It’s a bleak, gloomy Friday afternoon. Outside my bedroom window, rain is pouring, lightning is flashing, and thunder is roaring. It’s the perfect weather to discuss one of heavy metal’s longest running tales: A 20th century epic that vaguely connects, war, plague, and all other major world disasters to an extraterrestrial occult being. I’m talking about Blue Öyster Cult’s Imaginos. Originally conceived by manager and sixth member Sandy Pearlman, Imaginos was explored throughout various songs in their catalog, as well as a 1988 album of the same name. I let BÖC drummer and co-founder Albert Bouchard know that the scene outside my window resembled that on the cover of the original album. What follows is our full discussion on the past, present, and future of Imaginos, which is currently being revisited by Bouchard on his appropriately titled Re Imaginos trilogy.
What compelled you to revisit the Imaginos saga?
Albert Bouchard: Over the years, I would get a lot of fans writing and saying, “I love the Imaginos thing.” When it came out I was getting positive feedback. James Hetfield told me himself that it was the album of the year and he loved it. I was like, “That’s cool!” Critics that I knew, they all liked it, but I didn’t like it. I felt that what we recorded originally was better. Over the course of time, it kind of lost energy and got bloated in my mind. There was just too much of everything. I remember when we started it, Sandy (Pearlman) was saying, “It should be like a children’s folk song.” That’s what his idea was, a nursery rhyme: “A nursery rhyme for the children of the damned.” That’s really what he wanted, but it didn’t turn out like a nursery rhyme.
Then, what happened was he got sick. He had his accident and was in the hospital. I went to see him and of course, I had never really spoken to him at length without him…he couldn’t speak, so I was just talking for 8 hours. Not just talking. I would sing songs and talk about our friends, but for 8 hours straight, 2 days in a row. After he had come out of the coma, he could react, but he couldn’t speak. One of the things I sang was this song called “Independence Day”. It was the name of a song that he wrote. I said, “We never finished it. You just had a chorus and you had an idea of what it was gonna be about.” It was gonna be about the mirror and how the mirror inspires these people to want to have something of their own. “You gotta help me do it. I’m gonna do the trilogy. I’m gonna do the second and third acts of this thing. We’re gonna make it happen: Bombs Over Germany and Reformation.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t recover. He was never able to speak. I suppose if I was living in San Francisco…at that time, I was working in school still, before I retired. I couldn’t really take off. I guess maybe if I had thought about it I could’ve taken a sick leave and said I was taking care of a family member. I didn’t realize I could do that at that point in 2016. So I just went there for a weekend, just in case he didn’t get better, to say goodbye. In the course of trying to find something to say, I made a promise to him that I would do the second and third acts. I knew I was gonna do it if I could.
I had an internet radio show on my son’s internet radio station WFKU.org. I started playing songs from Imaginos that had never been played live. I believe that Blue Öyster Cult played “I’m the One You Warned Me Of” and “In the Presence of Another World”, two songs that we had already worked up with them. They already knew them. They only did those songs. They never did “Imaginos” live. They played “Astronomy”, but they played the original version. I heard somewhere that they did the Imaginos version at some point, but I’ve never heard a recording of it or anything, so I don’t know if that’s really true. I do know that they did the other two. I’ve seen videos of them doing it.
“Girl That Made Love Blind”, not only was that not on the record, but it was never performed live by anybody. “Imaginos” was never performed by anybody. We started playing that, me and my bass player, as a duo on my radio show. We’d play a different Imaginos song every month because it’s a monthly show. In October we played one song. In November we played another song. Then in December, I had this guy who played drums with us. We were The Albert Bouchard Project. He played with us and we did podcasts with him in December, January, and February. By the January one, I said, “You know what would be great? Let’s go into the studio and record the whole album over again, just as a trio.” Maybe we’d get another player.
On the last show, we had one of my drummer’s friends. My drummer, he was my student when I was a teacher about 15 years earlier. They had graduated and got careers and all that stuff, but they still played music. The two of them came and joined the two of us. We got together and had a little quartet. In January, we did about 4 or 5 songs from Imaginos. So I said, “We should learn them all and go into the studio in April or May. When we have them all down, we’ll go into the studio and record them all in a couple days.” That was the plan, but then COVID came and we couldn’t do that, but I already had demos that we had started doing of us playing them.
I took these demos and started working on them thinking, “Well, it looks like we’re gonna be in lockdown for a while. It’s not gonna be a couple weeks. It’s gonna be months and months.” Here we are almost two years later *laughs*. So I started working on it and when things finally did open up, I tried to get the drummer to come back and he couldn’t do it. He was a computer IT guy and ended up programming the robots for a grocery store chain, Stop & Shop. As the inventory changes, they have to keep changing what the robots do. He was one of the many people that programmed these things. He was in high demand because people weren’t going out to eat. They had to buy all their food, so the robot thing in the grocery stores turned into a big deal.
He couldn’t do it, so I ended up playing the drums. I replaced his drum part because the demos were just the demos. It wasn’t like we were trying to make a record. The other thing is that we didn’t do them MIDI. We did them straight. I had a very cheap electronic drum kit. It’s a Roland, but like a bottom of the line Roland, so it was the Roland sounds into the computer. “I can’t use or mix these. This is not up to the standards of this century.” *laughs* If we were in the drum machine age, maybe, but yeah. We’ve gone past that now.
Anyways, I ended up redoing the drums with MIDI. One of the things that I love about recording with MIDI is that I can get the exact sounds that I get when I go into the studio with my real kit. I have so many drums and have samples of the same brand with the same kind of drum and the same kind of head that I use. So I can make it sound exactly like how I want my drums to sound, but I can lay down a part and then a month later after I’ve gotten guitar and vocals and all this other stuff, I can say, “I should change this drum fill to fit with this guitar part.” I can just redo one little bit, punch it in, and it sounds exactly the same. You cannot do that recording real drums. You can only do that with MIDI, where you can go in after the fact and change things around. I’ve really gotten used to doing that.
Even on this new record, Bombs Over Germany, I had a drummer come in and he did it MIDI too. I didn’t give him any instructions other than start it out minimum and build up to the chorus and then after the chorus you go down minimum again. Just general comments like that, not any specific beats. I’d say, “Let’s do three takes. Then I can take what I want.” One time he played the perfect thing in the chorus, but the fill going into the chorus was a little bit standard. Then he did another fill into the chorus that was completely amazing. I was like, “I gotta use that fill!” *laughs* I discovered this guy in the park. He’s a busker. He’s 25 years old and he’s amazing, a virtuoso. He’s playing with all these other guys, but fortunately, I think I got in there before anyone else *laughs*. Who knows? He’ll probably get stolen away after a while, but that’s fine. I was there first *laughs*.
My initial takeaway of last year’s Re Imaginos was a bit of surprise. We all know and love the ‘88 album as being this big, grand 80s metal production. Last year’s album was completely stripped down, yet just as dark and haunting, if not more so in certain areas.
AB: The other thing that I noticed on the original Imaginos was that sometimes the lyrics seemed to be secondary to the sound, which is fine. I’m sure Sandy was totally into that and he was fine doing it, but I was like, “These lyrics are really quite profound.” You can’t quite figure out what it is, but you get a sense and that’s what informed me. That and the other little things that Sandy would say. When I was trying to do the vocals on “Astronomy”, which Buck Dharma ended up singing, but when I was trying to do it, he said, “You know what would be great? Maybe we should just get rid of this whole track and get some nuns from the convent up the hill to come down to the beach and sing it with nothing but claps. Let’s sing the first verse like that.” I had forgotten about it. I was trying to do “Astronomy” and was like, “Well, it’s gonna be acoustic. How can I do it?” Then I went for a run along the Hudson River and remembered Sandy saying it. I remembered the thing about the convent and nuns. I didn’t have access to nuns, so I used my TC Electronics vocoder to make it sound like a bunch of girls singing.
That’s how that version of “Astronomy” developed, which I kind of like. After Metallica did it, for me, that’s the ultimate version. The only problem with the Metallica version was they were so respectful. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t mess around with it more. Make it even heavier or something, but no. I know they’re big fans and friends too. *laughs* They were very respectful. It’s actually quite a compliment. This one I think competes with the Metallica version *laughs*. It’s completely different, that’s the whole thing. I try not to be compared too much. This is not meant to be a substitute for the other version. It’s meant to be an alternative and possibly, viewed as a whole, is stronger.
When did Sandy Pearlman first approach the band with Imaginos and how long had he been writing it?
AB: We already knew about the story. When I met him in 1967…I don’t know. Maybe Eric (Bloom), but certainly Donald (Roeser/Buck Dharma) and myself, we knew the story because he had told it to us within two or three weeks of me meeting him. We used to have this band house in St. James, which is the town where Don’s parents were living. He actually grew up in Merrick, Long Island, which is in Nassau County. This is in Suffolk County, in between Smithtown and Stony Brook.
We rented this band house in St. James and the guy that rented us was this older guy. We knew he would not be happy with hippies living in his house smoking pot all the time, so there was an attic in the house and we would go up there to smoke pot. We wouldn’t smoke it in the house proper just in case he came over and smelled it *laughs*. “Alright we’ll smoke it in the attic! That way he won’t know!” So we all would climb up into the attic, light some candles because there was no electricity there, and smoke pot. We’d laugh and act silly. One time we were up there doing it and Sandy came up. He starts telling us this story about this Imaginos character. I was like, “This is crazy. This is like Ulysses or Homer…The Odyssey or something!” It was crazy stuff.
He had written a few songs for the band. Around the time that we were doing the Elektra record, he presented us with this song “Blue Öyster Cult”, which he said, “This is part of the Imaginos saga that I talked about back then.” So we knew about Imaginos. We had this song “Blue Öyster Cult” and everyone was like, “I don’t know what to do with this song.” We thought it sounded funny. I’d never had an oyster. I always thought oysters were these funny gross things. I was like, “Oyster? Okay, that’s really a funny name.” Yes, I had a black oyster pearl drum set *laughs* but I thought that the whole idea of oysters was funny. I thought it was a humorous name. The band couldn’t decide, so we told him to come up with a name and of course he said Blue Öyster Cult. We said, “That’s the name of your song! We’re definitely not doing this song now.” *laughs*
Right after that, I guess when we were making Tyranny and Mutation, he came in with this song called “Astronomy”. We said, “Who’s this Desdinova?” He said, “Desdinova is Imaginos. It’s the same character. He’s just changed location.” Anyways, he teased out the songs bit by bit. I’m almost positive that “Blue Öyster Cult” was the first Imaginos song that was presented to us. We were still Soft White Underbelly at that point.
Back in those early days, would Sandy approach the band with a set of lyrics and a song would be built from there? Or was the band constantly working on new music regardless?
AB: The first song that we had written with Sandy, I had already written a song and then Sandy approached me with lyrics for the song. It was a song called “Buddha’s Knee”. He wrote lyrics to our song and then we had to try and fit them into it. He was inspired by the music and he wrote that song. Then he came up with a song called “Queens Boulevard”, which Allen Lanier wrote the music to. “Gil Blanco County” was one of the songs that he gave us. We had changed our name to Stalk-Forrest Group and that was one of the first songs he had given us.
We were playing some club in Westchester County. It could’ve been in New Rochelle, some place like that. It wasn’t far, but it was in Westchester. After the show, we were riding back in Eric Bloom’s van and he got a great idea for a song, “Gil Blanco County”. We ended up recording that for the second Elektra record. We made one record and then Les Braunstein, our lead singer, decided that he couldn’t sing these songs *laughs*. It was like, “Dude! We’re in the studio. We’re about to make history here and you’re saying you can’t sing these songs after you already sang them for months!” He’s like, “Yeah, but when you’re making a record you’re putting yourself out there. I don’t want this to represent me.” “Wow…okay…shit, you should’ve thought of that before. Now we’re in a tough spot!”
We auditioned some different people. Each of us auditioned. I was the original lead singer in the band, not because I really wanted to, but because no one else wanted to sing. So I said, “We can’t be playing instrumentals all the time.” Also, I already had this college band with Don. We had done a lot of gigs. We were doing some of those songs that we played in our college band and they needed a vocalist.” Our college guy, he was still in school. He didn’t drop out with us *laughs*. Don and I dropped out at the end of our sophomore year and started Soft White Underbelly that next fall. It would’ve been our junior year. We became full time musicians. My parents thought I lost my mind *laughs*.
One of the songs that came out of that collaboration between Pearlman and the band is “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll”, which appears on this upcoming album. How did that one come about?
AB: That was a song that he originally wrote when we were Stalk-Forrest Group. It was 1969. We were going to go to California because he had talked Elektra into letting us make another record. The reason why they didn’t like Eric’s vocals was because he was a different kind of singer than Les Braunstein. We had to rearrange the songs and in many cases change the keys and tempos. Some of the songs didn’t work for him singing, so we had new songs and very new arrangements of the old songs. He talked them into letting us go to California and record it in Elektra West Studios, which is where The Doors and some of the other bands on Elektra had recorded. I think Clear Light maybe. Lonnie Mack was there as a producer, so we got to meet him.
Anyways, he (Pearlman) wrote a song for me to sing that was gonna be called “Siren Singalong”. That was the original song. We worked it up, but by the time we got out to LA, Sandy said, “Nah, it’s not good enough.”, so we didn’t record it. It sort of disappeared from our repertoire. I guess we played it for a while. After we made that record, we actually played it when Joe (Boucahrd) joined the band.
Joe joined the band in 1970 at the end of the year, in September. Our bass player had gotten a job and we just decided he was a liability. *laughs* He had a habit of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. He had gotten us kicked off the label twice. The last time that we got kicked off, we believed it was his behavior that made it happen, but it wasn’t proven. They had sent Don Gallucci who was the original keyboard player in The Kingsmen. He was still in high school when he played “Louie Louie”. He also had a band called Don and the Good Times that played on Shindig!. In Don and the Good Times, he was the bass player. He came to produce us and the bass player says, “I gotta go to my job at the bakery. It’s my first day and I can’t be late.” So he leaves.
Meanwhile, Don Gallucci has been sitting around for almost a week to work with us. We were upstate trying to get some money and Sandy was trying to get in touch with me. Finally, I get a message from my mother saying, “Call this guy. It’s Sandy.” “Hey man! Where are you? You gotta get back down here. Don Gallucci is gonna make a single for you.” Because they didn’t think there were any singles on the record. We *laughs* apologized to the band we were playing with and said, “You’ll have to find some new guys for tomorrow night because we gotta go.” *laughs*
We went back to the city and within an hour of him working with us, the bass player leaves, so Don says, “Well, I play bass. I can do this.” He plays bass and comes up with this brilliant bass part that I don’t remember. We should’ve been recording it, I suppose. The song was “Gil Blanco County” and we were gonna redo it as a single. He says, “Okay! Great work guys!” He stayed until dinner time, about 4 or 5 hours. He says, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” That was it. Never saw him again. A week later, we’re told we’ve been dropped from the label. As it turned out, he went back to the city and I believe he produced Raw Power with The Stooges that following weekend. He must’ve thought, “That other band, they’re just a bunch of losers. But this guy (Iggy Pop) is really gonna go somewhere!” *laughs*
We sent out a call for bass players. I contacted everybody I knew that was good. Joe was the only one that was available. He wasn’t even really a bass player, but I knew he played bass in his college band and he owned a bass *laughs*. I knew he could do it because he was a decent musician all around. Unlike the other guy, Joe could really sing. He could play piano too, so he was doing a lot of stuff.
This album features guest appearances from Joe, as well as Eric and Buck. Would you say you have the same chemistry working with them today as you did back then?
AB: Yeah, I think it’s better now. I think I was a little heavy handed in the beginning because I was so concerned about making it. I really just wanted to have that hit. And then after we had a hit I wanted another hit. I fell into that chasing the hit idea. I would also sweat the small stuff back in those days. I don’t do stuff like that anymore. Now I’m all mellow. I gave those guys copies of Re Imaginos and never asked them to do anything on it. I felt like they had their shot. This was my turn to do it the way I wanted to do it and hopefully some of the other alternative ideas Sandy had. I changed some of the lyrics because of what Sandy had suggested while we were working on it. At the time, maybe I gave him a hard time and said, “No, I don’t want to do that. We’ve got the band. How can I bring the nuns on tour with me?” *laughs*
I can’t remember, but I think I was working with Richie (Castellano) on something. It might have been a Michael Moorcock record. I think it was. I said, “How did you like Re Imaginos?” He said, “Yeah, it was great! How come you got all these other guys playing and didn’t ask me or any of the other guys in BÖC?” “I don’t know. Hey, wanna be on the next one?” “Yeah, sure!” I contacted Donald and Eric and said, “Listen, here’s the songs that I have. Here’s my rough mixes. I’d love to have you on this record.” Joe had done a bunch of piano and trumpet. He had done all these things already. He had done a whole track for “Independence Day” and helped me finish the song. He had done a whole amazing trumpet thing on “When the War Comes”, which I retitled “When War Comes”. That song is a trip and that’s how it starts. I’m not chasing the single. You put this on, you think you’re at the opera, but it’s modern. Maybe a Philip Glass…no, no. Better than that *laughs*! I’ve only been to a few operas live. It has this grand vibe and that’s how the record starts, with Joe playing his ass off. He’s playing like 4 or 5 trumpets. We got a guy playing strings and all kinds of stuff.
The first single released off Imaginos 2 – Bombs Over Germany (Minus Zero and Counting) is a reimagining of “OD’d on Life Itself”, which features a couple lyrics that were omitted from the original recording. Why were these lyrics cut back in 1973?
AB: That was Sandy Pearlman’s thoughts because he had written the lyrics and given them to the band. I saw them and I didn’t know. Eric saw them and said, “I know what to do!” So Eric wrote most of the music. I think towards the end I helped them with the chorus, but he wrote the verses. He had the idea for the rocka chocka guitar and then the break. That was all his idea. Everything from the verses was his idea. I think that I helped him write the chorus, “OD’d on life, life itself.” Originally, he sang, “crumpled like grave cloths and hipped to the help…the power of powers and once luminous spell”. When Sandy heard him singing it, he said, “It doesn’t sound right Eric. Just sing “OD’d on life” over and over again.”
I believe that because Sandy had written it as a spooky thing, whereas Eric…I remember when Sandy got the idea for the song. We were all in the van. We were playing somewhere around Woodstock, somewhere in upstate New York. Sandy, for some reason, was there. We got invited to see The Allman Brothers Band the next day. So before we went back to the city, we stopped at this Allman Brothers concert. We watched The Allman Brothers and then as we’re leaving, we left before the end because we didn’t wanna get caught in traffic driving back to the city. We drove past the medical tent and we saw all these people OD’d there. There were kids on stretchers and Sandy says, “Oh, look at that. They OD’d on life itself.”
Eric took it as being about a specific person that was such an idiot they OD’d during this concert. I don’t think Sandy meant it that sarcastic. He could be sarcastic, and maybe he did, but I took it as being spooky. When I went to do it, I said, “I’m not doing it like Eric.” I’m just not good at sarcasm. It’s just not my forte, but spooky I can do. So I decided to put Sandy’s original spooky lyrics back, even though he was the one to change it. He suggested to Eric, “Leave those out. That doesn’t sound right.” I think he’d be okay with the way I do it.
It sounds fantastic.
AB: Thank you. It’s so simple, there’s hardly anything there. It’s just a drum part, guitar part, some little keys. Jack Rigg said, “I wanna play on that!” I said, “Oh man, don’t fill it up. It’s so sparse.” “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna. I got an idea.” It’s in the exact same range as that little piano bit. It fits together like a hand and glove.
There’s a couple songs on here, namely “When the War Comes” and “Shadow of California”, that were released after your time in BÖC. Did these tracks originally date back to the 70s?
AB: No. “Shadow of California” was a new thing. It was an idea that Sandy had talked to me about, but I never saw the lyrics until it came out on The Revölution by Night. Of course, they used that line from the song as the title of the record, even though they buried it in the back. It wasn’t the first cut, but it’s somewhere in there. I actually really liked it. I thought it was pretty good. “When War Comes” was on Club Ninja and I thought it was terrible. Also, there was another aspect that he (Sandy) had taken some of the exact same lyrics as “Half-Life Time”, which was written when we were making the original Imaginos back in ‘83 or something. Early 80s.
No, it was before Imaginos, because I have a demo. It’s on a reel with all the demos. It has “Taarna” (later “Vengeance (The Pact)”) on it, “Showtime” which was Eric’s song. It has a bunch of songs that were demos for the Fire of Unknown Origin record. That’s when he wrote “Half-Life Time”. Then he rewrote it for Club Ninja as “When War Comes”, although there’s a bunch of other lyrics. What I did with this new one was take out all the “Half-Life Time” lyrics and just left what was there. The Howard Stern introduction is part of the beginning of “Half-Life Time”. I like the Howard Stern introduction, but I thought, “If this is gonna be the first cut…”
That’s the other thing. I was talking to Joe. What happens is the mirror is somehow involved in the beginning of World War 1, so I would like this song to sound like the music of 1916 to 1920, that era. There was no Top 10 or Billboard or anything like that. The record industry was very young, but there were things that were considered more popular than others. I listened to the most popular songs from that era for a couple weeks before I started thinking about the arrangement. Then I thought I should write a new introduction that introduces the album to the people as the second act. I ran it by Eric and he said, “I love it. I’ll do it.” Howard Stern was his cousin, so he’s gonna do the Howard Stern part, but it’s gonna be different words. It all worked.
As a matter of fact, we’re just finishing up the official “OD’d on Life Itself” video. Because it’s the first single, I think we’re gonna put Eric’s words in there and use them again *laughs* recycle again as the intro, so you’ll hear it. It’s very good.
This year marks two major BÖC anniversaries, the first being 45 years of Agents of Fortune. I’ve always thought of this album as the band transitioning from the cold metallic sound of the black and white albums to a more accessible and melodic approach. Was this musical transition a conscious effort on the band’s behalf?
AB: Yeah, I would say it was, although I don’t think we recognized that the cold metallic sound was something we were going for. I think that that’s just how it came out. It was just because we didn’t know what we were doing in the studio that much. We didn’t know how to get good sounds. What happened in between those albums was On Your Feet or On Your Knees. We really disliked the mix on Secret Treaties. The first two albums we had no idea. We were just like, “I don’t know. It sounds weird and that’s cool.” With Secret Treaties, we worked very hard. I had every drum I owned and I tuned each one to a different pitch, so I would use drums in tune with the song. We really spent a lot of time getting the sounds exactly the way that we wanted.
Then we went back out on the road and when we heard the mixes, we were like, “What?! What did you do to “Subhuman”? It sounds like somebody threw a blank on it.” “Well, it was too trebly, so we turned the treble down.” “Oh my God.” We felt like we needed to work with a professional. When it came time to mix the live record, we said, “You know what? Aerosmith is the best sounding band out right now.” I think it was their first or second record. Jack Douglas was their producer, mixer, and engineer. We said, “We want Jack Douglas to mix it.” I think Aerosmith was on Epic, but it was still in the Columbia Records family. Columbia was perfectly fine with Jack mixing On Your Feet or On Your Knees. When we heard the mixes, we were like, “Holy crap. This sounds amazing! This sounds like what we want to sound like!” To this day, it’s the favorite of all of the original guys. Allen loved it too.
He (Douglas) worked in the Record Plant. So we said we had to make our next record in The Record Plant and we had to use Jack Douglas. Well Jack Douglas wasn’t available. Aerosmith was making some record at that point. Was it Toys in the Attic? Maybe it was Rocks. He couldn’t work with us, so he said, “You gotta try this guy Shelly Yakus.” Of course I knew Shelly because on the first record with Soft White Underbelly, he was the intern. He was getting me coffee and sweeping the floors and stuff like that. Now here he is as a real engineer. I figured we’d give him a shot. We met when we were both beginners in the recording business. From the first time we worked with him, it was like, “Oh my God. These monitor mixes sound great. The playbacks sound great. This is amazing.”
We fully embraced having a fuller sound, having a sound that sounded more like Aerosmith. I saw Aerosmith live. They didn’t sound better than us live. They didn’t sound as good, so how come their records sounded better *laughs*? They clearly did too, to us anyways. To Blue Öyster Cult fans, it’s like, “Oh Aerosmith sounds like any other band.” Now they do especially because everyone emulated them. They came up with a really great, full, hard sound. That’s what we wanted. The other thing is, and this was quite clear when we were developing the songs for the record, even before we had gotten to the studio with Shelly, that we were tired of seeing an audience of all guys. All white guys, especially. There was no diversity. There weren’t even any females there! It was just guys. We were like, “We gotta do something to appeal to females.”, so we started trying to write more romantic songs and more songs about emotions and the stuff that girls like *laughs* rather than war and weird people *laughs*.
The second anniversary is 40 years of my personal favorite BÖC album, Fire of Unknown Origin. Looking back, what songs stand out to you from that album and how much of it was intended for the Heavy Metal soundtrack?
AB: Everything was intended for the Heavy Metal soundtrack. As a matter of fact, I got storyboards for the entire movie. I still have them, just the little pencil sketches, but it was big too. So we had that and every time we would work on a song, we’d say, “How can we make this fit into this movie?” Every song was a scene from the movie. I can’t remember exactly now, but I remember “Vengeance (The Pact)” was for the Taarna scene when she’s on the bird. It’s the cover for the flyer of the movie. Fans know this and they put it together with that scene and it works perfectly. It’s almost like we’re playing to the scene, even though we didn’t see the actual final product. We just saw “Taarna does this. Taarna does that.”
I went up to the offices and talked to the director and I said, “We want to do this if you want us to.” They said, “Yeah, that’d be great!” That was an interesting process. Of course, then they didn’t use all the songs. They only wanted two: “Burnin’ for You” and “Veterans of the Psychic Wars”. We said, “You can have “Veterans”, but we’re not giving you “Burnin’ for You” unless you take more of our songs.” They were like, “Nah, we already got songs for all the other sequences.” Hollywood people…they had gone their own way. They didn’t know about the New York thing, but it worked out. We still had a hit with “Burnin’ for You”.
In the first couple minutes of the “Joan Crawford” video, are you playing the drums with a femur bone?
AB: No. Sorry to disappoint you. That’s a palm leaf from the palm tree that was right next to me *laughs*. It was from the “Love Stinks” video. I saw Stephen Bladd from The J. Geils Band in that video playing the drums with fish *laughs*. It wasn’t quite as good as that, but it was certainly as bizarre.
Next year will see the release of the final installment in this new Re Imaginos trilogy. Can fans expect the stripped down approach of these first two entries?
AB: I have another idea for this next one. I don’t know. I’ve only asked a couple bands, but I’m thinking it would be more like a compilation record where a whole band does a song, or maybe they do more than one song. It wouldn’t be so much a solo record as a compilation record of different bands. Hopefully I can talk Blue Öyster Cult into doing one of the songs, the current Blue Öyster Cult with Richie, Jules (Radino), and Danny (Miranda). I think that would be really awesome. It would be really great and it would make the album so epic. It’s gotta be epic. Whatever it is, it’s gotta be epic. It’s going to be more like the original Imaginos as far as overblown production. That’s what I’m thinking. There might be an acapella song. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be. I know what it is, but I’m not gonna say. There might be an instrumental piece. There’s lots of material. I was like, “I can’t write anything with Sandy. How am I gonna do it?” Then I was like, “Wait a minute. I’ve got a ton of stuff that I wrote with Sandy that never got used anywhere. I’ll just take these pieces and put them together.”
Imaginos 2 – Bombs Over Germany (Minus Zero and Counting) comes out Friday, October 22 on Deko Music. For more information on Albert Bouchard, visit www.albertbouchard.net.
Great interview!
This was awesome…..great job!!!