Gary Lachman (Blondie)- Touched by the Presence

If anybody wants to check out my other stuff, you can go to my link tree which is r M A r X and that'll pull up all my links as far as my artwork, my podcast, The metamind Cast, and very much like you, I was very enthusiastic about this stuff, and as time has progressed, I've become much more interested in the historical aspect and the arcs and all the different things associated with it, as it's kind of, you know, fractalized through the whole. But yeah, thanks for having me on, Nick, Yeah.

So go check that out. But enough out of me, Gary, please introduce yourself and let everybody know what your deal is and plug anything that you'd like to plug.

I was in Musician Asians Ago, I played in Blondie and I had my own band for a while, and then I played with Icky Pop and all those people turn out in the book turned up in the book I'm plugging. This is what I'm plugging, and plugging in the books. I'm doing that right now. They're all in there, a bunch of other folk. But also I transitioned, as people say, from while I was playing rock to getting interested in magic and the occult and Crowley and all

that sort of thing. Yes, and I did write book about Crowley many years later. It's Alista Crowley, Magic, Rock and Roll in the what is it? The Wickedest Man in the World, And that came out about ten years ago. So but I've written quite a few other books as well. We'll get onto that. So, yeah, this is fun. Yeah, I haven't been on this program before, so let's go for it.

think Gilbert's in LA was one of those places. And it's a place that you touched on in the in the aforementioned interview, And I'm just wondering if you could explain to people who are maybe unfamiliar with that history and like how important those kinds of places were in the Los Angeles scene.

actress and photographer and writer. She was on the scene as well, and by this point had become quite interested in Crowley and Gilberts was one of these great places. It wasn't completely or solely a cult bookshop, but it had a very hefty collection and people like Kenneth Anger, you know, the avant garde Curley filmmaker, and he used to go there, and David Bowie went there, and Jimmy Page,

and I don't know if it's that bookshop. There was another one I think was called Cherokee on Hollywood Boulevard that the guy who ran it have a story of and the anger, you know, stiffing him on a check or something like that for some you know, rare addition of some Croley item. But it was at that time in when I lived there then, so it would have been seventy seven to about eighty, and I was going

back and forth between LA and New York. It's my own band, the No And yeah, there was just so many good bookshops there and Gilberts was one of them. And in my own experience, I used to go there quite a bit and one time and I this is how I got involved with this Crole group. Back then, it was the OTO, I mean, but they book This is well before the Internet, well before anything that we

take for granted these days. But they had a physical bulletin board and there were people putting notices up on and I saw a notice for a Croley group something like that. So I thought, okay, well, I've been reading about this stuff for the past couple of years. I first got interested in nineteen seventy five in New York, living on the Bowery with Christein and Debbie Harry. I mentioned this crazy gay biker artist who was totally into Crowley but also into the Hill's Angels and all of

that sort of thing. And he used to do these impromptu tarot readings with the Crawley staff Taro deck, and he did these paintings based on the figures I modeled for one of them. I don't know whatever happened to it. And that's how I got interested and all this sort of stuff. So I had been reading about it for a couple of years and I thought, Okay, let's see

what happens. So I just answered them, and a couple of days later, there's a knock at my door and this very unprepossessing guy is standing out there and he's asking me if I'm ready to devote myself to achieving the knowledge and conversation of my holy Guardian Angel. And I had to think about that for a second, you know, because I was like standing outside Jehovah's witches. Well, this is exactly how I refer to it in the book. It says if somebody at Jehovah's witness said, are you ready?

And I always wonder why do they want people to join? Because there's there's a certain number of them. I forget how many it is, there's an exact number it's going to be saying, so if you keep people joined, I know, people die, Okay, fine, but somebody's got to get pushed off the bench, right if they keep they keep kind of joining new people somebody, what do you keep? You know? So I know, I never knew why they kept.

of fate. And that was actually the title of one of the songs I did in my band, the No and the band was called the No ken O W because my interest in narcissism and nosis and that kind of a you know, a cult knowledge or you know, immediate kind of direct knowledge, not not episteme, not not

knowledge through the left brain as it were. And you know, so I just went for it and h got the robe, started doing practicing different you know I had already read magic and Theory and Practice on the Bowery amazing, and a bunch of other crowly stuff I'm rambling on. That's just somebody should answer.

and roll stuff. This new one coming out in no memorical touch by the presence, and the title is a reference to a blondie soul and called called them always Touched by Your Presence Dear, which was a big hit in the UK and Europe, not in the States, but top ten UK Europe. It's in nineteen seventy eight, Long time ago, kids, but it's a song about the telepathic experiences and shared dream experiences Lisa and I were having

at the time. So that was my first foray into any of this sort of stuff because I was living on the Bowery with Christen Derby, reading Proley, hanging out with this guy Benton, who's a remarkable character, and talking about magic and all this kind of stuff, and then I started having we started having these experiences and so on and so and so I wrote that song. So that's the reference to that. That's where the title of

the book comes from. But in this earlier memoir, New York Rocker, it's all just the rock and roll stuff, and I go into detail about this character in La but he you know, he just turned out to be a little bad. That was the bad kind to do what you liked kind rather than to do without wilt kind, if you know what I mean. In any case, but I mean that was how so I just did that, and I got into it and all that kind of thing in practice. But after a while it became clear

that this guy was kind of a free loader. And then after a while I just got Crowley. Is all roads lead to Crowley? I mean, so I just started to feel sort of claustrophobic about it because it seemed to be you know, and I became more I said, I started out interested in nineteen. By the time I'm in la I'm about twenty two. The book that really got me into what I'm doing now is a book by the British writer Colin Wilson, and it's just called The Occult, and it came out in seventy one. I

read it in seventy five. I borrowed Tommy Ramone's copy The Drummer and then manager of the Ramones his cop I borrowed it. I mentioned that and the book I wrote about Crowley, and I say in that book that other Ramones, he's original Ramones. He was the only one who's still a lot And sadly he passed away after the after the book came out, it would have been about twenty fifteen, about ten years ago. But yeah, in that book, I go into like all the But that

was the thing with Croley. I just got kind of the old roads led to him, and I became more interested in basically consciousness, you know, And I was more interested in the effects. I never got into wanting to contact you know, some you know, interdimensional being and talk to them, And I thought, why would they know anything more than I do? No, I just wondered, why would they know anything more than I? For their perspective, I'm an interdimensional being, I'm from some other play as well,

maybe I know things la. So I was more interested in finding out about consciousness. And this is this is from reading Colin Wilson because at the time and I first read him, I didn't know that he had a previous career writing about existentialism, phenomenology and all this sort of thing. So we had this whole approach to the It wasn't the magic, let's wear the capes and do all the weird stuff, like, well, what's actually going on

in consciousness? What are the potentials of consciousness? What does this tell us about that? And it was through reading that book that that took me on the beginning of that so it broke, you know, drifted away from Crowley because it just became kind of I just outgrew it and then I got interested in other things.

that time. So I think Grady McMurtry initiated me. So I think he was at this initiation because he would have still been around it was I don't know for sure, and I'm never been in touch with anybody ever again, and I don't want to be. But I wondered because he this was seventy eight, he was still around. He had started it up again in the seventies. And what I remember it and I write about it in the book, is it took place. It's been in Orange County, somewhere

outside of LA That's what I remember. And it must have been near I don't know. It must have been near a marino some kind. And it was around Christmas time because I remember boats going by. I could see out the window, boats going by, you know, little you know, uh, with lights on them saying for last Navi DoD. So I'm I have this memory of that happening, and I'm in this kind of tent where this probablistic ritual Crowley

cablistic ritual. I forget exactly. There was a kind of tent that was put they had put up in the living room, so it looked like you know, Midnight on the Oasis or something like that. Oh, and and you're you're that's what I mean. I kind of like not not not like you know, a tent growing camping.

like that. So I thought, oh, gee, any case. And then the other thing I remember is that a kitten died that night and somehow and someone had said, ah, you know, one life ends as a another begins or something like that. That I mean that that that that that happened, and then I was in it and then sorted of doing the thing. And the other thing I remember is attending a Gnostic mass and uh in ingesting a communion wafer that had been spiked with menstrual blood.

Oh yeah, well all the my uh Lisa asked me whose blood it was, and I said I did. But you know, I mean, I'm I'm making light of it now, and I don't mean in any way to detegrate or you know, suspersions on or diminished you know, people that are into this and do this and all that kind of stuff. But I I I have a kind of you know, fond but sort of Okay, I did that and time to move on, you know, memory of it.

If you're willing to open up about that.

keyboard player, but incognito. He wasn't announced, And this was well before well my phone was the internet, so it was actually, wow, man, did you hear the actual old fashion grapevine whatever? Nice? Yeah, yeah, it's Bowie. It's Bowie, man, it's Boie. Okay and okay. So and on this tour, whenever I wanted to call Lisa, she wanted to call me.

We were at the phone. Each of us are at the phone, right, So had I called her and she picked it up, it would have been busy, yeah, because she was trying to call me, so that that happened. And again this is long before, so you had to be back before we were constrained by time and space. You had to be at a certain place at a certain time in order to do that. This is one of the things that we take for granted. But to me, this says something about our reality now we're not so

constrained by time and space anymore. And just parenthetically, this was something that the Swiss German philosopher Jehan Gebster said was indicative of our time now, that our relationship with

time would be radically different. And it is not in some weird, you know, Terrence McKenna's singularity kind of way, but in ordinary, stupid, boring ways, but in the sense like my kids, what you had to be weird what to get it and to watch something on television, So any case, parathetically, so nineteen seventy seven, I'm in Chicago, leases in wherever or someplace, and we were calling each other at the same time and then talking to each other where we realized we have similar dreams. So that's

I mean, it's vague like that. I don't remember the exact dreams, but that was like the beginning. And then subsequent to that, I read a book called An Experiment with Time by a fellow co J. W. Dunn, who was an aeronautics engineer, and he was written in the nineteen twenties and he had discovered just by accident that he had dreamt bits and pieces of his own future

ahead of time. And I read this is again. But I was in New York musician and I was indiscriminately reading all this stuff about the paranormal and magic and everything like that, and so I thought, Okay, I'll just start writing down my dream. So I did, and then boom it happened, right, And I've written a book about it. I wrote a book about this during the first COVID

nineteen lockdown here in London in twenty twenty. It's called dreaming ahead of Time Experiences with precognitive dreams, Synchronicities and coincidence. And I just have been recording precognitive dreams since then, so forty plus years years. Wow. Yeah, And so it's like that and then very very powerful, kind of vivid, lucid dreams and things. But I haven't had any entities

kind of thing. The one time I felt that I had some kind of thing like that was I was actually during a fever, and I remember feeling something was on my back and I had been reading about you know, the incubus or yeah, and I kind of said, look, you know, I'm interested in all this stuff, but my life's complicated already. I I don't really need this, and please can you guys go please go away? And it

kind of did. So I was in a fever. I don't know, it could have been a weird, but I In that book, I also talk about hypnagogia, which is you know, very strange in between state, the limital state, and also sleep paralysis, which not so much in recent years, but I used to be quite prone to that, and that that's related to you know, abduction experiences and things of that sort. So I'm not I'm not reducing it to that, but I know that's related to and so

that's kind of the area BIB. But I I've not had any kind of powerful dreams where I felt like there's an intelligence there it's more than mine. And that's how I feel about the synchronicities I've had like that. So I think there's a gradient, you know, there's the intelligence that I come encounter in my dreams, and then the ones that somehow arrange these synchronicities. It's the same, I would say, and the one again we're rambling on. But the other thing is like, you know the eaching.

I've been using the EA ching for since nineteen seventy eight, and if you know number four Mang beautiful folly, that's the one you get if you ask the same question twice. So how does a book I bought a secondhand bookshop in Santum Barbara in nineteen seventy eight, and these Chinese coins I got in Chinatown in Jula sometime, how does

it know? I'm asking the same question twice because it says, you know, the first time you asked the oracle, it's okay, But if you importune a second time, it's basically you know, you got.

You know, there's a hypnagogic when you go into sleep, and then if you want to split hairs, its hipping the pompic when you're coming back up. And if you want to explore this area, I suggest you concentrate on waking up a bit earlier in the day rather than trying to catch it as you fall asleep, because if you do that you usually initially just wind up with the bad night's sleep after you you know, you have to you have to work a lot to master it.

But if you do the other one in the morning, if you can arrange to wake up a little earlier and then drift back. That's how those that's when I most I have the most sort of vivid and dreams that I remember the most is when I do that. So I generally wake up.

the things that well, being in love. Being young helps too, I think you get older. I'm sorry, no, no, no, no. Oh.

having very vivid dreams as well. And so that's why I was asking if that was also going on at the time. That was not that.

anybody like that. But the main thing was that how he kind of literalized like physical dysfunction as an actual like well parasite really, but actually like something that you can treat or something that you can potentially work through and maybe even evolve out of, like through discipline or anything like that, to enhance kind of like consciousness and stuff like that. And I'm I'm a biologist by trade, and so I deal with the diseases and everything. So

this was like right up my alley. But to actually have that analogy, to speak to it through or at least give it more of a personification through that way, to me was was mind blowing for sure. And that you have had you spoke about Colin Wilson and how his book kind of was impactful to you, and I kind of wanted to ask you about that a little bit.

genre for his philosophical purposes. So he uses science fiction or that fantasy or crime novels, things of that sort. And in this one he's trying to well you're saying he's literalizing or fictionalizing what he wrote about and earlier. I mean, this is this is I think he wrote this in nineteen sixty six, so this is before he was writing about the occult. So this is during his

sort of existential phenomenological period. But his first book, The Outsider, came out in nineteen fifty six, and he was twenty four, and he had spent like the previous ten years learning how to write and keeping faith in the conviction of his genius. And then this very first book comes out and he was like he was overnight success. He was a bestseller and all this kind of stuff. Sadly, the British turned against him because they don't like people who

are smart. But don't go to university, so it's his class kind of thing. But his first book, The Outsider, it's basically about these people who individuals, creative individuals who have a strong appetitor need for meaning and purpose and in the increasingly secular, comfort oriented I mean again, this is nineteen fifty, so it's you know, seventy years ago. Now you can't find it. You can't find so it's

like basically kind of existential religious kind of questions. And he was considered like Britain's own homegrown interesstentialist, but he was he he was fascinating like people like say Nietzsche and van go and Strindberg and all these others who kind of blew up or went insane or died early.

And he said they were these people had this kind of appetite for meaning and purpose, and they also had these visions of kind of you know, transformed of all his good you know, absolutely redemptive vision of meaning and purpose in the face of everything and all this kind of stuff in variety of ways. But why did they wind up either blowing up in some way, cracking smashing, you know, dying young, or you know, committing suicide of

going insane. So he explores that question through the series of books that he called The Outside, and he applies I can't come into it in any depth, but he applies essential analysis to and but they're all page turners. I mean, it's existential. It's not. Sorry, who's like really tough to get through. It's like thick, you know, turgid stuff. But no, Wilson's Wilson's a writer. So it's it goes.

But in in the novel The Mind Parasites he he he, he invents this notion of a kind of parasite that's actually it's not it's not it's not a micro parasite that gets into the body. It's actually in the psyche. It's we. We we exist in the physical realm, right, and we tend to think there's a little blob of consciousness in our heads, but actually that little blob is connected to a larger, objective psychic realm that's within us, and we're all a variety of different ways everything trying

to explore that. Uh. And what he says is that, oh, for centuries, there's been a kind of mental parasite in the psychic realms, living, sucking life energy off from human beings. And then sometime in the nineteenth century, these these Titanic figures, these romantics, and then great, you know, powerful figures like Nietzsche and Strenberg and whatever. So the early ones could

overcome them, Beethoven and Gerta. But then they got tougher and tougher, and then he said, the parasites realizing that humanity is learning its own strength and power, and then we won't be able to you know, suck a dry anymore. We have to get rid of these guys. And so he says, the mind parasites drove them all mad, you know, drove them crazy because they you know, they were getting

too close to the secret. And so characters a spoiler character and actually it takes place well, it was written in sixty six, I think it takes place in I don't know, nineteen something or other. So it was the future when it was written. Now it's the past. But characters in the book learn about this and learn about them and learn methods to be able to overcome them.

And there's a fantastic I'm going but there's a I think one of the most remarkable things Wilson did in this genre where he's using genre writing for philosophical means. Is that he has this incredible cosmic battle going on between this one character who's learned about the parasites and has developed he's learned about phenomenology, which is this philosophical

methodology of understanding consciousness. It's tough to pronounce and it's even tougher to practice, but he's learned how to do this, and he's able to ward off the parasites, but it's all going on inside his head. So it's the most remarkable battle ever taking place. Is some guy's sitting in a chair and he's sweating because it's all well doing like that. So it's just incredible, and yeah, if you ever get a chance, it's really a great it's a

great read. Unfortunately, one of his novels called The Space Vampires, written in late seventies, was turned into one of the worst films ever made called Life Force Toby Hooper effect eighties, and it's I mean, my joke about that film is that there are there are two good things in that movie, and the lead actress has both of them.

popular culture. But it's it's you know, it's fairly hot high mind at high literary hygrow and it's a very good novel. But the film is ridiculous with Michael Kaine and Anthony Lewen, it's like one of the worst films ever made. And John Fowl sent you know, Colin Wilson of Postcard saying, you know, if you ever think of seeing my film The makea Stone. It's one of the

worst things ever made in that kind of thing. And then when Life Worst came out, Wilson wrote him back and said, you know, John, I've done you one better. But yeah, I mean again, I'm you know, it's a different kind of thing. It's a different I tell you one book I think should have been made of Wilson's

is his first novel. It's called Ritual in the Dark and it came out in nineteen sixty and it's best characterized as Jack the Ripper meets the brothers Karamtsov in Duffel coded post war nineteen fifties London, and it's an early serial killer novel with existential intent. And I think that would make a great film, but I don't know. No one's approached it.

of the Miraculous. And if you know the book In Search of the Miraculous, this is a book by Russian writer philosophy P. D Uspensky, and it was about his time under the tutelage of the enigmatic Armenian Greco esoteric teacher gi Gord Jeff. And after my time with the Crowley group, the next kind of group I got involved it was this Fourth Way Crowley excuse me for there I was a YOUNGI and Croley thelemic slip Fourth Way

Gergy group. And part of this mini search to the miraculous I was I visited the chateau outside of Paris and Fontainebleau where Gerjev had his briefly had his Harmonious Institute for Thermonious Development of Man. But on one leg of this I was at I was into lay lines and things like that, so I was going to lots of like megalithic sites and I had the Ordinance Survey map

and trying to find ley lines. But one of the things I did was making pilgrimage down to Cornwall, this tiny place called goren Haven, Wilson escaped to in the late fifties to escape the notoriety that he had as an angry man in fifties. And yeah, I mean I only spent one night there, but we got through a couple of bottles and he explained to me his ideas about philminology and consciousness, and I got it that night. It was a little difficult to dredge it up the

next morning, but right then I think I nailed it. No, he's very warm, and I mean a story about him is like estimates on the number of books that he had. It's somewhere between sixty and one hundred thousand. I mean, he just had enormous amount of books. And I after that visit, well, you know, lots of people visited him. So I say I became friends, but it wasn't particularly close, but I was someone who you know, they knew, and the family got to know me, and I got to

know them and all that. I kept visiting him, and he died in twenty thirteen, and I subsequently wrote a book about him called On the Robot, The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. So yeah, he was enormous, enormous, influential. But I tell the story of the pilgrimage to his

place in the book and all that. And one thing I do regret is in the late eighties, I worked at a at the time famous metaphysical bookshop in Los Angeles called the Bodi Tree, which doesn't exist anymore, but Shirley maclain, the actual Shirley McClain, put it on the map in the eighties because she had discovered her past life and aura and all that kind of stuff there.

And Wilson was in town giving a lecture in Los Angeles, and he was staying at a travel launch or something, and I was house sitting for one of the owners of the Bodie Tree, and they had and they were Buddhists. They started out in aeronautics at Lockheed in the early seventies and they decided they wanted to do something meaningful in their lives that they opened up this this metaphysical bookshop,

and it was it was a success. So this was been about I don't know eighty eight or something like that, maybe eighty nine. Wilson was in London, excuse me, I'm mixing it up in la giving a lecture, and I was house sitting for one of the owners. And they have this fantastic place in the Hollywood Hills and Laurel Canyon. I called it a zen castle. So I said, why don't you come and stay? So he and his wife

Joy stayed with us. And one of the things I regret is that we got so slashed one night that the next day he was having lunch with Robert Anton Wilson and he invited me along, but I was so hungover I couldn't go. So I absolutely regret that. So, yeah, this is amazing.

the interviews that I've listened to of you. Is that something that that you were I guess like a topic that you are interested.

comic books. We're learning to read through comic books. And then it ends when I'm getting on the plane at Lax to come here, and in between I'm reading Her and Hesse and I'm doing this and I'm going there, and I'm I have an academic career during the early PC days and I didn't want to deconstruct anything, and

so it's all. And then ten years after playing in Blondie and my own band and iggy Pop and you know, getting this a story where I'm kicked out of David Bowie's loft in Manhattan sometime nineteen eighty because he tells

this ridiculous story. Excuse me, yes, yes, he told this ridiculous story catch my drift about Colin Wilson heading a coven in Cornwall, and I in all innocence and just sitting there and a friend of mine says, oh yeah, Gary, he reads Colin Wilson, what do you think, I said, well, actually, as far as I know, that's not the case. Oh yes,

he does. And he goes on and on about this and I'm not realizing that I'm causing a scene, and you know, you know, you know, and I'm giving this is the stuff that people should wait if you want to know what happens next. Folks know, but I'll tell you what happens next. What happens next is, uh, Bowie has these two female bodyguards, and I think it's the last and if it's never Diamonds Off, I think it's time forever. I think the penultimate Sean Connery Bond film.

Again I'm dating myself, and like, there are these two kind of female assassins named Thumper and Bambi. So his Bowie's bodyguards are like these. And they come up to me and they say, David's tired. We think it's time you leave. And I said, okay, sorry to me, but it just he was just And subsequently I realized what had happened is he he was reading he was read what. Wilson has a book called Mysteries and it's a follow up to the Occult and it's it's came out in

the late seventies, but it's still a great read. It's basically a compendium of all everything that was going on at the time, but the paranormal everything. But he does tell a story about not him, but someone else in Cornwall who was telling a story about a witch going around and like making like which he signs on the

you know, the front doors of people's cottages. But that was a story that Wilson was telling about somebody else in this book, but in his exalted state, Major Tom had had had mixed it up, uh and if any case, So that's you know, that was kind of the thing. So I had these you know, run ins in that with with that with Wilson. But I know, but I got to know him, you know, very well, I uh said.

I wrote a book about him. I reviewed many of his books for when they came out here in London, visited in Cornwall quite a few times, and know the family. And just recently this year there was a there's a columnist and international conference that's been going on in the past few years and I saw his sons there. So yeah, we're trying to keep his legacy going. And actually the book I wrote about him went out of print, but my current publishers and traditions they're going to reissue it.

used to be so. But this would have been about nineteen eighty one in New York first off, and I had been reading about this stuff again, reading Colin Wilson and other other people about it, and he spoke highly of it out of all the kind of gurus and teachings and things of that sort that he had written about in the Occult and other books. He has a long section on Crowley and Yates and the Golden Dawn and Leovatsky and you know, it's still if you ever

find it, you know, it's still a great read. It's just called the Ocult. It's still a great read. But he had a good section on Gurjev and Uspensky in the Fourth Way, and I always liked Duspensky's early stuff.

He has a book called Turchier Organum, which means the Third organ of Thought, and something he wrote in the early twentieth centuries in Russia, and it was all about like higher space, higher dimensions, like sort of like chaos theory, or I guess entanglement now is kind of like the craze, and so this was like, you know, the time is the fourth dimension, then five, fifth, sixth, seventh dimension, and all this kind of stuff and a variety of different

ideas about consciousness and so on. Then another book called New Model of the Universe, which is a great again collection of different essays on dreams and hypnotism and at the superman and the variety of other things. So I liked reading all that stuff. And then I actually again, as I had in La I had moved back to New York at this point, and I had came across a notice for a lecture about you know, the Courage of Fourth wait at the Barberzan Hotel. So I thought, okay,

I'll go. And actually the lecture I went to. The people doing it are one of these bogus groups. But I and I had mentioned that I had gone to a friend of mine with whom I had discussed this sorts of stuff in my interest in you know, a variety of different spiritual and esoteric ideas. And he said, yes, well they're not the real thing. If you really interested,

I've been involved, you know, for a while. And oh, he hadn't mentioned to me, and he was kind of like he was checking me out, you know kind of thing. And so then he said, if you're really interested, here this is a phone number. Call it and I'll I'll I've mentioned you to my the group leader, and I'll tell him that I told you, and he expects you to call. So I did, and this again I had this is I my own I left Blondie, my own Bami.

We had failed to nail a record deal, and I was kind of in between in New York and trying to figure out what to do and all that sort of stuff. And but I met this fellow and his name is Paul Raynard, and he was an artist, and he was also one of the principal instructors of what's notice the Gerchef movements, which are these very very intricate

and strange and difficult sorts of dances. I don't know if you've it was a film of Gurdjeff's book Meeting with Remarkable Men, that came out in the late seventies. It's done by Peter Brook. If you know Peter Brook, he did the mahab Haka. There's different versions of that, like an eight hour version and a sixteen hour version, so it's very serious filmmaker and he tends to use non professional actors in it. But in this film Meetings with the Markable Man, he does use one professional actor,

the late Terrence Stamp who just passed away. But there's a fantastic scene. If you know the Gurjeff story, like Madame Vatsky, he went to the east and different you know lands in search of hidden knowledge. For him, it was more Central Asia, you know, it wasn't wasn't Indian Tibet. It was like Central Asia. And among other things, he tells the story of finding this hidden monastery, the Stomong Brotherhood and this is where he learns these very intricate

and very very difficult and complex sort of dance. I mean they're not you say they're dances, but they're they're much more like kind of weird movements. Again, the thing is, if you know the old that sort of thing, rub your tommy, impat your head, it's like that to the tenth pour something. But in this film there are some scenes of these things, so I think they're on YouTube. You can find it on YouTube, and they're just remarkable

to see. And so the fellow I met was one of the teachers of these things, and I, you know, but this time, I you know, I a song of my was a hit song, top ten, I got a gold record. I played around. I are you know whatever? I told David Bowie you didn't know what he was talking about, and you know whatever. But this is the first This guy was the most solid present person I'd

come upon. He was he was just there. He didn't have to do anything, He just was sitting there and I just felt what And he said, he said the simplest thing, why do you want to get involved in this? And it was like, ooh, that is a tough one. Why do I am. I just curious that I had been in this Crowley thing and it was I and I fumbled and I just, you know, lamely said I want to wake up, and said, well that will take some time. Uh, And then you know, here's here's the meeting.

Go there. And so I started going to these things and it was very, very different than the Crowley.

But on the whole, if you know the gurge of idea, it's this notion that we're mechanical or asleep, which doesn't sound like much these days because we tend to you know, we've heard it all very different New Age kind of ways, talking about similar sorts of things, mindfulness and so on

and so on. But when he first came across to the West in the nineteen twenties, and by the way, I've written biography of Uspensky and I've also written a biography of hill named Morris Nicol, who was of Gusbensky's students, who originally started out as Jung's British lieutenant here in the nineteen twenties and the New Jump Ship and became a follower of grigory from Duspensky. So I've written in

the background, that's my background in it. But it's this whole idea that we're mechanical, you know, we're just stimulus response, you know, machines, which pretty much straightforward behaviorism and pretty much straightforward you know, clinical psychology that we've been teaching in the academies at the time. But he said, there's a way not to be a machine, and so we had, you know, a whole technique of doing this. And one of the things that struck me, and again it's it's

this about consciousness itself. We hate this notion what they call self remembering. And I've actually just been finished and just working on a book about the old the whole idea that we forget that we exist. We we if he, if he, of course I exist, but most of the time we actually don't. You know, we know the fact that we exist, but we don't know the reality that

we exist. And this is something you can even find in you know, existential philosophy, like and Heidiger talks about zion but guess and height, you know, forgetfulness of being, and this is something and both Gurjeff and Heideger they both hit on this, say like, the one sure fire method of reawakening to being would be to have a vivid grasp of your own death. You know, So this this vivid grass of your own finitude that one day

you're not going to be here. We all know that, we know that factually, but we don't know it experientially then, you know, and when we do grasp it generally, you know, strikes us pretty hard. All that. So any case, this was sort of the thing I was. I was getting into this, and I was doing, you know, very different

exercises going to these meetings. But on the lights side, one of the things I did experience in this is the Gurd Jeff uh Gerjeff's birthday is generally celebrated on the thirteenth of January, and I was invited to a celebration uh in a mansion in upstate New York. And I the person who had got me in I met with him and some others. We all got in the car, didn't know the other people, and we drove and it

was and we got there. And if you again, if you're familiar with the Gerd Jeff kind of uh millieu, there's what they call the toast to the idiots. And one of the things Gerd Jeff did was he used to get people to knock back several, you know, very strong shots of vodka, and the idiot, I mean, we tend to think of idiot meaning somebody who's stupid. Idiot actually means unique, like an idiosyncratic or idiosyncrasy. It's unique to you. So if you look just the etymology of

it goes back to it just means unique. But an idiot now means, well, you know whatever, somebody who is stupid. But Gerjeff would say, there are different kinds of idiots.

And after you had a few of these shots of the vodkas and you toast to the round idiot, you know, to the square idiot, whatever it might be, your particular kind of idiot would come come out and he would see you and he would and he would and this was well after I mean, he taught one thing to U Spensky, and U Spensky turns it into a kind of system, you know, kind of intellectual sort of system. But Gergie was more the shaman Maha. He just had

the stuff and just to be around him. And what he used to doing is last days in this tiny flat he had in Paris. But he would cram as many people as he could possibly into the dining room, fifty people around a tiny little table where he prepared this sumptuous, fantastic meal. And by the way, ger Jeff Crowley and Young World good cooks. So someone should do

a cookbook of those guys. And while you were eating all these meals and knocking back this vodka, he would sort of see you and point out who you were and all that kind of thing. So any case, that's the background to that. So I'm taking to this mansion up in upstate New York Gurjef celebration. We knocked back quite a few, you know, shots of vodka, and then we're told that we're going to be treated to a special performance performance of Gilgamesh and fine, and who do

I see getting up on the stage. It's the comedian actor Bill Murray Oh from Saturday Night Live. And see he's up there, and I hadn't had anything to eat, but I had like three or four these fuckers, And every time he said, ank you do, I couldn't stop laughing. And but no, if you remember the film Groundhog Day, it's the eternal recurrence, It's the one day. But it's

not not so much in the work. But Uspensky is one of Huspensky's pet ideas was this notion of rather than reincarnation, there's what he calls the eternal wheel, the eternal recurrence. You when you die, you were born again into the same life and what you know throughout life, there are opportunities for us to wake up and realize, you know, where we are and to make different decisions and all that. So that that was kind of But also an early an earlier film that Bill Memory was

in was a remake of The Razor's Edge. That's the Somerset mone There was a film in the forties with Tyrone Power, and it's about somebody as like as a socialite who goes through the harr of World War One and then comes back and he realizes he can't he can't live the shallow life anymore, and he must go, you know, in search of the Truth. And it's supposally be based on Christopher Isherwood, who was the English novel who eventually got into Vedanta and things like that, but

Bill Murray did a version of that as well. So and I knew people in Hollywood when when because I knew people in the acting world, and a lot of them are really into that kind of stuff because the Gerzia version of it, not the Uspensey, but the Gersia version does a lot of role playing and psychodrama and things of that sort. And that was one of the things that Spency couldn't deal with. It's just was too kind of crazy for him, and he wanted to like, it's a system, you know, you do it like that.

the truth. There's a story behind writing the book. And I say in the in the acknowledgments in the back that I wrote this book, you know, to stay sane basically. You know, whether it's achieved that or not, I don't know. But I was going through a very very difficult time in my life, and I'm going to details about it, but there was a time and this was let's see. I think I started reading writing at twenty twenty three,

I think. And oddly enough, I said the book, the book ends with my leaving Los Angeles in coming here, okay, And that was the beginning of January nineteen ninety six. So at the beginning of January twenty twenty three, when I was going through this very very difficult time in my life, there's a place here in London called the British Library, which was a fantastic resource if you have

a researcher. Everything published in the UK, there's a copy of it there in tons of other stuff as well, and you can bring your laptop and sit and get a desk and you can work there. So living conditions where I was living meant that I was spending quite a lot of time in this place, and and I

didn't have any work. I just finished this book I was saying about this, Uh, this follower of Uspensky called Morris Nickel, who started out as a YOUNGI and then he became Musbensky and gerd chef and all that sort of thing. So I just finished the book about him, and he didn't have any work. And I'm the kind of guy if I don't have work. It's you know, I always say I need a break, and when I don't have work, I go out of my mind. Uh so I and and there you go, there you go,

and and I'm I can't stay at home. So I just found myself in the library and I was just reading stuff, and I said, I'm spared to do something. And I think it just just an effort to assert my existential being, my actual being in presence on here on the planet. Because where what was happening I can't go into detail, but what was happening was such that I was feeling like, my god, this is this, This can't be happening to me. Just cannot be the case. So I have the mind parasites coming on me. So

I had to fight them off. And so I sat down and said, just started, just just start writing. Just sit down and start writing. So I sat down, I said, I wrote, I am here. Yeah. Oh, on my sudden, I actually have a copy, and I wrote, yeah. I'm often asked how it went from being a rock star parentheses, although I never was a star, more of a satellite and one with an eccentric orbit, to a writer on esotericism and the history of consciousness. This memoir is an

attempt to answer that question. So January twenty twenty three, the January twenty twenty four, I answered that question beautiful. Can I even have it? Yeah, I even have British Library January twenty twenty three. January twenty twenty four completed on the twenty eighth end of our of my relocation to London. So the book ends at my leaving La

to come here. And I finished writing the book on the twentieth anniversary of my coming here, and it'll soon be the thirtieth later this year and knock on wood. So it had this kind of oraboric kind of thing, you know, the circle returning on itself in some way which I hadn't planned, but it just came out that way. So yeah, I mean, it's all the stuff about, you know,

growing up reading comic books. And I think I can trace my interest in all this kind of stuff back to when I was about five years old and there was a comic strip in Adventure Comics DC Comics called the Legion of Superheroes. I'm sure there's whatever now movies about them now. I don't know if they were teenage teenagers with superpowers from different planets and the future and just weird stuff, and super Boy got involved with them.

Remain ones. There was Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy. So I'm five years old. Lightning Lad makes sense, he shot Lightning bulls. Saturn Saturn Girl quite gets she had mental psychic powers, but there was a neat Saturn you know, on her, on her bosom, you know, with the rings and all that kind of thing. Cosmic Boy he had like pink, white and black kind of costume and that I don't know, if you know the British expression chav.

That it was kind of like chav colors, like pink and black, real chav colors, and that he he had magnetic powers, And I thought, why don't they call them magnetic boy? What's what's cosmic got to do with it? What does cosmic mean? So that's my sisters? I don't know, yess my mother she didn't know. I didn't bother ask my father. So I thought, ever since then, I've been trying to figure that one out? So what does cosmic mean? So it all started all started back then. So yeah,

so this comics influenced me. Then I got into Lovecraft and all that kind of stuff and the Conan you know, the rubberty Howard Conan stories. And I was a victim of all the all that paperback reissue of the pulp stuff from the thirties and the forties. And then a hippie girl about nineteen seventy when I was fourteen, whom I had a crush on. I can still remember the smell of the pe Julia oil she wore. She handed me a copy of hermann Hesse's novel, said Arthur, the

Bantam paperback. It was all blue and there was like a stature of the Buddha on it, and that was like the first serious, you know, literature I read. And then that was at the beginning of my journey to the East and all that, and I became a hess, you know, one of the victims the many many early teens and in America then and yeah, so that was like, well, that's just that's drifted, that's who we went. And then

read the Beats and all that kind of stuff. You know, found myself living in New York at eighteen, starving writing really bad poetry. Not purposely writing bad poetry, but subsequently I realized it was and this is before I joined blondie was I was living. I was sharing a storefront on East tenth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A. And if you know New York in nineteen seventy four seventy five, you didn't go It's Alphabet City. Now it's

like it's overpriced. You can't afford the cappuccinos.

of the world was coming. That doesn't add up, Like why do you want to start a band at the end of the world's coming? And why an a kipp it? Are you gonna play and ship like this? He stuff like that, And this guy was gradually going off his nut and Clem Burke the Lake. Clem Burke, who just passed away earlier this year, one of the greatest drummers ever, whom I knew from high school. We went to high school together in Bayo, New Jersey, and he had only

just joined Blondie because they kept losing musicians. They kept losing the drummer, the bass player, stuff like that. He had only just joined. And the first gig he did at CBGB, you know, the famous club where everybody came out of the bass player quit and I was I was not a musician. I was allowed to hang out with the musicians in New Jersey. I could kind of sort of almost maybe you know, play Johnny B. I didn't get up to good, but you know, you know so kind of kind of play. But that was what

you needed, you know. And in this place I was living in the storefront and he's tent that there really was. There was a broken down, upright piano for almost every key was wrong. But I somehow learned how to, you know, write songs on this and Clem said, come come in audition. So I went and auditioned. What I remember is playing the Stone song lived with me for like forever. I kind of I could figure that one out. And then

the end they said, that's it. What happened after that is that my roommate who he saw what was happening. So I was playing in them and all that kind of stuff, and he said, look it's it's either the kibbitz or out, so he kicked me out. I didn't. I was. I was on the street for a while, I was sleeping in the studio, and then Debbie Harry

finally took me in. So she had a tiny one bedroom flat in little Italy on Thompson Street and you know where like there was an Italian social club below and the Massachue ladies are sitting outside, you know, smoking cigarettes and drinking their espressos. And I'm you know, she's already living there with Christine and her three cats, and all the all the guitars, the amps and stuff is in there, and then now the bass players there. So

we crushed it. So from living in that tiny place, then we moved into this loft space on the Bowery and then my my life of magic began there. Sorry, that was that's half of those there. That's great, thank you. That isn't me.

strange being over here seeing what's happening. Uh, over here sat side, it's it's it's my god. It's like it's I can't It's like a bad dystopian movie. That's, oh my god, this is like really happening, you know, So keep the faith, you know.

side of it. It's glamor, you know, it's like, you know, it's definitely that kind of thing. And it's it's it's it's gone. I don't know, you know.

his eyes, he looks like a cat person. I mean, I really, I really think so that's why he was after the cat ladies because they would have they would they would have noticed, they would have found him out.

us out at the True gray Lodge dot com. But True is with a V, not a you. So thank you guys so much, appreciate it and have a great uh you know, evening. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Twitters where I talk most of my weirdness. But then uh yeah, you know, I just encourage you to go look and check out and let it play with your eyes. So and that's about it. Thanks for everything, and Nick, thanks for having me on for sure.