Imaginos - Background - Sandy Pearlman and The Soft Doctrines of 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), written in the mid-1960s during his formative years as a student of anthropology and sociology at the universities of Stony Brook, Brandeis and 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", as well as for books on modern warfare and conspiracies.

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 changes of name, 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 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" (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. 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.