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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Becoming Gary Lachman with Gary Lachman
01:02:31
Becoming Gary Lachman with Gary Lachman Gary Lachman is the author of The Return of Holy Russia: Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World as well as over twenty other books about the influence of esotericism o...
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- [00:00]
Gary Lachman
So once I started listening to this, you know, Sibelius and Beethoven and all this fantastic stuff, and I was reading so much, I just, my sensibilities changed and I just what I wanted to express it just I couldn't express it in a pop song anymore. And so I gradually kind of drew away.
- [00:20]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Keep watching to learn more.
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Announcer
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinking allowed.org book4 in the new Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
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Gary Lachman
Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Announcer
Hello and welcome.
- [01:41]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. How does one become one of the foremost cultural historians of the esoteric? We're going to ask that question today of my guest, Gary Lachman, formerly a songwriter and bass guitarist for the rock band Blondie. He is one of the world's foremost historians of esoteric culture. He's been interviewed 16 times previously on New Thinking Allowed on topics including Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blavatsky, Emanuel Swedenborg, PD Uspensky, Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley, hermeticism, Carl Jung, chaos, magic, and Russian Mysticism. His newest book is a memoir titled Touched by the From Blondies, Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult. Gary is in the United Kingdom, and now I'll switch over to the Internet video. Welcome, Gary. It is a pleasure to be with you once again. This is, incidentally, our 17th interview.
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Gary Lachman
Well, it is always a pleasure to speak with you, Jeffrey, and I'm looking forward to it very much. Thank you again for inviting me on.
- [03:08]
Jeffrey Mishlove
This is an unusual interview. In the past, we've talked about so many great figures in esoteric culture, Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner and Uspensky in Sweden and Jung and so on. But today the focus is what it's like, what it took to become Gary Lachman, the author of 25 books, mostly on esoteric culture, but also on your career in rock and roll. And when I read your autobiography, I thought one of the most interesting things really was your childhood, the fact that you grew up in New Jersey and your parents were, by your description, very unsympathetic. To your interests.
- [03:58]
Gary Lachman
I guess I started to come of age in the late 60s, so 69. I would have been 13. I was born. Just say I was born on Christmas Eve, 1955, so more or less the beginning of 56. And so I was always sort of like almost a year behind in the general kind of school and all that. So I would have been about 13 and then really getting into it in a teenager in the 70s. But at least in. Was in New Jersey, you know, there was the tail end of the. The hippies and the tail end of the 60s, and it was still kind of the notion of, you know, do your own thing and don't conform and, you know, march to the beat of a different drum and things of that sort still had currency, at least for me and people growing up with me in the beginning. And so. And my parents, they were from, I guess, what's called the. The greatest generation now. So the generation that was through World War II, or grew up during the Depression, let's say, and then in World War II. My father was in the service in World War II, and even he got a medal for bravery. I think it was the Bronze Star. So I was caught up in that kind of generational conflict that was part of American life now. I mean, America is very divisive now, but it was a divisive in sort of a different way. Then there was what was called the generation gap. I mean, and then there was that. That shop opened up, the gap. And that's. That got that name from the generation gap. And so you fell into the gap and all that kind of thing. So this notion of the younger generation and the older generation. So I, you know, came of age during that time, and I. I just became a reader. I was a reader early on. I mean, all the other stuff, music and rock and roll and drugs and all that kind of stuff. But I was very much a reader, and my parents just weren't. They weren't from that. I mean, they, you know, they left high school when they were, you know, in their teens in order to work and that kind of thing. But that was the life when they were growing up.
- [05:53]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I'm under the impression it was even worse than that, that your parents were hostile to books. You describe an occasion when you came home from the library with an armful of books and you were chastened for it.
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Gary Lachman
I just think it was something they were threatened by. They didn't get it. And I had an older sister I still have. She's living in New Jersey. But she read, but she wasn't a reader. So for some reason, I always wondered, where did this come from? I mean, I. A couple years back, I did one of these DNA tests. This ancestry, I think, was the company I use. And about 60% of it came from area of Europe that's in the news now, in Ukraine or in the midst. It used to be an area called Galicia. There's a Galicia in Spain, but it's not as different. It's Galicia in Eastern Europe. And it was this kind of patch of territory that the Poles had it, Lithuanians had it, the Russians had it, the Ukrainians had it. And I think after World War I, it was kind of done away with as a kind of entity, a geographical entity. But at least two of my grandparents came from that. That part of the world. And I just wonder, you know, did I pick up some gene of some kind of kabbalist or some strange, you know, alchemist from that kind of the world. But. But it was also a time, I think, my generation, at least, when I was growing. I mean, I. The book begins about, you know, or what. I've been writing this memoir, learning how to read from comic books. I mean, this was even the earliest part of that kind of. I mean, I grew up with what's known as a Silver Age kind of comic book. So a lot of the comic started late 30s, early 40s, and they went out of fashion after World War II, and then they made a comeback in the late 50s, where a lot of the Golden Age, the original comic characters, the Flash and Green Lantern and Adam and all that, got repackaged or refashioned in a very, kind of sleek, at the time, modern sort of style. And then I. I remember, you know, growing up with that, and I. I can even say I've told this story before that I think my interest in what I've been writing about now for practically about 30 years now, almost started then, because I tell the story in the book. There was one strip called the Legion of Superheroes that was in adventure comics. And it was teenagers from either the future or the planets that had superpowers. And super was one of their members. And there were three sort of lead characters. There was Lightning Lad. He shot lightning bolts. And there was Saturn Girl, which I didn't quite understand what Saturn had to do with her having kind of mental powers. She could read people's minds and things like that. And then this blasphemous guy named Cosmic Boy, and he had magnetic powers. And I didn't understand why Wasn't he called Magnetic Boy or Magnet Boy or something like that? Or Magneto? I would have discovered later in the X Men. And I asked my sister, I said, what does cosmic mean? I don't know. She didn't know. I asked my mother. She didn't know. And I figured by that time I wouldn't have bothered to ask my father because he probably wouldn't know either. So you can say I've been trying to figure this out, you know, ever since I was about five years old then. So it's been a long journey and I'm still working on it.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Your book is full of all sorts of erudition about the graphic artists and the writers of all of these different comics. They obviously had a big impact on you as well as the very notion of the superhero.
- [09:25]
Gary Lachman
The superhero obviously, you know, figures with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal man. You could. That goes into the magician or, you know, people who can alter their consciousness and things of that sort. So there's a. Jeffrey Kripal has written. And his book's right behind me. I can see it in the. Yeah, he's written Mutants and Mystics, so he's written a lot about that. And I also touch on. I mean, my first book. I do touched on this when I. I linked the X Men, who came out in the early 60s with. There was a film called the Village of the Damned British film and is based on a novel called the Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. And it's about a village somewhere in Britain. There's a meteor shower and all the women in the village become pregnant, whether they're actually, you know, have husbands or lovers or still virgins or not. And then the children are born. They all have this blonde hair. You know, they all look like Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones did in the early days. And they all have this kind of psychic ability to communicate with each other and they have psychic powers. And if you ever see the film George Sanderson, it's one of his last films and it's a very good film. And then I connect that with the rise of the sort of hippies in the Haight Ashbury. And they even called themselves the Mutants. So it was this notion of this teenagers with incredible strange powers that are threatening to the. To the generation. So in some way, I mean, that message, I think, came out through the comic books. And that was one of the few things I talked about my mother with, because I asked her, like, what. What were the comics when you were growing up? And she oh, Wonder Woman or something like that. But that got me interested in history and like. Oh, the past of that. And so I relate, insofar as I'm any kind of historian now. And I. I don't say that in any, you know, academic way, but I write about past things quite a bit is that I got interested through the comics. Oh, what was it like then? What were the comic like in 1940s, you know.
- [11:30]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, to jump ahead, I know you had a very active intellectual life even in high school, but I'm under the impression it didn't take very long before you're practically homeless on the streets of Manhattan.
- [11:45]
Gary Lachman
Well, this was the beginning of my career in music. I mean, what. Depends what point. I mean, I started out, I got involved with some of the weirdest people in my. Or the most, you know, radical or on the fringe kind of characters in my town in New Jersey. And there's a whole dark cloud backstory to what was going on then that not necessarily go into. But it's. But it's in the book. And people who know My Blondie Pass will be sort of aware of its connection to one of the songs I wrote. But at one point I was living in New York. This would have been. I was about 18 and what someone had turned a storefront. It was East 10th street between 1st Avenue and Avenue A. This would have been 1974, going into 75, and this would have been a time. Now you go there, I mean, Alphabet City, Avenue A, B, C, D. It's. You can't afford. Forget about the rents. You can't afford the cappuccinos. It's just like such a high, high end area then. It was no man's land. It was very, very dangerous place to go, really, really and truly. And I sort of lived on the fringe of it then. But one of the fellows I lived with, again, one of these guys, he was kind of like the William S. Burroughs of Bayonne, New Jersey. But then he became a sort of born again Christian. He did this complete turnaround, complete flip turnaround. And he was hanging out with Jehovah's Witnesses and then he got into some kind of Jews for Jesus group and convinced the end of the world was coming. And he was moving to a kibbutz in Israel and did I want to go with him at the same time? He thought, he said he wanted to start a rock and roll band. And I'm just trying to figure out if the end of the world's coming in, why do you want to start and what are you going to do with rock and roll band and a kibbutz? And so I said, no, I'm not interested in this. And so I got banished from where we were living. And I had by that time started playing with Blondie or with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, and my friend Clem Burke, who's the drummer who passed away earlier this year, sadly. And I got involved with them through him because he was a drummer when I was growing up in my hometown. And he used to play in cover bands and they would do Santana or, you know, the Allman Brothers and stuff like that. Grateful Dead. But then he got into the cutting edge of glitter rock and David Bowie and the New York Dolls. And he saw an ad in the Village Voice Debbie had put in because they kept losing their musicians. So they lost the drummer. He answered the ad, and then after a couple gigs, they lost their bass player. And I was not known as a musician. I was hanging out on the fringe with the real musicians in Jersey before I skipped over the river to the other side. But I could kind of, sort of almost maybe play, you know, and it was rough and on the edge. And in the storefront I was living in, there was an old broken down upright piano, you know, like the ones you might see in a bar, you know, kind of old Western kind of bar thing. And I figured out how to bang out some chords on it. And I started writing songs. I was writing poetry, which was pretty bad. Not consciously trying to make it bad, but looking back at it, it was pretty bad. But then that got transformed into writing songs. And then he. Clem introduced me to. He said, well, we lost the bass player. Do you want to audition? And I could kind of find my way on that, too. So I wound up doing that. But I got. Just as I started doing that, I got kicked out of this living with the born again Christian who was on his way to the Kibbutz. And I didn't have a place to stay, I didn't have a place to live. So I was kind of crashing at places. I was crashing the studio. We wasn't really supposed to do that. It was in midtown Manhattan, like in the upper 30s, over, like 7th or 8th Avenue. Crashing a couch, surfing before you called it that. And I actually did. I did spend one night in Central park, which is one of the strangest times. I didn't sleep very much there, but it was. I was on the edge like that. And then Debbie basically said, well, okay, you can move in with us. So she was living with Chris Stein in a Tiny, tiny one bedroom apartment in Little Italy. And that's how I, you know, first was found a place to live after getting kicked out. So yeah, that was, it was very kind of her, I mean, very generous of her. But then again, she didn't want to lose another bass player.
- [16:11]
Jeffrey Mishlove
So there you were, a person who didn't have any formal musical training. You're now hired as the bassist for, I guess Blondie in that era was considered punk rock.
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Gary Lachman
Oh, this was before that term came up. So it was. Debbie had been around for a while. She had a band called the Stilettos.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
And.
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Gary Lachman
A few other things. And I saw her. I didn't meet her, but I first saw her. There was a club in New York called Club 82 that was an old drag club. And well, I'm giving you a bit of the history of the background. The first place or the kind of beginning of the New York scene. It was a place called the Mercer Arts Center. Then that, that the building that was in collapsed and so there wasn't a place for people to play. And this drag club started letting rock bands play. So one of the bands who played there was a band called the New York Dolls. And they, they, they were like Glitt. They all dressed up and it was a famous show they all did in drag there. So they all had makeup on and all that. And so it was, it was very, very wild and transgressive and you know, this kind of David Bowie, Lou Reed, you know, kind of area era background. And at one of those shows the Stilettos played. And I remember seeing Debbie then. But they, they did a lot of campy, you know, kind of stuff. It was a lot of shtick, you might call it. So it was half, half cabaret, funny, half old girl, Cherelles, that kind of thing, Ronettes, kind of tunes. Then they kind of collapsed and then that, that scene kind of died. And then this place called CBGB on the Bowery started having bands play and that this was where everything came out of that. But then that, the whole glam, the glitter, the kind of flamboyant kind of campy stuff that was, that was passe. And the new thing was very cut down, very, very, very stripped down and simple. And if you know Patti Smith, who started out as a poet, then she started just having a guitar behind her, then the guitar and a piano and drum. And then it started into this fusion of a kind of beat poetry with simple rock chords. And there was a band called Television and all that. And so this was the kind of thing and for me it was one of the. It probably was the best time of my life in some way because it was. I was there like I'm all of 19. I'm not the guy you would have thought who had ever been here. The drummer. Yes, Clem. Clem is one of the best drummers ever. I mean he's. He's even on record now is like being one of the best drummers in pop, the history of pop. So it makes perfect sense that he would have been there. But I. I shouldn't have been there because I could barely play. But I was the right style, the right. I was thin, I was starving, I didn't wore dark glasses at night and all that kind of stuff. And so I. I fit in the scene. And what they were playing was very simple stuff. And then be. The other thing is because I never tried to be as good as the other musicians I knew who would put on the headphones and figure out a Jimi Hendrix lick or figure out, you know, if, you know. Yes. This prog rock band. Or figure out very, very difficult guitar things. I was happy if I could play an A chord or a D another one and figured out how they went together. So I didn't have that kind of. What do you want to call it? Hesitation about doing something on my own because, oh, I'm not that good. I can't play all this stuff because once I put those chords together and I started humming, oh, I can write a song, man. So I just started doing that and that's what was exciting. You could do it yourself. And so the early days it was called New York rock or street rock, underground rock. It wasn't until kind of the Sex Pistols over here in the UK started up that it got that kind of phrase, punk rock, but that's what it's known as now. But there was a period of a year and a half in New York where it wasn't called anything. And it was a strange fusion of kind of already beat poetry. Easy, you know, a simple three chord rock and then homage to the 60s. So early Blondie stuff. We did homage to kind of 60s stuff. And the kind of the songs I wrote were like that. Because that's the music I heard when I was growing up, going to school on AM radio, you know, WA Beatle C over in New York and wmca. And they would play all the British Invasion or, you know, Motown and stuff like that. So all those kind of simple melodies and really great tunes. I just absorbed them when I was.
- [20:27]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Growing up and along the way I gather you taught yourself how to play guitar as well as bass.
- [20:35]
Gary Lachman
I mean, I played bass because that's what they needed, and it was easier to play. There's only four strings on the bass. There's. There's six on the guitar. So I mastered the four strings on the bass and then gradually got the chords. But then I started writing. I had banged out, you know, chords to write songs on, on this piano. Then I just started figuring out songs on. On the guitar. And gradually I wanted to play, you know, more guitar. This is one of the points of friction that when we. We got a deal, when Blondie got a record deal and we got a deal with a song of mine called Ex Offender, which is sort of the inspiration is the sort of dark cloud period I mentioned earlier. And then Debbie turned it into a story of the hooker who falls in love with the cop who arrests her. You know, so this is. And the original title was Sex Offender. And at the time, 1976, so practically 50 years ago when it was recorded, the producer said, oh, we can't say Sex Offender. That'll be too, too, too. I mean, nowadays, you know, nobody would bat an eye at it. But it was considered a bit too risque then. But I. I wrote that song and then I played the guitar on. On the recording. So there's like a kind of surf guitar solo on it, you know, a lot of B verb. And it's like a girl. It sounds like, you know, Born to Run. It's that. That. Like Bruce Springsteen's. It's that kind of simple, you know, chord pattern with the recognizable hook.
- [21:59]
Jeffrey Mishlove
So you actually became rather successful with Blondie in their early years. But just as the band was taking off, you left.
- [22:11]
Gary Lachman
Yeah, well, I was young and headstrong. Now I'm old and headstrong, and I, you know, I wanted my own. As I gradually was able to, you know, get something out of the guitar and write songs. And I had been writing poetry and I wanted to play guitar in my songs. That was one of the things. And the other thing was that if you see any of the old. The very early videos of Blondie, I'm jumping around on stage like. Like. Like a crazy person. And it's pogoing. So I was. I was younger than, you know, I was 10 years younger than Debbie and then several years younger than Chris and, you know, Clement, Jimmy, the keyboard, as we. I was sort of the baby of the band. I was the youngest one. And I. I was, you know, I just was really excited and it was just A lot of fun, you know, So I. I mean, that was things too. Everybody had these. This guy named Richard Hell, and there was Johnny Thunders and Alan Suicide, and they all had these very, you know, dark kind of angry names. And I called myself Gary Valentine. And I just. What was there to be angry about? I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. I was perfectly happy. But, yeah, I mean, I just. I wanted to have my own band. That was basically it.
- [23:19]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And you went from being the guy who couldn't play as well as the others to a person who thought you're ready to go out on your own and. And form your own band, which is exactly what you did do.
- [23:34]
Gary Lachman
Left New York. Well, Lisa, my girlfriend, Lisa Jane Persky at the time and my closest friend now. I wrote the song for her and it's called I'm Always Touched by youy Presence, Dear. And that's an allusion to the book. The title of the memoir is called Touched by the Presence. And the song I'm always Touched by your Presence there was about. When Blondie, when we went on our first North American tour, we were the support act for Iggy Pop, who was making a comeback with David Bowie. David Bowie was incognito playing the keyboards in his band. And have to remember this 50 years ago. This is before the Internet, before mobile phones. So there was the old real grapevine back then. And people called people up and said, hey, Bowie, Bowie's in the band, man. All that kind of thing. So it passed around. And during that tour, whenever I wanted to call Lisa, she would be about to call me because she would be back in New York and she knew where we were staying, all the hotels. So I was about to pick up the phone in the hotel room and it rings and it's her about to call me, stuff like that. And again, you have to remember back then, if you wanted to make a phone call, you had to be someplace at some time. Now we are no longer constrained by being any particular place, any particular time to communicate. Then just like television, you want to watch something on television or a movie, you had to be someplace at some time in order to do this. So any case, that's an aside. So. And then we talk. We would have the same talking about the same kinds of dreams. So after the tour, we were back New York, and just before we were about, only back very shortly before we went off on this UK tour, my first time here in England, 1977. I wrote the song Always Touched by youy Presence, Dear, and the lyrics start, you know Was it destiny? I don't know yet. Could it be by chance? Was it no. Yeah. Was it just by chance? Could this be kismet? Something in my consciousness told me you were here now A movie's touched by your presence, dear and then so. But it's the only song, I believe, with the word theosophy in the lyrics. That's in the. Got to the top 10. So it was a big hit in the UK and Europe. Not so big in the US. UK Europe was a big, big hit in 1978. So it was like on the strength of that that I decided, okay, I've written this song. It's a hit. First song I wrote for Blondie, X Offender was the first recording and it was a bit, Bit disappointing. They didn't. I was a bit in. What's the word I should have kept? If I had more worldly wisdom, I wouldn't have announced that I wanted to go and got and played on the second album. But the manager didn't like me. He knew I was trouble, you know, I. You know, I. I didn't like him. I figured, I figured. And they subsequently had to admit that I was right, my instincts was right. You know, they wound up having to pay him some enormous amount of money. Money in some kind of lawsuit, something like that. In any case, I decided, okay, after we record the second album, I'll leave. And I was going to go join Lisa because she went to Los Angeles because she was pursuing her acting career. And any case, they decided, well, leave now. So I went. Funnily enough, when Lisa left for la, it was the same day I got the phone call from the manager telling me, basically, you know, go drive the band. That was Independence Day, July 4, 1977. So I took it as a good sign and then I went to join her in 78. I started my own band called the Know K N O W. And that was because my interest in Gnosticism. So I. When I was living, after living with Debbie and Chris in the small, little tiny flat in Little Italy, we moved into this loft space on the Bowery. This is how I got interested in all this magic stuff that I'm writing about now. And the fellow who sort of had the lease on the. There was three floors. He was this wild gay biker artist who was into the Hells Angels and wore all that kind of gear. But he was into Aleister Crowley, you know, the dark magician Aleister Crowley. And I had never. I never knew anything about any of that stuff. I mean, I read Herman Hesse and I was reading Nietzsche, trying to understand it, and Sartre and existential, all that kind of stuff. But like you said, in my high school, I had a high school teacher who fed me all that kind of stuff. He taught the rest of the class, the regular curriculum, and he fed me that kind of stuff. So I was reading that kind of thing. But I didn't read anything about the occult or magic, anything like that. But in this loft space, this guy, he was into it. He used to do this, the TofTech readings. And then I also, I read this book by Colin Wilson, which I've said many times, the occult. And it was such a good book and such a. Just absolutely captivating, gripping, you know, compelling account of history of the occult through this, his ideas about the philosophy of consciousness. And that's what really changed my life. So I had become deep and deep, deeply interested in that. And in some, you know, not particularly successful way, perhaps, I was trying to incorporate some of these ideas into the pop songs I was writing at the time. But then I went, you know, la, started this band called the no because I was interested in Gnosticism. And Yeah, we were two years, we did a couple 45s at the time. People did 45s and didn't land a major contract. But we were a big bicoastal band then. So we were back in LA and New York a lot. But after doing that for a couple years, I, I ended not getting a deal and I found that I, I was drying up writing songs. I, I, I, Lisa inspired a lot of songs and we had, we had fallen apart by then, so I, I wasn't, I didn't have the inspiration and I was just reading too much. I say in the book, I got too smart for rock and roll. I, and I got interested in classical music too. I couldn't, I wasn't listening to pop. I was one of the first people in New York with the Walkman. If you, if you remember the Walkman. I, I had a girlfriend for a while in New York who was a model. And she came back from a shoot in Tokyo with the Walkman. And check this out. And at that point, I was listening to classical sets on some, you know, tiny, you know, casual, you know, cassette player kind of thing, portable cassette player. So I took this thing and she let me borrow it. And I was walking around New York and it's like, suddenly you're in a movie. You know, this is long before any of that kind of personal technology. My kids think, what, you didn't have? No. And People are actually looking at me like, what's that guy got? I had headphones on. I was like, nobody else had that kind of stuff. So once I started listening to this, you know, Sibelius and Beethoven and all this fantastic stuff, and I was reading so much, I just. My sensibilities changed, and I just. What I wanted to express it just. I couldn't express it in a pop song anymore. And so I gradually kind of drew away and then just disbanded the no. At the end of 1980 and was in New York for a while, not knowing what to do with myself. Funnily enough, around this time, this is when I got involved with Gurdjieff work for a few years in New York and then in Los Angeles. But then my last fling in rock and roll, I got asked to play guitar on two tours with Iggy Pop. And this would have been 1981, and that was the Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll tour, let me tell you. I mean, I went back and looked over an earlier biography memoir I wrote called New York rocker about 20 years ago, which is all the rock and roll stuff and what I did. And I said, boy, I forgot the stuff that I got up to back then. It's like, so my life has really, really changed by now. But, yeah, I had my own band for a while, and then I just outgrew it. It. And after I played with Iggy, I, as, as it were, hung my Stratocaster on the wall, you know, And I decided I didn't know what to do with myself for a while. And I had earned enough royalties from the song Presence Dear to not have to worry for a while. So I had the great luxury of being able to just spend my time reading and trying to do what I always wanted to do was write. And it took me the next. At least the next 10 years to actually learn how to write something that anyone would want to read.
- [32:04]
Jeffrey Mishlove
If I recall correctly, you also enrolled in philosophy program.
- [32:11]
Gary Lachman
Yeah, that was my career change. That was my next career move after rock and roll because I was reading all these books and I didn't know what to do it myself. 1983, I went on what I call a mini search for the miraculous with a friend. And we were both interested in the Gurdjieff work at the time. One of the places he went to was the. The site of his institute in Fontainebleau. This prairie in the forest in Fontainebleau, outside of Paris. And on that tour, actually, I made this pilgrimage down to Cornwall to meet Colin Wilson and talked with him and fantastic encounter that's in the book as well. But yeah, I'm just living in Los Angeles now and I'm reading all these books and a friend just says, well look, you read all these books, why don't you go back to school? I mean, I had dropped out of university and would have been 1973 when I wound up going, living in New York and eventually playing in Blondie. And so I thought, okay, why not? So I literally kind of just picked at random a school and just applied to it and I'm decided to major in philosophy. So I, I, I would have been about 28. Yeah, about 28, yeah. Around there. And what they here they call a mature student. So an older student going, going back. And I told my philosophy professors, you know, when they said, well, you know what, I just told them about myself, what I used to do, and they said, hold on a second, you used to play in a rock band and you did all this stuff and now you want to study philosophy with the intention of teaching it. So that was, that was, I was said, okay, that's what I'll do. I want to study philosophy and teach. So I had already been reading it at random, you know, indiscriminately. So, okay, let's just go bang, bang, bang, do it, you know, seriously, and all that. And I had three, three great, I mean, I had many, many different good professors, but there were three of them that I got on with very well. And I talk about them a bit in the book. And no, I enjoy, I enjoyed doing the undergraduate a lot and I discovered I was good at it. I mean, I, I wasn't good at logical positivism. The only thing I was, I didn't get top marks in is symbolic logic, which is a kind of philosophical algebra, because I'm, I have no talent for math at all. I, I would not have got into Plato's academy because I, I just can't do the math. And you know, it's if and only if. And there's different symbols that, you know, like. What I don't like about that is it's contentless, it's just formal. So I'm not very good with just formal things, so I need it to be about something. So I guess I'm a romantic in that sense rather than a classical kind of thinker. But I got very interested in existentialism, Colin Wilson's influence as well in phenomenology. And I thought I was going to teach it. But at the same time, around the same time that I was doing this degree in Los Angeles. I started working at a famous New Age metaphysical bookshop called the Bodhi Tree, which people of a certain generation would probably still still remember. It's not there anymore. I think it closed in 2012. But it started in the early 70s by 2. 2 fellows who were from Lockheed, where they were Buddhist, and they wanted to do something more meaningful with their life. And so they pooled their resources and they opened this New Age metaphysical bookshop in the early 70s called the Bodhi Tree. And then they branched out with the second, a used branch nearby. And I used to go there when I first lived in LA, in 77, 78, and then 79. And then I started working there in 1987. When I started working there, the big thing was going on was something called the Harmonic Convergence, if you remember this. Yeah, yeah. So that was what was going on. And had it just. And the Bodhi Tree had just been really put on the map by Shirley MacLaine, the actress. So she had written this book out on a limb about her discovery of her past lives and all that. And then there was a miniseries. It was a TV miniseries, so the place had a decent clientele. But then after that, it was packed with people and I started working there. Then I worked there about six years. I worked there till about 93. And no, it was great. It was great. And it was a strange thing because I was leading this double life because by day I'm studying Wittgenstein or Aristotle, and then in the evening, because I did a lot of the evening shifts, it was open late, it was open to 11, was, you know, people asking me about their aura or, you know, what kind of crystal they should get and things like that. And I was, you know, it was kind of. It was sort of like when I was at the shop, I was the resident rationalist, and then I was in my philosophy class. I was the one who was more interested in spiritual, occult sort of thing. So I was kind of. Which I think later on, in some way, I think that comes through in my writing. And I think to some degree, if I can be so bold as to say that.
- [37:14]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I think you were getting in touch with the differences between esoteric philosophy and the fashion and academic philosophy at that era was, and still is, I suppose, postmodernism.
- [37:29]
Gary Lachman
Oh, yeah. Again, that was one of the things when I was doing the undergraduate, that was deconstructionism, postmodernism. And then also what was known as the Frankfurt School, which is kind of critical theory now, but it's not the critical theory that is more well known. This was philosophers like Godorno and Walter Benjamin, who were kind of. They're sort of Marxists, but they were trying to make it more interesting. They were not sort of the lumpen prolies. And I was never. I was saying I was never interested in that. I was never interested in Marx. I wasn't interested in the French and their absolute fascination with this. This kind of, you know, as most incomprehensible, incomprehensible philosophy you could possibly produce. So things like deconstructionism or Foucault and things like. But I wanted to know what it was about because it was really popular. So for a few years I put aside my interests in esoteric stuff, you know, whatever that was, and I just devoted myself to just understanding. Because in one way, I think you can only disagree with something if you understand what it's saying. You know, you sort of have to. You don't have to. I mean, to understand, you don't have to agree, but I think to disagree, you have to understand, to put it that way. So otherwise you're just sort of rejecting. So I did my best to kind of get it, and. And I intended to carry on. And I was. Stony Brook University on the east coast was a place where they had a lot of phenomenology and existentialism. One of the few places in the States where they had courses in what was known as continental philosophy. Most places don't have that or that kind of stuff was in the literary departments, literature departments, in some way. But. And what happened was, while I was at the shop, I had completed the undergraduate, and I met somebody at the shop and we got together and we wound up getting married. And so I decided not to go because she had a. Very soon after we got together, she got a very good job at Sony Studios. She was making quite, you know, quite a bit of money was a good thing. So I decided. I said, well, and I loved working at the bookshop. It was a very cozy place. It felt like home. And you actually was kind of, you know, shared. You know, you got a percentage of the, you know, the profits that the shop had and all that kind of stuff. So socially, you know, socially good. But I felt I should have been doing something more and working a bookshop. My ego kept telling me, and I wanted to write and all this kind of stuff. So I wound up doing a year of graduate study in English at University of Southern California. But by that time, at least for me, sort of what we would call the PC, the political correct kind of thing was very, very fashionable. And all the kind of hip theoretical schools were the hot things. So feminist theory or deconstruction, all this kind of stuff. And I was. I was a fish out of water. I was an old humanist, romantic. I didn't want to deconstruct anything. I want to know, you know, what can we learn from reading Blake and not his historical context and all that. Of course, that's all important. But I'm romantic, so I'm one of these people who think we can learn something from literature, not take it apart and analyze it and understand it in terms of some kind of theoretical structure. So I wasn't interested in anything like that. And I gradually came to think, well, by the time I'm finished with this, I'll probably be in my later 30s and I'm a white guy, and I'm not interested in any of this kind of stuff. So given the way things seem to be, I probably have a hard time getting a job anywhere. And I remember talking to my advisor there and saying, well, this is what I have in mind to write about. And he said, well, actually, no, that sounds brilliant, but nobody knows who these people are. You should do something like. And basically do something that's popular. So deconstruct something. I just don't want to do this. So I just realized. And then destiny, destiny knocked on my door once again, and I was touched by the presence of a very big royalty check, which I hadn't expected to happen. And, yeah, there was some greatest hits Blondie release sometime. I don't know, this would have been the. This would have been the early 90s somehow. 92 or something like that, and. Or no, maybe 93. Any case, I. I said, wow, I had to count the digits in order to make. This is. Well, so I just told the advisor I wasn't coming back for the next session. I just dropped out. And I decided to try to write a novel then, and it was an occult thriller, and I borrowed the title from Gurdjieff. He had this ballet called the Struggle of the Magician. So I borrowed that title and I had one. A bad magician based on Aleister Crowley, and a good magician based on Rudolf Steiner, whose interest. I got interested in Steiner while I was working at the Bodhi Tree, because they had this whole huge wall of Steiner's lectures and books, and I was doing this philosophy degree, and I saw that he had written a book on Nietzsche and he'd written a book about the riddles of philosophy. Or something like that. And I thought, oh, wow, he's actually saying something really interesting about Kant here. But on the next page, it's the Buddha on Mars or Lemuria, and it's like, well, how do I. So there was like, remember the old pinball machines? Tilt, you know, it was like, whoa. So I got very interested in how. Because it was what he said about Kant struck me as very cogent. But the other side, I said, how do. How do I understand this? I'm going to see if I can write. See if I can write, you know, a novel. So it became a kind of occult thriller and it was okay. I mean, it turned into a pastiche, but at least I devoted myself to doing it. And I was doing it and living of the world to Czech, which my wife didn't do well, whom I refer to now as affectionately as my future ex wife. She didn't care for that and all that sort of thing. I tell that story. And my last fling with sort of the academic world was just by chance. I got a job working as a science writer for the University of California, Los Angeles. And I should never have got the job because I had no background in science. But by that time I had started writing articles and book reviews. The Bodhi Tree had put out the Bodhi Tree review and was kind of a catalog. And then they had a section of book reviews and I reviewed a few books. One of the books I reviewed was this fantastic book called the Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas, that came out in the early 90s. And he even came to the shop to meet me because he so liked the review. And then he invited me to write. He was editing a journal called Revision at the time, and he invited me to write for that. And then through that I got other contacts and started writing for. There was a magazine called Gnosis back then, Lapis, put out by the Open center out of New York and a few other journals. So. And I found myself writing book reviews or articles about chaos theory and complexity that was very, very popular then. So on the strength. So my. My wonderful future ex wife was getting tired of me living off the royalties and not, you know, seriously working. So she saw an ad in the LA Times that UCLA had put in because they needed a science writer. And a science writer writes grant proposals and things like that. That's kind of boring work. But what they wanted somebody to kind of put together a newsletter and translate to the alumni or possible donors, you know, the wonderful work going on in the molecular biology department and the Astronomy department, things of that sort. So I could. I could do that. I could kind of make it readable. But I thought I would never get the job because they had no science background. None at all. But my wife said, no, just send them your stuff. So I thought, okay, I'm never going to get this job. I'll get her off my back. I'm doing what she wants me to do. I'm really making an effort to get a job and all that. And then they get in touch with me, basically, and they say, when do you want to start? So I got the job I didn't want, but it was, like, very good salary. I had a parking space, I had an office. I had a secretary. And it was. This was, okay, here's the real world. Oh, I'm. I'm entering the real world now. So maybe I'm not going to be the kind of writer I. I always wanted to be. Maybe that was just a dream I had. I had, you know, I. I've done things most people haven't done. Shouldn't I be, you know, happy with those? I've got gold records and whatever and all that kind of stuff. But I had set my goalposts higher, and I wanted to. And from reading Colin Wilson, I basically want. I want to write the kind of books. He's right. These things absolutely fascinate me, and they're my life's blood and all that sort of stuff. And one of the interesting things I tell the story of when I got the job, they showed us the files on the alumnae, and there was one file that they said we should never, never, never, never ever get in touch with. The person about it was Carlos Castanedas, who was still alive at the time, and he lived just practically, just across the road. Not practically, but not far away from the university in Westwood, part of Los Angeles. But, you know, all the story about him getting that anthropology degree and all that, and then subsequent, the suspicion that he had made Don Juan up and all that kind of stuff. I actually got funding for an aquarium that's still there in Santa Monica. And Santa Monica Pier, it's not run by UCLA anymore. Someone else is taking it over. But I remember writing grant proposals to get money for. So there's some actually concrete evidence of my. My work there. But when it happened, I remember, okay, I'm trying to be content with what I've got, you know, And I actually. I'm making a lot of money. I should be really happy. I'm using my brain. I'm writing all this kind of stuff. You should be happy. So I'm walking across the campus and convincing myself of this that you should be happy. Don't, you know, hey, just relax. Be like everybody else. Just relax. And then I say to myself, I should be happy, but am I? And then, you know, from the depths of my soul comes no. And I realize that, okay, I could pretend to be happy. I could do my best to go along with this and all the resolutions I've made, but I'll be miserable inside and I'll make my wife miserable too, and everybody else around me. So sort of this came to me. I carried on. But what happened after that was the marriage just dissolved and everything just kind of fell apart. The marriage fell apart. I wind up losing the job. I went down the tubes completely for a few months at least. And it was this kind of thing where, you know, it sounds so stupidly typical, cliche, but, you know, a lot of people say the same thing. Hesse. Jung said, you know, if you don't make the changes you need to make voluntarily, they'll be made for you. And it's not always a picnic, you know, it's not always a good time. And Goethe says something, you know, some kind of some wish made with real conviction sets things in motion. You know, you might not know immediately exactly what it is. So whatever it was, okay, okay, you're not happy here. Okay, let's get rid of all that stuff. And I just plunged. And I was out of it for a few months. And one of the things that got me back going was this would have been the end of 1995, this magazine I was writing for, Gnosis, and this place called the Open center in New York, which I think is still going on, they were sponsoring a conference on the Rosicrucians in a place called Esk Krumlov in the Czech Republic near the border with Austria. And the reason it was there is this was where the bohemian sort of renaissance came out. And I decided to go somehow. Colin Wilson had heard of my breakdown and breakup of marriage and all that, because I visited him with my wife Frances, future ex wife Francis, once. And actually while I was working at the Bodhi Tree, one of the owners, a house sat for one of the owners. And they had this fantastic place in Laurel Canyon, guy called the Zen Castle. It was a three floor, fantastic structure up in the hills. And Colin Wilson was in LA to give lectures. And he was staying at like a travel lodge or something, some not particularly comfortable place. And I said, why don't you Come stay where we are. So he and his wife Joy came and stayed at this place was up in the Hollywood Hills. And we had people coming from the bookshop and hanging out and he gave talks and that he would have the after talk party. And then he came to the bookshop one day and he spent $500 on used books to be shipped back to England and all that. He had somehow been told that I, you know, Francis and I had broken up and I'd gone through this breakdown more or less. And he said, well, look, very much love if you came to visit while you were here. And he's not the most gregarious guy and he even talks about in his books that he suffers from people poison. You know, people around him too much. He starts to, you know, basically want to run away. So for him to actually invite me to come see him, I thought, wow, this is. And said okay, well I'll. Yeah, well, sure, absolutely. You know, let me, I'll change my tail ticket. I'll figure out whatever the cost. Oh no, no, no, I'll pay. Just, just let me know. I'll pay the extra. Not only is he inviting me, he's going to pay the extra cost. So I go and have this fantastic time in Cesky Krumlov at this, at this conference and set in the castle in this chocolate box, you know, village with people like Robert Bly at the end of it, giving a reading of poetry through candlelight with Renaissance music in the background. Jeffrey Ash, who wrote many, many books about Glastaberry and places like that. And many, many people say from, from earlier generation that were well known scholars in the esoteric kind of world. So they were all at this kind of thing. And then I spent a week in Prague and then I went down to Cornwall and stayed with Colin Wilson for a while. But while it was at this conference in Esk Krumlov, funnily enough, I met an American fellow whom I knew from Los Angeles. But we should have been better friends, but we somehow of missed each other. Never quite got together because we had similar interests. He was interested in esotericism. He's a filmmaker. He was interested in like H.P. lovecraft and I loved it all. Weird Tales, pulp horror fiction and all that kind of thing. But he was at the conference and it's kind of like, oh, it's kismet or it's fate. Oh, here we are. Finally we meet at the right place kind of thing. And he has all these friends who live in London and they're there too. And he introduces me to them and I more or less tell them my sad tale. And they say, well, look, you know, if you want to get a change of scenery, why don't you come back to London? And this friend, he's saying, actually I'm thinking of moving there for a while and getting a flat, maybe we can share a flat and all this kind of stuff. So I think about this and I go back to LA and I realize, yeah, I'm going to do that. It's sink or soon I'm going to be 40 and this is. I'll be 70 this December. It was going to be 40 then. So it's 30 years ago. And it's either I'm going to follow my destiny, follow my bliss, as Joseph Campbell told us, and take the plunge and see if I can write. You know, I've been writing articles, writing magazines, book reviews, things like that. So go there and see what happens. And so I sold everything I could sell, you know, gave away everything else and put what I wanted into storage. And at the end of 1995, I get on a. January 1, 1996, I get on a plane at LAX for here, and that's. That's where the book ends. So the Touch by the Presence ends with me getting on the plane and to meet my destiny here in the.
- [53:37]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Uk, which is where your present career really began.
- [53:42]
Gary Lachman
Well, I think, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, there are no second acts in America. So people like me come here, we do it here. But no, I mean, England's been very good to me. London's very, very good to me. I mean, it hasn't been easy, but I've been working steadily since I came. So that's beginning of 96.
- [54:00]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, if you look back at this episode of your life, or a series of episodes up until the age of 40, it really, I suppose it'd be fair to say it took you four decades to find yourself.
- [54:14]
Gary Lachman
Well, I'm one of these late bloomers, I think, and I say in the book that at one point I became encouraged by people who didn't kind of come into their own until later in life. So Henry Miller, when I was living in New York and starving and working as a messenger, as he did, he was my favorite writer then, and he didn't really get going until like, he was in his 40s and he didn't get the success he had until much later, like in his 60s. And Owen Barfield, who I've written about, who was A friend of C.S. lewis and Tolkien, he was a philosopher of language and followers of Rudolf Steiner. But he wrote a lot about the evolution of consciousness. So he tried to have a writing career when he was younger, but he couldn't make a living at it. And then he joined his family's law firm, a legal firm. But then it was later in his 60s that he started writing in earnest again. And he had, like, a second career then. So I don't think I could have stayed in music, although. So I did play again with Blondie. That was some of the strange things, too. That's not in this book. It's in this earlier memoir I wrote 20 years ago called New York Rocker. But when I came here in the beginning of 96, not too long after being here, Chris Stein, the guitarist in Blondie, got in touch with me and said he was putting the band back together, the original band, because they had disbanded for quite some time and would I come to New York, work and do that. So I'm 40, I've just left LA to move to London, and I've just. I just came back from this kind of tour. The. The girlfriend at the time, subsequently mother of my sons. We have a tour of Eastern Europe, which is. That in itself was a whole thing. And then I got a call to go back to New York, and so I'm saying, okay, 40 is okay. Let's go. You know, who gets the chance at 40 to go play in a rock band again? So. So I went back and I played with him and I did some recordings. I mean, there's a Phantom Blondie track called Amor Fati, which means love of fate. And it comes from Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, you know, his. His formula for greatest greatness is the love of fate. Not, not, not, not. Not to want anything to be different in some way, to be able to affirm your life. It's.
- [56:32]
Jeffrey Mishlove
It's a.
- [56:33]
Gary Lachman
It's a. You know, it's a tough, tough, tall order. But I did a song when I had my own band, the. No, it was one of our sort of signature songs. And then when I was playing with Blondie again, we. When they were recording this comeback album. And so I recorded a couple tracks and this was on it, but it never. It never got released, but it's on YouTube. So again, it's a. It's an odd kind of thing because it's love of fate. So part of my love of fate included having a song about love of fate, not. Not having a proper kind of release, but it's this kind of, you know, cult. Cult item, you know, in the background. Yeah. So I Did that again. And then a couple years ago I, I, for fun, I wound up playing with the Blondie tribute band here, a cover band here, who, who they do all the great hits that I, I, I wasn't involved in. But they also did some of the early stuff and some of the songs I, I wrote. So it's something that's popped up. But, you know, it's not anything that I, I, I, I carried on with, you know, I wasn't, I just wasn't that interested in, in learning how to play more on the guitar than I knew at the time to be able to carry on with it. So I think used to be a musician then the musician who later kind of became a writer. Just because I've been doing this longer. I was playing music, all told, say 10 years, including the little bits and pieces after I was doing it. Main time I've been doing this, I mean, the first book came out 2001, so at least I've been books come out for 25 years now.
- [58:03]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You're not just a writer, Gary, you're a scholar of esoteric culture. And I have to think that you, your exposure to these figures, Ouspensky, Blavatsky, Steiner, Swedenborg, Jung, all of this, I imagine, has had a deeper impact on you than the fact that you wrote books or that you wrote songs.
- [58:30]
Gary Lachman
But it's the sort of thing, it's you, you're the subject. Even though there's all this wonderful literature and writing about this stuff, but, but really what it comes down to, because it's your experience, so it's your inner world.
- [58:43]
Jeffrey Mishlove
The thing that also struck me about your book is you never gave up. You had many, many disappointments in your life. You had a divorce, you were kicked out of the band Blondie just as it was becoming a big success, but you kept going. You always picked yourself up, up.
- [59:05]
Gary Lachman
What's the alternative? I mean, I'll be unable to pick myself up soon enough. So, yeah, I mean, I guess my, my philosophy of life is Geronimo. I guess that's just this full speed ahead. Or in German they say immigra aus. This is always, always straight ahead. I only wanted to follow the promptings of my true self. Why was that so difficult? So why is it so difficult to become who you are and, and you have to become who you are. You're not automatically are that person. You might, oh yes, I'm Gary. I'm like that. Who is that? Who is that? You assume you know who that is in the first place and so you have to go through different struggles and trials and experiences to it's find and create yourself. At the same time, I would say there's that wonderful quotation from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will do destroy you. So I did everything I could to and and what was in me came out very loud and clear when everything collapsed around me and my life completely went down the tubes and I had to be reborn again. And so in a way, that's what I've been. That's the life I've been living the last 30 years. Is this, this kind of second life here?
- [60:24]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, Gary, thank you so much for spending time with me today. As always, a joy and I hope we have many more conversations.
- [60:35]
Gary Lachman
Well, so do I, Jeffrey. It's always a delight. And thank you so much for inviting me to be on again.
- [60:41]
Jeffrey Mishlove
My pleasure. And for those of you watching or.
- [60:44]
Announcer
Listening, thank you for being with us.
- [60:47]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Because you are the reason that we are here.
- [61:13]
Announcer
Book four in the new Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. 70 Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies go to newthinkingallowed.org.
- [62:19]
Gary Lachman
Sa.