Blue Oyster Cult’s Imaginos is quite probably the longest-gestating album of all time. Its concept – in the loosest sense, the story of an alien race arriving upon Earth in the Middle Ages and shaping human history from that point forward – was developed by erstwhile rock critic Sandy Pearlman when he was still a college student in the mid-60s. Pearlman, of course, went on to found, manage and produce Blue Öyster Cult, originally as Soft White Underbelly. Even the band’s eventual name was taken from their mentor’s monumental creation.

The band used Pearlman’s sprawling collection of poems on the subject as source material for lyrics on their first four albums, notably on two tracks on 1974’s Secret Treaties –Astronomy and Subhuman – but never tackled the whole. That task eventually fell to drummer Albert Bouchard, who, having been fired from the band in 1981, went on to work with Pearlman on a planned three-double-album saga. However, Columbia Records, BÖC’s label, rejected the first instalment of Bouchard’s magnum opus in 1986, by which point BÖC had also disbanded, demoralised after the failure of their most recent album, Club Ninja, and then re-formed once again.

Pearlman coaxed the band back into the studio using his and Bouchard’s recordings as bait. He had BÖC’s two singers, Eric Bloom and Donald Roeser, substitute Bouchard’s vocals on the original tracks. He also added to them a so-called ‘Guitar Orchestra’ that featured, among others, Joe Satriani, and then persuaded Columbia to release the reworked

Trimmed to a nine-track single disc and with the songs lifted out of sequence from Pearlman’s original story, this new version of Imaginos was finally released in July 1988 and promptly bombed. So much so that it would be another 10 years before Blue Öyster Cult made their next record. Yet in spite of the concept being rendered now entirely nonsensical, in all other respects, Imaginos was as powerful and cohesive as the band’s best works from the 70s. Whereas BÖC had strived on their two immediate predecessors for a more AOR-oriented direction and sounded neutered, this was a hulking, riff‑heavy beast, casting them once more as an American Black Sabbath.

Suitably grandiose, it includes such high points as a retooled version of Astronomy and the ludicrously but also magnificently overblown The Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein’s Castle At Weisseria.

Speaking to Classic Rock in 2018, Eric Bloom didn’t necessarily agree such sentiments. Speaking today from his New York home, he seemed faintly baffled by the Imaginos experience, even 18 years on. This is what he had to say.

When were you first made aware of the Imaginos concept?

Eric Bloom: Sandy made the lyrics available to the members of the group in the original band house on Long Island. I moved into that house on Christmas Day 1968 and joined the band as a member in April 1969. So the lyrics were always there, in a manila folder. Any of us could just dip into that folder and write a song. But I was never aware that it was supposed to be three double albums. It was Albert who really took that under his wing. Most of the rest of us weren’t that interested in taking this material and making a record with it.

Did you understand the overall concept, or even care about it?

I got the general idea, but not necessarily every nook and cranny of the story Sandy had written. For instance, I know that the aliens lived underwater.

From your point of view, how did Albert’s solo project become a BÖC album?

The band had already re-formed with Donald, Allen [Lanier, keyboards], myself and a couple of sidemen. We had started to work again and there was an ongoing discussion about us making a record. At the same time, Albert and Sandy had been working together for years and by then burned through a small fortune that they had got from the record company. Ultimately, Columbia wasn’t interested in putting their record out, so it came filtering back to us that if we were interested in, um… I don’t know what verb you want to use, but I’ll say ‘fixing’ it then it could be released as a Blue Öyster Cult album.

My part in that record strictly extended to going in and doing vocals. I flew to San Francisco and sang at Pearlman’s studio for six straight weeks. Then I met Donald at the airport, passed off the keys to my rental car to him and he went on and stayed out there for an equal amount of time.

Ultimately, do you think it even really counts as a Blue Öyster Cult record?

In a way, since I sang on it and there’s one of my songs on there, albeit a slightly left-hand voyage through it [an updated Subhuman, retitled Blue Öyster Cult]. But I don’t really have a lot of love for that record because my involvement wasn’t so great. I think it’s fair to say that Columbia, certainly in America, didn’t do anything with it also.

For us, it was a means to a method in terms of getting a new record out. It was helpful to us while we were out on the road and we did play a few of the tunes in the live show. The people that cared, the hardcore fans, knew the story, but it didn’t reach out to the general public. Certainly, it didn’t sell much.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 232 (December 2016)

In 1969, the Allman Brothers were in Jacksonville, Florida, staying at the home of a friend. In the middle of the night, Gregg Allman woke from a dream with some music and lyrics in his head. Because bandmate Berry Oakley was in the next room with his wife and new baby, Gregg knew he had to be quiet if he was going to get his idea down.

He couldn’t find a paper or pen, so he ended up writing lyrics and notes using the only things available – an ironing board and the burnt end of a matchstick. It was the seed of the song that would become Whipping Post. For a number about a man who’s helplessly awaiting more torture from the woman who betrayed him, words scrawled in ash seemed an appropriately poetic beginning.

As with many classic songs, Whipping Post had a different feel initially. Guitarist Dickey Betts recalled, “It was a ballad when Gregg brought it to us. It was a real melancholy, slow blues.” Bassist Oakley’s intro bass lick – worked on all night, but only five seconds long – soon propelled the song in a new direction. Unusual for rock, Whipping Post had an unorthodox time signature. Or two, really – 11/8 on the intro, 12/8 on the verses.

“I just stumbled onto ‘em,” Allman later said. “I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I just did it. My brother said, ‘That’s good, man. I didn’t know you understood.’ I said something intelligent like, ‘What’s 11/8?’ and Duane just said, ‘Okay, dumb ass, I’ll try to draw it up on paper for you.’”

Recorded at Atlantic Studios in New York in August 1969, the song took an entire day to get down on tape. It clocked in at five minutes and seventeen seconds. But once the band took it on stage, it quadrupled in length, a mélange of blues, rock, funk and fusion jazz (the 22-minute version on 1971’s At Fillmore East is definitive).

“We just felt like we could play all night and sometimes we did,” says Betts. “We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it.”

If one song epitomises their concept of “hittin’ the note,” that interplay and musical telepathy they were famous for, it’s Whipping Post. The Brothers played it at every show they ever did, and no two versions were exactly alike.

They encored with it at their final show at New York’s Beacon Theatre in 2014, Gregg Allman ended his last UK show with the same song the following year, and in 2020, when the surviving members of the final Allman Brothers Band lineup reunited as The Brothers at Madison Square Garden in New York, Whipping Post was the final number in a mammoth set. In 2025, they repeated the trick over three nights.

Whipping Post also developed an unlikely relationship with none other than Frank Zappa. During a 1974 show in Finland, an audience member famously disrupted Zappa by repeatedly screaming a request for the song. Zappa didn’t know it, but improvised a response by playing his own track Montona while altering the lyrics to mock the request, which he subtitled Whipping Floss. This interaction became known as ‘The Helsinki Incident’.

“We didn’t know it, and I felt kind of bad that we couldn’t just play it and blow the guy’s socks off,” Zappa told Guitar Player in 1983. “So when [pianist/vocalist/saxophonist] Bobby Martin joined the band, and I found out that he knew how to sing that song, I said, ‘We are definitely going to be prepared for the next time somebody wants Whipping Post – in fact we’re going to play it before somebody even asks for it.'”

Zappa eventually released his own satirical-yet-virtuosic cover of it on his 1984 album Them or Us, while Gregg Allman would rerecord the song for his 1997 album Searching for Simplicity, ignoring the original’s mix of time signatures and rendering it in good old-fashioned 4/4.

While the Allman Brothers Band were rightfully proud of the song and its improvisational legacy, they remained resistant to easy labels. “I’ve heard that damn expression ‘jam band’ so many times,” Gregg told Classic Rock in an interview. “It’s b.s. The Brothers are not a jam band. We’re a band that jams.”