Major Letdowns: Blue Öyster Cult, "Imaginos"

As I keep reminding Mayor Wardlaw, Major Letdowns is not a column about shitty records, at least not per se; really, it's more of a look at the spots marking the moments when once-popular acts were forced to face their own commercial mortality. Like any ongoing discussion around artistic efforts, it's bound to dig up the occasional turd, but that isn't necessarily the point. As often as not, the records we'll revisit in this space flopped for reasons that weren't really the fault of the artists in question.

Blue Öyster Cult's Imaginos belongs in that category. Mostly. Kind of. I think. Like everything else about this album, it gets pretty complicated.

For a band that had a couple of enduring hits, BÖC were always kind of an awkward fit for the Top 40. Like a lot of '70s/'80s rock acts who tasted pop success, they fell into the mainstream spotlight unexpectedly, and the experience put a wobble on their axis for basically the rest of their major-label career. At heart, they were hard-rock proggers with a knack for pop chops; this made their music catnip for young suburban stoners, but it also meant that when they were at their Öysterest, they were doing stuff that had absolutely no place on crossover stations.

But then there was stuff like, you know, "(Don't Fear The) Reaper," which is vintage BÖC in terms of its denim jacket-friendly lyrical content, but also pretty goddamn undeniable as a pop crossover hit. Or "Burnin' for You"; same deal. (Real ones will insist we also mention "Godzilla" and possibly "Shooting Shark," but those demands are not to be taken seriously, at least not in this particular context.) Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the Blue Öyster Cult was one of those bands that might have been harmed as much as they were helped by their commercial success. As much as the band members and everyone around them wanted to sell records, they weren't really built to be a consistent platinum act — in fact, they might have been better off if they'd hovered at cult favorite status forever, indulging the Heavy Metal-induced dreams of a medium-sized but ardent group of devotees for decades.

Instead, they invited a certain set of expectations that they were ill-suited to fulfill — and they grew ever more ill-suited as the '70s wore into the '80s, and their blacklight-enhanced brand of rock 'n' roll started to sound awfully antiquated compared to the crop of younger acts that rose up to dominate the new decade. This had an inevitable warping effect on their discography — partly because they were compelled to try and extend their hit streak, and partly because their creative output was further muddied by the personal conflicts that seem to inevitably arise once the money starts pouring in.

Here is where we pause to talk about Sandy Pearlman, the manager/producer/renaissance man whose guiding hand really helped make Blue Öyster Cult who they were. And I don't just mean this in the usual "he gave them a few hundred bucks and hammered his Rolodex until stuff started happening" sort of way — by the time he became involved with the band, he'd already crafted the elaborate mythology that ended up serving as the basis for their entire career.

If you listen to the BÖC catalog, you're repeatedly left with the impression that while these guys were a bunch of huge nerds, they were nerds who were totally in on the joke. One minute, they were singing about giant monsters; the next, they were yelling about Joan Crawford coming back from the dead. Unlike a lot of the prog and hard rock groups they might have been nominally compared with — Kansas, ELP, Iron Maiden — they seemed to have a truly, openly goofy sense of humor, and it seems like a lot of that stemmed from Pearlman, whose sci-fi/fantasy noodlings had the expansive and overheated aura of a high school virgin's pent-up energy. Those noodlings took the sape of a story arc he titled The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos, which served as a sort of master text for the group's discography. This is not to say that all BÖC songs were inspired by Pearlman's work, but it was something they returned to repeatedly over the years — and prior to all that, they actually took their name from the story.

I share all this to lay the stakes for what a big deal it was when the post-"Reaper" Cult parted ways with Pearlman in the late '70s. It set the stage for an era of attrition that eventually included the departure of drummer Albert Bouchard, who took a hike after 1981's comeback Fire of Unknown Origin LP — a loss that was more profound that one might expect, given my use of the word "drummer." In addition to keeping the beat for the Cult, he was also a significant contributor to their songwriting, and chipped in on lead vocals too, all of which explains why Columbia was willing to sign him to a solo deal after he left the group.

(I know this is a hell of a lot of preamble, but we're getting to the point, I promise.)

Unlike 99 out of 100 drummers who are lucky enough to be deemed worthy of a solo contract after parting ways with a band whose commercial fortunes are clearly rapidly declining, Bouchard wasn't content to take the easy way out by staying behind the kit and rounding up a passel of name-brand guest stars. Instead, he set his sights on a triple double-LP suite of concept albums designed to finally, at long last, bring The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos to stereo speakers in its full glory.

To make it happen, Bouchard hooked up with Pearlman, and together, they spent three years assembling the bones of the ambitious hard-rock opus they dubbed Imaginos. I refuse to get into the finer points of the story, which begins in 1804 and involves Lovecraftian beings whose presence on Earth is somehow responsible for World War I; if you really want to, you can read a long outline at the album's Wikipedia page. For our purposes here, it's only important to note that all of Bouchard and Pearlman's hard work ended up getting the finger from Columbia execs, who reportedly weren't willing to release it after hearing Bouchard's lead vocals. (I tend to think this might be apocryphal, given that the execs in question had to have heard his vocals before signing him, and also, his singing was fine. You can hear Imaginos 1.0 here and judge for yourself.)

Right around the time the Bouchard-fronted Imaginos was rejected by Columbia, Pearlman was busy reconnecting with the remaining members of Blue Öyster Cult, helming the boards for their godawful Club Ninja LP, which put a drab exclamation point on the commercial slide they endured after Fire of Unknown Origin put them back on the map. Half-penned by outside writers — including future Kix co-writer Bob Halligan — that record sounds like the work of men who believed the secret ingredient to chart success lay in sounding like a more anonymous version of mid-'80s Kansas.

They were sorely incorrect, which is what led to the version of Imaginos that reached record stores in 1988. Backed into a commercial corner, the tattered remnants of Blue Öyster Cult — which crucially included singers Eric Bloom and Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser, who later claimed they agreed to hang around as a favor to Pearlman — set to work on recording new parts over Bouchard's album. Bouchard, naturally, assumed he'd be invited back into the fold for the project; just as naturally, he was pretty pissed when it turned out he wasn't invited.

All things being equal, it might have been for the best that Bouchard didn't end up spending even more time in the studio on this material. If you listen to Imaginos after playing Club Ninja and its not-quite-as-bad predecessor The Revölution by Night, it stacks up pretty well; unlike those two records, it's an album that at least has enough conviction to consistently rock, and it's imbued with the wildly silly spirit that enlivened the Cult's best work. But none of this mattered in the summer of 1988 — first, because Columbia Records was in the midst of the tumultuous period that followed its sale to Sony; second, because Pearlman racked up massive studio bills by bringing in an army of session players, thus dooming Imaginos to end up in the red before it even reached stores; and third, because at this point, absolutely nobody gave a single shit about a hard-rocking concept album from Blue Öyster Cult.

I'm glossing over a lot of stuff here, because Imaginos is the type of failure that inspires reams of text, and if you really want to dive into all the behind-the-scenes madness, you can start with Tim Sommer's excellent, authoritative post before moving on to Martin Popoff's book. Just believe me when I tell you that these 1500 words or so barely scratch the surface. They're enough, though, to get the main point across, which is this: The suits at Columbia Records were nuts enough to bet nearly a million bucks on a Blue Öyster Cult concept album in 1988, even one that was sewn together using the bones of an album they'd already rejected, and the fans made them pay for it. Imaginos peaked at No. 122, the band lost its record deal, and their next album of original material took a full decade to materialize.

That's a bummer of a note to finish on, so before we go, I just want to reiterate that I don't really think Imaginos is a bad album. It certainly isn't anything I'd listen to for pleasure, but if you're a Blue Öyster Cult fan, I tend to think it'd be hard to dream up a higher note they could have ended the '80s on — even if you can't ignore the miles of tape it took to patch this thing together, at least it maintains the goofily ambitious, proudly out-of-vogue spirit that anchors their entire deal, and there isn't a power ballad anywhere in the joint. I still don't have the faintest clue what's supposed to be going on here, but that seems fitting somehow. I'm not sure anyone involved with the making of the album really did either.