Richard Metzger, of Channel 4 TV, Britain makes an unusual claim: “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.”
Metzger is right. 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.
Called “the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known,” Bloom, who as a scientist knew nothing about popular 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, 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 triumphant, returning to his primary field—science—and writing seven books, including his latest, “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 nourish 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,” which he was urged to found by Buzz Aldrin, and the subject of the award-winning 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 synapsed with my clients is because I listened so incredibly intently. I looked for their passion points, their imprinting points, the moments when their brains had opened up and grabbed something that would power them for the rest of their lives.. I gave 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. His only way of getting the 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 Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me. I spent a month trying to figure out the damn lyrics on his upcoming album. They just baffled the hell out of me. I was stumped and I kept going back to it week after week. 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 looming over Kenny’s life, casting him in the shadow, leaving him small and powerless.
Did you ever discuss that with Kenny?
I flew from New York to Colorado to see John Denver for the first time in person, and the only time in person. Then I was supposed to take off that evening on a flight to go to Santa Barbara and meet with Kenny Loggins the next morning for brunch. 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 films of the 1960’s or 70’s. I was too busy reading books way back then. And working. So I was of no value to John Denver whatsoever.
Did he win?
No, We lost. But because of the Trivial Pursuit game, the next morning I had to get up at 4 AM and climb into a little plane where I was actually staring through the windows of the cockpit because I was sitting right behind the pilot. When clouds tower above you and look as solid as the walls of a castle tower, it’s intimidating. When I landed, I got my rental car and I drove up to Santa Barbara and discovered I had made a huge mistake. I used to demand that I see every client in his own environment without any wives assistants, 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 alone we were in the house, the spirit of his tall, blond, Scandinavian wife was booming over us. When I described what I had deciphered from Kenny’s 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 in some of the things that have been written about me, I have been called a Messiah. That sounds appallingly presumptuous. But in fact I have been on the track of prophecy since I was 12. I wasn’t a part of baseball games, parties, or get togethers. The example of Isaiah the prophet was the only role that was left to me. Then there was another role model. When I read Albert Einstein’s book on relativity theory at the age of twelve, in the introduction to the book it felt as if Einstein had reached out through the pages, grabbed me by the front of my shirt, put his nose up to mine, and said “listen up schmuck, to be a genius it’s not enough to come up with a theory that only 7 men in the world can understand. To be a genius you have to be able to come up with that theory and then explain it so clearly that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable amount of intelligence can understand it.” That message from Einstein has been a motto in my life ever since. That’s why I became so obsessed with writing. In his own strange way Einstein was telling me that since there is no place for me in normal society, the only role that I could take is the roll of genius. What I have discovered since then is that 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. And that’s a gift. It’s shoved me 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. And I’m stuck with the fact that there is something basically weird about me, something that forces me to see the cracks in the sidewalk of the perceptions of my fellow humans. 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 those emotions 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 overcome. In 1979 everybody thought America was number one and would stay that way forever. Well what’s happened since then? Was that statement prophetic? Was it as strange as what I said to Kenny Laguna ,Joan Jett‘s manager when she had been turned down by 22 record companies? I said “if you work the way I work 17 hour days, seven days a week and if you do everything I tell you to, I guarantee you that in two years we will have a star.” Those are both prophecies. Where do they come from? 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 in 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 that 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 Noory, the host of “Coast to Coast,” the highest-rated syndicated overnight talk radio show in North America, started using me every week. So, I stopped feeling that nobody needs me because I had that spot on the radio show that proved somebody needed me stuck in the middle of my week. Now it’s regular every Wednesday night. Every day, once I’ve spent an hour on my work and once I’ve had contact with other people even though it’s vague and of a very distant kind, email and electronic stuff …. Once I get into an hour into the flow of my work it gets me 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. But it’s a major theme in my first book, The Lucifer Principle. The Lucifer Principle says that our greatest gift to each other is our need for each other. Why? Because we all need to be needed.
After a very successful career and life you have recently discovered love….
I hadn’t experienced love 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 of what I call supersized surprise, and I didn’t even know it exists. It’s absolutely extraordinary. Love is a very vital part of the living process. These things that I am talking about, are things of the spirit, Yet they are hard and fast realities. Fucking goddamn science has to understand these realities because until it understands these realities, until it takes on these realities, it’s a child’s toy. It’s missing 99% of what the universe is about. Unless science comes to understand things like the human soul, the human spirit, and what happens when two humans are in love with each other it isn’t really science yet.
Why don’t you just sit back and enjoy it?
Well, Science is my life. In my view science is the aspiration to 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 can possibly find in order to experience the extremes of human possibilities. Human emotional possibilities. Then my job is to come back and put what I’ve experienced into the scientific framework so that other humans can use it as a reality whose mysteries they can pursue even farther…. As diligently as they’re pursuing the god particle.
About a week or two ago the magazine The New Scientist announced that Michio Kaku, a physicist from the City University of New York who has appeared on TV steadily over the last 40 years, would be giving a virtual lecture. Kaku was going to explain grand unified theories of the universe. First, he was going to explain how Newton came up with “laws of motion. Then he was going to show how over a hundred years later??, Maxwell managed to work our an equation that took Newton one step further and described what electromagnetism was. Now physicists are trying to come up with an even more inclusive equation that describes the laws of the motion of matter, electromagnetism, and gravity. This has been escaping physics for a long time. Physicists want an equation that you can put on a T-shirt. That to them 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 we can experience when we are in love with each other, when we have sex and make love with each other. The ecstasy at a rock concert. Those ecstasies are so far beyond just you and me that it utterly defies belief. Crowds have these ecstasies. These ecstasies are forces of history.
Look at Hitler….he was an artist of these group ecstasies. He gave Germans the feeling of being a part of something far, far bigger than themselves. When he gathered the German people in crowds, he was able to evoke collective ecstasies. And those ecstasies fueled the Germans to start a war of conquest—World War II. Ecstasies, things of the spirit, can power new realities. New realities in the material world. 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 opposite of the atom smasher. The opposite of the instrument that lets us break things down to their tiniest elements in order to understand everything. My tool has lunged for the biggest picture, not the smallest. My tool has been the timeline of the cosmos…. The history of the whole goddamn thing so that you can see how the emergence of the big bang relates to the things that produce spirit, what the human spirit is 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, It’s self-delusion to parade it as “the grand unified theory of everything”. It’s a sham. It shows how narrow the scientific vision has become. But I have been working on a Grand Unified Theory of Everything since I was twelve. Its tool is not the atom smasher at CERN. It’s the timeline that tries to encompass the whole of what we know. A Grand Unified Theory that puts physics, chemistry, biology, the evolution of human societies, poetry, the arts, and the strange emotions of the human mind into a single big picture, a grand panoramic vision, a real grand unified theory of everything.
Science is not just about narrow visions.. In my mind it’s about the biggest picture, the biggest of visions you could possibly possess. It’s about why I was right about Joan Jett. It’s about why I was right about Chaka Khan. Why was I right when I told Chaka’s manager that if you let me focus all the attention on the lead of singer of your band, Rufus, and cover my ass with the rest of the band, I will give you a star. I only made that statement twice in my life. With Joan Jett and with Chaka Khan. Why was that statement so fucking accurate? What the fuck was I tapping into? How does it relate to the wandering of the prophets in the wilderness? How does it relate to the fact that some of the most important people in ancient Greek society were people you’ve never heard of. They were 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 beckoning 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 that Joan Jett and Chaka Khan could be made into stars.. What the fuck? That’s the question……. what the fuck….that science has not answered. It’s the job of science to answer that question, and science is what drives me. Science and just plain curiosity.
The official website for Howard Bloom may be found at https://www.howardbloom.net