Imaginos
Imaginos is the eleventh studio album by the American rock band Blue Öyster Cult. It was released in 1988, and was their last recording with their original record label, CBS/Columbia Records.
The album took nearly eight years to complete and was originally intended to be the first in a trilogy of solo albums by Blue Öyster Cult drummer and songwriter Albert Bouchard after he was fired from the band in August 1981. CBS rejected the album in 1984, but a re-worked version was eventually published as a product of the band. Many guest musicians contributed to the project over this eight-year span, including Joe Satriani, Aldo Nova, and Doors guitarist Robby Krieger, but some band members were barely involved in the recording process. Thus, Imaginos is often considered more as a project of producer and lyricist Sandy Pearlman than as a true album of the band.
Imaginos weaves scripts and poems by Pearlman, dating from the second half of the 1960s, into a concept album and rock opera about an alien conspiracy that is brought to fruition during the late 19th and early 20th century through the actions of Imaginos, an agent of evil. The tale combines elements of gothic literature and science fiction and is strongly inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Subtitled "a bedtime story for the children of the damned", it has an intricate storyline whose often-obscure lyrics contain many historical references, prompting speculation by fans and critics. It is often considered one of the heaviest albums released by Blue Öyster Cult, its music more akin to heavy metal than the melodic and commercial hard rock of their two previous works. The poor sales of those albums resulted in record label pressure on the band that led to their disbandment in 1986; a subsequent comeback featured only three members of the classic line-up.
The album received some critical acclaim, but was not a commercial success, and Columbia Records ended their contract with Blue Öyster Cult at the completion of the Imaginos Tour. Albert Bouchard, excluded from the recording progress of Imaginos after the initial rejection from Columbia Records, then took legal action against the band and the label to protect his rights as author and producer on the album. Blue Öyster Cult continued to perform and remained a live attraction, but ten years passed before they released an album of new songs.
Background
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, prior to 1971,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. During the band's first period of activity, the theme of the alien conspiracy became more defined and predominant in the mind of its author, 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" and "When the War Comes". 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. Nonetheless, with the exception of the extracts used for song lyrics, the text of The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos remains to this day largely unknown and unpublished.
Blue Öyster Cult in 1988
The commercial success of the single " The Reaper" in 1976, 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 and the single "Burnin' for You", 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. As a result, "in the summer of 1986, the band semi-officially broke up", Bloom explained in an interview to the British music magazine Kerrang! in 1988. The final line-up of 1986 included Bloom, Roeser, Tommy Zvoncheck on keyboards, Jon Rogers on bass and Jimmy Willcox on drums.
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. Blue Öyster Cult returned to the road in 1987 and 1988 with renewed enthusiasm, 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. This album represents an abbreviated version of the first volume of that planned trilogy, but with the songs arranged out of order, rendering the story harder to comprehend. Even when the song lyrics are analyzed in the chronological order that was devised by the authors and is followed in this section, the narrative progression is scarce and the content often difficult to decipher for the casual reader. However, thanks to various comments in interviews by Pearlman and Bouchard, and the extensive sleeve notes by Pearlman that were issued with the original release, it is possible to reconstruct the story to a great extent.File:Sirius A and B artwork.jpg|thumb|left|180px|The star Sirius A and its companion Sirius B, the possible home of 'Les Invisibles'
Although often referred to as a dream, 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", which he crafted on elements of mythology, sociology, alchemy, science and occultism. This "combination of horror story and fairy tale" cites historical facts and characters, and is filled with literary references to ancient civilizations. These elements come together in a conspiracy theory of epic proportions, the subject of which is the manipulation of the course of human history.
Central to this story are Les Invisibles, a group of seven beings worshipped by the natives of Mexico and Haiti prior to the arrival of Spanish colonists in the 16th century, identified by some fans as the Loa of the Voodoo religion. The nature of Les Invisibles is left unclear, although it is hinted that they may be extraterrestrials, or beings akin to the Great Old Ones in the works of H. P. Lovecraft. An interpretation of the lyrics of the song "Astronomy" 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; it is during the so-called Dog Days of August, when Sirius is in conjunction with the Sun that their influence over mankind is at its apex. By subtly influencing the minds of men, the beings are said to be "playing with our history as if it's a game", affecting events in world history over the course of centuries. For the three centuries after European discovery of the New World, this game plays out as the desire for gold is used to transform Spain into the dominant power in Europe, only to be usurped by England in the 17th century and later, through technology, by other nations.
The principal story begins in August 1804, with the birth of a "modified child" called Imaginos, in the American state of New Hampshire. Because of the astrological significance of the place and time of his birth, the hermaphroditic Imaginos is of particular interest to Les Invisibles, who begin granting him with superhuman abilities while he is young. Unaware of his true destiny or nature, the young Imaginos finds out that he is apparently able to change his appearance at will and see the future. As the child becomes an adult, he develops a sense of wanderlust. Billing himself as an adventurer, he sets out to explore Texas and the western frontier, arriving in New Orleans in 1829. It is there that he has a vision imploring him to travel to Mexico in search of an artifact "lost, last and luminous, scored to sky yet never found". 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. 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. Imaginos accepts their offer, and is resurrected from the dead by the Blue Öyster Cult, the servants of Les Invisibles. He is inducted into the cult and given a new name - Desdinova, "Eternal Light". He realizes that his descent and the origin of his powers comes from the stars where his masters live and becomes aware of his role in the making of history.
From this point on, Imaginos becomes a tool in Les Invisibles' manipulation of human history. For the next sixty-three years, he insinuates himself into the world of European politics. He uses his ability to change identities to take the place of high-ranking officials, whose offices he uses to bring about Les Invisibles' will, introducing new knowledge and technology to the unsuspecting world. 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.
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, Imaginos discovers that Elizabethan England's rise as a superpower coincided with John Dee's acquisition of a magic obsidian mirror from Mexico, which serves as a bridge between Les Invisibles' alien world and ours, and the means to spread their influence on Earth. Some fans see Les Invisibles' actions in favour of England against Spain as a sort of vengeance for the extermination by the conquistadores of their worshippers in Central America, while others view their intervention as only part of the mysterious scheme carried on by the alien entities through the centuries.
This revelation in mind, Imaginos decides that the time has come to reattempt his aborted mission to Mexico. On August 1, 1892, he sets sail aboard a "charmed ship" which, despite "storms on land and storms at sea", delivers him faithfully to Mexico. After several months exploring the jungles of Yucatán he finds an undiscovered Mayan pyramid. Following a long passage into the interior of the pyramid he discovers a chamber carved from solid jade, in which he finds the "Magna of Illusion", a twin of Dee's magic mirror. Stealing away with the artifact, he returns to Cornwall a year to the day of his departure, which coincides with the tenth birthday of his granddaughter. Imaginos gives the mirror to the young girl as a birthday present, and for the following 21 years it sits collecting dust in her attic, silently poisoning the minds of European leaders. In 1914, "World War I breaks out. A disease with a long incubation".
The two songs excluded from the final release introduced further elements to the plot. "Gil Blanco County", a song with music written by Allen Lanier for Soft White Underbelly in the late 1960s and recorded in the unpublished Elektra album of the Stalk-Forrest Group, 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.