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Ten most important records of the 20th century

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HIT IN THE HEAD BY HEAVY METAL how I accidentally became the king of rock and roll

The history of recorded music is long and illustrious and I'm totally unaware of most of it. What's more, I haven't got the energy to do any research and dazzle you with my erudition. So let me see if I can lure you off the track with a few thoroughly mangled tid?bits. First of all, did you know that Caruso sold something like five million records way back around 1905? How's that for going multi?platinum? Of course, in those days, you had to throw your needle away after you'd played about two disks, and you had to buy a new record after you'd run it around your turntable about a dozen times, so Caruso addicts had to purchase fresh copies of the same platter every two weeks or so, and sometimes a good deal more often if one of the toddlers accidentally sat on the thing, since the records of those days were about as sturdy as a great grandmother's hip bones, which meant they broke in half if you breathed on them hard.

Then around 1927, Gene Austin (I think that was his name), who had a gonzo hit with "My Blue Heaven," sold so many records that RCA felt silly just giving him one gilded platter after another and presented him with a full?sized, gold RCA dog.

Then came the Depression, and Austin's concert audiences couldn't afford to go to auditoriums, so Austin took a tip from P.T. Barnum and revival preachers and moved his show into a tent. The overhead was lower (in those days, they didn't make tentpoles very high), so he could charge rock bottom ticket prices that even people selling apples on streetcorners could afford.

The scheme was so successful that Austin schlepped his tent all over the country, making sure (in another tradition pioneered, among others, by Barnum, who, as a former newspaperman, was a master at publicity) that several weeks before his show hit town, an advance man rolled in to wangle space in all the papers and to plaster the lampposts with posters and get the entire population repeating Austin's name like a mantra and salivating for tickets, thus messing up their chins with drool and disturbing the neater mothers in the neighbornood.

Well, one day this very young dog?catcher in Florida (because of his youth this kid was only allowed to catch very young dogs) came up to Austin and begged him for a job with the show. Austin took pity on the pooch?hunter and made him an advance man, along the way giving him a basic education in hoopla and razzamatazz.

The kid's name was Tom Parker. Later, he'd aspire to a career in the fried chicken racket and start to call himself a colonel, but before he had a chance to perfect a really superior, seven?spice batter, he ran into this yahoo driving trucks in Mississippi and ended up a mere flunkey for some singer who couldn't keep his pelvic bones on straight. Alas, poor Parker had to abandon his ambitions in the poultry biz and content himself with the humiliating task of counting swimming pools full of large denomination bills in the record industry.

Tommy Overstreet, the country singer of yesteryear, told me this story. He got it from the horse's mouth. Gene Austin was his uncle. And his uncle's horse could really talk your ear off.

So there you have it: the entire pre?history of rock and roll.

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Taking as much advantage of the reprieve as I can, I've just finished my second book, How I Accidentally Started The Sixties: or the case of America's missing virginity, have knocked out 300 allegedly humorous captions (and taken a bank?breaking 800 panoramic pictures??which because of their double?width format cost the equivalent of Brunei's oil income to process) for a proposed photo book called Panoramic Paradise: walking tours with an idiot and his idiot?proof camera, have been ordered by my wife to finish the next of the eight 75%?written books in my series outlining a new paradigm that knits together psychology, endocrinology, history, sociology and geopolitics, and have been placed in the first Who's Who in Science and Engineering for the plaudits with which the scientific community has welcomed my first as?yet?unpublished book introducing the Bloom Grand Unified Theory of Everything But How To Make Pizza Sauce.

Which leads to the totally incongruous rumor you heard that I, a person immersed in literature and science all my life, was once an agent. What a bizarre notion! But it's true. For over fifteen years I was the leading publicist in the rock and roll business, founder and president of the industry's dominant p.r. firm. I worked with folks like Michael Jackson, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, Prince, Kiss, Billy Joel, Simon & Garfunkel, and Lord?knows?who?all?else.

How did this happen? I got married at the end of my freshman year of college (after dropping out for three years to hitch?hike, ride the rails, start the Hippie movement, live on a kibbutz in Israel, do research at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University, and write foundation grant proposals for the Middlesex County Mental Health Clinic). I had bought my wife out of her first marriage by paying for her divorce with money I earned during my summer vacation writing a pamphlet called Ten Steps To Organize A Boy Scout Troop (which explains why the Scouting movement has been in serious decline since 1965). Don't worry, my wife had been separated from her leech?like first husband for two years. However it meant she came with an instant family, in the form of my five?year?old daughter (OK, stepdaughter, but I HATE that term).

Three years later, I graduated NYU Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude with fellowships from four different grad schools in clinical psychology. But Linda, my wife, who is a wonderful, delightful miracle, had put husband number one through school for two years, then had earned a pittance teaching six?foot teenagers who spent their entire class time trying to play basketball by throwing each other through the windows while I piddled around in school for three years, and she was fed up with student husbands.

So I turned down the grad school fellowships and started an avant?garde commercial art studio, which initially earned me a whopping $50 a week. But we ended up doing all the graphics for ABC's seven FM stations, film for NBC?tv, and art?directing The National Lampoon. This gave me a chance to scope out the media world. Hence while running the art biz, I became a contributing editor to two underground magazines, which meant getting up at six AM to write, then coming home from the studio and pummeling the typewriter until 11:30 at night to meet my deadlines.

So when someone offered me a position as a magazine editor, it sounded like a great way to get up at a normal hour and still do what I really wanted: write. As a consequence, I never asked what the magazine was. Turns out it was concerned with rock and roll, a form of music about which I knew nothing. So I studied the field like a Talmudic scholar, dissected it using tricks I'd learned from Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games section of The Scientific American, and raised the circulation of the magazine 211% in two years.

Then Noelle, my daughter, hit an awkward age??the age where New York schools specialize in teaching the proper insertion of hypodermic syringes filled with poppy extracts. I needed to send her to a private school. This meant I had to earn more money. But how?

Just then, the head of a record company, noticing that my publisher had moved from a small Second Avenue walk?up apartment to a giant co?op overlooking the East River, figured maybe I could do the same thing for him. He had his distributor, Gulf & Western, hire me to form a public and artist relations department for the company's fourteen record labels. I got a 50% raise...enough to pay my daughter's tuition. And the record company president who had saved me from penury became a multi?multi?millionaire.

So everyone was happy. Until one day the record company president walked into my office and said, "Schmuck, if you're so smart, how come you don't have your own company?" Since I can't catch a baseball and look like a cross between Kermit the Frog and Woody Allen, smart is about the only thing I can hang some self?respect on. The insult stung. I started my own firm.

The first two years were sheer hell. Business is like flying fighter planes in war. You use all your senses. You don't get much sleep. Your intelligence is always clicking at maximum speed, trying to prevent destruction and sense opportunities so subtle as to be nearly invisible to the ordinary mortal. Sometimes it's exhilirating. Sometimes it feels as if you'd spent the week being beaten with baseball bats. I had to forget about reading and get totally immersed in things about which I was an utter moron. I read books on (yech!) accounting and business management. I designed radical new book?keeping systems, since the traditional variety invented by a bunch of confused Italians in the 15th century were utter gibberish to a man with my miniature mind. I put together the first major computer system in the field. And I treated every campaign the way Sam Sneed polished his favorite putter.

So the company became the tops in its discipline. I won a bunch of awards, appeared on The Today Show, CNN, CBS Nightwatch, and was written up in a lot of magazines.

But much more to the point as far as the mad?scientist in me was concerned, I had penetrated the world where modern myths and rituals are made, where tribal passions are stoked, and where the masses are dipped in emotion like tea bags??the media.

What's more, I had gotten the opportunity to walk down the corridors of power like a native, and feign a position of authority in the conference rooms where decisions on the fate of the collective consciousness (or the pop cultural components thereof) are made. Something like Margaret Mead finally getting her chance to enter the inner lives of New Guinean villagers without creating alarm.

Believe it or not, this gave me the perspective to come up with my Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe, which has since been praised by folks like the Royal Society Professor of Physiology at Cambridge University, the founder of the Neural Surgery operation at Sloan?Kettering, the head of the anthropology department at UCLA, and an assortment of other academics everywhere from Harvard and Cornell to the University of Waterloo.

These people have revealed their ignorance by declaring the Bloom opus "revolutionary," "momentous," "a long step forward in the human understanding of human biology," and "a whole new view of human nature and the nature of life itself." Ah, well, not everyone is clever enough to realize what an ignoramus I am.

sept8/disk38/hyman

You were curious about how I slid into the black music business and ended up as Al Sharpton's travelling companion, Don King's arch enemy, an acquaintance of Benjamin Hooks, and one of the few white men who can get Percy Sutton (former Boro President of Manhattan and owner of one of the country's largest black electronic media conglomerates) on the phone. Let's see if I can squeeze some of it into one letter.

This issue of race and the black community has loomed very large in my life, as it has in yours. Here's the reason. Back in my teens, when I was a member of Buffalo's Unitarian youth group (about the only aggregation of really bright kids in the whole city??though half of them seemed to come from my temple, and the leader of our pack was actually Catholic), I had my first brush with racial issues. I headed the group's political action committee, and we addressed the dilemma of red?lining...bank policies that prevented blacks from getting mortgages for homes outside a pre?determined ghetto. The problem was pretty academic to me, and I must confess, it never really engaged my emotions. After all, the only black person I knew was my maid, and I'd never even seen a black neighborhood in my life.

Then came the early sixties and the civil rights movement. But I was in Israel on a Revolutionary Marxist kibbutz and missed the whole thing. So I never had the standard experience of being tarred and feathered as a Freedom Rider, or any of that stuff.

Plus, the attitudes about race and ethnic groups (Italians, Poles, etc.) in my house seemed totally non?existent. But the operative word here is SEEMED. When I was about four years old, I had been reciting the ancient folk rhyme "eeny meeny miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe" with a bunch of neighborhood kids (this is when we lived in a much poorer neighborhood than Amherst St., one where there actually were lots of children my age, most of whom found that the most entertaining sport they'd been able to invent was beating up on ME). My father happened by, and when we got to the end of the verse, he broke into something very rare for him, a total fury. We were never, ever to recite that stanza again, he said. And from the look on his face, you could tell that the full fury of hell was just one tiny mis?step away. So we never did, and I never understood why.

Then, about ten years later, I realized the cause of my father's outburst. I ran into a variation on the poem I'd never heard before, the one that ends "catch a nigger by the toe." The possible use of racist phraseology like that had turned my father's stomach. Today, it turns mine. My Dad may not seem like much, but he is a Gibraltar of morality and a truly remarkable man. Not a bad role model, even for a Martian like me.

None of this meant very much until I got into the record industry. I'd wanted to write, and needed someone to pay for it so I could afford to raise my child. I was acting as contributing editor to a couple of magazines on the side while I ran an avant?garde commercial art studio, and my labors at the typewriter weren't earning me enough money to buy newly?inked ribbons. So when someone asked if I'd like to become a magazine editor, I didn't even ask what the magazine was about. There was a living wage involved, so I grabbed the job.

Turned out that the publication was dedicated to rock and roll, something about which I, with my background in Bartok and Vivaldi, was completely ignorant. So I worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day to learn all about this musical form, its history and its heros, used a bunch of correlational techniques from the Scientific American to figure out how to predict trends four months in advance (not to mention how to boost magazine sales), employed some anthropological devices to get a handle on the rock audience (like spending ten ethnological weekends in a Connecticut suburb taping interviews with kids from twelve to eighteen years old), and, in my spare time, tried to please my publisher by teaching myself how to make our publication read like his favorite weekly, Time. The result was a 211% increase in sales in two years, an increase which literally made my publisher a wealthy man.

By now, Noelle, my daughter, was about to become a more expensive proposition. There wasn't a decent junior high school anywhere in New York, and I was going to have to earn money for private school tuition. So someone at a record company heard about this kid literally locked in a windowless, closet?sized office on Manahattan's Second Avenue spinning hay into gold, and offered me a job at 50% more than I was able to earn editing a magazine. The position: forming a public and artist relations operation for Gulf & Western's fourteen record companies. I had no choice but to make the move. I needed the money to pay Noelle's tuition.

Now, Gulf & Western's record holdings were more like a colony of clowns that had lost their leader than a real company. The president of the firm's nineteen?year?old son, an extremely sweet kid, had come down with leukemia. The father couldn't take it??he loved his son dearly, and much as the lad was still capable of walking into the office and charming anyone who met him with his unassuming smile, his days were numbered. So our corporate leader had taken to locking himself in his office from nine to five and emptying the contents of his executive bar.

The firms' staff may or may not have been competent under normal circumstances, but without someone to give guidance and crack the whip, it had degenerated totally. It was now so mired in professional impotence that it couldn't have rolled an oiled ball bearing down a playground slide.

What's more, twelve of our fourteen record companies were such duds that if you'd attempted to base tv sit?coms on them, no one would have believed your script. (A typical example: the pop label headed by a bunch of priests.) But there were two companies that were well run and had all the makings for success...except public relations. With no one to set priorities for me, I set my own. I concentrated all my efforts on these two firms, where I knew my contributions could make a difference.

Meanwhile, one of the record labels run by fellows in baggy checked pants and size 37 shoes had a talent scout who didn't bother to wear his red nose and circus makeup in public, but should have, because if he said something was going to be a big hit you could bet all your grandchildren on the certainty that said "hit" would never be heard from again. One day this scout for talent?guaranteed?to?sink ?to?the bottom ?the?minute?it?hit ?the?pond came into my office wildly waving his arms and bubbling about megastardom like water in an overheated pasta pot (just for the record, he always waved his arms and bubbled??inappropriate enthusiasm was his only natural gift). He'd just discovered this fifteen?year?old black girl from Crown Heights, and she was going to be a monster, gonzo, super?duper SMASH!

Well, you know what that meant. She was probably incapable of carrying a tune if you put it in a bucket and stitched the handle to her palm. But the talent mavin had set up a showcase, and I was obligated to take two hours from my already overcrowded schedule and waste it watching his protege try to figure out what a note was and how in the world to hit it.

I trooped dutifully off to the Plaza Hotel, where he had his big unveiling set up, and dutifully took a seat, waiting for the worst. Then out came this squashed?looking girl 4'8" tall and started radiating energy like a nuclear blast. As she sang, she walked up to men in the audience and grabbed them by the lapels, then warbled notes into their faces that no one had ever heard outside of Robert Moog's synthesizer lab. When it came to exuding emotion, she whipped it around like a tornadoe. She was nothing short of astonishing!

So despite the fact that she was signed to one of our companies that hadn't had a hit in 40 years and that she'd been discovered by a man who learned everything he knew about music from Emmett Kelly's correspondence course, I quickly made room for her on my priority list...LOTS of room. This was my introduction to black music.

Two weeks later, there was a big corporate shakeup, and our record division was put under the control of Frank Yablonz, the president of Paramount Pictures, another, slightly more successful Gulf & Western subsidiary. Yablonz, who was an inch or two shorter than Napoleon, had a reputation akin to Adolph Hitler's and Idi Amin's. He was one tough cookie. So our president, who now reported to this pint?sized Fuehrer, tried to put the bottles back in his office credenza and learn to stand upright again. Then he did something unprecedented. He threw a meeting of all his department heads (standard, weekly procedure in any other firm, but unheard of in our realm since the unfortunate leukemia visitation had begun).

This meant that the chief honchoes were going to have to drop their usual activities??having affairs with their secretaries, haggling with their drug dealers, leafing through wingtip shoe catalogs??and actually pretend that sometime in the last six months they'd done some work.

So there we were at eleven in the morning, seated around a big conference table, with a neatly?typed list of records the company was planning to release during the next month in front of us, all disks none of us had ever heard of. Our president was just clearing his throat and preparing to take charge, when the door suddenly opened, you had the feeling that laser lights and the sound of trumpets had streamed into the room, and as if walking on a path of lightning bolts there strode this munchkin with a thousand?dollar suit and an expression scientifically designed to strike terror into even a titanium?armored heart.

The multi?megaton martinette elbowed our president, who was twice his size, out of the way as if he were a pile of dust. You could see our Prez shrink visibly as his normally semi?erect backbone curled up like a question mark and he nearly prostrated himself on the floor in fear. Then the newcomer took over the Power Chair from which our noble leader had just been evicted.

This was Frank Yablonz, the thunder?making president of Paramount. Yablonz glanced at the list of records on the table in front of him, picked the first one, turned to the executive on his left, and said, "You. What are you doing to promote this record?" In reality, nobody was doing anything to promote any record, much less a record not a soul had ever heard, but I don't think the man upon whom the withering stare was fixed quite wanted to say that. So he mustered all the brain cells he had used in college to answer essay questions about matters he'd never studied and made up an elaborate story on the spot, a tale which featured a develishly clever fictional account of his heroic efforts.

Then Yablonz turned to the next executive in line, opened his Howitzer mouth, and fired the same question. Executive number two followed executive number one's highly creative example. About four executives later, Yablonz finally got to me. Now remember, I was relatively new to the corporate world, and had my father's example of integrity to live up to, so my reply went something like this. "I'm not doing anything about this record at all. In fact, I'm not doing anything about ANY of the records on this list. 99% of the music we sign doesn't stand a chance of success. Most of these disks are doomed to disappear faster than a freshly?baked chocolate chip cookie at a meeting of dropouts from Overeaters Anonymous. But there's this girl one of our labels has just signed who is getting 40% of my attention." And I proceded to describe the 15?year?old from Brooklyn, Stephanie Mills.

When I finished, Yablonz abruptly walked out of the meeting, his face frozen, leaving nine executives unquizzed but still quaking like the Oakland Overpass during an earthquake. My immediate superior, a top vice president, grabbed me by the arm with a grip designed to take limb bones to the breaking point and hissed, "You fucking nun. If you ever do that again, you're fired."

As I arrived back at my office, the phone was ringing. It was not my exit notice. Instead, it was Frank Yablonz' secretary. Mr. Yablonz had set up a meeting for the next day at noon with all his department heads. He wanted me there. And he wanted me to bring Stephanie Mills.

It was my first lesson in the benefits of the color?blindness my father had tried to teach when he'd balled me out for "eenie meeny miney mo." From that point on, the Paramount Pictures people began to treat me as a member of their own staff, calling me in when they were planning campaigns to break their major films. In fact, they even allowed me to do the publicity for one picture entirely on my own. It was, ironically, The Life and Times of Sonny Carson, directed by Frank Yablonz' little brother, Irving. Irving would eventually make a fortune creating Friday the 13th, and Carson would become a leader of the anti?Korean, anti?Semitic movement in the New York black community.

The corporate VP who'd threatened to fire me for being "a nun" was tossed out of the company by Frank Yablonz (which sickened me, since I actually adored the man).

As for Stephanie Mills, I got her into everything from The New York Times to Seventeen Magazine with a whole bunch of television shows in between. Then she landed the lead in the Broadway production of The Wiz, which gave me the hook to land her not only a landslide of additional press, but to generate most of the publicity for the show itself, which was fun.

Meanwhile, as long as she was with our record company, I don't think she sold a single disk. Our VP of sales was still too busy ordering wingtips. And our VP of promotion (the guy who's supposed to get records played on the radio) had TWO secretaries by now, was absorbed in affairs with both of them, and was still trying to give his wife and kids the impression that everything was normal. What's more, he hadn't figured out what a radio was.

But the base for Stephanie's career was well?laid. And she'd eventually go on to sell millions and millions of records.

As I said, I concentrated most of my efforts on two companies that DID seem to know how to get things done. One was battling to move up from the third?most?successful country music operation to number two. The other specialized in picking up on musical trends other people hadn't spotted yet. Their executives were top rate. So was their music. All I added was a heap of press. But the other twelve companies continued to float belly?up on the top of the tank. And despite the fact that this might lead some to think of fish, it induced Gulf & Western to conclude that its record operation was a turkey.

So G&W sold all its record holdings to ABC.

ABC Records flew in a corporate vice president who gathered our comatose team of 57 Ringling Brothers rejects together and said, "Now, I know what you're thinking. But not a single one of you has to worry about his job. No blood will flow in these corridors." The employees took to stumbling around the hallway like zombies. Not that this was much different from the way they'd behaved before. But you could see there was trouble when the VP of sales couldn't bring himself to look at a shoe catalog anymore, and the VP of Promotion kept telling his secretaries he had a headache.

Then, two weeks later, 56 pink slips arrived in the mail. Everyone was bleeding in the corridors but me.

Nonetheless, they had fired my staff. I'd worked as a one?man operation at the rock magazine for two years, had put in 100?hour weeks (on Saturdays and Sundays, Linda literally had to bring me my meals at the typewriter, since I couldn't afford to stop working), and when I left the publication actually had to hire a staff of three to replace me. Frankly, being a workaholic, I rather enjoy salt mines, but I didn't want to go back to digging the salt out of the ground with my teeth. So I told the folks from ABC very politely that I appreciated their offer, but without a staff I'd simply have to resign.

Well, the same vice president who had made that pleasant speech promising to prevent roving red blood cells from clotting the corridors got back on the plane from Los Angeles and flew in to see me. He walked into my office and put a blank piece of paper on my desk. "Fill in which members of your staff you want to keep. Fill in the salary you want for yourself. And fill in the salaries you want for your underlings," he said. I was impressed by his sense of drama, and gave us all modest raises. We were now working for ABC Records as its newly?transplanted East Coast public and artist relations department.

How did this happen? The presidents of the two companies I'd been working my tale off for had apparently delivered ultimata on my behalf. And frankly, it was their profits for which ABC had bought the whole shebang. What's more, the lawyer who negotiated the deal later said to me, "You know why ABC was willing to buy this company, don't you?" I confessed I didn't. After all, it seemed like a pretty stupid business move. "They bought it," he said very soto voce, "because of you." I was sure the guy was kidding. "I'm serious," he said, "your PR campaigns made those two companies you were working on worth a lot of money!" I still didn't believe him. Neither should you. But it was a nice idea. And maybe if my grandchild is ever interested in talking to me, which seems pretty unlikely since my daughter doesn't care for me too much and the kid is growing up in California, where I only appear as one of his mother's distant nightmares, I might someday claim that it was really the truth.

Suddenly, I'd been sprung from clown college into the REAL record industry. And it was here that I made a peculiar discovery. REAL record company types only deign to work on music that's hip, that's stylish, that will bring them looks of envy from their friends. Nobody in his right mind touches the records that aren't in fashion with the in?group. Well, I've never cared for in?groups, so I found this rather revolting.

What's more, one thing was definitely not IN at all (this was back in the '70s, since which time things have changed drastically)??black music. The most successful record ABC had on the charts was by a black aggregation called Rufus. Due to the color problem, Rufus was the very opposite of hip. So none of the myriad members of ABC's west coast publicity department would even touch the project.

When I saw what was happening I got mad. I mean, if you take something that's got the ingredients for success, and you know that if you add what you have to offer you can put it in orbit, you get in there and FIGHT. Making things succeed is fun. And if you feel like judging by hipness and race, you might just as well chop up your brains and use them to soak papier mache.

So I threw myself into Rufus with a vengeance. The group had a black lead singer who was pretty darned good. So when its manager came into New York, I picked him up at the airport in a limo and said, "Look, if you can help me out, I guarantee you I can turn this group into stars. But it'll take a lot of political backup on your part. The press and the public love female performers. And journalists have a much easier time focusing on one individual than a group. If you let me concentrate all my efforts on your lead singer, I will deliver you a career on a level you never dreamed of. But you'll have to cover my back so the rest of the band doesn't get jealous and carve its initials on my spine."

The manager saw the logic of the plan. It worked. Chakha Khan, the lead singer, became a legend and a minor household word. Despite a host of drug and self?discipline problems, she is still able to make a hefty living fifteen years later on the basis of the name value we created that year.

Now this brought me to the attention of the guy in charge of all the black talent for the company, an African?American named Otis Smith. Smith had been virtually ignored by everyone in sight up until now. When he walked down the corridors of the ABC Records office in LA, people averted their eyes or slightly elevated their noses. And nobody would touch his projects. Now there was this kid on the East Coast who seemed eager to work with him. So we started launching other stars together.

Meanwhile there was an elderly black publicist with a business of her own back in New York who did campaigns I thought were wonderful. No one else outside the black community seemed to know she existed, and even I never got to meet her. But I began to study her methods with all the dissection tools at my disposal. Finally, I figured out her major trick. There are about 180 small, black weekly community newspapers around the country. White publicists simply don't know they exist. Or if they know, they don't care. But these papers are a pipeline to the people.

What's more, they're all cash poor and desperate for material to fill the space between their ads. So if you give them good photos and write solid stories, they'll print the stuff you send them verbatim. Using this technique, and the color?blindness my father had been kind enough to instill, I gradually became the leading black publicist in the country.

By the time I started my own firm, I was able to launch Prince, work with Michael Jackson, handle press AND management consultation for Lionel Ritchie, attract Diana Ross, labor so hard for Bob Marley (literally Jamaica's guiding saint) that you would have thought we'd been sewn together at the hip, and help probably hundreds of musicians you've never heard of who were extremely important in the black community. I also became the first publicist to work in a major way with rap.

Along the way, I learned a whole lot of lessons, most of them not nice. First of all, there was a color barrier at record companies. The black staff were ghettoized in their hallways. The white staff had theirs. The prestige all went to the white staff. So did the big budgets. If an artist was black, his music was thrown to the black staff members, and the white guys forgot about it, no matter what its potential, and no matter what it sounded like. This disgusted me. I worked, along with the managers of black acts like Prince (who were extremely bright, extremely white, and extremely Italian), to break these barriers down. I even wrote editorials in Billboard about it. Sometime in the mid?80s, after nearly ten years of hammering with a pickaxe, those walls began to crumble.

On the black side of things, I ran into a culture with its own self?destruct mechanisms. Some of the clients I had were real mensch, or the female equivalents thereof. Lionel Ritchie, for example, is articulate, intelligent, has so much charm and humor he could bring a chronically depressed mental patient to a state of euphoria, and is spotlessly honest (aside from his affairs with women other than his wife).

Michael Jackson has the finest creative sensibilities I've ever run into in my life. If you show him a painting by a really extraordinary artist, he will let out the kind of sounds that most people exude only during sexual orgasm. His pleasure in the products of other's minds is that intense. He can see whole worlds where others see nothing. He practices his art with a vehemence that would make most normal people crack. Onstage, he exudes five times the authority of Fred Astaire. And his brothers are monuments to ethics. One night, they stormed out of a contract negotiation in a fury. Why? They felt that in an effort to maximize profits for them, their lawyers were trying to cheat the promoter who wanted to back their concerts. They wouldn't stand for it.

The Jacksons insisted on giving away enough free tickets to kids from poor, inner?city communities to fill Dodger Stadium. And they were determined to use their money to help the starving children in Africa.

Meanwhile, Michael was so concerned about giving his audience something special that when you talked to him about it, you felt as if three or four of his fans were seated invisibly next to him, and that he felt it was his job to defend them and their right to a sense of wonder at all costs.

Switching stars for a minute, Prince gave a quarter of a million dollars to Marva Collins, the black educator who's been able to take "uneducable" kids and turn them into college material. What's more, he insisted that absolutely NO publicity be done about it. He also showed up unexpectedly to give free concerts at places like the Gallaudet College For the Deaf, again insisting that there be no publicity.

But there was a dark side to the black culture, too, a very dark side. I worked for years with a group called Cameo, because even though they'd sold no records to speak of when we started together, I was convinced that they had a fierce work ethic, something rare among black musicians. Twenty?four months after we began our relationships, they started to land gold and platinum records. Then they all bought $200,000 Lamborghinis and stopped paying their bills. They stiffed everyone they could sucker into their grasp. I later discovered that what wasn't going into sports cars was going up their noses??I mean in the form of cocaine.

I worked with an old blues musician whose music was legendary. He'd come to a friend of mine complaining that he was as broke as a homeless bum because every manager he'd ever had had cheated him out of his money. My friend, who became his new manager, got him jobs that payed twice what he'd been pulling in before. The night of the first concert under the new arrangement, the musician picked up all $4,000 in net proceeds from the boxoffice when the peformance ended and spent it the next morning on an antique jukebox and hand?made cowboy boots, forgetting that he owed 15% to his manager, 10% to his booking agent, salaries to his crew, and bills for his hotel, food and transportation. It was a classic case of what psychological research on the black inner?city communities of the sixties called a "lack of ability for gratification postponement."

When I worked for a black act, the odds that I wouldn't get paid were twice as high. When I set up an important interview for a black act, the odds were three times as high that the act wouldn't show up. (It was my black clients who told me about the concept of "CPT," "Colored Peoples' Time," which means that an appointment set for 2:00 P.M. Wednesday could take place at 3:30 Wednesday, sometime Friday, or not at all.)

The sense of what work is all about in significant segments of the black community seemed radically different from anything I'd encountered before. Take black promoters, the guys who set up concerts, rent the halls, advertise the events, collect the ticket money, and are critical to the success of a performer. If you were a black act unfortunate enough to be booked by the leading "black" agency in the business (which was run by a charming Jewish man with Mafia connections and about the only stomach on earth strong enough to tolerate the shouting, screaming, threats, gun?waving, cheating, lying and theft endemic to the black concert promotion business), your concerts were set up entirely with black (I mean genuine African?American) concert promoters.

This meant that your schedule was a hodge?podge in which you couldn't predict from one week to the next where you'd be playing your dates, thus making it impossible for your publicists and record company to do a thorough job of saturating the upcoming markets with propaganda on your behalf. Often, you'd be on your way to your concert for the evening, stop your tour bus at a Wendy's for lunch, call the promoter to see how things were going, and discover that he'd switched the hall at the last minute (leaving potential patrons in a state of utter confusion) or had cancelled the date. Getting paid when you came offstage was like pulling teeth. This kind of professional ineptitude could kill your career.

Eventually, I was asked to be the only white participant on a panel with black promoters at the Black Music Association's annual convention. The promoters showed up wearing half a dozen diamond rings apiece, and other forms of jewelry worth as much as the building I live in. They were angry. Furious in fact. The black superstars wouldn't work with them. Instead, the big money makers went to white promoters, who could book an entire tour three months in advance, do a solid job of advertising, give the publicists and record company a chance to get in there and pitch each date with a fury, and turn a tour into a major event, a step upward in a career that constantly has to be on the escalator to the top if it isn't going to slide ignominiously to the bottom.

I couldn't tell the truth to these bejeweled co?panelists??that they were sloppy, dishonest, that their business incompetence damaged every act they worked with, and that people like Michael Jackson and Prince had put their whole lives, literally from the time they were children, into perfecting their art and needed the finest professionals around them , no matter what color those professionals were, or their careers would be over and their lifetimes of effort would bring them nothing. After all, the audience at this conference was solidly black, these promoters were twice my size, and I didn't want to be lynched.

So I phrased it in slightly different terms. "Why don't you put together a national network so you can offer services that compete with guys like Dick Klotzman [a white promoter who did a fantastic job??until the IRS got him for owing $450,000 in unpaid taxes and cheating one woman who'd wanted to put on a Prince concert out of $250,000??I'd guess because Klotzman's mind had finally been addled by cocaine]. Set it up so you can book a tour three months in advance, so the act knows where he's going to play on what night, and so that the other members of the team can work with you to turn every date into something spectacular. Offer a service that competes in quality with what the white guys are making available."

The assembled promoters looked at me with hatred and contempt. As far as they were concerned, concert promotion was not something in which you offered a service, it was a free ride. You nabbed an act who'd gotten big in spite of you, put tickets on sale, sat back, fondled your girlfriend, and waited for the money to roll in. Since many of the performers bringing in big bucks were black, my fellow panelists felt they had a right to demand that the performers hire promoters on the basis of the color of their skin. Then the black promoters could do what they'd always done, skim the cream off the top without putting in any effort of their own. After all, isn't that how money is made? Isn't that how white people make their fortunes? Isn't work just a scam, a legitimized form of theft? Words like "productivity," "contribution," "accomplishment," "creativity," and "backbreaking effort" were not a part of these gentlemen's vocabulary. Literally!

Things turned ugly. After I made my suggestion, the phrase "Jew boy" was used a lot. No racism here, no sir!

Then came the question period, and a dozen black suppliers??printers of concert programs, caterers (who put together the meals for the acts and the backstage crew), small newspaper owners, etc.??stood up and angrily aired their grievances, all of which amounted to the same thing. The $#@@*&!! promoters on the dais had gotten their jewelry by stiffing these people of $6,000 here and $12,000 there, and the folks in the audience wanted their money.

The African?American concert promoters liked to claim that by hiring them, black acts put money back into the black community. But you could see just how much of it trickled into that community by listening to these suppliers' gripes. The only blacks who shared in this wealth were jewelry salesmen.

At about the same time the conference was taking place, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton showed up in the record industry, intent on "representing the interests" of these poor, downtrodden black promoters with their diamond?studded fingers. Jesse started the ball rolling by organizing boycotts of black superstar concerts if they were not organized by black promoters. Then Jackson moved on to other things, and Al Sharpton picked up the ball.

From Al's machinations, I learned just what has happened to certain aspects of the civil rights movement in the days since I had wanted to end red?lining in Buffalo. When Sharpton heard that a major tour by a black artist was being planned, and that a white promoter was handling the arrangements, he threatened to throw demonstrations that would seriously damage the performer's reputation in the black community. Al's "civil rights" activities were a thin disguise for an extortion racket. Back in the 30's, if you didn't pay Al Capone a monthly stipend for "security," your restaurant was bombed. If you didn't pay Al Sharpton HIS form of protection, your concert tour would be seriously damaged...in the name of black pride and civil rights.

When Al tried to pull his maneuvers on several of my artists??Diana Ross, Prince, Luther Vandross??they ignored him. But he made a lot of ugly noises in the press, and, believe me, it didn't help. However when he threatened his boycotts and picketing against the Jacksons, another of my clients, ignoring him was impossible.

The Jacksons had started their tour badly by hiring a black promoter, none other than Don King. King, with his record for actually having killed a man, didn't lend credibility to the venture. Neither did his approach of making himself the star of the event instead of Michael Jackson and his brothers.

Because an association with Michael Jackson represented more potential cash flow and power than anyone in the record industry had ever seen, everyone was working overtime to get a piece of the action. One particularly press?savvy powerhouse??a white guy incredibly good at Machiavellian strategy??came up with a plan. Michael Jacksons's attorneys owed him favors, very BIG favors. He obtained internal documents on the early tour negotiations, and leaked them to a gullible "investigative" reporter at Rolling Stone. The point he attempted to make with the unfinished memos and contracts was that the Jackson brothers were incredibly greedy, and were milking poor Michael and the public for all it was worth. (In reality, Jackson ticket prices were high because Michael had a crew of 90 extremely creative people working for close to a year putting together the most expensive stage show in the history of modern music. This was part of his feeling of obligation to absolutely boggle the minds of his fans. By the way, Michael had every one of these stage magicians laboring under a contract that swore them to complete secrecy. He possessed this child?like anticipation of the delight he'd create by surprising his audiences. This secrecy, alas, gave the Machiavellian press manipulator a clear field in which to work his evil ways.)

The Darth Vader behind this plan, by the way, had everything to gain from destroying the credibility of the tour. He was hoping that if he put enough holes in the ship's hull, his minions could convince Michael that old Darth was the only one savvy enough to patch up the damage. The scheme eventually worked. It didn't land Vader the total control of Michael's life and tour that he had hoped. But the would?be master of the universe was hired as a "consultant" for $750,000 to "repair" the wreckage.

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone swallowed the carefully?skewed story, hook, line and sinker.

Now the press is one of the least intellectually independent?minded group of people I have ever seen in my life. Carlyle, in 1827, said that journalists operate like a herd of sheep. If you put a cane in the narrow path a passel of sheep are about to traverse and the lead sheep jumps over it, the next 200 sheep will jump in exactly the same spot, even though you've long since withdrawn the cane and walked away. So Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, People, ABC, NBC and CBS all sent reporters out on the case. These diligent searchers for the truth were not supposed to come up with any facts on their own. Instead, their mandate was to jump in the same spot Rolling Stone had leaped and duplicate the misleading Stone story, while making it look as if they'd done their own independent sleuthing. (Sorry, but that's how the press operates, whether the issue is musical or political. If you want, I'll tell you the amazing story sometime of how Fidel Castro used the same trick to get his "Revolution" off the ground. The Castro episode is so astonishing, it'll boggle your mind.)

By the time the Jacksons hired me, their tour was getting the worst publicity I'd ever seen, and they were being smeared in a manner that was disgraceful. My first job was to attempt to slow the avalanche of negativity. I didn't feel we could afford Al Sharpton's antics. The journalistic pack was too anxious to find any unpleasant fact (or fiction) it could use to bolster the Rolling Stone misconception. And Al was a sufficiently sly press manipulator to take advantage of that situation.

So I told the promoters that we'd have to stop ignoring Al Sharpton and shut him up. Which meant, we'd have to do what he asked, pay him off. Al got a fat fee for "co?promoting the tour" (despite the fact that one of its key promoters, a man who never contributed anything but damage to the tour but got payed $4 million for his efforts, was already black??Don King; and that King was apparently augmenting his $4,000,000 by purloining thousands of tickets and scalping them on the side).

So Al and I toured the country together, sitting elbow?to?elbow on airlines and having many a pleasant chat. Whenever he came up with a crazy idea that would give him publicity and damage the tour, it was my task to persuade him not to pull it off. Meanwhile, I worked with the NAACP on the more legitimate chore of helping enroll black voters outside the stadia where the Jacksons were performing (Michael threatened to fire me for this, since voting violated the tenets of his Seventh Day Adventism). And we went into the poorest black community in every town (without Sharpton) to give free tickets to kids who couldn't afford them.

Al Sharpton is a con man, pure and simple. And his latest con involves the promotion of anti?semitism in Crown Heights. But the basis for this virulent hatred of Jews has been laid for many years now, as I also discovered in my work with the black community. The problem first came to my attention via a community newspaper in New York called The Black American. Every year, the paper hit me up for a donation. It was a struggling operation, so though I was barely clearing a profit in the early days, every year I made out a check.

Then, one day, a giant headline appeared on the paper's front page declaring that Jews were trying to destroy the nuclear industry to prevent blacks from getting jobs. This was a mind?boggling notion. The nuclear industry has never been known for offering a job to a single black anywhere in the continental United States. And what in the world did Jews have to do with it?

(It would take years of study and guesswork to come up with a hypothesis on the origins of this dangerous piece of fantasy. But here's what I finally came up with as an educated guess. Bechtel Corporation, the construction company that gave us such notables as George Schultz and Caspar Weinberger, does tens of billions of dollars a year in business with Saudi Arabia. So do many other American firms, like Ford and G.E. All these organizations have worked their tales off to keep their Islamic clients happy by banding together in an Arab?American Chamber of Commerce that acts as a semi?secret lobbying and publicity ministry for the Arab countries, twisting many an arm in Washington and influencing many a mind in the press. But Bechtel's relationship to Saudi Arabia goes far beyond this. It views itself as the Saudi's unofficial representative in the U.S. And it has enormous clout in the government. The results are misdeeds like the following?? when the Saudis joined the rest of the Arab nations in 1948 in an attempt to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, Bechtel used its high?level military contacts to obtain top?secret American reconnaisance photos of Israel's military border deployments, then handed them over to the tank?happy sheiks.)

(In more recent years, the Saudis have made a top priority of spreading anti?semitic propaganda in the American black community. My guess is that Bechtel has stepped in with a grin and offered to help out. Now, Bechtel does not make all its money from construction projects in the Near East. One of its biggest businesses in the sixties and seventies was the construction of nuclear power plants. So why not kill two birds with one stone??turn the black community against the anti?nuclear movement, and help the Saudis spread anti?semitism. Bechtel, I'd guess, is where The Black American got its story.)

Then The Black American came up with yet another blockbuster headline on page one. The family?planning movement, revealed the paper, was a thinly disguised attempt at black genocide. And who was behind it? The Jews! (Some of the ultra?conservative types who hang out at The Bohemian Club in California with the boys from Bechtel oppose birth control, abortion and Planned Parenthood. They probably learned a lesson or two about the use of black newspapers from their friends in the construction business.)

Needless to say, I stopped sending contributions to The Black American.

Then one day I was cruising in a cab with a black driver who gave me a non?stop lecture on how Jews had systematically sucked the blood out of the black community. Jewish managers and agents, he spat with vehemence, had descended like vampires on every black star that ever existed and had turned these celebrities into paupers. This was strangely discrepant with my experience. The black artists for whom I was working were rolling in money. They had elaborate mansions (I used my pedometer on a walk around the periphery of Lionel Ritchie's gorgeous house in Holmby Hills and discovered that the outer walls of the building, not including the grounds, covered a quarter of a mile). They possessed fleets of high?priced cars (like Prince's white Rolls Royce limo), and pulled in enough cash each year to float the welfare programs of a small African nation. Meanwhile their Jewish and other employees were often paid in the monetary equivalent of lumps of coal, when they were paid at all.

Yes, there were a lot of black entertainers of talent who had died broke. But the money had usually disappeared because of a lacuna in the standard black vocabulary, from which words like "thrift," "savings," "investment" and "self?denial" are conspicuously absent. (I had numerous black employees, two of whom were such outstanding human beings that I would gladly have put my life in their hands. But a vast percentage of the others, all of them talented people, were either destroying themselves with cocaine or running up hefty charge accounts at overpriced places like Sak's Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdales and Tiffany's, then dodging the bill collection agencies for years.)

During the cabby's harangue, he had the radio tuned to WLIB, New York's leading all?black talk?radio station. WLIB is owned by Percy Sutton, a major backer of David Dinkins and a man with whom I'd formed a good relationship when we spent several hours together plotting career plans for Bob Marley, a man whom Sutton said is regarded by blacks in the Caribbean and Africa as "on a par with Jesus Christ." As I mentioned before, Bob, who allowed me to do most of the speaking on his behalf at this session while he sat back and smiled approvingly, was a client I became very close to. So I was shocked to hear that one of Sutton's radio stations was echoing the cab driver's words. Listener after listener was calling in to report as fact one anti?semitic slander after another. Jews had financed the slave trade. Jews were trying to take over the world. Jews were responsible for all the black man's sufferings.

If a radio station anywhere in America had dedicated its airwaves to similar attacks on blacks, it would rapidly have been hounded off the air.

Where does all this potentially homicidal nonsense come from? It took years of sleuthing to figure it out. Black Muslim libraries distribute books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery concocted in 1905 by the Tsar's secret police to take the heat off the government and encourage pogroms. The volume was later resurrected by Adolph Hitler. The Protocols, in fact, has become one of the most popular pieces of reading in certain sectors of the black community. One black imam told me that every one of his friends and acquaintances displays it proudly on his coffee table. (Ironically, this Islamic holy black had been introduced to scholarship by a Jewish book store owner, who had encouraged his intellect and leant him the reading material that had elevated him above his functionally illiterate peers.)

Henry Ford's anti?semitic ravings, The International Jew, are also high on the Muslim reading list.

The funds for these influential libraries come from such enlightened countries as Libya and Saudi Arabia (whose king generously hands out The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to visitors). And the Muslims have been extraordinarily successful in reaching black youngsters. As a consequence, Islam is the fastest?growing religion in America today. And its concepts reach numerous black youths who never bother to become official members.

Do I have solutions for any of these problems? I conceived and executed two inner?city programs deesigned to make it hip it stay in school and to become an academic achiever. One, Lionel Richie's "Superstudent" campaign, was sponsored by Pepsi. The other, Kool & The Gang's "It's Kool to Stay in School" project, was sponsored by Coke. Between the two of them, we reached roughly a quarter of a million kids, which is a drop in the bucket. What's more, programs like these would have to run for years, not six months, to have a real impact. I worked a lot with Marva Collins, the educator Prince put me in touch with. I don't know what form of wizardry this woman uses, but she utterly alters black kids' self?image and learning accomplishments, and has runs a Chicago workshop that educates teachers from all over the country in her techniques. A few years ago, all the major black organizations put together a conference on the black family. I wasn't involved, but I heartily applauded the effort. And after I got sick, I had a black high?school intern who showed promise as a writer, and tried to teach her as much as I could.

As for the problem of black anti?semitism and black racism in general (the anti?semitic Crown Heights riots, which apparently included violent attacks on Jews reminiscent of pogroms, and the attempts to drive Korean greengrocers out of New York's black communities are despicable examples), nothing can be done until the press abandons its cowardice and begins to cover this stuff??including denouncing the Black Muslim philosophy that Blacks are God, whites are the Devil, and because of the Holy position of the Black man in the universe, all the earth belongs to him.

This is the most blatant racist ideology pumped into ignorant but enthusiastic brains by dishonest demagogues since the days of Mein Kampf. It deserves the same exposure and censure received by the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately, I was presenting heavily documented evidence on all this stuff to some of my friends in the media, including hard evidence on the financing and other support black anti?semitism receives from the Arab world, when I became ill and had to stop the effort. I ran into initial interest and later resistance. The concept of racism has been turned around to protect racist behavior. Anything blacks do is holy and cannot be criticised, no matter how morally reprehensible it may be.

My father would understand the truth of the situation. It's totally unacceptable, he'd say, to recite rhymes about catching "niggers" by the toe. And it's equally unacceptable to say that "Jew boys" are trying to take over the world, or that Koreans have no right to sell vegetables to blacks.

But my father, alas, does not run the world. And no one in the media has his integrity.

++

As for the time Linda and I went to Bermuda: it was 1978 or so, my struggling PR firm was two years old and fighting for its life, and we'd just been hired by the youngest government minister in the history of Bermuda to publicize an international music festival he was putting on back home in the mid-Atlantic. The guy was utterly charming. Suave and handsome, black as the ace of spades, spoke with a British accent, wore Saville Row suits, and must have been all of 27 years old.

However there was something fishy about the affair. Every supplier the guy was using kept calling my office and insisting on sending his bills to me. Limousine companies, manufacturers of stage equipment, lighting specialists...they were all prepared to send several hundred thousand dollars of invoices to The Howard Bloom Organization. I explained patiently that this must be some sort of mistake; we were simply doing the publicity. But the rather gruff sounding businessmen had a hard time taking no for an answer, and the integrity of my kneecaps was threatened on several occasions.

Meanwhile, we rounded up a small squadron of abnormally brave journalists willing to endure the hardships of four days in Bermuda to get a story that might involve the risk of death at the hands of bloodthirsty guerillas, the loss of legs to well-camouflaged land mines, and the ever-present possibility of being taken hostage by terrorists (this is assuming that our plane was hi-jacked to Algeria). But journalists are a courageous lot. They were even willing to hazard hearing impairment caused by the giant speaker systems for which a sound company somewhere in Florida was trying to bill my office.

The political charisma-master putting this whole extravaganza together begged that I come to Bermuda along with the press corps and get some well-deserved rest (I was planning to allow a subordinate to herd the press through their half a week of hell). To me, this was unthinkable. I worked seven days a week. I couldn't afford four days away from my desk. Then the close friend who had landed me the client called and pleaded with me to come. There was something a bit peculiar in the tone of his speech. He telegraphed a subliminal impression that the trip might well be the only form of payment I would receive.

Finally, I consulted Linda and we agreed to go.

Bermuda was wonderful. We rented motorbikes and set off with our journalistic gang to explore every inch of the island--which took about two hours and four minutes. We watched thunderstorms approach over the ocean while we were still swathed in sunlight, saw the black clouds swing overhead, douse us with water for five minutes, then proceed on their travels toward Europe. We lolled about on the beach getting the life stories out of our intrepid reporters. I even showed off my ability to do several laps underwater in an Olympic-sized swimming pool without coming up for air (did I mention that my great great uncle was the world's only Jewish dolphin?). I only discovered when I emerged and began to towel myself down that I'd forgotten to remove my non-water-resistant 1/8" thin gold watch (the only luxury item I'd ever purchased) or my glasses. We had, in short, a terrific time.

Then came the night of the musical spectacle. The crowds were cheerful, as well they should have been. Security was somewhat inadequate and half of the concertgoers had snuck in over the fences for free. But one thing puzzled me. There was a journalist hanging around whom I hadn't invited, an investigative fellow who specialized in probing the Mafia.

That night, when the music ended and the listeners all went home, I sauntered into the cinderblock building where Julien, the young politician, and his staff should have been counting the money and setting aside bundles to pay such worthy folk as the performers, the sound and light company, and me. But Julien was seated with a large smile on his face doing nothing at all. The real action seemed to be taking place in the locked room next door. Every once in while, the door between the two chambers would open a crack, cigar smoke would pour out of the adjacent hideaway, and as it cleared a bunch of very Italian-looking gentlemen in suspenders would become visible seated around a table covered with currency. Meanwhile some lackey with a suspicious bulge under his jacket would poke his head from the doorframe and ask Julien to order in a large quantity of liquid refreshment.

About two in the morning, the sounds of activity in the next room came to a halt. The Italian gentlemen exited carrying bulging briefcases, stepped into a waiting limo, and headed for a private jet which, I was later told by the investigative reporter, took them home to Boston.

The performers never got paid. The limo company never got paid. The sound and light people never got paid. And I never got paid. But apparently, a whole lot of dirty cash was laundered that night.

Julien's political career was destroyed. Everyone had said he was destined for the premiership. Now the local populace was nominating him for a position in the hoosegow.

And the head of the limo company who'd been stiffed called every week for the next two years swearing that I was the guy who actually owed him his money. But at least Linda and I had gotten to see Bermuda.

++

First off, you wanted more anecdotes, specifically about folks whose careers may have been launched by publicity. As Linda told you when she recounted the Springsteen history I narrated to her, the people who almost always make somebodies out of nobodies aren't publicists, they're the members of the entertainment press. Though journalists pride themselves on their intellectual independence, they are neither very intellectual, nor even marginally independent. In fact, they operate on the same herd instincts that guide ungulates, ants, and numerous other social creatures. Everything you've ever heard about pack journalism is true. In fact, it's an understatement.

In 1827, Carlyle??who came along well before the sciences of ethology and sociobiology had even been invented?? said that the critics of his day were like sheep. Put a stick in the path as a lead sheep goes by, wrote the sage, and the beast will jump over it. Remove the stick, and each following sheep in line will jump at precisely the same spot...even though there's no longer anything to jump over! Things haven't changed much since then. If the key critics at the New York Times, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone fall in love with an artist, every other critic in the country will follow their lead. On the other hand, if these lead sheep say an artist is worthless, every other woolly?minded critic from Portland to Peoria will miraculously draw the same conclusion.

When I was out on tour with ZZ Top in 1976, I remember sitting at the group's concert between the top critics for the city's two major dailies (alas, today there is only one). At the time, I was also handling a group called Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band. The lead sheep in the press hated ZZ Top, but they loved Dr. Buzzard. So it had been fairly easy to land major features lauding the Original Savannah Band in The New York Times and the Village Voice during the same week. As I sat between Minneapolis' two finest models of journalistic integrity and independent judgement in the moments before the lights dimmed and ZZ Top hit the stage, one was reading the Times article on Dr. Buzzard and the other was reading The Voice's. Both were hungrily snorfing up the latest hints on how they should feel about the music of the month.

Not suprisingly, when the concert ended and the duo returned to their typewriters, they cranked out copy with identical judgements. ZZ Top, whose music the Village Voice, in a blaring headline, had once said sounded like "hammered shit," was roundly panned, despite the fact that both critics admitted grudgingly in print that via some collective descent into tastelessness, the crowd had gone wild. Then both turned their attention to slaveringly sycophantic paens to Dr. Buzzard, thus echoing the opinions they'd absorbed from their fashionable reading earlier in the evening.

Now, most music publicists are surfers at heart. They ride the waves generated by a positive herd movement within the press, then claim credit for having created it as it splashes onto the shore. What's worse, most publicists try very hard to become a part of the press clique themselves. This means that they rapidly grow to love and loathe the same groups it is fashionable to adore and detest among the press elite. These pr folk will gladly work with an artist the press has already decided to make into a star. But they shudder at the thought of saying a kind word about a performer the press has labeled as doggy drek. This is despite the fact that as publicists for the shunned musical groups, they are paid to find the band's good points and attempt to convey them to every writer in sight. Nonetheless, pr experts are frequently found badmouthing their own unfashionable clients. They do this in the name of maintaining their "integrity"??i.e. their popularity with their writer friends.

Why, then, you may ask, do they take such clients on? In most cases, they have no choice. Many of the publicists in the record industry work for record companies, and are stuck with whatever is on their firm's roster. But they often do more bad than good for some of the acts on behalf of whom they are empowered to speak. After all, they are laboring mightily to avoid being tainted by a politically incorrect enthusiasm...or, to be more specific, to avoid having their friends in the press sneer when they show up at the latest party.

I vividly remember an afternoon in 1981 or so when I hopped into a cab leaving a press party with the top publicists for Epic Records (a division of CBS). At the time, I had been working with one of Epic's acts for two years, trying to overcome a loathing within the media community so potent it could have doubled for the odor of Liederkranz cheese. When I failed to get anywhere with the critics, I pulled an end run around them. In three days of interviews with the band out in LA, I had discovered that they possessed a sense of humor similar to that of the Marx Brothers, and were constantly pulling shenanigans on the road that competed successfully with anything in Animal Crackers. So I started writing the incidents up in bite?sized items and sending them to syndicated columnists, thanks to whom REO Speedwagon began cropping up in literally hundreds of newspapers and radio station news shows virtually every week for almost two years.

On top of all this, I had grown tremendously close to the band, and would have laid down my soul for them. In the cab with the Epic publicity execs who were supposed to be REO's greatest champions, I happened to say a few kind words about the group's brand new album. The Epic contingent began snarling and hissing like the inhabitants of a snake pit in a James Bond flick. Then they unloaded their opinions of this fivesome of performers they were being paid high wages to love, cherish and obey. REO Speedwagon's music was reprocessed sewage, they said. Its members had the personality of wet cardboard. The whole quintet and all of its LPs were beneath contempt. Anyone who could say something nice about them (like me) clearly deserved to be blackballed from the human race.

Later that year, largely thanks to good music and ten years of diligent touring, not to mention partly thanks to the name recognition created by literally tens of millions of what the advertising folks call "multiple exposures" created by their PR campaign, REO went on to have the biggest selling album of the year. Roughly sixteen million REO Speedwagon Records changed hands over retail counters worldwide in twelve months. It happened to be the worst year for album sales in several decades. Half the superstars on the planet couldn't even give their disks away. Record companies were firing staff members by the hundreds. So the band that was beneath contempt literally paid the salaries??and probably saved the jobs?? of the publicists who had snarled their hatred in the back seat of that cab in Manhattan.

If I sound like I despise such attitudes, it's because I do. An appalling number of the acts the press (and the publicists who fawn over journalistic dictates) dislike have tremendous validity. I always felt it was my job to do for erring writers what Edmund Wilson, the literary critic had done for me. When I was a teenager, I couldn't make head nor tails of T.S. Eliot. His poetry utterly baffled me. So I came to the conclusion that Eliot's work was an elaborate hoax, a pastiche of devices designed to fool the pretentious into thinking that if they admitted a failure to understand all of his erudite refereences, they'd make themselves look like fools.

Then along came Edmund Wilson (or at least one of his books), and gave me the perceptual key that unlocked Eliot's poetry. Now that I finally understood the stuff, I fell so in love with it that I started giving public readings of Eliot's work, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" became one of the biggest influences on my 16?year?old life.

My task as a publicist was to provide similar perceptual keys. It was to read every lyric an artist had ever written, listen to his album 20 or 30 times, and immerse myself in his work until I understood its merit. Then my job was to impart that understanding to a hostile press. In other words, my fellow publicists liked riding waves. I preferred the more difficult task of making them happen.

What's more, I felt my job was to act as a surrogate journalist. I studied everything that had ever been written (quite literally) about a new client in English (or sometimes French, my only other tongue), then subjected the artist to an interview that lasted anywhere from six hours to three days. My goal was to find the interesting stories, the things that would amaze, the facts that would make sense out of the music, the angles that would make for unrejectable feature stories, and the tales that would give some insight into the hidden emotional and biographical sources of the performer's creations.

After one of these interviews, John Cougar Mellencamp, a natural?born talker, was literally so exhausted that he couldn't croak more than a sentence or two to his wife and fell asleep in his chair (we'd been going since ten in the morning, and it was now four in the afternoon).

At any rate, this may explain why it was not Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band??the one with automatic popularity??that I spent six years working on, but ZZ Top??the group the press either refused to write about altogether, or put down with some variation of Robert (Village Voice) Christgau's "hammered shit" verdict. It took three years to turn the press around. Creating that about?face involved a process I used to call "perceptual engineering." ZZ Top had authenticity and validity out the kazoo. My task was to do everything in my power to reverse the direction of the herd's stampede and to make the critics see the substance they had overlooked. For the first few years, the press continued to sneer whenever the group's name came up. But gradually, I got a few lead sheep by the horns (do sheep have horns?) and turned them around. The rest of the herd followed. One result: for the past ten years, ZZ Top has been one of the few bands of its genre to command genuine, unadulterated press respect.

Eventually, the group didn't need me anymore. They don't to this day. The press is now ZZ Top's best publicists. Say something nasty at a press party about this band, and those in the know will turn around and snarl, forgetting that over a decade ago they would have growled if you'd even confessed to LISTENING to one of the Texas band's LPs.

The trick with ZZ was to get the facts. At first, I had a staff member spend months gathering statistics from ZZ Top's manager and every major concert promoter in the country, compiling a list of all the times the band had broken concert?attendance records set by The Rolling Stones or the Beatles. This compendium of information was eventually enough to get us into publications like Newsweek and Parade (a Sunday supplement with a 36 million circulation or something of the sort??my memory for these statistics is, alas, a little foggy; also a publication that almost NEVER covered rock music). Our ammunition still wasn't sufficient, however, to win the respect of the people who really counted: the critics.

My interview techniques are usually pretty good. If you'll let me get away with such an appalling display of hubris that Zeus will probably barbecue me with a thunderbolt, I'll go a step further. I think I can out?interview any publicist or journalist in the business. It's a result of tens of thousands of miles hitchiking around the country as a teenager pulling the tales of their lives out of everyone from insurance executives and migrant workers to Bible College graduates and carnival hands. Later, I had to perfect the skill further as a journalist and a magazine editor.

I operated on the short story writer's assumption that in every life history, no matter how mundane it may seem on the surface, there lies a drama. And I used a lot of empathy to try to put myself inside the psyche of my subjects. I was also willing to share with my interviewees an awful lot of the sort of personal stuff that people usually keep very much to themselves. The result: I was usually (but not always) able to yank tales out of people that amazed the folks who had worked with them for years, things those closest to them never knew, things so astonishing that some managers actually suspected I had made them up (I hadn't).

But in the beginning, I'd failed on that front with ZZ Top. The reason only came to light about six months after I'd begun working with the band, and had started travelling with them every weekend. They were Texans. And Texans back then (1976) had a peculiar inferiority complex about their ethnic identity. Texas, I gradually learned, is not a normal part of the United States, at least not in the mind of its more dedicated citizens. Texas is a sovereign entity, much like Kurdistan, which has been pulled somewhat unwillingly into the Union. Once the boys in ZZ Top began to let down their hair, they gave me subtle signs that Texas has a culture all its own. Its "national" heroes are not George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Its founding father and pivotal symbol is Sam Houston. It has its own mythology, its own story of its founding, its own equivalent to the Revolutionary War (the fight with the Mexicans that included the Battle of the Alamo).

Do you know, said one of ZZ's members to me conspiratorially one afternoon as we were sitting around a hotel room in San Antonio, that if you sawed Texas off at the border and set it adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, it would be the nation with the sixth largest economy in the world? And you could see from the gleam in his eye that if you gave him a chainsaw, a pick?up truck, and a week's shore leave from touring, he'd gladly perform the act of geographic surgery himself. Did you know, another enthusiastic bandmember jumped in, finally revealing to a foreigner (me) the kind of secret that Texans normally keep entirely to themselves, that the Texas State Constitution still gives us the right to secede from the Union anytime we want? And did you know, said the third member of the trio, that every year we had a contest in my neighborhood to see who could make the best garden in the shape of the state of Texas? (Some woman kept winning who managed to prune her bushes to look like a silhouette of the Lone Star State.)

Then the bandmembers revealed the real key to their six?month silence with me. Texans, they explained, are a downtrodden minority. People in LA and New York despise them. So they try their best to "pass" as normal Americans, hiding the shame of their origins. Janis Joplin worked hard to give the impression she was from San Francisco. She didn't want anyone to know that she'd come from some hick burgh like Port Arthur. Johnny and Edgar Winter had buried all clues to their Texan roots and pretended they'd sprung full?grown from the forehead of some anonymous but respectable state like Connecticut.

These revelations were only the first crack in the dam. Suddenly, the group began confessing the stories behind each of their songs??amazing things that could only have happened to teenagers in Texas. Like the time guitarist Billy Gibbons and his best friend went to his best?friend's ranch to seek out "Slim," a black ranch hand whom Billy described as "the Michaelangelo of the arc welder." They asked Slim if he could construct a six?foot high, spherical cage out of sucker?gauge steel, the stuff used to connect a windmill rotor to its pump. On that cage, they wanted a door. And welded very, very securely within, they requested a bucket seat, a safety harness, and hand and footholds.

Slim made the contraption. Then, late on Saturday nights, they'd load it onto a pickup truck and head for a relatively deserted stretch of highway called Jackrabbit Road. There, one of the twosome would strap himself into the bucket seat, grab hold and grip tight. Then Slim would slip behind the wheel, take the pickup truck to its top speed (about 65 miles an hour), and yank a rope that lowered the truck's back flap. Out would roll the steel cage carrying one teenager end over end onto the highway, where the metal would hit the asphalt, send up a rooster tail of sparks higher than the trees, and go bouncing down the road at a horrendous velocity, giving its inhabitant the ride of his life. The only drawback was that occasionally the steel ball would bounce off the straightaway and hit a barbed wire fence, rolling enthusiastically down the fence's pathway picking up wire like a ball of yarn. Then getting the contraption's rider out of the trap door could be a little prickly.

This, it turned out, was the tale behind the song "Master of Sparks." And there were similar stories behind most of the other songs on the group's LPs. No, ZZ Top's lyrics were not what the critics thought?? mere pallid imitations of stuff cranked out by Fleetwood Mac in its early days as a blues band. They were authentic chunks of regional Americana, chunks SO authentic that they made the jaws of anyone who'd never grown up in a state where you could put a car on cruise control and go straight at 80 miles an hour for 200 miles without pause drop.

Armed with this material, I began to take key critics out to lunch, plying them with food and stories of an ethnic group they'd had no suspicion even existed. As I said, the process of turning a few heads took several years. But it finally paid off.

It's hard to tell what contribution, if any, the press respect that came to ZZ Top made. But the band achieved its first quintuple platinum LP in the mid?80s. And I suspect the altered media attitude had something to do with it.

Well, enough of that sort of tale. I haven't been privy to all the correspondence you've carried on with Linda, but glancing at one letter, I noticed you asked about philosophy. It's a welcome question, since that's a critical issue. Most publicists in the music industry mis?train their clients, and give them what I feel is a counterproductive mental set with which to deal with both their art and their press. The result: among other things, the musicians give interviews which are carbon copies of each other, pastiches of cliches that reveal nothing. And they are gradually led to distance themselves from their music as well, turning it into mere "product"??stuff cranked out to order.

Here's pretty much the lecture I used to give to each of my clients at our first meeting. Forget the word "image," I told them. "Image" implies that some guy in a polyester suit with his feet up on his desk is going to say "Hey, kid, I can make you a star," then will change your name, do plastic surgery on your face, teach you how to walk and talk, put words (and songs) in your mouth, and send you off into the limelight as the new robotic celebrity. The concept may have made sense in the Hollywood of the '20s and '30s, when that's exactly what the studios did to actors. And it may have even made sense in the dreary days when the record industry sank so low it was coughing out Fabians and Frankie Avalons. But those days are long gone.

Music??whether it's pop music, rock music, rap music, or r&b??is an art. And art is a form of self?revelation. It doesn't involve plastering on a phony mask. It involves unmasking your inner self. It's a process of reaching deep down inside to your most inaccessible levels, and finding the things that other folks have never learned to express. It involves plugging into your obsessions, discovering your most potent passions. It means clearing away the cobwebs of the latest formulae the guys at the record companies have distilled by reading the charts in Radio and Records and finding ways of putting into words things that no one has ever put into words before. It's a matter of breaking formulae, not repeating them.

If you're a performer you have two different selves. There's the self that goes on about its business in the everyday world, carrying on conversations according to social ritual, saying "hello, how are you?" and answering that you're "very well, thank you." Then there's another you that comes out when you're onstage, or are faced with a blank page and the task of writing a lyric. That second self emerges from someplace hidden deep within you. It's a ball of seemingly independent energy that flashes around controlled by a personality all its own. It appears and disappears like a comet, and can leave you in your dressing room after a show drained, an empty husk, wondering what exactly has possessed you for the last hour and a half, and waiting for the self you know in daily life to return.

When Peter Townshend of The Who was trying to get Eric Clapton off of heroin, he told Eric something like this: "Look, I know what your problem is. When you get up in front of 20,000 people, you gradually begin to feel their energy coursing through you. Then, slowly, you become like a pipeline connected to something divine. And that divinity comes pouring through you to the crowd. But when you go offstage, the force that's been using you tosses you aside. It leaves you empty. And your problem is that you've been trying to fill that emptiness with a drug." The disappearing flow of energy Townshend was talking about is the self we're seeking. That is the self that makes your art. It is the self you owe to your audience. It's the one we're going to try to find in this interview. And it's the self I'm going to try to teach you to reveal when you do your interviews with the press.

Let me give you an example. Back in the Sixties there was a kid down in Arizona named Vince Furnier. Vince was a scrawny little thing with a big nose whose mother used to dress him impeccably before she sent him off to school, and who behaved so meekly that he always became the teacher's pet. The other kids hated the way he looked, hated the way he dressed, and hated his perfect behavior. So during recess, they called him "the schnoz" and kicked him mercilessly around the courtyard.

When he was sixteen, Vince was sitting at a ouija board with a nice, suburban neighbor who said she had the knack of contacting spirits from a higher plane. Furnier was sceptical, but willing to go along and see what happened. Sure enough, a spirit showed up and began to get personal. It said it was a 17th century witch who had been burned at the stake, and that Vince Furnier was its modern incarnation. The witch's name: Alice Cooper.

So Vince got a rock group together and went onstage, but not as the well?behaved, scrawny little kid his high school classmates loved to hate. He wore mascara and a dress and chopped up baby dolls. He was Alice Cooper!

That personality formerly hidden within him had an emotional reality more powerful than the one which inhabited the well?pressed suits he wore to satisfy his mom. And the newly unmasked personality's energy tapped something buried in the members of his audience as well. The high school kids who had hated him loved his shows. And the jocks who had kicked him around the schoolyard were suddenly all begging to be members of his band. Ten years later, the lucky former football players who made it in as bass?players and drummers would be world?famous millionaires. All because Vince Furnier had connected with the most intense personality buried inside him.

There's a reason all this makes sense in a supposedly commercial world. What we're selling in the music business isn't an inanimate "product" like a cornflake. It's raw human emotion. It's a sense of self validation. It's a chance to make contact with normally hidden parts of the human spirit.

Virtually everyone in this world walks around with thoughts and feelings he thinks are his alone, feelings so strange he wonders why everyone else is so normal and he is so insane. He has strange emotions about love, jealousy, commitment, and a million other things. The role of the artist is to find those hidden feelings inside himself, reveal them, and tell ten million people that they are not, indeed, insane. They are not alone. They are part of a mass who share a common experience.

Your job as an artist is the one that a guy in the 18th century took on. He decided to do something that sounded incredibly self?centered. Generally, when folks wrote biographies, they focused them on some king or general or emperor, somebody important. But this relative nobody decided to write a biography on a relative non?entity??himself. And in it, he planned to reveal every hidden emotion no one ever talked about. His biography was a big hit. It sold incredible numbers of copies and influenced entire generations. Why? Because by writing about himself, the nobody was writing about EVERYONE. Millions of people recognized themselves in his experiences, especially in the most intimate parts that no one of good taste and breeding was supposed to reveal. The man's name was Jean Jacques Rousseau. [Bill, I simplified history here and overlooked the previous autobiographies of St. Augustine and Montaigne to make a point to my rock and roll?creating listeners.]

Your task as an artist is essentially the same as Rousseau's. You owe your audience more than just your presence on a record or on a stage. You owe them your SELF.

Well, the lecture went on from there to other things. I generally then proceded to drag the inner selves out of the poor artists like an old time dentist yanking a tooth. Then, in subsequent months and years, when an artist I'd gotten a handle on (and I didn't succeed in getting a handle on all of them) needed help in making a decision, I could aid him by giving him a lecture reminding him who he was and what he stood for.

Like when John Cougar Mellencamp was offered $1.5 million by Heinz Ketchup for the use of his song "Hurts So Good" in a commercial, and he called for advice. It took an hour (I was long?winded in the days when I could still talk), but I explained to Mellencamp that he was the voice of the little guy who feels locked out of the gates of society by the overwhelming forces of corporations and other entrenched powers, a little guy raising his fist and shouting that no matter how small and insignificant he is, he's somebody important, somebody no one can afford to overlook. Mellencamp was a force of empowerment in the face of a steamroller of artificiality. And to become part of the artificiality he opposed would strip him of what he was and what he stood for. He would gain $1.5 million and lose his soul. And since his soul was what he gave to his audience, he'd also lose his career.

If he wanted to clip the coupons from bonds for the rest of his life, I told him, he should take the money. But if he preferred to continue making music, he'd better say a polite but firm "no."

I have a good story about an artist I DID build from scratch??a fifteen?year?old black girl living in the modest neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who I pretty much single?handedly built via publicity and a willingness to risk being fired from my job (in those days I had organized a national public and artist relations department for Gulf & Western's fourteen record companies), along with her own absolutely incredible talent. She was Stephanie Mills, and since then she's sold quite a few million records. I could also tell a similar story about Chakha Khan. But I think my energy (and probably yours) has run out.

So let me close with a chunk of a letter I wrote to a friend a while back that gives some more of the philosophy according to which I ran the old Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd. Excuse the highly colloquial prose, but that's how I like to write. @BEGIN[QUOTATION] In my humble opinion, the whole conservative vs. liberal thing is one of the most counterproductive set of notions ever to grab America in a headlock and hold it there. And, believe me, in a country that's as riddled with counterproductive notions as a smallpox victim is dotted with little red spots, this is no mean achievement. You put your finger on the truth when you said that the liberal faith in government is a pile of baloney processed through the bowels of a perpetual overeater and dumped into the toilet of the popular mind. You also put your finger on it when you said that untrammeled private enterprise is not likely to lead us into a kind and sunny utopia??though I happen to think a sort of Confucian entrepreneurship??one shot through with a sense of moral obligation??is an indispensable part of a healthy society.

It IS possible to operate a business in the knowledge that you're supplying a service to people, that you're keeping your feelers out for their needs and attempting to satisfy them. In fact, that's what a businessman does. The more succesfully he psyches out the desires of his customers, the more he prospers. The satisfaction of needs is where profits come from. Business is stewardship.

It's also possible to run a business with a commitment to honesty and to an overall social contribution. I say that from experience. I mean, I basically grew up with everyone in sight knowing I'd be some sort of absent?minded college professor and scientist. After all, I had the absent?minded part down pat. So my parents dragged me off to chat about the Doppler Effect and the Big Bang and such with the head of the graduate physics department at the University of Buffalo when I was thirteen or so, and the man had the unspeakable audacity to tell my trusting dad and mom not to bother to save up for my grad school education because I'd get a fellowship in theoretical physics at any school in the country. I could have killed him. My parents put all their money away to pay for my brother's medical education and left me out on my own. That's the kind of thing that keeps siblings seething into their 90s. Hope the physics dpt. head eventually got his sexual plumbing caught in his cyclotron and ended up glowing like a Coleman lamp beneath his jockey shorts.

(OK, so he did turn out to be right??I ended up with four fellowships [in clinical psychology]??but that's another story for another time, and certainly no reason to forgive him.)

One thing goes along with being the kid everyone knows will be a college professor??you somehow absorb a contempt for money. It's pretty damned easy when you're a teenager to look down on people grubbing after bucks. All you've got to do is go to dad whenever you need cash, then despise him for the fact that he works like a dog to earn it.

At any rate, pushing myself into PR??which was, after all, a business??took some doing. It violated all my priggish feelings of revulsion against commercial enterprise. But I had a daughter who needed to go to private school so that she wouldn't learn the easiest method of inserting heroin needles as she hung out in the corridors of the public institutions here in New York. Besides, entering pr was an absolutely amazing chance to worm my way into the machinery of the mass mind??where myths, rituals and ultimately gods are made.

But when I first hit the profession, it was so sleazy you wouldn't believe it. The dominant firm at the time??Gibson & Stromberg??got its business by servicing the orifices of record company presidents. They'd take these middle aged and paunchy corporate heads out for a night on the town, supply 'em with a slinky and willing blond or two, slide alchohol down their throats and cocaine up their noses, then send the contented prexies back to the office the next morning with bloodshot eyes and happy smiles, convinced that Gibson & Stromberg was THE firm for the job??any job.

There was only one small problem. The staff at Gibson & Stromberg had never heard of half their clients, and didn't bother to find out anything about them. One day, when I was head of PR for ABC Records on the East Coast, I got a call from the president of my company saying John Klemmer, the saxaphonist, was coming to town, but not to worry, our noble president had hired Gibson & Stromberg to handle the press several months earlier. I called G&S to find out what sort of campaign they had in mind for Klemmer, and they'd literally never heard his name before. Guess they hadn't bothered to read their client roster for a while.

At any rate, being a stiff?necked Jew with Jehovah somewhere in the family tree, and having the kind of dad who hated lying, and who actually rushed out of the house one evening to protect a couple of teenage girls who were being attacked in the park across the street despite the fact that my dad, at 5'7", is a relative peanut and the goons pursuing the attack could have applied for parts as King Kong's stand?ins, I was convinced that if you run a business, you have to be honest and stand up for your principles. (Doing this while sitting at your desk is the real trick.) What's more, you have to work your tail off for your clients. And even beyond that, you've got to do it in such a way that you ultimately make some sort of social contribution. Stupid, huh?

Well it worked. When I started my own company, it eventually became pretty successful. [Bill??New York Magazine called it "the most thorough and efficient company in its field," Delta Airlines in?flight magazine said it was "one of the most prestigious pop pr firms in the world," and it won Performance Magazine's PR Firm Of The Year award four times.] Most of the sleeze merchants were driven out of the business. And God ultimately showed his gratitude by giving me the latest fashionable disease and turning me into a mute. So the Good Lord may not care for honesty and a sense of what you might call social responsibility, but the clients appreciated it, and??if you want to get real gnarly about it??you could say it was a winning corporate strategy.

So I believe in the power of business and the fact that the profit motive is directly attached to one's ability to serve humanity. At least if you've got a hefty dose of ethics. @END[QUOTATION]

Another few notes, and then I promise to go away. Linda worked for me during five years as office manager. Now, I had a reputation in those days for training the best publicists in the field. Not that the reputation was terribly helpful. One year, CBS came along and stole six (count 'em, SIX) members of my staff. It wasn't hard. Their budget was a lot bigger than mine.

But I never felt I'd been able to impart anything further than PR 101 to any of my acolytes. Somehow, they got the basic techniques just fine, but they never seemed to grasp the big picture. Linda, who happened to be my only employee with a Phi Beta Kappa key (I'll admit that I've got one too, if you don't threaten to shoot me for being insufferable), was the one person who understood not only the methods, but the underlying philosophies and the ability to think in terms of three or four year strategies. Since then, she has applied her publicity abilities to public interest causes close to her heart, and has pulled off press miracles that go far beyond anything any of my staff members ever achieved. So, even though she doesn't do celebrity press, and what she does do she does entirely as a volunteer, she's well worth quizzing on her own.

Another one who got it was Billy Joel. I was a person with a scientific background who had wormed his way into the entertainment field as a sneaky way to get an ethnographic sense of the innards of society's mass-perception machinery. Billy was a would-be history teacher turned singer. We were very much on the same intellectual wavelength.

The press had been kicking Billy around for over a decade. I genuinely thought he was a poet whose work would be anthologized 100 years from now. So I presented him with a campaign so unconventional (it was based on a hodgepodge of behavioral science-inspired insights) that his manager said "absolutely not" and Billy said "absolutely yes." A year later, Billy had the respect and plaudits of the critics who had put him down for years.

Then one day I went to his apartment for lunch and he was ecstatic. He had just met the first woman in the world he could talk to as an intellectual equal, as one of the boys. It was Christie Brinkley. Under his arm was the notebook of lyrics he'd been up all night writing for her. I believe the resulting album went quadruple platinum. The rest is history.

I've also managed to dig out the working materials we've been promising you on the Womack campaign. They give a good idea of procedure. One document is the file I compiled by reading everything ever written on the duo. This was part of the preparation process I went through before interviewing them. Next comes the edited transcript of the interview I did with the pair. On the plane flying back from their farm in Virginia, I used a laptop computer to organize my interview notes in chronological order and pull the narrative thread out of it. Then a few weeks later I handed a copy back to the Womacks and said, "Here's what you should tell your interviewers." And finally, we have the bio??the product of the two previous steps, which I wrote over the weekend after my Friday meeting with the clients and had ready for approval by Monday morning.

As for what happened with the Womack campaign??we got the beginnings of a small press avalanche going. And because of the unique sort of bond that really intense and personal interviews tend to set up, the record company came to rely on me as the one person who could talk sense to the headstrong Womacks. The Womacks had cooked up a marketing plan??all neatly typed up??for their LP, one so mistakenly conceived it would have torpedoed the record from the start. I found a song on the album I was certain should be their first single, and managed to convince them to abandon their own ideas (something the record execs had been incapable of doing) and let everyone run with that song. Then I went back to the president of the company, who fortunately was happy to have me butt into his business, and convinced him to make that song the single as well. At about the same time, I came down with chronic fatigue syndrome in a heavy duty way (I actually caught it somehow on the Womacks' farm the day I did my interview) and had to pull out of the business. The incipient press avalanche stopped. The single went nowhere in the U.S. Neither did the album. But the song I'd picked and convinced everyone to go with became the number one single of the year in Britain and Europe, making the Womacks richer, more famous, and hopefully more happy. Meanwhile, I withdrew from publicity to my bed, where I've been pretty much ever since.

Late in the 60s, when I was emerging from college and Linda didn't want me to accept any of the graduate school fellowships I'd received because she was tired of nursing student husbands through their studies, I took a turn into left field and threw my lot in with a bunch of artists I'd run into in my college days. They were all starving??having their phones ripped out, their electricity turned out, and their fists stuffed with eviction notices. They were absurdly talented, and totally incapable of comprehending the real world. So, since my continued education was out of the question, I figured I'd try to rescue these guys from malnutrition. Together, the bunch of us started on art studio. Now, instead of listening in solitude to the sounds of our bellies growling, we could go foodless together. Which, for the first year or so, is precisely what we did.

The studio was a great big place on the Lower East Side (the most poverty stricken artist colony on the North American continent) where one of the artists and his family lived, but it had a weird sign outside, and occasionally attracted attention from passersby. One day, one of these passersby stopped passing and actually marched up the stairs into our parlor. He was a strange sight??6'4", blond, 18 years old, skinny as a bean pole, with a big grin. Under his arm was a torn and dirty portfolio of drawings. More than anything else in the world, he said, he wanted to be a member of our studio. He handed over the portfolio. I looked at it... and was amazed. he had one of the richest imaginations I'd ever seen. On each page he'd created an astonishing little mini?world. Now, the kid had made a serious error in judgement. He imagined that by penetrating our stellar crew, he'd find art stardom. In reality, the best he could get was a few tips on how to live without meals.

But it didn't matter. I asked him what he was planning to do for the next few months. He said he was being incarcerated. Seems he'd been caught with some marijuana back in his home state??Connecticut??and they'd given him a sentence in a treatment facility off in the countryside somewhere. Among other things, for the next six months, he wouldn't be allowed to draw.

Well, the kid disappeared on the dusty streets below, and we figured that was the last we'd see of him. Good thing, too, considering the way our careers were going. Then, four months later, he showed up again. Same portfolio clamped between his elbow and his ribcage. He'd escaped, he explained. Had walked out with the garbage, put the can down by the curb, stuck out his thumb, and headed for New York. For stardom. For Cloud Studio. The poor yutz.

Fact is, I adored this kids drawings. (The artists didn't??they sensed competition. After all, there's only so many ways you can split a can of beans.) So I hauled him home to Brooklyn, introduced him to Linda and my daughter??then a perky little blond thing of roughly nine??and told him he could live with us.

I won't bore you with the artist's further adventures??the day I came home to find a crowd gathered in front of my apartment only to see a blond head flicker by the open second story window a few seconds later and a huge mass of water come hurling out, for example. (Brad, the artist, had started a squirt?gun war with my daughter and her friends. That had escalated to a chocolate milk fight. By the time I came up the street, they'd moved up to heavy artillery. Brad was filling a 30 gallon trash can in the tub and dumping its contents out the window. The neighbors had never seen anything quite like it.)

The point of the story is this??Brad eventually brought his eight?track tape machine from Connecticut and started playing his favorite music around the house. Since I was still a strict Vivaldi and Bartok man (it was years before I'd get into rock and roll professionally), much of it came as a revelation. One of Brad's favorites was a folk/rock chanteuse whose voice and songs were the essence of every flower power dream of innocence. Her name: Melanie.

Ten years later, I was a music publicist struggling to develop a reputation. (Brad had a steady, though trickling income thanks to a series of graphic books for which I had landed him a contract. By now, I'd largely lost touch with him and the rest of the artists. Trying to make a living to put my daughter through private shcool had become a 90?hour a week proposition. No time to maintain old friendships.) One day, I got a call from a little record company that had had an occasional disco hit. There was an artist they wanted me to represent. Her name? Melanie.

Well, thanks to Brad, I was an expert in the subject. What's more, I was a fan. The unsullied purity this woman's songs exuded was delightful and sublime. To meet Melanie, the record company president told me, I was going to have to fly off to her home in Florida. So off I flew??to Fort Meyers.

The visit with Melanie and her manager/producer/husband Peter was a delight. Melanie was charming. We walked along the beach discussing the profundities of life. The whole thing was magic.

Then, when I got back to New York, strange tales began to surface. Melanie and her husband were constantly moving from city to city to avoid the bill collectors. They had pilfered money from everyone in sight. Peter, her charming and talented husband, had a knack for placing a siphon in other people's bank accounts and draining them dry. Peter had even, so the stories went, convinced Melanie's mother in New Jersey to mortgage her home and give him the money, then had never spoken to the newly destituted lady again. Clearly the tales were exudations of jealousy. No two such pleasing people could possibly be guilty of such rabscallion deeds.

Two months later, my staff and I had set up a rigorous schedule of interviews for Melanie in LA. Close to thirty of them in three days. "You," said Peter the husband, "will have to come with us. We need your indispensable aid."

So off I flew to join Melanie and Peter in the land of angels. I was astonished by the accomodations. Peter and Melanie were ensconced in a three?story suite at an expensive hotel. They had a Rolls Royce limo on 24?hour?a?day call. This seemed a little strange. Though Melanie had been a big star a decade earlier, it had been years since she'd sold more than a handful of albums. What's more, her record company wasn't rich. With three disco hits, it had tucked some money in the bank, but it was the kind of nest egg that can disappear fast. Where was all this lucre coming from?

The next day, we did some interviews. Then, when there was a break, Peter and Melanie dragged me off to the limo and headed for Rodeo Drive to go shopping. And shop they did.

[search disks for "sanibel" to get the rest of this story]

I worked with many a white musician whose background was so different from mine that it was is if we'd been raised on separate planets. But by spending anywhere from six hours to three days alone with each of them, I was able to penetrate their inner worlds. My main tool, aside from interview techniques I'd been honing since the days when I used to hitch?hike and extract life stories from kindly drivers who ranged from carnival barkers and murderers to insurance salesmen, was empathy. The trick was to find that part of my emotional self that resonated to the same frequency as that of the person I was speaking with. From that point on, the process became almost like telepathy. I could often tell clients more about themselves than they'd ever been aware of. Sometimes they had the spooky feeling I could see straight through them. Needless to say, this worked wonders for my ego, and also turned out to be very advantageous in elevating my customers' careers and ballooning their bank accounts, since pop music, like most other arts, often succeeds to the extent that its substance is self?revelation.

But with my black artists, I had a much, much harder time pulling off empathetic insight. There were oodles of exceptions (Michael Jackson, Prince, Herbie Hancock, Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire, etc., etc.), and all of them were fascinating. But often, I'd find a black client totally opaque. I don't know whether it was the fact that they came from a culture in which the vocabulary of introspection is largely absent, that they were unwilling to reveal themselves to a white person, or that they had learned that by opening themselves to anyone they could create a vulnerability that, in street culture, might be deadly. So I was reassured to discover that my difficulties along these lines were not just some form of ineptitude on my part, but that a friend who'd taught black children to read for 25 years had had them too.

However I do have to confess that at least some of the time, it was my fault. Doing publicity for a black act was so much easier than a white one that sometimes I didn't fight for the lengthy private access that made seeing into someone's soul possible. I didn't always insist on being able to spend a day or more at the client's home in utter privacy, as I did with my white clients. I was lazy.

Someday I should tell you the tales of the numerous black clients I did manage to penetrate. Their stories are fascinating, and blast away the oversimplified images of blacks that most of us are handed by both conservative and liberal writers. In fact, the stories are SO varied that they make the idea of generalizing about blacks (something I've done a lot of in these letters) seem utterly absurd. However, these weren't typical folk. They were not only unusually talented, some of them were absolute geniuses.

Back in the early 80s, when I came down with a six?month back problem, rock and roll clients would jet in from California, drive out to Brooklyn by limo, walk up three flights of cat?fur?balled stairs (we own this brownstone, but we only occupy the top floor), step in, have their gonadal areas probed by the nose of one dog and their rump explored by the snout of another, be ushered into the bedroom where I was spread out in all my glory, and be seated on a chair from which the cats had long since removed the covering and stuffing (Linda hospitably covered the thing with a sheet).

These little visits helped me become legendary as an eccentric, though I can't for the life of me figure out why.

fisk/disk45/jan26

One of my correspondents recently wrote to report with puzzlement that he was taking a vacation at a Barbados hotel, but something strange kept happening in the middle of each night. For an hour or two, he heard the sounds of furniture moving on the patio that separated the building's wings. Was he in the presence of a Caribbean poltergiest? Of course I instantly had the answer to his question. The hotel was clearly being visited by one of my favorite former clients, REO Speedwagon. These Illinois lads were never satisfied with their accomodations. In Memphis there's a famous hotel, the Peabody, with a pond in the lobby inhabited by live ducks. Knowing that the complimentary basket of soap, shampoo and sewing kit would not be enough to amuse them, each member of the band tucked a duck under his arm and took it to his room as a bathtub toy. REO were banned from the Peabody for life.

At a Hyatt Hotel, they felt that things were a little dull, so the intrepid musicians went to the local K?Mart, bought GI Joe outfits complete with plastic machine guns, put pantyhose (on sale that day) over their heads, and raided the Hyatt lobby, grabbing the desk manager and tying him up in his office. But the Hyatt chain didn't ban them until the night they got bored and threw a toga party in the hallways at 2AM, roping a group of Sweet Adolines (elderly barbershop quartette ladies having a convention in the place) into their festivities.

Then they were staying at a motel below the Mason?Dixon Line with no accomodations for amusement and figured it was a shame to let all that southern sunshine go to waste. So they hauled the furniture out of their bedrooms??beds, chairs, tables, bureaus and Gideon Bibles??and proceded to throw a picnic. Neighbors horrified by the scene called the cops. In those days the group travelled via an old World War II airplane they were able to purchase cheap because its parts kept falling off. So they had a permanent pilot who'd become a member of the gang. The airjockey anticipated trouble. Just as the entire automotive fleet of the local constabulary drew up in a ring, sirens blazing, a helicopter landed in the parking lot and pulled the boys to safety. The pilot had driven off to the local airport and rented the whirly?bladed means of escape.

So REO Speedwagon were clearly camped out in my friend's Barbadian vicinity attempting to get a moontan. Hence the sound of dragging furniture.

fisk/disk45/jan26

My experiences in country music led to one of the gustatory highlights of my career??a feast in anItalian restaurant where ricotta cheese is unavailable and the local pasta is made from forms of flour no Italian would even spit at. The location was Monte's (I've cleverly disguised the name to protect the innocent) in Nashville, Tennessee. You should have heard poor Monte singing his woes. (Italians are very big on turning their complaints into arias). He had started the first ethnic restaurant in a decidedly anti?ethnic city, and wasn't having an easy time of it. Ah, what a gustatory pleasure it was to taste lasagna stuffed with Kraft American slices.

fisk/disk45/jan26

In Argentina before the place was democratized, the traffic direction was handled by soldiers wearing submachine guns (this definitely discouraged turning right on a red light). And when one of the small army of American journalists I had hauled down to Buenos Aires tried to take a picture of a soldier, a member of the secret police force inconspicuously surrounding us grabbed the reporter's camera and tried to take his film. The writer objected and cited the First Amendment. So the secret policeman whipped out his equivalent to a Swiss Army knife and explained that he was about exercise his freedom of expression by removing the scribe's thumb. The film got confiscated; the thumb stayed in place.

I am now going to punish you with the story of the steel band's origins. This comes to me from Ralph MacDonald, one of the top percussionists of the 20th century, who, in addition to being a client, became my mentor and taught me how African culture and music managed to make the transition to the New World.

Ralph comes from a long line of Trinidadian calyso masters. His ancestors were Yorubas who literally telegraphed the news with their drums and travelled from village to village singing the editorials and comic section. His father was the leader of a successful Calypso band in Harlem. And calypso, according to Ralph, is only the mid?20th century version of the old practice of singing journalism. So MacDonald's tale of the steel drum comes from his own research, Harry Belafonte's (Harry was Ralph's second father figure and original employer), and from his own relatives' experience.

Back in World War II, the Caribbean was used as a fueling station for American naval ships. The fuel was transported in steel drums. When the drums were emptied, they were tossed away. (This was before environmentalism.) So the islanders, to whom manufactured items of any sort looked like a treasured luxury, attempted to adapt the discards for daily use. Turned out that if you took a hammer or a heavy stone, you could pound the top of the drum into a concave shape. And if you hit the resulting piece of metal with a stick, you could get a pleasing tone. In fact, the tone varied depending on exactly where your blow was aimed. This was nothing new to Yoruban descendants. They'd been using tuned drums (drums that produce musical notes instead of just bangs and pops) for millenia. So they instantly began to use the oil cans to make music. And people say that the military budget has never resulted in the production of art!

When I was a little kid, I lived a kind of bizarre life. We won't go into all the reasons, they're too numerous. But one of them was that I felt I needed to wall myself off from my mother (if you can imagine a four year old feeling that way), more than anything else to protect my feeling of independence. As a result of that, and the fact that my mother was the kind of person who longed for physical contact but didn't know how to go about giving or getting it (she was probably as frightened of it as I was), there was no hugging (subject of our last series of letters) in my life. Then one day I was out on the sidewalk with my father. A dog licked my face, something that I'd never experienced before (we didn't have any animals). My father tried to explain it by telling me delightedly that the dog had kissed me. Well, that was it. I was hooked. Here was a way of getting hugs without giving up any independence or descending into the nightmare world of my parents' interpersonal tensions. Animals!

The ultimate animal experience, though, didn't come until about 23 years later. By now, I was doing publicity in the record business. I'd started my own company, and my first client was a band that the critics absolutely loathed. The Village Voice had said (in a headline, no less) that they had "a sound like hammered shit." Most of the rest of the press simply ignored them. The band's name: ZZ Top. Now ZZ Top were from Texas. And there's something very strange about Texans. They have an unusual kind of inferiority complex. Once you've won their confidence??which takes a very long time??they'll let you hang around while they talk of things Texans are not supposed to discuss in front of outsiders. They'll discuss their own ethnic identity, which is built on a set of folk memories as deeply ingrained as the Irish memory of independence, the Cajuns' memories of Acadia, and the Jews' 2,000?year longing for Jerusalem. Texans remember when they were an independent republic, and they long for those bygone days. Our sense of national identity is built on our idealization of Washington and Jefferson. But the Texans have their own national heroes??men like Sam Houston, who remind them that somehow they are a race apart. One day, the boys from ZZ Top were sitting around a hotel room in God?knows?what town talking about the ultimate Texan dream. Did you know, they said to me, that if you took a chain saw, cut Texas off from the United States along the border (you know, that dotted line you see on the map) and set it adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world (that was before the price of oil went down)? Did you know, they said wistfully, their eyes fixed on a misty world in a future never?to?be, that the constitution of the state of Texas still gives it the right to secede from the union whenever it damn well wants?

Texans, at least the bunch I was now in with, saw themselves as one of the world's more unjustly oppressed peoples. In their opinion, they were the unrecognized engine that made this country run. Their culture, their economy, their energy, their ambitions, outshone anything in New York or LA. But the New Yorkers and Los Angeleians hogged up all the credit, soaked up all the limelight, and loftily looked down upon their lone star cousins as poor relations, benighted citizens of a strange, faintly laughable, and ultimately barbaric land. And the Texans didn't take this humiliation lightly.

ZZ Top, back in 1976, came up with one answer to the dilemma of degradation. They would mount the biggest tour the world had ever seen. With it, they would take Texas to the world. They would let their long horn steer out of the closet. They would no longer do what Johnny Winter and Janis Joplin had done to succeed. They wouldn't hide their identity and pretend to be from somewhere else. They would rub the land they came from in everybody's face. TEXAS PRIDE (raise your fist high, girl), YAH!!!!

The result was ZZ Top's Worldwide Texas Tour. The universe's biggest stage, shaped like the state of Texas and slightly tilted upward so that everyone in the audience could see its outline. Carefully painted backdrops that caught the mood of the Texas desert at sunrise, noon and sunset. Eleven trailer trucks filled with equipment, the front four of them painted with a Texas landscape that formed one continuous 250?foot panorama as it barrelled across the American highways. And, topping it all off, three rattlesnakes, still alive and hissing, two turkey vultures flapping their wings and demanding an occasional bite of lizard meat, a longhorn steer, and one of the world's first tame buffalos.

Minister of information for this attempt to break Texas out of the third world was a Jewish kid from Buffalo who'd grown up with reptiles, guinea pigs, and a cat.

ZZ Top's exercise in national pride took to the road and played the biggest stadiums in America. We were doing the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl. And these stadiums are weird affairs. Up above, there's a huge dish of seats and a central green where football players normally try to batter each other's brains out over a piece of pigskin. But down below is the territory the public never gets to see, a kind of dungeons?and?dragons labyrinth of concrete tunnels and massive, fluorescent?lit underground parking lots where flotillas of trucks dock and unload their cargoes. But in each stadium on this trip, one of those fields of subterranean concrete would be commandeered. A portable metal corral would be erected. And within its perimeter would pace two animals unaccustomed to sliding their hooves over polished concrete or staring into a fluorescent sun??the buffalo and the long horn steer.

Up close, a buffalo is not a reassuring beast. Its body is nearly the size of a Volkswagen van. A long horn steer is not much more inviting. You suddenly realize that those huge and pointed protuberances on the steer's head could, with just a tiny little lunge, go through you as clean as a stapler through a sheet of typing paper. As a result, the cavernous rooms where the animals were penned was always eerily empty. On those occasions when they provided the only way to get from one spot to another, folks would skitter through, see the buffalo roll his eyes in fury, realize that only a thin bit of metal tubing prevented them from being trampled into paste, and high tail it out as quick as was humanly possible.

Well, one day I was making the dangerous passage through the animal room, keeping a wary eye on the buffalo, but moving much more slowly than most of those who marched this way. The buffalo swung his head around and fixed me with a dark brown eye the size of a canteloupe. You could feel his vision connect with your body. It was like being lined up in a vise. Then I had a sudden notion. I didn't think the creature was sizing up the best way to pulverize me after all. I got the distinct impression he was lonely.

So slowly, very slowly, I did what no one was supposed to do. I inched my way toward the corral. The buffalo moved his head a quarter inch at a time, following my every movement. Finally, I was about two feet away from the fencing. I held out my hand, my arm fully extended. And very gently, the buffalo put a head the size of my entire torso over the top rail of the fence and leaned his forehead against my palm. Within two minutes, I was rubbing his ears and his head was against my chest. His relief was palpable. He'd finally made a friend.

Well, the buffalo and I had a wonderful time that summer. I was in my office five days a week, and out with the band every weekend. The buffalo was always delighted to see me. And the feeling was totally mutual. I'd stop at his corral for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time to rub him like a big and grateful dog. When they'd try to lead him down the corridors to the stage at night to do his part in the show, the buffalo would always yank his trainer over to the sidwall where I was standing with the rest of the crowd and give me a greeting, then go on like a trooper and do his bit (which consisted simply of standing still in a mini?corral as a hydraulic lift hoisted the platform he was on up to stage level, where the spotlight would catch him for a moment, amaze the audience, then lower him again to return to his concrete prairie). He was a total sweetheart.

I am ashamed to admit that when the tour was over, and the buffalo went back to Texas, I didn't try to keep in touch. I didn't even send a postcard. I was too busy that year attempting to establish a new business. It was very, very hard, demanding nearly all my waking hours, and creating emotional pressures of a kind that it's hard to believe. But, you know how you feel when someone you admire enormously tells you you're terrific? It is a privilege, and you know it. It lifts you up, gives you a warm feeling, and makes you feel just a little bit better about yourself. Strange as it sounds, that's what the friendship of the buffalo did for me.

As for ZZ Top, the tour established them as a major band. The press stopped ignoring them. They made it into Newsweek and God?knows?what?all?else (after all, they had a good publicist). One of their later albums, as a matter of fact, sold five million copies. They had stopped hiding their true identity and revealed their Texasness to the world. Whether it made them feel any better about who they were or not, I never did find out. But the fact that they now own quite a few oilwells and will be wealthy men for the rest of their lives may, I hope, provide them with some compensation for any lingering feelings of inferiority.

Well, that's about it. I have no more animal stories left. What's more, I've used up all my allotted time at the word processor, and it's time to clamber back into bed.

++

The last few days with Linda have been like riding a bucking bronco. Yesterday or the day before, I forget which, Linda's emotions went through the same giant change that yours and mine sometimes do. It is predictable. It is necessary. We are going through a period of transition from one steady state to another. And transition runs emotions through unpredictable bouts of fear and insecurity. This is why every tribe has established rituals for the transitions of life: birth, the coming of puberty, marriage, death. They bring people together. They provide distraction. They offer an accepted form on which to lean when internally everything could become a maelstrom of chaos.

But there is no transitional ceremony for the three of us. Marriage and divorce are not sufficient. They allow only for serial polygamy--one wife after another. Like my friend John Cougar Mellencamp. He married his first wife when he was 19 and she was 21 (I was 21 and Linda was 24 when we began living together). They had a baby. At the time he was just out of high school, lost and confused in college, so depressed and without a sense of purpose that he almost could not bring himself to raise himself from bed in the morning. So enervated that he would look at his sock two feet away from him on the floor and feel that the reach was so long he couldn't possibly make it. His first wife gave him a life-capsule in which to live while he searched for a new meaning. He had been king of the roost in high school. As he used to tell me, he had been at the center of the Panorama screen, living out all the Paul Newman movies he had ever seen, from Hud to Cool Hand Luke to Sweet Bird of Youth. He was the star at the center of his high school world.

Now he was no longer within that structure. He was in a period of transition. His emotions and his life were out of his control. From being a big face in a close-up on a small screen, he had become an invisible blip on the infinite screen of an adulthood that didn't even notice his existence. His sense of self had dissolved. His sense of purpose had fled. He was a nothing. His first wife at least gave him a home and a structure within which to live out his nothingness. They had a child. And one day John had the idea of a fool, of a madman. He got in his car. He admired David Bowie. He wanted to be a star like Bowie. So he drove his car over 2,000 km from Indiana in the mid-west to New York City, and he found the office of David Bowie's manager. He sat in the waiting room with a dozen other David Bowie wanna-be's. And when David Bowie's manager passed through the room on his way to his lair, he briefly beheld John Mellencamp, he thought he noticed something special in the kid's face, in the kid's eye. He had John summoned to his office. John was the only one waiting who was invited to the inner sanctum.

The manager told John Mellencamp he could make this lost kid from a tiny Indiana town into a star. His magic trick for generating the transformation--he would change John's name. "Mellencamp" was banished. The star-to-be was named Johnnie Cougar. Meanwhile wife number one sat at home in Indiana, in a shack with a refrigerator on the wooden porch, and waited with her baby in her arms.

Johnnie Cougar had his photo shot with that tough, defiant look he'd always maintained, even in his emptiness. The picture was put up on billboards in New York and Hollywood to capture the attention of record company executives. The trick worked. Every executive knew that David Bowie, born David Jones, had come from the star factory of Tony I-forget-his-last-name, the manager whose new "star" Johnnie Cougar had become. Tony the manager had produced a cash machine with David Bowie. Surely he was about to get the gold gushing once again. So the record companies fought for Johnnie Cougar. They offered millions of dollars in advances. Polygram Records came up with the biggest wad of cash. The manager pounced on the money and put John Mellencamp through a campaign of press manipulation and hype so overdone that it backfired.

John Mellencamp was just learning to play the guitar. John Mellencamp was just learning to write songs. John Mellencamp was just learning to sing. John Mellencamp's record was the best he could make, but it was a pile of shit. The press resented having the shit shoved down their throat. They killed John Mellencamp (now Johnnie Cougar) in a barrage of negative headlines. Meanwhile, John Mellencamp, who had grown up in a town of 2,100 people, was being flown from New York to LA. Feted at Hollywood parties. Offered girls on the left and boys on the right and hot and cold running cocaine.

Cyl, his wife, still sat home with the baby. The record didn't sell. The critics made it their favorite target of mockery for the year. I forget what year that was. John Mellencamp either sat at home in Indiana on a small allowance from his manager or was out on the road playing every fly-specked bar in the world. Five years later Johnnie Cougar had finally learned to play the guitar. He had learned to write songs. He had learned to sing. He was on the path to finding his own voice. And he had his first hit. The critics laughed and jeered. But there it was on the radio. Johnnie Cougar's first hit. John was a star who wasn't a star. A person the public was willing to buy and the tv shows were willing to feature, but a star who was the object of mockery. He was once again bouncing from Hollywood to New York and back again. His manager was driving John's career down the wrong road in the wrong direction, but driving it so fast that no one could see the signs fly by. I was watching from a distance. I knew the car was hurtling in the wrong direction.

Cyl's kid was now five years old. John was back in the world of Hollywood glamour. Cyl had been a big step up for John when he got out of high school. Everyone else was horny as hell. John had married an older woman and was getting nooky every night. Cyl was able to hold a job and support him. Cyl was someone solid to hold onto.

But now that John was doing the Hollywood scene, women were flinging themselves at his pelvis with their mouths open. And John couldn't resist these women. They made his wife, Cyl, look less like the prize she had at first seemed and more like just another small town girl who was losing her figure now that she had carried a child.

John had two role models: his father and his uncle John. His father was like the father of Hud, the picture of solidity, married happily for 25 years. His uncle John was married miserably to a wife who waited for him bitterly while he went out whoring every night. Uncle John was like the young Hud, the Paul Newman-played rebel who had partied until the roof of his convertible was ready to fall off. John followed the path of his uncle. He met an extraordinary little blond with a beautiful shape, the daughter of a Hollywood stunt man, a girl who could get into a car on a stage set and drive it between two oncoming trailer trucks without getting a scratch on the paint, who could do the stunts her Dad had done, a girl with brains and a body to die for, and a sense of integrity so strong you could use it to soak poles like they do with creosote, to make 'em last forever.

John divorced wife number one, Cyl, and came back home to Seymour, Indiana, with his new blond Hollywood bride. He set up house with his new money, and used the rest to pay alimony and child support to Cyl. Cyl hung around and continued to help him with his career. She never married another man. John was going through serial bigamy. For all practical purposes, he now had two wives--one who still took care of him, and another with whom he fucked his nights away. Fucking leads to babies and the blond, petite little wife who could drive unerringly through flames and wrecks, had two of them.

John met me and I helped him find his voice. I helped him find his inner self. I showed him how his passions could be the source of a more permanent stardom. Johnnie Cougar turned from a pop star doomed to rise and disappear overnight into an album artist, someone you take seriously, someone you take to your heart and pattern your life upon, someone whose career becomes a lifelong cash machine.

John moved his Hollywood wife Vicki and her two babies to a bigger house. Then he bought her a spare home big enough for twenty families in Georgia on the beach in one of those communities reserved for the super-rich.

VCRs had been invented, and John had all his old Paul Newman movies on tape. He watched Hud over and over again. Slowly John stopped identifying with the wild and rebellious son and identified with the father. He stopped identifying with his uncle John the hell raiser and identified with his own father, the committed monogamist. Cyl stuck by him, working in the Indiana office that ran the business which John Cougar Mellencamp had become. His first daughter was now sixteen, wild and rebellious. His kids by Vicki were five and three, and had two giant houses and two giant swimming pools.

John sat me down in his living room at I forget which house. Don't know whether it was the big one in Seymour, Indiana, or the bigger one on the beach near Savannah, Georgia. One year, yeah, I guess it was in Indiana, John showed me Hud. He showed me the magic of the movie. That the young Paul Newman was the chrysalis who would turn as he grew older into the rock solid manhood of his father. The rebel who spurned responsibility would become a pillar everyone could lean on, a pillar of fire in the desert whose path one could follow to the promised land, a man of integrity, a modest copy of his non-existent benevolent God.

John finally knew that transition was the meaning of the movie. Why? Because he was undergoing it himself. He was moving from the role of the young rebel to that of the father everyone could rely on. And he liked it.

I had taught him a lesson--know your inner self. Stick with your passions, no matter where they take you. His passions were taking him from adolescence into adulthood. His songs and his lyrics went with him across that line. And his audience, which was growing up and buying homes and settling down, went with him too. He became one of the biggest-selling stars in America, then in the world. He was as big as David Bowie. In some people's eyes even bigger. But he wasn't doing it by taking on a plastic name and pretending to be something he wasn't. He was doing it by being exactly who he was. And whenever he got confused about who he was, he'd call his publicist in New York, the curly-headed, skinny little Jewish kid who saw through him like a pane of glass, who read his innards and reminded him of the thread of his changing identity.

The next year I flew down for our annual meeting and searching of John's soul. It was great to see Cyl, with her round and smiling face, now getting almost middle-aged but not quite. And it was good to see Vicki, slim and blond with the fire of integrity in her eye. John and I sat on a patio the size of six tennis courts while he told me the story of his father and of his uncle. He wanted to be like his father now. He wanted to stop porking every girl who crossed his path. He wanted to be a dad his kids could rely on. A one-woman man, even though he actually had two.

Then I got sick and John had to go on figuring out who he was by himself. It was confusing. He'd call every year and ask if I could come back. At first I was just too sick to work. Later, when he called, I was too sick to talk, and he'd ask if someone could just prop me at the phone and let him talk to me without my having to answer. "I dunno, Howard," he'd say, and you could hear him shaking his head on the other end of the phone. "I've tried everyone in the fucking business. I've tried the hot shot publicists, and I've tried every girl you ever trained, and none of 'em is you. Is there any way I could pay you just to talk on the phone and help me through all this shit?" But I was too weak to talk. And I couldn't even handle the stress of watching a sitcom on tv, much less of John's career. Whoever answered the phone for me had to just say no.

John wanted to be like his father, a pillar of monogamy. But on the road, his uncle John kept grabbing his balls and pulling him toward some tempting beauty. Or that's the way I imagine it. John has never told me what or why. But Vicki, the Hollywood wife with the integrity of steel, finally told him to get out. She continued to live in the big house. Cyl continued to work in the office. John built himself a house nearby, and married a fashion model who he swears has every bit as much inner grit as Vicki and as much inner goodness as Cyl. It's not serial bigamy anymore. It's serial polygamy.

The model has had her first child. John's first daughter is twenty five and has gotten the wild oats out of her system and married and had a child and has become a role model even John is proud of. John's a grand-daddy. And when he's home, nearly every day he saunters out of the house he shares with his model-wife and visits Vicki and her kids, then goes down to the office to work with his father, who runs the place these days, and Cyl.

I talked to John about four months ago. He told me the story of the new wife and the new baby, and how it baffled him that Vicki had tossed him out, but that the new wife was someone I'd admire every bit as much as I'd admired Vicki and Cyl. She had brains, he said. She had integrity that just wouldn't quit.

I'd been monogamous for 28 years by then. There was something distasteful to me about John's scheme of multiple wives.

Then Linda said we'd never have sex again, I went nuts for a weekend, and I met you. I had never met anyone like you before. Yes, you came across like a cock teaser, a bar girl who picks up one man after another. But you had a streak of honesty about your sexuality and your emotions. You were able to express your need and your insecurity. You were the archetype that lies at the bottom of all our souls. The hidden us we don't recognize, much less express. You were like me. You put in word what other people couldn't. Our souls were mirror images. We were lost twins torn apart at birth who'd refound each other. Actually, you could be the lost twin to any man or woman who is honest enough to see clearly through the muddy pool of his consciousness all the way to the muck on the bottom. But very few humans have the guts or the ability, or even the eyesight to accomplish that. Which is what makes you my twin, not just everyone else's. Because I've been staring down into the muddy waters all my life, finding the stuff no one else can see. That's how I fathom people like John Mellencamp and help them find their hidden selves. I look for the part of me they and I share. I look down into the bottom of my soul, and I find theirs.

When I began to pursue the lures you tossed at me I was on the path to becoming something I loathed, a bigamist. Then I slowly fell in love with you. There was no way in hell I was ready to live without you permanently implanted in my life. But I couldn't do it the way John had done, one marriage at a time, one after the other, yet keeping every woman he'd accumulated along the line, keeping them all so close they were like a single family. I had to be open and honest. I won't divorce Linda. I'd rather kill myself than have her leave. And I don't want to let go of you. That would be another kind of death. So I've been trying to nurse the two of you along toward what yesterday I could finally see in a vision as clear as any Moses ever had of his Promised Land. As clear as the one Joshua saw when he looked over the mountains into the valley that Moses never reached but had sought for forty years. A vision where each of us helps support the other two. Where each of us is a leg on a three-legged stool, making a structure that's firm and strong and mutually supporting.

My dancing defies all the laws of physics, and demonstrates that some human bodies were never meant to be seen in motion. When Daryl Hall and John Oates and Tommy Mottola and Martha Quinn and I all went out to a club after a concert in Detroit, I swept Martha onto the dance floor and flung myself into spastic gyrations for two hours. Hall, Oates and Mottola sat in their seats with their eyeballs hanging out and their mouths open like roach motels, incapable of believing the spectacle unfolding before their eyes. They never moved from their chairs or took their pupils off my crazily bouncing knees and elbows once. The real miracle was that Martha didn't flee in humiliation from my side. The girl may have been tiny, but she had guts.
_________
Yikes, Joe, it's 4:33 am and I should have eaten dinner and gotten to sleep. Look at what I put my new wife through. Lights on and the sound of me pounding the keyboard over five hours after what she, a normal human, considers a decent time to go to sleep. Ryze just swallowed a bunch of what I'd written to you--poor timing, just when my mitochondria are coughing up their last gasps of energy. But how about we get together on Friday via phone at 10 pm ny time, 7pm your time? Or on Saturday evening? Stephen, my assistant, didn't know I have a meeting at 8pm on Friday. The morning meeting at which we synchronize our calendars doesn't take place for another four hours. We have interludes of synching (without swimming) later in the day--ten pm was probably our last. Stephen and I both work almost all our waking hours. So does Mario Ribeiro, who flew up here from Rio two weeks ago to join the volunteer big bang tango media lab team. Both of them live here...another thing that drives my new wife nuts and hopefully won't drive her away. Joe Sparks writes: > I love reading your letters... > >Got a call at Leap Frog today, from you pal, who said we'd be chatting on the phone come this Friday, @ 8PM your time, 5PM mine. I'm really looking forward to it! > > I will probably be on the way to pick up my boys about then, so I will be driving. I was in a bit of a rush when he called, so I didn't get a chance to totally think it through when he set the time. If you can, try to call a bit earlier, and we'll probably have more time. If for some reason, the call is not optimal, the next best time will be later that night, or the next day. > >I now work in this huge airplane-hangar of an office. I have my own card-key which beep-unlocks the doors. I'm not used to being around so many people constantly, I get actaully feel ill by afternoon. hb: you are not alone in this. being digested by a group freezes my brain. I have to gather my own groups to be happy. I have to find friends who resonate to my frequency. I got sick when there's a hint that I might be forced to resonate to a clique. And, Joe, that may be an illness; that may be an abnormality; that may be what they mean when they say we're maladapted to society; but frankly that's what makes us valuable to the folks who are better "adapted" than we are. Without our social aversions, they would starve. We feed them surprises. We feed them the strange. And that's what they need to perk their tired brains. > >I go into the kitchen area, and hide behind a coke machine. I actually feel my insides physically relaxing. > >I have not worked a real office job in over a decade. Even as a full time employee with 1000+ population Macromedia, they were happy to let me work out of my own studio. > >I come home completely exhausted. Take a nap, and get up, trying to work more. This has only been going on since Thursday- hope I get more used to it soon. > >My lovely girlfriend gets home from painting, and we have dinner, talk about the day. This is my favorite time, and she's the main reason it is great to be Joe Sparks! hb: I was pondering today how I could have dinner with my wife a few times a week. I eat at three or four am, and I'm horizontal in a bed. I used to take my previous wife (a wife of 33 years) out to dinner twice a week so we could face each other and talk without the distraction of her desire to zonk out with the TV. It was fun. It was good for us. Our brains ran so wild with curiosity that we carried a pocket encyclopedia to dinner with us so that when there was a fact we needed we could get it instantly. Jeez, where' the mini-essay I wrote on that tonight for a journalist who wanted tips on how to stifle jealousy? Here it is: "The nightmares of betrayal the mind flashes in microseconds are hard to stop. One thing that helps a bit. Take your mate out to dinner two or three times a week. Choose a quiet restaurant. This gives you two or three hours of time to sit face to face and talk, with no tv, no cell phones, and no interruptions. The conversation builds intimacy and trust. And the meal releases a hormone from your gut called cholecystokinin. This is a biological love potion, a bonding hormone. Sometimes these awkward bodies we live in give us gifts. Cholecystokinin is one of them." > >There's two other great parts reasons to be me- when my boys see me and jump up and down screaming dad! and run over to hug me. hb: how old are they? > >Then, there's when I go out dancing, I'm such a freak, I have a great time making a fool of myself, & embarassing all my friends. hb: wait a minute, I thought that was my specialty. I was carried down the aisles and up the sidewalk on the shoulders of the audience once for doing this onstage. It was the first time this sort of dancing--and this sort of crowd response--had ever happened to me. Then there was the night in Detroit when Martha Quinn--one of the original MTV VJs--and I went out on the dance floor and the dancing did itself through me again. I was with Tommy Mottola, until recently head of Sony/CBS, and Darryl Hall and John Oates. Stevie Wonder was seven stories above us, but it didn't matter--he wouldn't have been able to see us anyway. Tommy, Darryl, and John were not accustomed to staring at a dance floor for hours with their mouths either shut or open with astonishment instead of words. But it is SOOO much fun. I didn't know why it amazed folks until I did it for a girlfriend after my wife of 33 years had up and left. I did it in front of a mirror and it was unbelievable--like some Warner Brothers cartoon Chuck Jones had drawn on LSD. But much as I was doing it, I wasn't doing it, Joe. It was doing itself through me. (There's an out of body experience in the midst of this dancing tale--but I really have to eat and go to sleep.) My Lord, you do make le bontemps roulons. Snotty way of saying that writing to you is a way to have a very, very good time. Howard > >No time to write more- but I will write more later. > >Best Wishes, > >JS >joesparks.com >415 731 6918 >415 596 7966 > >

++ fisk/may5/disk33

A few weeks ago Linda clipped an article from a magazine telling me that a man I used to work with in a strange way had died. He wasn't one I was close to emotionally, and he'd lived a long, full life??so for me, at least, there was no pain. But his story is rather amazing.

Back in the early 70s, when I first found myself somewhat confusedly working for Gulf & Western as head of a department of public relations (something I knew nothing about) in the segment of the company dedicated to pop, rock and r&b music (also things about which, until just two years earlier, I had been utterly ignorant), one of the first people to walk into my office was the manager of several of the bands on one of our leading record labels (we had fourteen of them...labels, that is). He was a strange, intense guy roughly my age with an accent that could have made him either English or American, it was impossible to tell which. He wasn't the kind of person who revealed himself readily. In fact, he seemed unable to handle simple courtesies like "hello, how are you" and "it's been nice talking to you, good bye." Just got straight down to business. I liked that a lot, since I was very efficiency oriented myself in those days.

But I gradually discovered bits of his life story, and they were a wee bit strange. Despite his rugged and clearly Anglo?Saxon exterior, he had grown up in Beirut, Lebanon. At the time, Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. It had a thriving international jet set whose kids got together and danced until dawn...largely to the music of bands they'd imported from Europe. He was part of this gay international clique, though he wasn't exactly the type to smile nonchalantly, toss down a dozen gin fizzes and party through the night. He was more likely to have been cruising the edges of the crowd with a serious expression on his face trying to figure out how to harness all this celebratory energy.

When he went to college, he finally figured out how to do it. He began organizing some of the rooftop dances in his spare time, meaning it was his job to import the bands, sell the tickets, count the money and pocket the profits. All was going swimmingly, profits and all, until one week he brought in a British classical/rock band with a diminutive female lead singer who had an astonishing five?octave range.

I don't think it was her octaves that impressed him, it was probably her looks, but one way or the other, this deadly serious and utterly practical youth did something wretchedly impractical. He fell in love with her. In fact, he fell so in love with her that he left college, abandoned Beirut, moved to London, and became her manager. Within a few years, he was managing a whole stable of rock bands, and doing reasonably well with them.

Some of them were on one of my labels, and I ended up doing their publicity and, apparently, winning his respect, because when I finally started my own PR firm he was one of my first clients. Then he went bankrupt, and though I was very fond of him, I lost track of him for a few years and worried about what had become of him.

About four years later, I ran into him in a record company office, a long?lost soul, reappearing as if he'd been stranded on some desert island for half a decade. I was delighted to see him. Told him so and asked what he was doing. He showed me some utterly unfamiliar looking albums by some utterly unheard of bands, and gave me a speech that would have warmed the cockles of a French Revolutionary's heart about how the old guard of rock superstars had become nothing but super?pampered aristocrats drained of talent and there was a new generation of rockers in the streets of England spoiling to overturn the musical establishment, wreak havoc in the rock world, drag all the old farts off to the guillotine, and rhythmically liberate mankind. As he spoke, there was a kind of mad gleam in his eye that I'd never seen before. He had latched on to a movement and become more than a mere convert, he was a zealot bucking for candidacy as head apostle.

One of the unknown bands whose albums he was carting under his arm turned out to employ his youngest brother as its drummer. And before long, another brother, another child of Beirut, but this one tall, lanky and with a definite American accent, showed up in the States. Turns out that no one wanted the unknown bands that my former client was touting. Agents wouldn't book 'em. Promoters wouldn't offer them concert dates. So the newly arrived brother started a booking agency of his own, mostly to book the key band his older brother managed and his younger brother drummed in. The booking agency member of the threesome did a remarkable job. Found clubs no one had ever heard of, recruited college kids to promote concerts, rented a dilapidated station wagon to carry the band and its equipment, ferreted out a string of fleabag motels with rates so low that even the fleas could afford them, and sent the unknown musical aggregation, fueled by a combination of nepotism and revolutionary zeal, on the road.

A few months later, I started hearing the band's music on the radio when I was motoring on business trips in distant places like Philadelphia. The whole phenomenon these brothers were concocting smelled like the newly sharpened blade of a cutting edge to me, and every few years I needed to keep my mind from turning into a moldering cheese by plunging into a new phenomenon (which generally was associated with new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things, and the unearthing of new subcultures), so I convinced the booking agent brother to follow in the footsteps of old family tradition and let me be his publicist.

At any rate, the band that started as a nothing ended up as one of the biggest superstar acts of the 80s??The Police (you may have heard of its lead singer??Sting). The revolutionary musical movement the manager/brother had been pontificating upon was punk, later renamed New Wave so it wouldn't scare elders out of their socks. And the younger brother who played drums eventually made so much money he could afford to indulge on a regular basis in his favorite punk pastime??polo.

But the real story isn't the rise of The Police, it's what I discovered about the three brothers (the manager, the booking agent and the drummer) I was working with as we went along. The story of their lives. And just what the hell they were doing growing up in Beirut to begin with.

Ian, the booking agent, lazing back in his Manhattan office chair with his sneakered feet on his desk and a joint in his hand (his usual way of doing business) one afternoon, began to give me the first clues. Yes, they'd grown up in Beirut. Their mother was an English anthropologist. Their American father, on the other hand, did... no one knew what. He'd spend six months away from home, reappear for a week or two, then off he'd go again, and nobody had the foggiest idea of where.

Well, when Ian was fifteen, this became a serious problem. He was going with a girl he was beginning to get really interested in. She dragged him home to meet her parents. They asked him what his father did for a living. He looked embarrassed, shuffled his feet, and had to confess that he didn't have the foggiest idea. On his father's next return engagement at the luxurious Lebanese homestead, Ian sat him down and put the question to him point blank. The old man gave him a piercing gaze, and said, with quiet, suspicious intensity, "who wants to know?" But he never answered the question.

Papa also pulled off another maneuver on this particular visit home. His oldest son, Miles, the one who would soon become the rock manager, groused interminably about how tight?fisted his father was and how no one in the family could ever buy all the luxuries in sight, as was the birthright of every Anglo?Saxon teenager in the Beirut of the '60s. So his father fished a large checkbook out of a locked drawer, shoved it at him, and said, "All right, from now on, you're in charge of the family finances."

From that moment, Miles, who was roughly 17, became a bigger miser than Scrooge. What's worse, he asserted his right to tell his younger brother Ian what he could and could not do. After all, he who holds the purse strings has the Power.

Ian couldn't stand living under the new tyranny. He ran away from home, finding refuge with a motorcycle gang who lived in the heart of the city, a kind of no?man's land straight out of the Mad Max movies. This is how he finally discovered what his father did to earn his daily bread.

Dad showed up back in town to track his errant son down. It turned out he was capable of doing this with a host of resources unavailable to most normal mortals, and he pinpointed Ian's location in an amount of time that was truly astonishing. When he had the wayward lad cornered, he sat him down for a chat. "Look, son," he said, "you can run away from home if you want, but you can't do it in the Middle East. It's too dangerous." Ian wanted to know why. After all, the Middle East was his home. He felt he could handle its ins and outs pretty well. "There are people who would love to get at you," said Dad, "in order to get at me." And that's when the pater familias let the cat out of the bag. He was the head of the CIA for the entire Middle East.

Now if most fathers who had no apparent way of making a living gave this story, you'd have to chalk it up as a cross between wishful thinking and lunatic fantasy. But in this case, papa wasn't kidding around. It turned out that he'd come from an old Southern family (whose proudest achievement in centuries past was the time one of the family entrepreneurs, leader of something called The Copeland Gang, had burned down the northern half of a town to distract the inhabitants so that while everyone in sight was passing waterbuckets from hand to hand he and his cronies could mosey over to the now?deserted south side and rob the local bank). I'd imagine there were some more respectable types perched in the family tree as well, like plantation owners and such, but the papa of my friends (also named Miles), was not the type to take to them as a role model. When he was finished with Ivy League college, instead of sitting on the porch, sipping mint juleps and clipping the coupons from his bonds, as was expected of him, he went off and became, of all conceivable horrors, a musician, playing trumpet with Harry James or some such famous bandleader of the time.

Then came World War Two, and he stumbled into the OSS??the military's intelligence division. Lord knows what he did there, but it must have been fairly impressive, because the OSS folks after the war were asked to put together a full?time intelligence agency, and he was drafted as one of its founding architects. The new agency, of course, was the CIA.

Well, eventually Miles Sr. went off to the Middle East to found a local bureau. His six?month absences from home were easily explained. He spent some of the time setting up an internal security operation for the state of Egypt. Then one night, after sitting around drinking with some spy?type friends, they all decided it would be quite a prank to overthrow the government of Iraq, which they promptly went out and did. A while later, they decided that Kwame Nkrumah had outlived his uselessness as head of Ghana and nudged him off his presidential throne as well. Lord knows what other manner of hell they raised.

But not everyone in the Mid?East was happy about it. Hence hanging out with a motorcycle gang in the middle of Beirut was not the safest thing young Ian could be doing at the moment. So papa gave him an airline ticket to London and told him to run away to someplace a little bit more secure.

Later, Ian and Miles, Jr. (the budding manager), who were both now in England together, were joined by little brother Stewart. The threesome got caught up in the punk fever. Ian and Stewart began to write song lyrics. Stewart recruited a band. And the rest is history??history smothered under piles of platinum records and cash.

Meanwhile, occasionally I'd get a call from one of the Copelands while I was handling the family publicity (landing them in The New Yorker, among other things) with an ominous message??"Dad wants to see you." Dad would insist that I pay him court at the Palm Room of the Plaza Hotel. He was a genial fellow with a florid face who enjoyed the occasional drink and positively rollicked in telling tales of his sons as toddlers sitting at the feet of witch?doctors in Africa learning the native rhythms and other such nonsense, none of which I believed. But in the world of the spy, the line between fantasy and reality apparently doesn't exist. When I asked him what he was doing for a living these days, he answered mysteriously, "international consulting." You have to wonder just what that meant.

At any rate, he was a great character, and he obviously still had some pretty potent contacts, even though he'd retired from the Agency. When The Police went on a worldwide tour, they arrived in Egypt on a Friday. Now Friday is the Islamic Sabbath??it's a holy day and the customs offices are all closed down. So when the several tons of sound and lighting equipment the boys needed for their performance the next night arrived, the gizmoes were locked in an empty shed with no way in hell to get at them and set them up in time for the next night's performance.

It was time to call Papa. That afternoon, Anwar Sadat's wife showed up with a small squadron of customs officials and sprang the equipment in ten minutes.

Last week Linda came to me with a few pages she had clipped out of The National Review (Linda's the Republican in the family, I'm the Democrat; I shudder with horror at Bill Buckley's name, she shudders with pleasure). It turns out that Miles Sr., the papa, had been a great friend of Buckley's, had just died, and the Review had eulogized him in one of the longest pieces dedicated to a passing man without a national name you've ever seen.

But the elder Copeland WAS an amazing man. And his sons showed their appreciation of his professional exploits in a rather peculiar way. Stewart named his band the Police. Ian named his booking agency the FBI (Frontier Booking International). Miles named his record company IRS. And when Miles branched out with separate management and film offices in LA, one was named LAPD and the other CCCP (the Russian acronym for the USSR).

Did I ever tell you the story of Miles Copeland's great, great grandfather? It's indispensable for any book on cowboys. Miles, as you know, is manager of the now?defunct Police. He also heads a record company called I.R.S., a management firm called L.A.P.D., and a film operation called C.C.C.P. (cyrillic for U.S.S.R.).

You may notice a certain theme running through these corporate titles. Turns out Miles' late dad, with whom I spent many a cheerful hour, was head of the Middle Eastern division of a little operation he helped co?found: the CIA.

Miles' pa informed me that undermining municipalities and other governmental bodies (he personally overthrew the government of Syria) is an old family tradition. Seems back in the mid 19th century some of the founding fathers of his clan had a little social group they called The Copeland Gang. It was a very?much?for?profit operation designed to put pablum in the mouths of generations to come.

One day, for example, the gang decided to rob the bank in some Alabama town. Here's how they went about it. They set fire to half the settlement??the half with no fiduciary institutions. The citizens, motivated by admirable public spirit, all came running with buckets to extinguish the flames. This left the business district empty. So the Copelands sauntered through the empty streets on their horses, moseyed into the First National Cash Pile of Alabama, blew the safe, and casually rode into the sunset, their saddlebags stuffed with wallet?sized presidential portraits, and nary a witness in sight.

It wasn't until that night, when the townsfolk had staunched the embers, mopped their brows, and thanked God that there were still three buildings left, that they looked at the old First National and discovered they were now all penniless.

prevost/may3.mss/disk51

As for Miles Copeland, I'm sorry to hear he's in financial straights. He and I worked together for fifteen years, and I got to like the guy a lot. But I've seen him go through this before. When he and I were first slogging in the trenches together, he owned a company called British Talent Management, handling Curved Air, The Climax Blues Band, Renaissance and a bunch of others. Then he decided on the grand maneuver that would take his bands from mere money?earners to superstardom. He'd package them together and send them on a worldwide tour. In the process, he lost his shirt, lost BTM, lost face, and literally disappeared from the record business for years. I tried to stay in touch, but it was hard keeping track of his locations.

Then, in 1978 or so he resurfaced in the New York offices of A&M with records by two bands no one had ever heard of??The Police and Squeeze??under his arm. On our way down the elevator together and up Lexington Avenue, Miles told me with maniacal excitement about the political agenda of this thing he was now a part of: the punk movement. The rest is multi?platinum history.

But in his later years, Miles had a strange hands?off approach that didn't bode well for his business. He'd pick up artists, give them a line about how he'd make their career via his Olympian contacts, then disappear to another continent, leaving the acts to languish. As for the record company, that was always Jay Boberg's baby. I liked Jay a lot, and I think the feeling was mutual. But his track record was sort of hit?and?miss.

By the way, not sending checks??as Miles did to you when he picked up the Def Zep contract?? is a common Copeland practice when he's running out of funds. Your theory of why he's hanging on to the band sounds very much on target. But your likelihood of ever seeing a penny may be very, very slim. Miles liked me, yet when BTM went out of business he left me dangling with thousands of dollars unpaid for services rendered.

But I threw my lot in with him again when he resurfaced. I did it out of loyalty and a genuine joy that he'd emerged from beneath the ooze. What's more, he was always loyal to me.

By the way, there IS a way to function in the music business and still come out alive. It's called publishing. Which means you own a big piece of somebody's songs and collect all the pennies, nickels and dimes that come rolling in every time the music is played on radio, television, a jukebox, or sold on CD, LP or tape. Well, actually, you hire underlings to collect the coins. You just read the bank statement at the end of the year. It is, as you can tell, an extremely demanding business. I mean, how in the world do you figure out to do while you're waiting for the annual report?

How do I know about this racket? Once upon a time this elderly gentleman named George Pincus took me out to lunch. He was charming and a fount of wisdom. He also radiated a peculiar glow of inner contentment. At first I thought his ribs were plated with radium. But it turned out there was another cause for his interior light: he was a music publisher.

Back in the early sixties he had picked up some songs from this scruffy foursome of unknowns in England. Then the unknowns had gotten moderately famous??apparently as a result of their trendsetting haircuts??and George Pincus had become very wealthy. All this despite the fact that the band had had the bad taste to name itself after a rather repulsive family of insects, specifically beatles.

Mr. Pincus sat back in his booth after the expensive meal he had payed for with an infinitesimal fraction of his pocket change and said, "Son, do you want to know the secret of a long life? Publishing. Publishing, publishing, publishing."

So, if you are like George Pincus, you will probably live to be 90. Plus, you may well end up rich. You may even become Jewish. Stranger things have been known to happen.

Kaufman/disk48/mar8

Having lunch with Mick Jagger's homosexual assistant Tony King five years ago was an experience I'll never forget. He was utterly charming, let down his hair (carefully keeping it out of his soup), and told me the whole story of his life, not holding against me the fact that I'm straight. The hard part was the fact that he was one of the last of the gay warriors on a battlefield strewn with fallen comrades. His world had been nearly wiped clean of friends. They'd all been killed by AIDs.

When Zohn Ardman, who'd been Bill Graham's publicist for eons, and who'd had me over to his Victorian house in SF and taken Linda and me roller skating in the local park, died of this disgusting plague, I was not happy. Actually, I wasn't too pleased when Bill Graham bought the farm either. He isn't the rural type.

langsam/apr5/disk49

You paid $400 for a pasteup? There are cheaper ways of doing this. Down on 23rd Street is a little place called the School of Visual Arts. Every would?be commercial artist or wannabe advertising art director in the nation goes there. So it's riddled with untapped talent. These kids are strapped for money. And the first thing they learn in How To Sellout 101 is making pasteups and mechanicals.

So call SVA, tell them you've got work for a student interested in doing mailers, and they'll send you bright young things carrying portfolios. Pick the kid you like the best (or whose work appeals to you, whichever you prefer), and work out a price structure. Your artwork will now cost a small fraction of what whoever you're using now is charging.

Next, the question of screening photos. If you use Midwest Photo (or any other postcard house, for that matter), you don't need a screen. That applies whether the photo is black and white or color. The only time you need screening is when the photo has not been previously reproduced in a newspaper or magazine and you're using a printing press, rather than the photographic?reproduction techniques the postcard folks employ. Photos that appear in newspapers and magazines have already BEEN screened. To screen them a second time not only tosses money out the window, it creates moiree patterns on the artwork. These may be pretty if you're on acid, but if your drug of choice is coffee, cocaine, or Sprite, they really mess things up. You probably know all this without my telling you, so feel free to perforate me with .22 caliber pellets the next time you catch a glimpse of me. (A clue: I'll be in hiding.)

As for an industry list, get out the Billboard Annual and/or The Yellow Pages of Rock and start typing into your computer. Feed in managers (they make all the major decisions about PR firms), record company PR heads, and, if you feel like it, some record company presidents. Set it up on the machine so the gadget will print the data out on self?stick labels. (I know how to do this on our computers, but haven't the foggiest idea of how to accomplish it on yours. What is the computer you're using, anyway?)

You can charge your client for sending the mailer to the press. That's a legitimate expense. But you'll have to absorb the cost of shipping this nonsense to industry folks yourself. It's part of the process of dredging up business.

By the way, it takes a steady stream of colorful, prestige?magazine?derived mailers over a year or two to get yourself established in people's minds. I think folks ignored our HBO mailings for quite a while. But eventually it got to the point where I'd walk into an office at Motown or at Tommy Mottola World Headquarters and some high?ranking secretary would have our whole collection of color pieces up on her bulletin board where her boss was exposed to them sixteen times a day. Because our flashy little piece of self?advertising had pictures of hot folks like Prince, Michael Jackson and our mutual former client Billy Idol, they were collectors' items. Of course, it took about ten years of work before we were able to SNAG clients like this. And half the time we had to make them from scratch. Joan Jett, Billy Idol, Prince and a whole lot of others were nowhere near cover material when we first latched on to them. In fact, Joan didn't even have a record company contract.

But your press stuff would probably get more coverage and more readers if it were broken down so there's just one news item per release, and if you concentrated on the stuff that's hot enough to run as a column item.

When I was a magazine editor, I'd get a stack of mail about five inches high every day. Needless to say, I had to rip through it at lightning speed. I didn't have time to read newsletters with fifteen items in them (though these are the very newsletters I'd suspect a fan club would enjoy).

I quickly learned that the best material came from Solters & Roskin (Friedman wasn't yet part of the triumvirate...in fact, I don't even know who this mysterious Friedman person is). Their press releases were generally one?page long, double?spaced (the theory, as you probably have known for centuries, is that a double?spaced press release allows someone who wants to slot your material into his or her column to edit it). S&R press releases were genuine news, or at least they read as if they were. When I finished perusing one, which didn't take more than a few seconds, I felt either genuinely informed, or knew I had something I could use in my rag.

Bloom press releases were modeled on the Solters & Roskin format...with one minor modification. They generally had a punch line or a strong quote at the end. This apparently worked. The releases were picked up verbatim all over the country. Last time I listened to Casey Kasem (about three years ago), he was still reading antique Howard Bloom Organization press releases about REO Speedwagon instead of whatever garbage Mitchell Schneider, who'd had the band for about four years by then, was sending out.

The fact that Skid Row is doing a Ramones song, and the quote that Rachel Bolan drooled about how the Ramones are G?d is a news item. It deserves a release to itself. So is the one about Olympic Gold?winner Donna Weinbrecht. THESE ARE COLUMN DYNAMITE.

OK, here's the last word of ersatz wisdom, and you really have to promise you won't hate me for this, or I'll throw myself off the roof, the Sanitation Department will ticket my mangled remains as litter, and the garbage men will refuse to take me away because I haven't been properly plastic?bagged and placed in the appropriate recycling bin (the one for "slightly used internal organs").

Be vicious on yourself. Don't let a single item that could be regarded as trivial out of your wordprocessor. If journalists know that every Langsam release will contain a piece of meat, they'll open the envelope. If they suspect they're in for four single?spaced pages where the protein and blood are buried in fluff, they'll toss the packet without a glance at its contents.

for rock.bk2

[October 22, 1989] to: Janet Oestereich Bernstein

Dear Janet,

Your letters are a delight. I love your style. Somehow, you even make changing a light bulb into entertainment.

First, for your p.s. about the bar code on our envelopes. There's a bar code on our envelopes? I hadn't the foggiest idea it was there. I guess it means we could ring up our mail on a cash register, if we had one.

As to my imminent demise from terminal cynicism. Our recent lettristic pas de deux (God, is that how you spell it?) concerned a subject that always brings out the sneer in me??The Rolling Stones. The first and only concert of theirs I ever attended left me totally cold. I couldn't believe anyone would actually pay money for the privilege (I was a magazine editor at the time and got my tickets for free, but would far rather have had the evening to myself. I felt like sending Mick a bill for wasting my time.)

Then, a few years ago, Mick was about to put out a solo album. I was one of the publicists his assistant interviewed. His assistant, whom I'd known from a distance for some years, turned out to be absolutely charming, and the occasion gave us an excuse for a lunch or two I found fascinating. He's gay, very attractive, and carries himself well, but is one of those people who can be queenishly difficult??snapping, snarling, vicious, catty. Somehow, during these supposed business sessions he let down his defenses, poured out the story of his life, which turned out to be fascinating, opened up about the agony he was going through as his friends died of AIDS, etc. For years, the real pleasure of doing publicity had been the entree it gave into people's minds. Like a psychotherapist, I had carte blanche to probe around in the hidden corners of my clients' psyches, pulling out stories they'd never told anyone before. Somehow, in the last few years of doing publicity, though, this pleasure had ebbed. It wasn't that I stopped getting enjoyment out of visiting the hidden corners of people's minds. It was that, for some reason, I wasn't getting to visit those corners anymore. God knows what the reason was.

So the revelatory sessions with this guy were an absolute pleasure??all the more so because I was (and hopefully still am) heterosexual, he knew it, and he was letting me into his private world nonetheless.

But behind these meetings lay a shadow: the possibility that I might be chosen to handle Mick's press. Why a shadow? After all, that's what I was there for, right? As a businessman, I should want an extra client, especially the kind of high prestige, high visibility client that would help attract extra business. But the fact remains that the last thing in the world I wanted was to land this client. For one thing, it was in my last year or so of doing press, and I no longer looked forward to any new client with much eagerness. I really wanted out so I could spend more time on my book writing.

But I wanted to avoid Mick even more than most. His first solo album had been second rate. I figured his second solo effort would be more of the same. The record, I was sure, would not do well commercially. And, as it failed to live up to expectations, anyone involved with promoting it would be blamed for its failure. (A client very seldom blames himself.) What's more, Mick had a reputation for being difficult, demanding, even capricious. For years, I'd had a reputation for being able to handle demanding clients more easily than anyone else in the business. But I wasn't willing to throw my whole self into it anymore. I wanted to put in my 75 hours a week, and let it go at that.

To top it all off, I loathed Mick's participation in the lifestyle of the ultra?rich and the semi?aristocratic. (When I showed up for my regular visits at Lionel Richie's seven?million dollar house in LA, with its Jaguars, Rolls Royces and Mercedes in the driveway, its small squadron of servants, etc., I simply threw my backpack into a corner, marched into the dining room where executive sessions were about to go on, and was accepted with considerable respect. No one objected to my eccentric lifestyle. I doubted that would be the case with Mr. Mick.) In the end, I needn't have worried. Jagger's record company public relations department head waged a very successful effort to keep the project in house. I was relieved.

The thing was not a complete waste of time. Aside from the sessions with his assistants, I'd run out to buy a biography of Jagger and had plowed through the whole thing. From it, I managed to construct an essay on what Mick, St. Augustine, and a restless young lady ape have in common, an essay that promises to play a pivotal role in my next book.

So there you have it. Mick brings out the cynic in me. Where he's not concerned, though, I probably have more optimism than at most of the previous points in my life.

Meanwhile, what is Jake going to do next? Will Ann pull out of her "toxic mother" phase? (Noelle, my daughter, still hasn't, and she's over 30. Come to think of it, Henry, my brother, hasn't, and he's over 40!) Did the fluorescent fixture ever get fixed? And, finally, how can I learn to write with your charm?

Much affection??

Howard

[October 22, 1989] to: Janet Oestereich Bernstein

Dear Janet,

Your letters are a delight. I love your style. Somehow, you even make changing a light bulb into entertainment.

First, for your p.s. about the bar code on our envelopes. There's a bar code on our envelopes? I hadn't the foggiest idea it was there. I guess it means we could ring up our mail on a cash register, if we had one.

As to my imminent demise from terminal cynicism. Our recent lettristic pas de deux (God, is that how you spell it?) concerned a subject that always brings out the sneer in me??The Rolling Stones. The first and only concert of theirs I ever attended left me totally cold. I couldn't believe anyone would actually pay money for the privilege (I was a magazine editor at the time and got my tickets for free, but would far rather have had the evening to myself. I felt like sending Mick a bill for wasting my time.)

Then, a few years ago, Mick was about to put out a solo album. I was one of the publicists his assistant interviewed. His assistant, whom I'd known from a distance for some years, turned out to be absolutely charming, and the occasion gave us an excuse for a lunch or two I found fascinating. He's gay, very attractive, and carries himself well, but is one of those people who can be queenishly difficult??snapping, snarling, vicious, catty. Somehow, during these supposed business sessions he let down his defenses, poured out the story of his life, which turned out to be fascinating, opened up about the agony he was going through as his friends died of AIDS, etc. For years, the real pleasure of doing publicity had been the entree it gave into people's minds. Like a psychotherapist, I had carte blanche to probe around in the hidden corners of my clients' psyches, pulling out stories they'd never told anyone before. Somehow, in the last few years of doing publicity, though, this pleasure had ebbed. It wasn't that I stopped getting enjoyment out of visiting the hidden corners of people's minds. It was that, for some reason, I wasn't getting to visit those corners anymore. God knows what the reason was.

So the revelatory sessions with this guy were an absolute pleasure??all the more so because I was (and hopefully still am) heterosexual, he knew it, and he was letting me into his private world nonetheless.

But behind these meetings lay a shadow: the possibility that I might be chosen to handle Mick's press. Why a shadow? After all, that's what I was there for, right? As a businessman, I should want an extra client, especially the kind of high prestige, high visibility client that would help attract extra business. But the fact remains that the last thing in the world I wanted was to land this client. For one thing, it was in my last year or so of doing press, and I no longer looked forward to any new client with much eagerness. I really wanted out so I could spend more time on my book writing.

But I wanted to avoid Mick even more than most. His first solo album had been second rate. I figured his second solo effort would be more of the same. The record, I was sure, would not do well commercially. And, as it failed to live up to expectations, anyone involved with promoting it would be blamed for its failure. (A client very seldom blames himself.) What's more, Mick had a reputation for being difficult, demanding, even capricious. For years, I'd had a reputation for being able to handle demanding clients more easily than anyone else in the business. But I wasn't willing to throw my whole self into it anymore. I wanted to put in my 75 hours a week, and let it go at that.

To top it all off, I loathed Mick's participation in the lifestyle of the ultra?rich and the semi?aristocratic. (When I showed up for my regular visits at Lionel Richie's seven?million dollar house in LA, with its Jaguars, Rolls Royces and Mercedes in the driveway, its small squadron of servants, etc., I simply threw my backpack into a corner, marched into the dining room where executive sessions were about to go on, and was accepted with considerable respect. No one objected to my eccentric lifestyle. I doubted that would be the case with Mr. Mick.) In the end, I needn't have worried. Jagger's record company public relations department head waged a very successful effort to keep the project in house. I was relieved.

The thing was not a complete waste of time. Aside from the sessions with his assistants, I'd run out to buy a biography of Jagger and had plowed through the whole thing. From it, I managed to construct an essay on what Mick, St. Augustine, and a restless young lady ape have in common, an essay that promises to play a pivotal role in my next book.

So there you have it. Mick brings out the cynic in me. Where he's not concerned, though, I probably have more optimism than at most of the previous points in my life.

kaufman/disk51/may3

I LOVE politics. One of my major frustrations at the HBO was that none of my publicists seemed to even know how to spell the word, much less have any idea of what it meant. Susan Blond once said something very smart (which isn't surprising given her intelligence level): "To be a good publicist, you have to have a good knowledge of just about everything in the world." My staff seemed to think that all you needed was a little knowledge of rock and roll. Big mistake. Without general knowledge, you can't generate angles. So the fact that you're cognizant of more than beats per minute helps explain why you're one of the few people on the planet to master the angle business.

langsam/may3/disk51

Ah, Wendy Carlos. How well I remember him/her. Larry Fast, whom I love dearly, had something to do with ___ (fill in the sex of your choice) for a while.

I always preferred Holly Woodlawn. He was a spectacular queen, gorgeous and utterly charming. It was much less confusing dealing with someone you knew was actually male. But maybe I'm just old fashioned.

Did you know (of course you did) that Mark Bolan was a nice Jewish boy? His father operated a vegetable push?cart and lived in the fabled hovel of the poor, London's East End. This would have made him cockney, it it weren't for his Yiddisha roots. This, by the way, explains why poor Mark had a tendency to bloat up like an eggplant. Vegetables ran in the family. His mother asked them to walk, and wipe their feet at the door, but they never listened. As for why his father operated a pushcart, the answer is simple. The instructions for every other kind of vehicle were written in Japanese.

I was very sad when the poor man was pureed in an auto accident. I LOVE driving, but internal combustion vehicles impress me as the most dangerous inventions since the Uzi.

Danny Goldberg at Atlantic Records! What a turn of events. No one can say he hasn't worked hard at building his career. Now if he'd just done as well with his artists and his record company. Though maybe he's had more success since I stopped following music three years ago. Like, didn't he manage Bonnie Raitt and Sheena Easton when they started cleaning up? Washing bathrooms can make an artist a fortune these days.

So Marilyn Laverty is getting business by claiming she was Bruce Springsteen's publicist. That'd be like me claiming I was the Beatles publicist because I did the 20th anniversary of their arrival in America. I mean, Springsteen was not exactly unknown when Marilyn took charge of the PR department at CBS. It reminds me of the huffy way in which Elaine Schock claims to have been Dylan's publicist. As if she didn't notice that Dylan became a legend when she was still in diapers, and that the man is living off his past, not his present. (Did you know old Bob's daughter is married to Peter Himmelman, a nice Ba'al Tshuvah [see, you're teaching me the vocabulary] who's a friend of my cousin Debbie? Good musician, too. And the day he asked if we could have lunch [before I was stricken with my bubonic bamboozlement], he was an absolute pleasure.)

The stories of the Ramones' cheapnesses and unreliabilities are ghastly. As for why the Ramones are so cheap, did I tell you the tale of the day Seymour Stein and his wife Linda signed them? In those years, the Steins and the Mouse (my adorable wife) and I were close. They took us out to dinner. And Linda spent the whole night cackling about the deal they'd just pulled off. They'd gotten this absolutely fabulous band for Sire, and they'd managed the whole thing for a pittance. The advance, I think, was $5,000. Meanwhile, when they took us back to their apartment, Seymour got on the phone with Elton John to negotiate the purchase of some $150,000 piece of art nouveau.

+ten most important records of the 20th century

Sorry, I just hit the send button by accident. In case it didn't get to you, here are the first four on the list, which I'll now attempt to complee. Howard Bloom Enrico Caruso. Red Seal Records??1902??the first record to sell over a million copies. In fact, it sold five million. Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" 1911??the first record by a white composer to popularize a black music form and turn it into a rage. Original Dixieland Band. 1917??took the style developed by black musicians in the red?light district of New Orleans and injected into the popular culture. Paul Whiteman. 1920??introduced the form of blander jazz to which debutantes and others would dance, much to their parents' disapproval, thus turning the twenties into what F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed "The Jazz Age." Whiteman had the sagacity to hire black arrangers, among them: Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong's Hot Five 1925??established the musical vocabulary of the Dixieland soloist. Armstrong then went on to become one of the first black superstars. George Gershwin. "Rhapsody In Blue." 1924. Paul Whiteman, now known as "the King of Jazz," commissioned Gershwin to write a jazz composition in a classical style. The resulting masterpiece was debuted by Whiteman's band at New York's Aeolian Concert Hall, thus giving respectability to a music whose name had originally referred to a liquid which flowed in copious amounts at the whorehouses where geniuses like Jellyroll Morton, the pianist, played. The liquid in question was semen??Jiss, in the lingo of the time. By the way, Morton's name, Jellyroll, also spoke sweetly of the trade which payed him for his artistry. Jellyroll was slang the female labia and vagina, preferably served al dente. Laura??original soundtrack recording. 1944. This was one of many films whose soundtracks were serious pieces of music, and whose recordings stood on their own. Though the original soundtrack by David Raskin had no lyrics, the main theme was turned into a hit single with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. My father hummed this tune whenever he drove my mother, brother, and I on trips from Buffalo, New York, to St. Petersberg, Florida, to the Grand Canyon, the the Canadian Rockies, or to Mexico in our rocket?ship?designe blue Fraser automobile. And my father had damned good taste in music. The Encyclopedia of Jazz??RCA Records (12 album set). In my early teens I'd stack six of these records at a time on the spindle of my turntable and play them day and night, even listening to them while I slept. The whispered of freedom, the freedom to take flight from mundanity and to improvise with joy and creativity in the very act of life. Elvis Presley. "Heartbreak Hotel." RCA Records. 1954. Ok, let's get this straight. I HATED this record. All the guys in black leather jackets with slicked back ducktails who loved it loathed me and occasionally demonstrated that fact with fist?power. The two girls who had seemed interested in me went into a sudden swoon of fandom and found their Elvis Presley lunchpails an attraction so irresistable that I became the invisible man in their lives. "So much for romance, so much for love" as the Everly Brothers would later put it. Elvis had totally hound?dogged me. But he put a new kind of oomph into music which I hope will never die. He put the rock in rock and roll. The Beatles. The White Album. 1968. "I Wannna Hold Your Hand" had been a bubblegum promise of something new to come, something that would give our generation, the generation of the sixties, an identity. But the White Album was so rich, so full of poetry, so full of the bizarre turned to mystery and delight, that it validated the madness in our souls and helped each of us blaze in his or her own sweet, delicious, or painful way. There are lots more??albums from Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson("Beat It"), The Eagles("Hotel California"), The Rolling Stones (Let It Bleed), Joan Jett, Prince ("Purple Rain"), and tons of others. Most important, this was the first full decade which has left its music, in the voices of those who performed and often of those who composed it, in a form other generations will be able to hear. This was the onramp to the musical recordings??or whatever they may be technologically??of a millenium whose ancesters can sing and dance for them on video or cd whenever they call us forth to energize them, educate them, or give them something to absorb, reinvent, and spit back in our face in that form of creativity rock and roll once epitomized, rebellion of the richest and most inventive kind

I do love good
rock and
roll.
hb: moi aussi, cit. Bob Seger, the Eagles, Aerosmith, AC/DC. strange tastes, eh? I do love Beethoven hb: me too. what a stormily emotional bastard he was, what a gloriously angry crank. the fury in his music is divine. that anger is what you'll hear in the voices of all the rock and rollers I've just mentioned. in the voice of billy joel too when he was writing his best songs, his songs of anger at his wife, Elizabeth. (yes, I worked with bily and had breakfast with him the morning after he met a woman who changed his whole notion of womanhood. he couldn't wait to explain it. it confused and awed him--that a woman could be not just a chick but a human with an intelligence as rich as his own. he showed me the notebook full of lyrics he'd written between the time he'd said good night to her--2 am--and the time he said hello to me--10:30. they were the worst lyrics he'd ever penned. the album he put them on sold 4 milion copies. the woman? he married her. Christy Brinkley.

Hb: to Marcel Roele 6/14/01 Marcel--I can definitely get Joan Jett to show up in this bedroom for a brainstorming session in front of your cameras if we can fit it into her tour schedule. Joan is like family. Her manager, Kenny Laguna (my manager now as well) worked side by side to build Joan's career from rejection by 23 record companies up to double platinum. Her rise was important for more than just show business reasons. Joan was a powerful, self-motivated, independent woman in the late 70s, a time when the number of working mothers was shifting from a minority to a majority in the US. I suspect the same demographic shift was occurring in Europe as well. Until then, girls had grown up with housewives in frilly skirts as mothers and role models. Only their fathers put on pants in the morning and went to the office. Now, suddenly, both mom and dad were putting on trousers or pants suits and going off to work. Young girls were left in confusion about their own roles. They had no media models who reflected the new, masculinized reality of female life. Joan was that role model incarnate, and I deliberately focused on that in her public identity as well. The morning I sat with Joan in her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and explained to her what she was accomplishing for millions of others simply by being herself was an extraordinary occasion. Sociology and rock music met the Global Brain--and changed its mind a bit. Is Joan sufficiently well-known in Holland to get our point across? Howard --

Marcel Roele 6/15/01<<Would it be convenient if we'd visit you from August 3 to 7? We're flexible, but let us know. hb: I've just blocked out those dates in the calendar, setting them aside for you. mr: I was a boy in high school when Joan Jett became famous in the Netherlands and must admit that I was very shallow at that time - Joan didn't strike me as an icon of working mumhood, but rather as dead sexy hb: when I was the one who chose photos, there was a simple rule of thumb. each picture had to be something a boy between the age of 12 and 19 could masturbate to. it may sound crude, but it's true. and it contributes more than we generally confess to the lives of adolescent boys. the icons you imprint on sexually become a permanent part of your emotional makeup. they retain a power--for good, for bad, or merely for pleasure and pain--over the adults of an entire generation. mr: (but that's also a manifestation of the global brain - if you prefer a female living thousands of miles away over girls next door). hb: good point. mr: I can assure you that both Jett and Mellencamp are household names in the Netherlands at least for people of my generation and/or ten years older/younger.

the publicist in Spinal Tap is based on the publicist for Spinal Tap--Bobby Cowan, an old friend who acted as my LA arm during the time the movie was being made. (I later established my own LA office.) The musical consultant on the film was Derek Sutton, on whose exploits many an episode was based. Derek and I first got to know each other when Derek was managing Jethro Tull, Robin Trower, and Procol Harum and I was covering those bands for the rock magazine I edited, Circus. Bobby was Derek's publicist at the time. Derek remains one of my closest friends to this very day. Meanwhile the film was made by National Lampoon people. My art studio--Cloud Studio--art directed the first seven issues of the National Lampoon. All these crossed connections are beginning to make me feel like the Forest Gump of the 70s and 80s.

Oh, by the way, I've only seen Spinal Tap twice. Which is way below the national average.
_________
that fumbling beast with 88 teeth (the phrase Billy Joel used when complaining about how painful songwriting is for him...did I tell you about the morning we were having brunch and he needed ever so badly to talk about this woman he'd met the night before, a woman who defied all his stereotypes of what women are [his stereotypes were EXTRAORDINARILY narrow]. he shoved a student notebook across the table to show me that for the first ime in his life, instead of agonizing over each song for months, he'd written an entire lp worth of lyrics in two hours. the album was the worst he ever made, but it sold four million. the woman was Christie Brinkley.)

In a message dated 8/6/01 9:34:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time, alex writes: Howard: did you see press coverage of MTV's 20th birthday party last week? It featured Joan Jett and Billy Idol. Further proof that your fear of the music industry passing you by are not so :) Joan (Jett) was here on the Bloom bed taping the tv special based on Global Brain with me the day after the 20th birthday bash and told me a bit about it. but i didn't realize that Billy was part of it too. Lord, Alex, I wonder how his drug problems are. I actually recruited his parents to fight them with me for a year. I suspect this was one battle I lost. His parents wanted me to manage billy and he was into it too, but I didn't feel it was something I had the time and inclination to do. I was approaching the time for writing up my own theories and couldn't put in the 17-hours-a-day of focus on billy's career and his humanity that would have been required. The managers who grabbed Billy felt that cocaine was ok as a recreational drug and didn't mind seeing a bit of it around. my impression was that with young William Broad, there would probably never be such a thing as "just a bit" of "recreational" cocaine. Howard
ps I told joan about the year Warners decided to do some sort of music video cable channel and hired someone who took me out to lunch every tuesday to brainstorm ideas for the upcoming enterprise. I also confessed with some dismay that I didn't think any of my ideas had proven useful. Joan said "wrong," and pointed out that her video was one of the first eight used to launch the resulting product. Said Kenny Laguna, Joan's manager and mine, Joan became MTV's female Elvis Presley. Whether I had anything to do with that is very hard to say.
Did you have anything to do with the Aerosmith/Run DMC collaboration? :) hb: yes. and I could have made sure that INXS tour strategy took them straight to the top. tour strategy was at the very heart of what I did to build billy idol, joan jett, and john mellencamp. since managers were supposed to know tour strategy but didn't, i handled that for them, even convincing the bands to tour when it was necessary but when no one else on the team--including the manager--could persuade the artists to abandon their living rooms and go out on the road.
See the \newpara\joan jett* file

Alex burns & hb 0810-01 > hb: yes. ironically, my friend and antagonist John Mellencamp, the > jacksons, and, in all probability, Prince. maybe kristin scott thomas, > > too--at least i hope. surely there must be others!!!???? AB: Well, I would have guessed Mellencamp. Prince's output is amazing: he averages a new song everyday, and the rumors are that he has thousands of session hours and unreleased material in the Paisley Park archives. hb: yup, he and Elton John suffer from hyper creativity. They produce so much music it would glut the public and drag their fame into the dust. So they have to be sneaky. In Prince's case, he used to hide it behind the bands he created. They were Trojan horses for his music. The Time, one of the first of his attempts at this, disappointed him. It turned out they were arch music makers themselves and didn't need to play his stuff. That must have been a bitter pill to swallow. I suspect Prince aches with his musical pregnancy and needs the release of birth. The release of recording and performance. ab: I've heard stories that when he tours, it's not uncommon for him and his band entourage to go to a club afterwards and play for another 3 hours. hb: music is literally Prince's language, his way of communicating to his fellow human beings. Notes pour out of him the way words pour out of me. Our similarities, strange as it sounds, is what gave us a nearly psychic alchemy. ab: With that kind of "work ethic", I'm not surprised he ended up working with you :) hb: I think you've just perceived a great deal more than I've seen until now. ab: Speaking of Spinal Tap, the English team behind "The Young Ones" (an early 1980s series) once put out an hilarious album as "Bad News", a fake heavy metal band (their songs skewered Queen, Led Zeppelin and Status Quo), complete with "in-studio" dialogue and guitar solos by Queen's Brian May. hb: did you know that before joining Queen, Brian May got his degree in astronomy and did his thesis on intergalactic dust clouds. so you can probably guess which was my favorite member of the band when we worked together. Howard Very, very funny: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000032RP/ hb: amazing. and it's selling well to this very day!!!!! oh, by the way, I just bought a four-cd boxed set of all Tom Lehrer's work to play to Di. Do you know his stuff? it's hilarious too.
(A sample song lyric: "'Once they go up
Who cares where they come down
That's not my department,'
Says Werner Von Braun.")
Alex Burns and hb 8/10/01 > hb: music is literally Prince's language, his way of communicating to > his fellow human beings. Notes pour out of him the way words pour out > of me. Our similarities, strange as it sounds, are what gave us a > nearly psychic alchemy. AB: So you established enough rapport to communicate across music/word boundaries? hb: it was beyond belief. his managers literally suspected I was a psychic. They used me over and over again to read Prince's mind. I'm not kidding. But it was a matter of highly-tuned empathy and a lot of study, not anything supernatural. > ab: With that kind of "work ethic", I'm not > surprised he ended up working with you :) > > hb: I think you've just perceived a great deal more than I've seen > until now. AB: Hmm, intriguing. You're definately working in the _Daimonic_ tradition (Carl Jung, James Hillman, Thomas Moore, Raghavan Iyer: the subjective approach to the Subjective Universe, which you then interlink with your scientific research). hb: some amazing insights into why I had "visions," "channeling," "mind-reading," and other psychic-style abilities came a few days ago from the work I did with the Dutch tv folks on the special for Global Brain. They wanted me to give examples from the sports world of how parts of the brain that consciousness never knows carry out lightning calculations of the most astonishing sort in the minds of championship athletes. Marco Van Basten, the Dutch soccer star, was able to calculate in a microsecond the trajectory of the ball, the position of all the players on the field, the position of the goalie, and what each twist of the goalie's face and muscles revealed about what spots in the goal he'd be unable to defend. At the same instant Van Basten's non-verbal brain was able to handle terrabits of coordination between the millions of cells of muscle and nerve needed to kick the ball in a strategically perfect manner. That much the Dutch had figured out for themselves. The point I tried to make was that it had taken decades of conscious application of will to get Van Basten's muscles and brain so precisely practiced that these macrocalculations could take place in a flash. Then it hit me. The answer to a mystery. I'd never been able to figure out how, when Joan Jett's manager, Kenny Laguna, had visited my office, my brain had coughed up an instant vision of how to take her to the top. She'd been turned down by 23 record companies and Kenny had no management experience at all. So theoretically she should have been an unlikely candidate for stardom. But, Alex, I could see her as a star, predict the timeframe--2 years--and had a feel for every step she'd have to take along the way. You know the story. I sat Kenny down, gave him a two-hour lecture on the obstacles he'd encounter along the way--humongous and dastardly hazards--then told him that if he worked 17 hour days seven days a week and did everything I told him to do I'd deliver him a star in two years. My calculation was a tad inaccurate. Joan was number one on the record charts with a double-platinum album in eighteen months. But the whole vision had flared up in a microsecond. So had other strategic "visions" that were used to create longterm strategies and guide us through daily twists and turns while building the careers of Billy Idol, John Mellencamp, and a bunch of others. Then there was the weird ability to read Prince's mind from a distance of 1,500 miles after not seeing him for six months. How does one account for that? Here's the insight that came from working with Fons de Poel and Marcel Roele last week. These "supernormal" skills were Marco-van-Basten-style insta-maneuvers based on huge amounts of study. I'd spent years taking rock careers apart, applying correlational studies to extract the secrets of success, learning to predict four months in advance what albums would be on top of the charts, then finding out why the albums showed the patterns of sales I'd absorbed, and finally befriending booking agents, taking those with the most eager minds out to dinner so we could analyze the strategic errors of rockers who were almost-making-it-but-not-quite and so we could reverse engineer the tricks that had taken other artists to greatness. On top of that, I learned lessons on touring strategy from managers who were wizards at it. By the time Joan walked into my office, I was ripe, trained, practiced, and pre-rehearsed for an instant vision. As for the alleged mind reading--I'd been studying my own emotions and those of others since the age of thirteen, had begun to take courses in psychology at sixteen, had learned a lot of practical lessons in human nuance from the seven therapists who'd tried to help me out, had turned down four fellowships in clinical psych, had spent my hitchhiking-and-riding-the-rails years learning to extract the life story from every driver who picked me up and every hobo I met, then had honed the skill of life-story grabbing and of applying empathy to fill in the blanks during years as a journalist. When I sat down with Kenny Loggins at his home in Santa Barbara and told him he was terrified of a woman and wanted to rocket away from her at 200 miles an hour, preferably in a Lamborghini, he was startled as hell and blurted, "Who told you about the problems I'm having with my wife." But it wasn't telepathy. It came from applying a great deal of training--including empathetic calisthenics--to his body of work. It came from a month of studying his lyrics, being utterly baffled by them, returning to them over and over again, then finally rearranging the stanzas like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Feeling out the things that Maurice White, founder of Earth, Wind, & Fire, never told his managers was a matter of reading the meaning of the graphics on his album covers. Getting what Styx' vocalist and songwriter Dennis de Young was really trying to say in his albums also involved a month of puzzling out the lyrics and the album graphics...then interviewing him for three days straight. By the way, I was not able to read Prince's mind in a vacuum. His managers would usually send (in great secrecy) a sheet of his upcoming lyrics, or let me visit the set where Purple Rain was being made (a trip on which I never got to talk to Prince--but the details were all there to read), or even to see a semi-finished video of Under The Cherry Moon before I'd give them the Swami act. I'm posting this to paleopsych because our ability to tune ourselves to the frequencies of others has a lot of scientific meanings. It's an example of the way we integrate socially. It's the equivalent of the electrons I was talking about last night--electrons that probably participate in a wave by simply ooching back and forth a tiny bit and passing their movement on to the unstable electrons circling atoms adjacent to them. We do that as humans. Watching news reports last night on the violence in Israel and Macedonia it became obvious that we humans easily pass anger to one another--the sort of righteous anger over martyred fellow-members of our group that leads to mass violence and a breakdown of society. We do it in ways that very much mirror the passage of a sea wave's motion from one gently rolling molecule to the next one down the line. We can easily ignite with a shared rage because we have common instincts, common brains, common genes, common emotional capacities, and we resonate easily to our neighbors' frequencies. Music synchronizes us. So do rituals, propaganda, and news reports. A deep empathic core causes us to congeal, to come together in large scale social enterprises as automatically as termites do when building a mound of enormous size and complexity. When you tap that core consciously, what you achieve can look like outright telepathy.
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In a message dated 8/20/01 1:25:05 PM Eastern Daylight Time, DKenny2222 writes: very interesting. now i'm curious - why did you and prince "split up" - or did the relationship just end when you left the business? he had a fear of men, which he overcame enough to allow me into his life for roughly five years. then it closed in again, and though I continued to be his interpreter, he retreated within his shell and we lost contact. prince can relate to women, but men frighten him. in 1987 he changed direction, dove into christianity, and began severing relationships to those outside the tiny community of chosen people he led in Minneapolis. I was one of those severed. One result was a plunge in his popularity and in the accessibility (and success) of his music. love--Howard
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Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes Date: 8/22/01 2:02:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: pjricherson To: ('Howard Bloom') Howard, The trick, I think, is to account for the unstable outbreak dynamics of pastoral conquest. Why does it come in concentrated events and then fall apart, only to break out again centuries or millennia later? hb: excellent, excellent question. in several theories of self-organization--including mine, Ilya Prigogine's, and Koen DePryck's--forms grow until they reach a godelian point of paradox, then fragment and reform in grander, more complex ways. In material E. O. Wilson cites in his book Sociobiology implies that groups grow, suppress intragroup squabbles, become successful, master other groups, then fragment as the subgroups within the victorious superorganism compete to grab the spoils. This happened, for example, with the Mongols once their conquest was assured. They fragmented and fought for superiority within the Mongol Empire...thus cutting that empire in pieces and eventually destroying it. Adolescent langurs gather in pack, oust a head honcho from his harem, take over, then battle among themselves to see who will be the one langur to dominate. The winner takes over the harem and ousts his allies. Machiavelli outlined the same plan for coups in The Prince--gather allies, topple the top man, take over his position, then eliminate your allies. Why? Because they've been your equals and are likely to try to topple you. Another example. I was asked yesterday by the Toronto Star why Michael Jackson was ousted from his position as top dog in the music world, then, ten years later, revived as a hero again. The answer: when his solo career was starting and he was breaking down the race barriers of radio and mtv, he vicariously lived out the desires of his fans. He represented the group soul for those who loved him. He began as an underdog--shunned by white radio and tv. Many of those in the public--especially the teens who buy and embrace music--could identify. Teens, too, are underdogs about to embark on the attempt to carve out an identity in an adult culture in which they are outsiders. it is a difficult process that usually does not end until people reach roughly the age of thirty. As Michael Jackson rose in the 1980s, his fans rose with him. They rose vicariously. More important, they felt that their enthusiasm was the force that was turning him into a superstar. Their egos, their sense of power and control, were fed by his success. Why? Because they felt they had made it happen. They had felt it, not articulated it. The feeling was emotional, not verbal. But emotional feelings are the most powerful of all. Once Michael was ensconced as the king of pop, he ceased to be an underdog. He was no longer a lifter of the souls of those who loved him, but an overdog, an established aristocrat of pop. His power no longer gave his fans a sense of control. His success was self-sustaining. He didn't need his adherents anymore. In other words he was an alpha male, an oppressor. How could those who had championed him show control? Especially those who had in the press who had aided his rise? By tearing him down. And this they proceeded to do--for a decade. Today he is an underdog, and the public and press can once again demonstrate their power--their control over another's destiny, by rebuilding him. This, in fact, is what they are doing. As someone who did 20 years of fieldwork in mass culture and worked with Michael Jackson, I've been able to study this phenomenon from a privleged position--from the inside. But here's the bottom line. Oscillation underlies most things in this universe. Social organization is no exception to the rule. pr: Nomad life makes for pretty independent sorts who can move at a whim with their livestock. In East Africa, pastoralists compared to farmers tend to be low on respect for authority and low on belief in witchcraft. Farmers tend to be high on witchcraft belief, people suppose, because sedentary lifestyle leads to festering disputes with neighbors, whereas pastoralists just move away from trouble. The political problem of nomadism is that it can lead to lots of conflict at quite small scales. Remember Lawrence of Arabia's bitter speech about the Arabs being "small people" after the Bedouin character played by Omar Sherif kills his guide for trespass on his tribe's well. hb: this is excellent thinking, Pete. If you look at T.E. Lawrence's book, this killing plays an even more important role than in the film. pr: If so, pastoral life is very insecure, and the pastoralists involved are liable to be subjugated by enamoring agrarian states or even oasis city-states. However, the latent political power of pastoral nomads is enormous. Mobile, tough, experienced, fighters, they are hell on the hoof hb: brilliant phrase. pr: if put together in sufficient numbers. Eurasian pastoralists developed political institutions that generated rather highly organized tribes. They became pretty effective coalition building politicians. Tribes, tribal confederations, and alliances could presumably secure more domestic tranquility, conduct more efficient long-distance trade (another specialty of nomads), and deal from a position of some strength with other tribes, states and cities. Sometimes, such tribal leaders could make minor conquests of city states or insert themselves into the politics of agrarian states, often via service as auxiliaries in the states army. Gothic leaders came to play a big role in late Roman politics via Roman military service. Ibn Kaldun, the mediaeval Islamic geographer, has a nice model of the relationship between city-states and small states in N. Africa and Iberia and the pastoral nomads in the North African hinterland. hb: I'd love it if you could expand on your interpretation of this, I've read Ibn Khaldun, and you've seen something in him I failed to spot. Which means you saw a Richersonian meaning I'd love to know. pr: If a charismatic leader could organize a sufficiently large confederation of tribes then he could embark on major conquests. My image is that once a confederation gets so big, no coalition of other tribes can resist it. Agrarian statesmen with a nomad frontier are themselves usually pretty sophisticated players of balance-of-power politics and manage to play one pastoral polity off against the others to forestall threatening superconfederations. Once in awhile, the stars line up just right, and one escapes this control. hb: In the relations of the Chinese to their nomadic neighbors, the Chinese frequently picked an underdog, armed and trained its warriors, and used them to harrass the overdog nomads who threatened China's borderlands, and sometimes threatened to take over all of China. By arming the enemies of their enemies, they often strengthened the underdogs so substantially that the nomads they'd armed overwhelmed the old nomadic empire, then invaded and took over China itself. China tried this strategy once again in the 1980s and 90s when it worked with us to arm and train the mujahdeen fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Now those very mujahadeen--Osama bin Laden and his buddies--threaten both us and the Chinese. The growing superconfederation offers death to pastoral tribes that oppose it, but a share of the booty of conquest if they join up. Naturally, all but the pathologically intransigent join up. Then the conquest takes off, or at least becomes a real possibility. Probably a whole lot of thing have to go just right for a super-confederacy to take off, ranging from extra-ordinary political skills on the nomad side, blunders on the agrarian side, economic weakness on the agrarian side, a surplus of horses on the nomad side, etc., etc. Something, at any rate, needs to keep the triggering events fairly rare, as the outbreaks are isolated in time, tho the politics of state-nomad interaction are routinely conflictual. Likely every outbreak differs from every other in detail too. As far as I can see, the historical records are too scanty to support much besides speculation as to these details. In the aftermath of conquest, pastoral empires are unable to sustain charisma by personal means and have trouble institutionalizing it a la Max Weber. They often employ institutions modeled on those of their Roman, Chinese, etc. victims, but these are not very well suited to governing nomads. So the confederacy fragments, the states, perhaps now ruled by a nomad dynasty, return to successful balance of power politics, and the cycle is complete. (No doubt to call it a cycle oversimplifies greatly). I suppose the reason that state level institutions generally did not persist in nomad country is that nomads are more costly to supervise than peasants but are generally less productive. I read a neat analysis of the Roman conquest of Britain. The argument was that the reason the conquest couldn't be extended to Scotland (and by extrapolation Ireland, Germany, and other similar frontiers) was that the farm population and its surpluses were too small to support a network of legions and their towns sufficient to police the area. Presumably other low productivity farming areas with a history of fractious independence, such as Switzerland, Afghanistan, Caucasia, and most of sub-Sahara Africa obeyed a similar logic. Pastoral nomads are analogous to poor mountain farmers, except that in Central Eurasia taken all together there were an awful lot of them and their whole economy, not just their fighting force, is extra-ordinarily mobile.. In the early modern period, innovations in arms plus greater economic power and rising populations led the most affected states, Russia and China, to bear the cost of pacifying their neighboring nomads. One can't guarantee that we've see the last of the nomads. Russia's controls have at least temporarily lapsed, with even one mountain farming outfit, the Chechens, tying their military in knots. The Chinese are still quite firm. But the Oigur Turks are said to be restive, and certainly the Tibetans would strike for independence if they thought they could succeed. Perhaps the "cycle" will continue. Of course, if economic modernization does raise productivity on the steppes enough to support a state, then the peculiar dynamics of nomad conquest may disappear, depending as it does on relatively great military power on the part of relatively poor people. Did I recommended Anatoly Khazanov's Nomads and the Outside World (U. Wisconsin 1994) to you? He is a Russian expat specialist on nomads, with a number of keen insights. hb: this sounds extremely helpful. All thanks. Another thing--you have put together an extraordinary train of thought. Howard

-----Original Message----- From: Howard Bloom Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 5:17 PM To: Peter Richerson; paleopsych Subject: re: the empires of the steppes Peter--rereading this brought to mind one of the most successful conquests by steppe people's of all times--the Indo-European conquests of India, the Middle East, Greece, and seemingly of much of Europe in the second millennium bc. Later known as Mycenaeans, Greeks, Brahmins, Hittites, and Aryans, these folks from north of the Black Sea pulled of some rather amazing feats. What do you think accounts for the periodic coalition of steppe nomads into brilliantly organized mass cohorts?

Howard In a message dated 8/14/01 4:47:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time, pjricherson writes: The Ottoman Empire is only a late exemplar in an ancient string of large-scale states operated by Turkic speakers and other East and Central Asians ethnic groups. A French historian Rene Grousett wrote a thick book translated into English as The Empire of the Steppes outlining their nature. Given the rather hostile environment of the steppes, and the fractious nature of the pastoral nomads that dominated them, Turkish (and Mongol, etc.) statecraft is not to be sneezed at. Of course, the steppe people absorbed a lot from the Chinese and other agrarian states on the better-watered margins of Eurasia. They were able to maintain their independence throughout most of the historical period and of course conquered the more "advanced" agrarians from time to time.
The following comes from Eric Shinn, entertainment reporter of the Toronto Star, to whom I forwarded our correspondence on the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson. Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson

Date: 8/23/01 2:13:31 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: eshinn To: ('Howard Bloom') Thanks for the forward, Howard! There's a really good article in the current Wired magazine about the Japanese communications company DoCoMo, which has built its business model around providing a content-neutral platform upon which independent parties can offer wireless services to cellphone clients. hb: Docomo posted good earnings today while more traditional Japanese communications companies showed downturns. You may have explained why this occurred. es: This company is doing tremendously well, and in light of your conversation with pjricherson, I think it has a lot to do with the manner in which they formalized a process in which the nomadic adaptibility of user demands fulfilled by flocking independent parties can be maintained within a larger empire run by their neutral tech. hb: this is a standard oscillatory pattern in the record and film business. The major corporations lock into a proven formula and repeat it until it bores the public silly. meanwhile small, independent production companies or record companies put out the music and films of rebels, those who dare create new formulae. Public interests shift from the films and music of the majors to the film and music of the rebellious intruders. Eventually the majors get the message and either immitate the indies or buy them out and incorporate the creatives in their stable--often keeping the indie presidents in place. What was indie eventually becomes mainstream, the public gets overdosed on the new formulae, new rebels arise on the fringes, and the process happens all over again. Film rebels I've worked with include Harvey and Bob Weinstein (Miramax), Bob Shea (New Line), and Chris Blackwell, (Island). Two out of these three were outsiders in the 1980s and are the mainstream today. The list of music outsiders I've helped bring into the mainstream--or have brought the mainstream to--is too long to mention. But helping cultural and subcultural invaders succeed--something I specialized in during my years of fieldwork--provides many insights into the intricacies of cultural evolution. es: If only DoCoMo commanded the Mongols, what would Asia look like today? Hmmmm...... So here's my current dilemma: My roommate Chris (aka DJ C-Rat) and I are both heavily into jungle music. (I know you said you're a relative techno music novice, so suffice it to say this is a style of music with the ritual and rhythm of Carribean reggae soundclash culture hybridized with european techno production aesthetic. hb: it sounds neat. es: It's quite good! I write about it for www.torontojungle.com, and if you're curious, you should check the site out!) hb: I turned off Mendelsohn (some political music of the 1800s) to pull up the site and listen. So far I've heard the sound intro, which is good, but the main screen is coming up slowly--which may be because I'm running 14 computer screens simultaneously. I'll be getting a bigger microprocessor (this one's only 450 mhz) in the next two days. es: The Toronto scene is essentially run by one particular crew, called Vinyl Syndicate. They used to be the underdog, and they're damn good, but they've become rather stagnant in their taste, and many fragmented crews have gained increasing respect around them over time. hb: aha. the typical electronic age pop cycle at work. by the way, the same pattern also operates at the level of sensors on a cell membrane. they're very much a mob with a mob "mentality." A few outsiders find something interesting, and broadcast the message to the rest of the sensor community. The other sensors take it up, it becomes all the rage, then gradually it ceases to seem shiny and new. Then, once again, unconventional sensors find some new molecule with a clever hook or twist. They broadcast its novelty, gradually win over the masses, and the outré becomes mainstream. Fractal patterns in this cosmos tend to repeat on many levels of emergence. es: Chris and I would like to figure out a way to connect the suppressed crews all over our province in such a consolidated front that Vinyl Syndicate will crumble pathetically, or realize that they must adapt to survive. Our concern is, of course, how to maintain our tribal underground functionality while essentially achieving market domination. hb: a tricky proposition. Call me some night between 7pm and 8pm when I'm free (what night that may be I don't know, since I get booked up quickly) and we'll talk about it. Howard

Date: 8/22/01 2:02:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: pjricherson To: ('Howard Bloom') Howard, The trick, I think, is to account for the unstable outbreak dynamics of pastoral conquest. Why does it come in concentrated events and then fall apart, only to break out again centuries or millennia later? hb: excellent, excellent question. in several theories of self-organization--including mine, Ilya Prigogine's, and Koen DePryck's--forms grow until they reach a godelian point of paradox, then fragment and reform in grander, more complex ways. In material E. O. Wilson cites in his book Sociobiology implies that groups grow, suppress intragroup squabbles, become successful, master other groups, then fragment as the subgroups within the victorious superorganism compete to grab the spoils. This happened, for example, with the Mongols once their conquest was assured. They fragmented and fought for superiority within the Mongol Empire...thus cutting that empire in pieces and eventually destroying it. Adolescent langurs gather in pack, oust a head honcho from his harem, take over, then battle among themselves to see who will be the one langur to dominate. The winner takes over the harem and ousts his allies. Machiavelli outlined the same plan for coups in The Prince--gather allies, topple the top man, take over his position, then eliminate your allies. Why? Because they've been your equals and are likely to try to topple you. Another example. I was asked yesterday by the Toronto Star why Michael Jackson was ousted from his position as top dog in the music world, then, ten years later, revived as a hero again. The answer: when his solo career was starting and he was breaking down the race barriers of radio and mtv, he vicariously lived out the desires of his fans. He represented the group soul for those who loved him. He began as an underdog--shunned by white radio and tv. Many of those in the public--especially the teens who buy and embrace music--could identify. Teens, too, are underdogs about to embark on the attempt to carve out an identity in an adult culture in which they are outsiders. it is a difficult process that usually does not end until people reach roughly the age of thirty. As Michael Jackson rose in the 1980s, his fans rose with him. They rose vicariously. More important, they felt that their enthusiasm was the force that was turning him into a superstar. Their egos, their sense of power and control, were fed by his success. Why? Because they felt they had made it happen. They had felt it, not articulated it. The feeling was emotional, not verbal. But emotional feelings are the most powerful of all. Once Michael was ensconced as the king of pop, he ceased to be an underdog. He was no longer a lifter of the souls of those who loved him, but an overdog, an established aristocrat of pop. His power no longer gave his fans a sense of control. His success was self-sustaining. He didn't need his adherents anymore. In other words he was an alpha male, an oppressor. How could those who had championed him show control? Especially those who had in the press who had aided his rise? By tearing him down. And this they proceeded to do--for a decade. Today he is an underdog, and the public and press can once again demonstrate their power--their control over another's destiny, by rebuilding him. This, in fact, is what they are doing. As someone who did 20 years of fieldwork in mass culture and worked with Michael Jackson, I've been able to study this phenomenon from a privleged position--from the inside. But here's the bottom line. Oscillation underlies most things in this universe. Social organization is no exception to the rule. pr: Nomad life makes for pretty independent sorts who can move at a whim with their livestock. In East Africa, pastoralists compared to farmers tend to be low on respect for authority and low on belief in witchcraft. Farmers tend to be high on witchcraft belief, people suppose, because sedentary lifestyle leads to festering disputes with neighbors, whereas pastoralists just move away from trouble. The political problem of nomadism is that it can lead to lots of conflict at quite small scales. Remember Lawrence of Arabia's bitter speech about the Arabs being "small people" after the Bedouin character played by Omar Sherif kills his guide for trespass on his tribe's well. hb: this is excellent thinking, Pete. If you look at T.E. Lawrence's book, this killing plays an even more important role than in the film. pr: If so, pastoral life is very insecure, and the pastoralists involved are liable to be subjugated by enamoring agrarian states or even oasis city-states. However, the latent political power of pastoral nomads is enormous. Mobile, tough, experienced, fighters, they are hell on the hoof hb: brilliant phrase. pr: if put together in sufficient numbers. Eurasian pastoralists developed political institutions that generated rather highly organized tribes. They became pretty effective coalition building politicians. Tribes, tribal confederations, and alliances could presumably secure more domestic tranquility, conduct more efficient long-distance trade (another specialty of nomads), and deal from a position of some strength with other tribes, states and cities. Sometimes, such tribal leaders could make minor conquests of city states or insert themselves into the politics of agrarian states, often via service as auxiliaries in the states army. Gothic leaders came to play a big role in late Roman politics via Roman military service. Ibn Kaldun, the mediaeval Islamic geographer, has a nice model of the relationship between city-states and small states in N. Africa and Iberia and the pastoral nomads in the North African hinterland. hb: I'd love it if you could expand on your interpretation of this, I've read Ibn Khaldun, and you've seen something in him I failed to spot. Which means you saw a Richersonian meaning I'd love to know. pr: If a charismatic leader could organize a sufficiently large confederation of tribes then he could embark on major conquests. My image is that once a confederation gets so big, no coalition of other tribes can resist it. Agrarian statesmen with a nomad frontier are themselves usually pretty sophisticated players of balance-of-power politics and manage to play one pastoral polity off against the others to forestall threatening superconfederations. Once in awhile, the stars line up just right, and one escapes this control. hb: In the relations of the Chinese to their nomadic neighbors, the Chinese frequently picked an underdog, armed and trained its warriors, and used them to harrass the overdog nomads who threatened China's borderlands, and sometimes threatened to take over all of China. By arming the enemies of their enemies, they often strengthened the underdogs so substantially that the nomads they'd armed overwhelmed the old nomadic empire, then invaded and took over China itself. China tried this strategy once again in the 1980s and 90s when it worked with us to arm and train the mujahdeen fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Now those very mujahadeen--Osama bin Laden and his buddies--threaten both us and the Chinese. The growing superconfederation offers death to pastoral tribes that oppose it, but a share of the booty of conquest if they join up. Naturally, all but the pathologically intransigent join up. Then the conquest takes off, or at least becomes a real possibility. Probably a whole lot of thing have to go just right for a super-confederacy to take off, ranging from extra-ordinary political skills on the nomad side, blunders on the agrarian side, economic weakness on the agrarian side, a surplus of horses on the nomad side, etc., etc. Something, at any rate, needs to keep the triggering events fairly rare, as the outbreaks are isolated in time, tho the politics of state-nomad interaction are routinely conflictual. Likely every outbreak differs from every other in detail too. As far as I can see, the historical records are too scanty to support much besides speculation as to these details. In the aftermath of conquest, pastoral empires are unable to sustain charisma by personal means and have trouble institutionalizing it a la Max Weber. They often employ institutions modeled on those of their Roman, Chinese, etc. victims, but these are not very well suited to governing nomads. So the confederacy fragments, the states, perhaps now ruled by a nomad dynasty, return to successful balance of power politics, and the cycle is complete. (No doubt to call it a cycle oversimplifies greatly). I suppose the reason that state level institutions generally did not persist in nomad country is that nomads are more costly to supervise than peasants but are generally less productive. I read a neat analysis of the Roman conquest of Britain. The argument was that the reason the conquest couldn't be extended to Scotland (and by extrapolation Ireland, Germany, and other similar frontiers) was that the farm population and its surpluses were too small to support a network of legions and their towns sufficient to police the area. Presumably other low productivity farming areas with a history of fractious independence, such as Switzerland, Afghanistan, Caucasia, and most of sub-Sahara Africa obeyed a similar logic. Pastoral nomads are analogous to poor mountain farmers, except that in Central Eurasia taken all together there were an awful lot of them and their whole economy, not just their fighting force, is extra-ordinarily mobile.. In the early modern period, innovations in arms plus greater economic power and rising populations led the most affected states, Russia and China, to bear the cost of pacifying their neighboring nomads. One can't guarantee that we've see the last of the nomads. Russia's controls have at least temporarily lapsed, with even one mountain farming outfit, the Chechens, tying their military in knots. The Chinese are still quite firm. But the Oigur Turks are said to be restive, and certainly the Tibetans would strike for independence if they thought they could succeed. Perhaps the "cycle" will continue. Of course, if economic modernization does raise productivity on the steppes enough to support a state, then the peculiar dynamics of nomad conquest may disappear, depending as it does on relatively great military power on the part of relatively poor people. Did I recommended Anatoly Khazanov's Nomads and the Outside World (U. Wisconsin 1994) to you? He is a Russian expat specialist on nomads, with a number of keen insights. hb: this sounds extremely helpful. All thanks. Another thing--you have put together an extraordinary train of thought. Howard

-----Original Message----- From: Howard Bloom Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 5:17 PM To: Peter Richerson Subject: re: the empires of the steppes Peter--rereading this brought to mind one of the most successful conquests by steppe people's of all times--the Indo-European conquests of India, the Middle East, Greece, and seemingly of much of Europe in the second millennium bc. Later known as Mycenaeans, Greeks, Brahmins, Hittites, and Aryans, these folks from north of the Black Sea pulled of some rather amazing feats. What do you think accounts for the periodic coalition of steppe nomads into brilliantly organized mass cohorts?

Howard In a message dated 8/14/01 4:47:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time, pjricherson writes: The Ottoman Empire is only a late exemplar in an ancient string of large-scale states operated by Turkic speakers and other East and Central Asians ethnic groups. A French historian Rene Grousett wrote a thick book translated into English as The Empire of the Steppes outlining their nature. Given the rather hostile environment of the steppes, and the fractious nature of the pastoral nomads that dominated them, Turkish (and Mongol, etc.) statecraft is not to be sneezed at. Of course, the steppe people absorbed a lot from the Chinese and other agrarian states on the better-watered margins of Eurasia. They were able to maintain their independence throughout most of the historical period and of course conquered the more "advanced" agrarians from time to time.
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Hb: In 1619, Descartes would have been 23 years old. Meaning in all probability that he fixated on a passion point-had an imprinting moment-a moment that sealed itself permanently into his neuronal makeup-as a young soldier, but didn't have the chance to get back to the question that had burned itself into his synaptic lattice until he was roughly 40 years old.

The idea of passion points--imprinting moments in childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood--comes from my work with rock stars. Musical artists easily fall into the one-hit wonder pattern. They put out a song that soars on the charts, release, perhaps, one more, then they disappear forever from the public eye, never to be seen--or heard--again.

My goal was to give rock and r&b artists an enduring career. The first task was to do a four-hour session--or several--in which we went through the artist's life story from the very beginning on up to the present, searching for what I thought of in those days as the artist's soul--the source of personal passion, of the unseen self--that roared and danced in her music, her lyrics, and her stage performance. The performing and creating personality is often one the self of daily life doesn't know. The everyday self is the one that goes through the automatic rituals of "hello, how are you?" "fine, thank you, and how are you?" It has a full arsenal of clichés with which to deal with most situations that involve what TS Eliot calls preparing "a face to meet the faces that we meet." (Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959, covers this aspect of self pretty thoroughly.)

But another self reveals its existence in lyrics, music, and performance. It is often a separate personality, an interior god of sorts, a self that reveals its form only in ecstatic moments--when a piece of music "writes itself" or when in the throes of a stage performance the singer "loses himself" and is caught up in a transcendent experience.

I went through the story of an artist's life with him hunting for the moments in childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood that had sealed themselves into the web of emotion that made the hidden god of creativity and of ecstasy. If I could find the passion points, I could find the hidden self. I then introduced that self of ecstasy to the everyday self, the self of hellos and how are yous. From the moment of discovery on, I did everything in my power to keep that artist in touch with the hidden self. I also told him or her that he owed his audience not just his songs and his performances, but his life. By revealing his life and articulating his passions he could reveal others to themselves, he could validate them in their moments of madness or confusion, he could bring order and out of the chaos of his listeners' emotions.

Give your audience just a glimpse of your emotional self, and you become a one hit wonder. Come to know that self and reveal it to your audience year after year-through its changes and growth--and you become an icon, a figure who helps interpret others to themselves, takes others out of themselves, and validates feelings multitudes have had but have been afraid are insane.

What is insane? Feelings that have no social acceptance, no words to describe them, no validation of an other, no mirror of recognition in others' eyes or words. If an artist gives this validation and transcendence to others, he saves their souls. He makes what seemed lunatic sane. He yanks others out of their moments of trouble and gives them instants of joy.

Give your emotional self to others and they will hold you in their heart for a lifetime.

Al Cheyne suggests a relationship between Descartes' living out of his passionate self--the self of an imprinting moment--and the revelations of saints. I agree with him. The inner gods are easily described in secular terms. They can be described and explained via psychology, evolutionary theory, sociology, and the other tools with which we work in science. They can also be described in the parallel languages-the isomorphic metaphors--of poetry and religion.

But the trick is more than just understanding where the inner gods come from (passion points), it is to invoke them. The real goal is to make those gods come alive, to make them thrive, and to help others achieve their own revelations and mystic ecstasies.

However one must do this while suppressing one of the most potent inner gods of all-the god of violence, hatred, and war. One must unleash the gods of wonder, of light in darkness, and of creativity. Howard

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