by Howard Bloom
Gerald Rothberg, the publisher of Circus, explained to me that his magazine was about rock and roll. Umm, what? Say that again? And Gerry was desperate. He’d had two editors. They’d both quit. The next issue of the magazine was due at the printers in two weeks. Could I do the work of two editors and put together a finished copy of a magazine on a subject I knew nothing about in fourteen days? All by myself? Sure. Why not? Anything to get up at 7:00 a.m. like a normal human being. And that is how I came to be credited with founding a new magazine genre: the heavy metal magazine.
The man who gave that credit was Chet Flippo, one of the founding editors of Rolling Stone in San Francisco, the man who had put together Rolling Stone’s East Coast office in New York. Chet felt he was lacking in academic cred and tried to make up for this deficiency by writing a master’s thesis on the history of rock journalism, thus giving himself a dollop of respectability. One day Chet sent me six pages of his thesis by messenger. I had no clue to why. Messengers were very expensive. But I opened the big manila envelope from Chet, fetched out half a dozen sheets of typewritten paper, and read them. They told the tale of a person who worked in a converted broom closet on yet another manual typewriter (yes, Gerry Rothberg generously allowed me to work in a windowless converted storage closet across the hall from his six-window corner office overlooking the East River). This prisoner of a room designed for brooms, wrote Chet, was turning straw into gold. Yes, the miracle man in the mop cubicle was increasing the circulation of a forlorn monthly rock magazine that hadn’t stood a chance by 211 percent in two years and utterly reinventing the field of rock monthlies.
What Chet didn’t get into his thesis was the real secret. When you land in a field you know nothing about like an alien from Alpha Centauri, you are able to evaluate the way things are traditionally done with antennae and bug-eyes, thus giving yourself a fresh perspective, a perspective those mired in the field do not have. And you can apply the techniques of Martin Gardner’s Scientific American Mathematical Games section to see what works and what does not. Then you can listen to your publisher and steal tricks from European magazines whose astronomical sales figures he envies. What’s more, you can pickpocket the secrets of a magazine your publisher keeps on a pedestal, secrets of a weekly that has been guiding your bohemian eccentricities for nearly two decades—Henry Luce’s Time magazine.
And, above all you can love the kids you’re writing for. You can be grateful to them for letting you into a secret world your own peers once shut you out of, adolescence. Yes, you can make up for a major deprivation—the lack of a teenagehood. All that can motivate you to excite, thrill, and entrance your audience. And to invent new ways to get a daily feel for what they like and what they loathe.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how I stumbled from art into a career in another branch of popular culture I knew nothing about—rock and roll. Thanks to Circus magazine, I ended up five years later as what Delta Airlines’ in-flight magazine called “one of the most prestigious pop publicists in the world.” Yes, I founded my own public relations company, cleverly named The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd., and passed my working hours with fellow eccentrics like Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Prince, Paul Simon, Bob Marley, Diana Ross, John Cougar Mellencamp, Lionel Richie, Kiss, Queen, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Joan Jett, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, ZZ Top, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kool and the Gang, Run DMC, and Bette Midler. Not to mention Michael Lang, who was still buying designer toys to furnish his posh apartment on New York’s unaffordable Central Park South with the proceeds from Woodstock number one, but couldn’t pass up the chance to burst the seams of his Swiss bank account by launching Woodstock number two (the twenty-fifth anniversary edition). What’s worse, he is apparently plotting a fiftieth birthday of the bacchanal in the mud of Max Yasgur’s farm. I don’t know how he’ll guarantee the presence of the mud.
One day in 1971, just after I’d been named editor of Circus, I was required to attend my first rock concert. The band was one of a flush of British blues groups that had been big in the late Sixties, but were now on their last legs. The two most important of these bands had been Chicken Shack and Fleetwood Mac. This concert was Fleetwood Mac at Carnegie Hall.
The performance began normally enough. There were three thousand of us in the audience. While the lights were up and there was no band onstage, we were all insanely self-conscious, aware of how the people behind us and on either side of us viewed us. We were trying to look intelligent and under control. In other words, we were trying to look cool. Then the lights went down, the band took to the stage, the music began, and I got my first glimpse of that mystical thing that happens at concerts. We lose our sense of performing for the audience of folks near us and are sucked into the performance onstage. We lose the self-consciousness of the interior makeup department I’d seen at work when I was on peyote. We are lifted out of our selves. We become a part of something bigger.
Then, half an hour into the show, something strange happened. The power went out onstage and the house lights, the lights over our heads in the audience, went on. The magic that had sucked us out of our selves was in danger of disappearing.
The stage had no lighting at all. But Mick Fleetwood, a tall, gangly string bean of a man, came to the very lip of the proscenium, getting as close to us as he could get without jumping down and breaking a leg. He raised his fist in the air, and said something to the effect of, “Fuck this. We’re going to rock and roll.” The audience was galvanized. Yes, including me. We were all together in this, riding over the forces of calamity and telling them to go intercourse themselves. We were a part of something higher than ourselves. We were exhilarated and exalted. We were what Hitler’s torch light parade audiences had been, a group with a collective soul, a soul uplifted by challenge and fired by ecstasies. But we were elevated and galvanized without a hint of scapegoats, violence, and war. By total accident, I had found my way into the land of the gods.
A land in which I’d learn to “empath” people like Michael Jackson and Prince by remembering the out of body experience I’d had when dancing on a stage in high school. A land in which the marginal insanities that sometimes bring truth—and deity—the madnesses admired by William James in his Varieties of the Religious Experience come alive. A land on the outer margins of the forces of history.
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Ten years later came the best thing that ever happened: Barbara delivered an ultimatum. By then, she’d escaped from the Bedford-Stuyvesant knife fights that punctuate a teacher’s life, gotten a degree in library science, and had worked her way up to second in command in the New York Public Library’s second-largest reference section—at a library in a neighborhood nicknamed Fort Apache—the South Bronx. Barbara announced that she was planning to leave the New York Public Library to embark on something new. What unexpected field did she want to go into? Working at my company, The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd, the biggest PR firm in the music industry. I absolutely forbade it. I put my foot down. I issued strict orders. I got out my stone tablets and chiseled “thou shalt nots.” I even skulked around pretending to be a burning bush.
Not that I was being arbitrary, mind you. Barbara was my joy and my refuge. The music biz was a sizzling wok of stress. My clients frequently employed oriental torture techniques to stir-fry my nerve endings. My staff was a Freudian kindergarten. Since I couldn’t afford to pay high wages, many of my not-entirely-faithful team members were neurotic drug enthusiasts whom I had scraped from the underside of the earth and pushed, shoved, and dragged into productivity. But keeping them from going over their perpetually enlarging deep-ends was a moment-to-moment task.
Then there was the normal instability of the music industry, which made the earth beneath my feet ripple like a perpetual Pakistani earthquake. Every few months the inevitable would happen and I’d lose a client. Since I’d inserted my whole soul into each client, a chunk of me was macheted away. The emotional effect was l
ike a monthly amputation. So I needed Barbara as an escape. Or so I thought.
Apparently, the Mouse (as Barbara was known) was not impressed by my imitations of the voice from the whirlwind. The day after I absolutely vetoed her planned career move, she appeared in my office, took over a desk, and stayed for the next five years. Which shows you who wears the pants in this family.
The result was miraculous. Instead of sitting at my desk twelve hours straight using gigawatts of energy to retain my composure while all hell broke loose, I could now punctuate my torments with hug-breaks. I’d grab Barbara as she walked by, plonk her down on my lap, smoosh my lips all over her face (especially her tiny nose), and nibble her ears (her lobes are the most wonderful tactile devices the creator ever concocted—better than the texture of freshly-baked pita). If I didn’t nab her on the stairwell (we had a two-story office on Manhattan’s 53rd Street near Lexington Avenue) and flatten her against the wall, thus intolerably embarrassing every member of the Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd, with public displays of unadulterated mush, Barbara would sneak up behind me as I ascended to the second floor and give my bottom a good, hard pinch.
The staff loved it. It was like having a slightly randy mommy and daddy on the payroll.
What’s even better, ever since the summer of the Great Polygamy Experiment, Barbara’s angelic smile had returned.
It all goes back to the wisdom of the murderers. You remember, the ones who tried to straighten out my life in a Hudson on the way to the San Francisco Bay.
First on the homicide-experts’ list of rules for reforming a lost soul was, and I quote, “Ya gotta have a goal in life.” It really doesn’t matter what it is. My first was to find satori, which somehow eluded me. My next was to get through college with decent marks. Straight A’s. And the one that followed was to raise Barbara’s kid and make Barbara smile again—all of which involved entering a variety of rather strange occupations.
Now that my stepdaughter has a kid of her own and Barbara’s grin is semi-permanent, I’m back to the goal I started with when Einstein became my hero—to figure out the nature of the universe. And to pinpoint where your inner gods and mine fit into the cosmos’ big picture. However, unlike Albert, I’d prefer to do it with my daytime clothes on.
The murderer’s second lesson was, “Ya gotta have a woman.” That’s where Barbara comes in. True, I’m the demonstrative one in the family. I initiate most of the kissing and the expressions of affection. As for Barbara, if she has a slight cold, she wipes her nose on my shoulder, which, for some strange reason, I find endearing.
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OK, so I admit we’re not sentimental. What do you expect from a couple who never went through the paroxysms of romance? For example, there was our twenty-fifth anniversary. Normally, we forget this yearly occasion until after it’s occurred, then we suddenly realize that the fifth of September whiffled by a few days ago, poke each other in the ribs, and say, “My God, we missed it again.” We reminisce, and are delighted that we’ve been together ten, twenty, or whatever number of years. I babble a lot about what a good time I’ve had and how it’s been the best years of my life. Barbara tosses in some similar musing and is generally tickled that I count my existence as having started to include fun on a regular basis for the first time after I began living with her.
But our twenty-fifth anniversary was marginally different. First of all, we didn’t forget the date. How could we? My cousin—the one who put me up at his home after I had the momentary mental breakdown in Israel and who set me up as a researcher at Rutgers—called and made a fuss.
Later in the day, I bought Barbara a batch of roses, a gourmet Danish with cherries on top, and a Nestle’s Crunch. Barbara came home from her day of high-powered political meetings in Manhattan bearing a tiny wind-up frog with a giant smile on its face that hopped with mechanical glee across my dinner tray. And two days after the big event, we headed for the local 440-acre park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who’d created the sylvan wonderland across the street from my bedroom in Buffalo. We passed the creek where we’d spotted chipmunks last year (the first chipmunks we’d ever seen in the Big Apple), through the glade where we’d spied wild rabbits, and over the rutted puddle where we’d once encountered an elegantly slender, luminously green snake. We circled the lake, where a male white swan was trying to court a female. She was skillfully avoiding him, and he was half-flying to chase her, sticking his long neck out straight, opening his six-foot wingspan, and flapping so low that his feet dragged in the water, then settling down to paddle after her, tucking his chin into his chest as if to cut down on aerodynamic drag. Ahhh, the lengths to which a male will go to woo a female.
We came out of the far side of this nature patch and entered neighborhoods the likes of which we’d never imagined existed in Brooklyn during our first twenty-five years here—houses like the ones in my hometown, built around the turn of the twentieth century, big, sprawling domiciles with balconies in odd places, whimsical turrets, Ionic columns holding up massive porticoes like those of ante-bellum plantation mansions, strange Dutch curving roofs, Victorian greenhouse-like second floor solariums with arched glass tops and sides, a riot of early 1900s imagination poured into the shape of gables, stained glass windows, and sharply peaked roofs. And we had our anniversary talk about how good it has been, and how much fun we’ve had, and how my life has been different, very different, because of it, and how I’ve had pleasures I never imagined could exist. I still didn’t believe it had been twenty-five years. Five was more believable.
A friend recently commented that Barbara plays an essential part in my life. But the statement was just a bit off. Barbara is my life. Which, I guess, means the quest of The Sixties is over. Satori has been found.
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I wrote that ending in 1995. It’s now 2016, and it turns out that there is one more form of satori that emerged as a result of accidentally contributing to the start of The Sixties. Edna St. Vincent Millay, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Phil Fish had laid out a mission: come to understand as much of everything as you can. Yes, everything. Be bold. Use adventure as a tool of understanding. Then gather every science you can comprehend, all the history you can gather, a bit of the arts, and your personal expeditions into the wilds where science has not yet been applied—from riding the rails with fruit pickers to helping establish Amnesty International in North America, going into the trenches with the NAACP, and working with rock stars. Meld all of that together to forge new perceptual lenses, new lenses with which you can see everything inside of you and everything outside of you from a radically new point of view.
Don’t be the mole digging a hole so deep that you can’t see the world around you. Be the eagle who flies over the landscape. Be a synthesizer who puts the puzzle pieces unearthed by specialists into a big picture. Into a sweeping, awesome narrative that covers the history and future of this universe. A universe in which the greatest amazements are in the minds, the unnamed emotions, and the creations of human beings. In the minds, emotions, and creations of you and me. That’s the goal that you glimpsed with the help of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, LSD, peyote, and methedrine. That’s the aim you learned to strive for without drugs. That’s the target you’re still aimed at today. With all of your heart, your soul, and your brain.
Strive to see the infinite in the tiniest of things. How? By going off the beaten track. By stepping outside the normal perceptual frame. By moving beyond the tools of grad school and the lab. By surfing the seas of passion, religion, and politics. By scholarship plus adventure. Remember the lesson of Sisyphus: the joy is not in the endpoint, it’s in the pursuit. And that grand chase, that push for new insight every hour and every day, is the most exhilarating satori of them all.
EPILOGUE
Remember what happened when you were sixteen? You were working at the world’s biggest cancer research lab—The Roswell Park Cancer I
nstitute. You did not want to be like the mentor who had been assigned to you, biochemist Phil Fish, a wonderful man who spent five years trying to synthesize just one molecule. You did not want to be a mole digging a hole so deep that all you could see was the darkness, the dirt ahead of you, and the dark soil on either side. You wanted to be the eagle who soars over the landscape and sees how all of the narrow results of the specialists converge in a big picture. A soaring, stunning big picture. The sort of big picture that Edna St. Vincent Millay and William Blake would have cheered for. The sort of big picture that the Spirit of The Sixties would have thanked you for. But there was no name for what you wanted to do. And names count. Words change realities.
The closest thing to a name came from a forgotten nineteenth-century philosopher, Herbert Spencer, a man who was once regarded as the most important philosopher of his century, then fell into disrepute. Spencer lived on the Strand in London, in the building, the “establishment,” of a new magazine, The Economist, where he was an editorial assistant. But his real goal was yours: to sew all the narrow scraps of the scientific specializations—from physiology and embryology to sociology and psychology, two fields he helped establish—into a massive tapestry, a grand panorama. An evolutionary panorama. Yes, it was Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and who popularized the term “evolution,” not Charles Darwin. Spencer had a word for what he was doing: “synthesis.” And what he was after, he said, was a “synthetic philosophy.”