But when I got there, Bloom himself answered the door. Wait a minute. Hadn't he been paralyzed since the suicide attempt 2 weeks ago? In fact wasn't he crippled just 3 hours ago when we spoke on the telephone?

"A lot of weird things are going on right now inside me. I'm walking around in a body that is a bunch of barely connected parts. I'm getting feeling in my legs that hasn't been there for 2 weeks -- I'd given up thinking I'd ever walk again -- and I just walked 5.6 miles around this apartment."

He glanced at an Pedometer hooked on the belt of his jeans. "Yeah, 5.6 miles. Do you mind walking around with me so I can get the blood flowing?"

And so it was that I first met Howard Bloom. We talked (and walked, in a makeshift track around his apartment) into the wee hours about everything or more precisely Howard talked and I listened. He badly needed an audience, badly needed to perform, to be witty and special and a genius, and as promised, he put on quite a show. It was like having a private conversation with Krishnamurti or Buckminster Fuller. If you've ever seen film footage of either of these men, you know what I'm saying here: Remarkable figures and geniuses like Bloom don't seem to exist in any great number, but they are unmistakable once you've met them. You'll know when you've met the real thing.
Trust me, you'll just know.

Here then is a transcript of a conversation between Howard Bloom and myself that took place a few days after our initial meeting on January 28th, 1998. Also present was our mutual friend, Naomi Nelson. As soon as we arrived Howard informs us that the suicide attempt, he has now figured out, was primarily the result of severe Valium withdrawal (I'm sure the divorce didn't help matters) and he's been feeling much better lately. He seemed almost a different person, calmer, much calmer, but the edgy energy was still there. He sat in his bed, propped up by pillows, surrounded by books, 6 computers, wires, televisions, VCRs, notepads, pens, magazines, keyboards and lots of little bottles of vitamins, amino acids, and prescription medicines.

Richard Metzger: Okay, let's get started. Since we only have a few hours, there are a few basic themes I wanted to explore and . . .

Howard Bloom: Let's start with this, you need to tell them why in the world they should be interested in me. Let's start out with the credentials.

RM: All right, well what I was going to propose is: since I have no need to impress either you or Naomi with my interviewing prowess and suavey Roger Moore-like talkshow host "stagecraft" (laughs) I was thinking that . . .

HB: Well let me do this for you, let me write your lead for you . . .

RM: Hang on, let me finish. It's more interesting for me to get your take on yourself, you know, you are this legendary publicist and consummate modern mythmaker and memetic engineer, so I'd love to know how you would, uh, handle your own account, I suppose. How would you sell yourself to the public if I was a publisher approaching you to handle my newest author, the controversial genius author of The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom?

HB: All right sure. So why should they interested in this absolutely anonymous character named Howard Bloom? Why be interested in Bloom? Hmmm . . . Bloom's got a book called The Lucifer Principle. The Lucifer Principle was endorsed by 22 major scientists, none of whom had ever met Bloom or heard of Bloom. None of them. They said things like it's a seminal book, it's monumental, it;s brilliant, it;s gonna change the way we see human nature, it's gonna change they way we see the world around us, it's going to scratch holes in our illusions about ourselves and force us to face realities we never saw. These are major scientists saying that this book is revolutionary.

It's become a textbook in universities from Germany to Australia, but it comes from this person who everybody thought: Who is this person? He can't write a book about science. He's a music publicist. He established Prince, he worked closely with Michael Jackson, John Cougar Mellencamp, Joan Jett who had 23 record companies turn her down. He worked with Kiss. Publicized Simon and Garfunkal's Central Park reunion concert. He started the "heavy metal magazine" according to the grad school thesis written by Chet Flippo, used to be the East Coast editor for Rolling Stone. Howard Bloom, who occupies 8 pages in this book, invented a new genre called the "heavy metal magazine," which became the dominant form of rock and roll magazine until the 90's. From the early 70's to the 90's. I didn't want to do it, the task was dumped in my lap. I did this without knowing a damn thing about rock and roll, I listened to Mozart, Bartok, and Vivaldi, but I took Time magazine apart like a biologist dissecting a fetal pig. I came to understand all of its nuances and then I was able to reproduce it as a heavy metal rock and roll magazine [Circus]. I tuned my guts to what the kids wanted, I was 28 at the time, and then used every marketing trick in the book, every marketing survey technique I could invent, to sell it back to them. I was doing statistics and correlational studies using ideas I'd picked up from reading Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American.