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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]