to be performed live again. ==Critical and commercial reception==

Imaginos received mixed reviews both from professional critics and fans. David Fricke, in his review for the magazine Rolling Stone, considers Imaginos "the best black-plastic blitz to bear the Cult's trademark cross and claw since 1974's Secret Treaties", but remarks that the "lengthy gestation" of the album and the many musicians involved makes it "a bit of a cheat for Cult Purists", and that is "only an illusionary re-creation of the way BÖC used to be". and on the online collaborative metadata database Rate Your Music are in general quite positive, praising Imaginos as a "creative masterpiece", but underlining that the work is not a group effort but "the brain-child of original drummer Albert Bouchard and longtime producer and lyricist Sandy Pearlman". A professional Italian reviewer describes the Blue Öyster Cult name on the cover as "only a commercial decoy" for an Albert Bouchard solo album. The album entered the Billboard 200 album chart on August 19, 1988, peaked at No. 122, and exited the charts on October 8. It sold about 50,000 copies in the US, and was a commercial failure for Columbia Records and a financial failure for the band, which was forced through legal action to pay back the money used for both the recording of Albert Bouchard's solo album and for the re-recording of Imaginos. It was their last album to enter the Billboard charts until The Symbol Remains in 2020. ==Influence==

The manga Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro contains references to Imaginos. Particularly the name of the principal villain - Desty Nova - and the cyber-body of Alita, called imaginos. In 2021, Canadian rock critic Martin Popoff released a book on the Imaginos mythos entitled Flaming Telepaths: Imaginos Expanded and Specified. ==Albert Bouchard's new version==

In the spring of 2020, an announcement was made on www.goldminemag.com that Albert Bouchard would be releasing ReImaginos, his own reinvention of the concept of Imaginos, in the fall of 2020. Bouchard eventually released 3 albums based on the concept: ReImaginos (2020), Imaginos II - Bombs Over Germany (Minus Zero And Counting) (2021), and Imaginos III - Mutant Reformation (2023). ==Track listing==

;Band members • Eric Bloom – vocals • Albert Bouchard – guitar, percussion, vocals, associate producer • Joe Bouchard – keyboards, backing vocals • Allen Lanier – keyboards • Donald 'Buck Dharma' Roeser – guitars, vocals ;Session musicians • Phil Grande – guitars • Tommy Zvoncheck – keyboards • Kenny Aaronson – bass • Thommy Price – drums • Joey Cerisano – vocals • Jon Rogers – vocals • Jack Secret (aka Tony Geranios) – backing vocals • Shocking U – backing vocals on track 3 • Daniel Levitin – guitar sounds (uncredited) ;Guitar Orchestra of the State of Imaginos • Marc Biedermann (lead guitar on tracks 1 and 3) • Kevin Carlson • Robby Krieger (lead guitar on tracks 7 and 8) • Tommy Morrongiello • Aldo Nova (lead guitar on track 4) • Jack Rigg • Joe Satriani (lead guitar on track 5) ;Technical personnel • Sandy Pearlman – producer, engineer, mixing • Corky Stasiak – basic tracks engineer • Paul Mandl – engineer • Steve Brown – mixing ==Charts==