I read in a quote from from Richard Metzger (Channel 4 TV, Britain); “I have met God, and he lives in Brooklyn….Howard Bloom is next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and Buckminster Fuller. He is going to change the way we see ourselves and everything around us.”
A modern day Messiah, visionary, prophet ….Howard Bloom exists in a world outside of itself like a jigsaw puzzle, all in one color….the 8th wonder of the world, the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz.” No one ever lost anything by asking for the answers….Howard Bloom creates the questions.
Bequeathed “the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known,” Bloom, who as a scientist knew nothing about music, founded the biggest PR firm in the history of rock and roll. He helped build the careers of the biggest legends on the planet including that of Michael Jackson, Prince, Queen, Run DMC, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Bob Marley, Chaka Khan, Joan Jett, ZZ Top, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Aerosmith, Kiss, AC/DC, Kenny Loggins, Alice Cooper, Styx, Bob Marley, John Denver, and over 100 more.
Then tragedy struck leaving Bloom suffering from an illness called chronic fatigue syndrome. For the next 15 years Bloom’s circadian rhythms became deranged and he was forced into exile, a prisoner of his own bed. Since then he has emerged triumphantly managing to reinvent himself as a best-selling author, recently penning “ Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me: A Search For Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll”, a tale of a “scientific expedition into the dark underbelly of science and fame where new myths and movements are made.” Constantly seeking “The gods within you and me,” Howard Bloom knows where the soul resides and how to protect it.
Other books that Bloom has authored include: “The Lucifer Principle”, “The God Problem”, “How I Accidentally Started the Sixties”, “Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century”, “The Muhammad Code”, and others. He is also the founder of the “Space Development Steering Committee”, and the subject of the film “The Grand Unified Theory of Howard Bloom.”
Bloom is a telescope of memory. Through his book “ Einstein, Michael Jackson, and Me”, he brilliantly masters the intimate stories of the artists he represented making sure their fleeting scent remains in the air forever……Life is defined not by what we let go but what we let in. In a unique conversation with Howard we become privy to the thoughts and theories of God in his human form…..
Howard you would interview your clients in the hope of reaching their very soul….
I strongly suspect that one of the reasons I sort of synapsed with my clients is because I listened so incredibly intently. I sensed the oxygen of intention in the human soul and intention is all about the imperfect points they go through early in their lives that reshapes their brain. I was giving them the most intense possible attention outside of sex.
When you represented all of these rockers it was a great time in music history and I often wonder was it partly because of you?
I don’t know…I was just doing it one person at a time. Remember there were individuals that I couldn’t comprehend and there were individuals that I comprehended too well. I could never publicize the loneliness of John Denver, even though that was at the core of what he did. That meant that his only way of getting attention that lifted him out of his isolation for an hour was performing. As a consequence, he was one of the best performers you’ve ever seen in your entire life. I didn’t really have an opportunity to put that side of him across. Then the story of Kenny Loggins which is in the book… I spent a month trying to figure out his damn lyrics on his upcoming album. They just baffled the hell out of me. I was stumped and I kept going back to it. Then one day it occurred to me. It was like a jigsaw puzzle and if I rearranged the lyrics in a certain order, they made sense. They were basically about some woman leaning over Kenny’s life, casting him in the shadow, leaving him small and powerless.
Did you ever discuss that with Kenny?
The story is in the book. First, I went to Colorado to see John Denver for the first time in person, and the only time in person. Then I was supposed to takeoff that evening on a flight to go to Santa Barbara and meet with Kenny Loggins. Once John Denver got an inkling of the fact that I was a walking encyclopedia, he was in a trivial pursuit contest that night for a charity and he asked me to be on his team. He really prevailed on me heavily so I stayed. But I am actually a dunce when it comes to something like a trivial pursuit contest. I don’t know the television shows or the music of the 1960’s or 70’s. So I was of no value to John Denver whatsoever.
Did he win?
No, I don’t think we won. The next morning I had to get up at 4 AM and get on a little plane where I was actually staring through the windows of the cockpit because you’re right behind the pilot. I got my rental car and I drove up to Santa Barbara and I had made a huge mistake. I used to demand that I hit my clients hardest in their own environment without any wives assistance, or managers. So I met with Kenny in his home but I didn’t realize that home was where the problem was, and that he really needed to get away from it. No matter how low we were in the house the spirit of his wife was booming over everything. When I described what I had deciphered from his lyrics he became furious. He said “who has been telling you about the problems I have with my wife?” So, I could not publicize that either.
That must have been frustrating?
I shouldn’t say this but many of the various things that have been written about me, I have been called the Messiah. I have been on the track of prophecy probably since I was 12. That was the only thing that was left to me. The same way when I read Albert Einstein, an introduction to a book when I was 12. He reached out, grabbed me by the lapels and said for all practical purposes to me, “listen schmuck, to be a genius it’s not to come up with the theory that only 7 men in the world could understand. To be a genius you have to come up with a theory and then describe it so clearly that anyone with a high school education or a reasonable amount of intelligence can understand it.” In his own strange way he’s caused that to be a motto in my life ever since. That’s why I became so obsessed with writing. in his own strange way he was telling me that since there is no place for me in normal society and the only wall that I could take on is the wall of genius. What I have discovered since then is genius is not something you have, genius is in the eyes of the beholder.
Kind of like the thing that matters most is never the thing itself but what we make of it?
You know I am astonishingly dumb in 99 percent of things in life. I have the gift of being 99% dumb of all the things in life because it shoved everything over into the 1% where I am not dumb. Meanwhile other people never wanted me around and would only accept me as a leader and not a member of the group, so they shoved me to the exterior. So that meant my only place in life was outside of groups. One day I was in the first 15 rows of a concert because I wanted to feel the intense, ecstatic feelings of the audience, and that’s where they are the strongest. The artist asked us to clap along, and I was clapping along with all my might. All of a sudden I noticed something strange. Every time other people’s hands were parted mine were clapping. Every time other people’s hands were clapping mine were parted, in other words I can’t exist except in the exterior space, outside of the norm. In 1979 I wrote my first TV series proposal. It was for a series called “Can America Get Back to Number 1?” It was the story of a whole bunch of areas in which we were being challenged and in which we could easily be over-come. In 1979 everybody thought America was number one. Well what’s happened since then? Was that statement as prophetic as saying to Kenny Laguna Joan Jett‘s manager when she got turned down by 22 record companies? I said “if you work the way I worked 17 hour days, seven days a week and if you do everything I tell you to I guarantee you in two years we will have a star.” Those are both prophecies. Do they come from the same place? Who the hell knows. I have always been immersed in not just current affairs, but also international affairs. The big power plays in which entire civilizations go up against each other the way several bacteria colonies go up against each other over a piece of human shit in the Pacific Ocean. So, I am very fortunate that the coldness and pain of being so alone has allowed me to see ways that are different.
Do you wake up in the morning or at night….whenever you wake up, thinking I love my life?
No. Up until 3 years ago I would wake up every morning feeling nobody in the world needs me, nobody in the world wants me and I have no reason for living. I might as well just go and shoot myself. That’s how I used to wake up. And then George Norris, the host from “Coast to Coast” started using me every week. So, I stopped feeling that nobody needs me because I had that spot on the radio show that proves somebody needed me stuck in the middle of my week. Now it’s regular every Wednesday night. Once I got going and once I had contact with other people even though it’s vague and of a very distant kind, email and electronic stuff …. Once I get into the flow of my work it takes about an hour to get over that feeling of being useless and wanting to shoot myself. Once I am up and in my work then I am flying. I think it’s that way for all of us. I think that when we are not in contact with other human beings we all go into depression. I believe, I can’t be sure.
After a very successful career and life you have recently discovered love….
I hadn’t experienced that in my life until the last 2 years. When Ric Ocasek died a couple of years ago at the age of 75, I thought if I had died at 75 like Ric Ocasek, I would never have known the of experience of being loved. I would have never known those feelings even existed. Can you imagine that? A whole level that I called supersize surprise. It’s absolutely extraordinary. That is a very vital part of the living process. These things that I am talking about, things of the spirit they are hard and fast. Fucking goddamn science has to understand these realities because until it understands these realities, til it takes on these realities it’s a child’s toy. It’s missing 99% of what the universe is about. Unless it comes to understand things like the human soul and the human spirit and what happens when two humans are in love with each other….
Why don’t you just sit back and enjoy it?
Well, Science is my life. In my view science is the aspiration through omniscience. If we can imagine an omniscient God, a God who knows everything, then that is our task to understand everything. My task is two-fold. My task is to throw myself into every adventure I could possibly find in order to experience the extremes of human possibilities. Human emotion possibilities. Then come back and put it into the scientific framework somehow so that other humans can use it as a reality whose mysteries they have to pursue…. As diligently as they’re pursuing the god particle.
About a week or two ago a new scientist announced that he would be giving a virtual lecture from Michio Kaku. He was going to explain theories of the universe. First, he was going to explain how Newton came up with “laws of motion” then Maxwell managed to work at an equation they took that one step further and described what electromagnetism was. Now a physicist is trying to come up with an even more inclusive equation that describes the laws of the motion of matter, electromagnetism plus gravity. This has been escaping man for a long time. He wants an equation that you could put on a T-shirt. That to him will be “the grand unified theory of everything.” Look at the stuff we’ve just been talking about. It is real as hell. The ecstasy is what we can experience when we are in love with each other, when we have sex and make love with each other. Those ecstasies are so far beyond just you and me that it utterly defies belief. Crowds have these ecstasies.
Look at Hitler….he was constantly an artist of these group ecstasies. We don’t just need a science that uses the atom smasher to look at things that are so small that even a microscope cannot see them. And then to claim that this equation sums up everything….it sums up almost nothing! Yes it’s important but it sums up almost nothing. So my goal since I was 12 years old has been to put together the timeline of the cosmos…. The history of the whole goddamn thing so that you can see how the discovery or how the emergence of the big bang relates to the things that produce spirit, what it’s all about and why it exists. It’s not simply enough to get motion, electromagnetism and gravity together in one equation. Great, you’ve done something wonderful but it’s almost nothing, and to parade it as “the grand unified theory of everything” is a sham. It shows how narrow the scientific vision has become.
Science is not about neurovision. In my mind it’s about the biggest picture of visions you could possibly possess. It’s about why I was right about Joan Jett. It was why I was right about Chaka Khan. Why was I right when I told that manager that if you let me book sole attention on the lead singer and cover my ass with the rest of the band you will have a star. I only made that statement twice in my life. Why was it so fucking accurate? What the fuck was I tapping into? How does it relate to the wondering of the profits in the wilderness? How does it relate to the fact that some of the most important people in Greek society are people you’ve never heard of? They are called seers, people who can see. In my project with Mark Gaffney we are talking about how the future calls to us. How it draws us. The future is drawing us toward it in some strange way that our current scientific ideas of causality deny. But somehow the future is alive in us waiting to be set free. That future was obviously calling to me with the revelation of Joan Jett and Chaka Khan. What the fuck? That’s the question……. what the fuck….that science has not answered. That’s the job of science to answer that question, and science is me.
The official website for Howard Bloom may be found at https://www.howardbloom.net
Interview by Meredith Grant