Passion Points
On tapping into what you love and telling your life story.
In March 2006 Howard Bloom revealed how he helped superstars bring their stories to life, and how we can each do the same for ourselves.
From 1976-86, the Howard Bloom Organization was the publicist for many rock stars.
This is Howard’s story.
I was challenged, when I was in eighth grade, by this girl. When I was in high school, I could walk through the entire school with no eye contact from anyone. And I didn’t even realize it, because it was so normal for me. But one day, one of the girls who may have hated me most, her eyes turned toward me. It was a startling experience, and it never happened to me before, in school, that somebody’s eyes actually turned toward me! And she said,
“I told my mom that you understand the Theory of Relativity.”
Well I didn’t understand the Theory of Relativity. But for God’s sakes, you know, I ran to the library, which was my second home as soon as I got out of school, and said,
“Give me everything you’ve got on the Theory of Relativity.”
They gave me two books. One was a great big, giant book by Albert Einstein. It had about eight words of English on each page, and the rest of the page was all equations. The way I handled the Scientific American and everything in science, I plowed through one way or the other.
So I got into about page 50 in this thing, and then I realized,
“It’s getting late. My parents are going to put me to sleep. And I got this little skinny book here. I better stop with the big fat book, and go with the little skinny book.”
* * *
Konrad Lorenz, one day he walks past a nest on his farm of geese. He keeps lots and lots of geese. The goslings normally do this single file walking-around after their mother. Konrad Lorenz is very perplexed because by the time he gets into the kitchen, he’s got a whole line of little goslings going into the kitchen after him!
They’ve got the wrong idea. So he takes them down to their nests. He’s not their mom. Their mom is their mom! But every time he sees them, they go following him around.
Gradually they grow. Eventually when they hit puberty, and their sexual hormones hit, guess what they want to fuck? They don’t want a guy or girl who looks like dear old mom, because dear old mom is Konrad Lorenz! The only thing that they can fall in love with is a human being.
When they learn to fly in a V-formation, who’s the leader? Konrad Lorenz on his bicycle! They fly at directly head level in a perfect V behind him. So Konrad Lorenz is gonna be it for the rest of their lives. Every year there are going to be brand-new geese that are either going to be going through puberty, adulthood, old age, and whatever it is, Konrad Lorenz is their leader and their guide!
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‘Bloom’s modus operandi with every new client was to sit down for a psychotherapy-like discussion to uncover what he called an artist’s “passion points”—the inner feelings that are the wellspring of creativity.
“What I would tell my artists is that there’s a ‘you’ who walks around everyday saying ‘Hi, hello, how are you?’—a rather bland personality,” he recounted. “Then there’s another ‘you’ that comes out when you sit down at a blank piece of paper to write a lyric or a melody. That’s the part we’re looking for.”’
– from Possessed: The Rise and Fall of Prince by Alex Hahn
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You say, very simply,
“What’s the first thing you ever remember that got you interested in music? What’s the first thing you ever remember about music?”
When I’m talking to Ralph MacDonald, he says,
“Well, I was about three and a half years old, and I was still crawling. My dad had a day job and ran a calypso band. On holidays, they would throw balls. I was crawling around under the table while they were planning, a year ahead, for these balls up in Harlem. Then they were planning raffles, so that they could sell tickets all over the streets.”
Everybody who bought a raffle ticket would have to put his phone number and name down. That gave them a mailing list which accumulated over the years. They hit that mailing list with as many announcement of the upcoming event as it took to sell the tickets.
Then what did they do with Ralph? They put him on stage, on a very high stool, with a little bongo drum, and Ralph was already performing in front of an audience as a percussionist when he was three and a half years old. So here we have the elements that are going to determine who Ralph is for the rest of his life.
Passion points provide the roots for personal narrative. What you’ll generally find is there’s a key passion point at roughly the age of five.
In Prince’s case, it’s being taken by his mother over to a theater where his father is rehearsing. His father is a pianist. And he sees his father in the center of the stage with 3,000 seats pointing at that stage, implying 3,000 bodies and their eyes – six-thousand eyes – trained on his father, and his father alone. His father in the spotlight, and five of the most gorgeous women he’s ever seen in his life, scantily dressed, surrounding his dad. And that’s it. He is a musician; sexuality is very close.
* * *
One of my imprinting points is this piece of very long poetry, “Renascence,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. She wrote this when she was nineteen years old.
This is a passion point of mine. I read this at sixteen. And then I started reading it in coffee-houses. If I wasn’t in coffeehouses, I was reading in a jazz club. I read it to everybody I could read it to. I read it to audiences at my school. I read it all over the place. (Along with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which has a message that’s not necessarily relevant to what we’re talking about.)
But this poem said to me the essence of what became ‘tuned empathy’:
“A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.”
Those are the key lines.
When I started working in rock and roll, I had really not listened to rock and roll. I grew up on classical music and became the editor of Circus Magazine.
I really loved working for those teenagers. I did all kinds of research and discovered that the median age of my audience was sixteen years old, that my audience started at thirteen and it went on to the twenties. I loved them among other things because I had never had a teenage-hood.
I was a science kid. In Buffalo, New York, there weren’t other science kids to hang out with. You can’t go to Bronx High School of Science or Brooklyn Polytech. There was no such thing. It means you’re all on your own. You have no friends. You’re picked on, all the time. So I never had a chance to be a teenager. And now, the teenagers of America were giving me a chance to be a teenager through them.
I had all kinds of analytic tools to work with that I had gotten from Martin Gardner’s mathematical science section, growing up on the Scientific American, another passion point.
It was the ability to resonate to the frequency of the kids, and really love the fact that they were letting me into their world, that allowed me to see: every story has to show the artist when the artist was young and struggling and just like one of these kids! No better, no worse, no more secure, just as insecure, just as uncertain. An ordinary kid with a bizarre notion driving them.
I had to show you how he went from being ordinary to being who he is now, so that you can feel that passage inside yourself. Without that, I wasn’t going to hit my kids or me, either. Because if you’re reading someone who’s already above a glass ceiling above your head, that means you have nowhere to go. No, you can’t do that to kids.
When I worked with ZZ Top, ZZ Top let me be a teenager in Texas. When I worked with John Mellencamp, John Mellencamp let me be a teenager in Indiana, and who was actually popular in the pack. Who actually had a substantial place in the pack of bad kids. Well, that’s not an opportunity I ever had in my life! Was it buried somewhere inside of me? Absolutely.
How did I train for this? I trained for this by hitchhiking and riding the rails. I don’t know if the phrase ‘riding the rails’ means anything anymore. Riding freight trains – illegally.
The first thing I did, when I got on the car when I got on the car with some stranger who was picking me up somewhere in California or Washington or Oregon, was find out what they did for a living, and then get the story of their life. What could be any more interesting? I’m alone, in this car. I don’t want to listen to the radio. The story of your life is fascinating! You’re a person I never met before. You grew up in places I’ve never been and do things for a living that I’ve never done. I got story after story. Did I know it was practice for anything? No. But it was. Each one expanded the limits of what I knew and could feel.
When Prince told me about going into André Cymone’s basement, and starting his own mini-society down there, that had its own rules, where sexuality was totally free, where you could do absolutely anything sexually, well, I related to that – to my teenage-hood, cause I had been isolated too.
I couldn’t be accepted in an existing clique. Existing cliques kicked me around! I was a bonding tool for them. The people you kick around help you bond and you stick together. But I gradually got to the point where I could create my own cliques.
When we were doing one of the television specials that I’d done, I was talking to the writing partner over in Holland, Marcel Roele. And I tried to explain myself.
“Look. I would sit in a dark room for hours, just looking at Joan Jett pictures, picking the right ones on this basis:
I had met enough people who had grown up as vinyl junkies to know that these guys when they saw a picture of Ronnie Spector, they got a poster of her, they hung it on their wall and they masturbated to it. Because that’s a key imprinting point. That is a thing you’re not supposed to regard with any degree of respect? I’m sorry, fuck you. This thing needs respect. This is a vital imprinting point! And I deliberately chose the photos of Joan that guys could jerk off to.
Cause that is a sacred moment of life. As bizarre as it sounds to say that.”
When I told that to Marcel, Marcel said,
“Well, it worked. You got me.”
Joan was a powerful, self-motivated, independent woman in the late 70s, a time when the number of working mothers was shifting from a minority to a majority in the US. Until then, girls had grown up with housewives in frilly skirts as mothers and role models. Only their fathers put on pants in the morning and went to the office. Now, suddenly, both mom and dad were putting on trousers or pants suits and going off to work. Young girls were left in confusion about their own roles. They had no media models who reflected the new, masculinized reality of female life. Joan was that role model incarnate, and I deliberately focused on that in her public identity as well.
I sat with Joan in her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and explained to her what she was accomplishing for millions of others simply by being herself.
Take your sales points. Memorize them.
I started my own business in the record industry: the Howard Bloom Organization. I’ve been clinically depressed all my life. I woke up every morning with a long list of every failure that I had. So when a potential client called, all I could think of were my failures! Now, you’re not going to sell a client by saying,
“Well I’ve failed at this, I’ve failed at that, I failed at the other thing and I failed at this.”
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‘“Billy [Joel] never thought of himself as good-looking at all,” Howard Bloom recalls, “so we had a problem with photos. We had an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot, and basically I said, ‘If we’re going to have a photo shoot, it has to reflect who Billy is. Billy loves his motorcycles, so we’re going to do it with the motorcycles. It has to reflect the rebellious aspect of Billy, so we’re going to do it with the motorcycles.”’
– from Billy Joel: The Life & Times Of An Angry Young Man by Hank Bordowitz
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It was horribly difficult for me to think of the things that were positive. It might take me as much as three or four days for just one scrawny little item! I had a list of 30 items I’d failed at when one scrawny little positive item came butting into my mind that I knew I was going to lose in 20 seconds. So I had to write it down immediately. I had to keep 3 by 5 cards where I had these digested in front of me.
And over the course of six to eight months, I finally had 20 points that were positive! I kept this right next to my telephone, so that any time I got a call from a client, it didn’t matter how dumbleheaded I was, and how little I could remember these things, the card was there to remind me.
Well eventually, through repetition, and this is very important, repeating repeating repeating repeat it till it becomes automatic. The best context for that is probably some sort of group therapy session where everybody just has to repeat their good points and add a new one every week. Because after a few months, it becomes automatic. Then when you wake up in the morning, the narrative in your head doesn’t tell you what a terrible lousy horrible god-forsaken piece of shit and failure you are, it tells you in addition, what successes you’ve had! And you can build on those.
Yes, having a good and interesting story is very important. But what sells the story is your confidence.
If you call on the phone and you’re like me, a person who goes through my asthma of depression at the beginning of the day, and you sound timid and uncertain of yourself, the person is going to say no. It’s an automatic. You’ve just given him a bunch of repulsion cues and set him up to say no without him even knowing why he’s saying no to you. So your first phone call of the morning, and this can be applied in other areas, has to be very easy.
Why? Because it took you 20 minutes to drive yourself with every bit of discipline in you to make your first phone call to begin with. You need positive reinforcement on that first phone call.
So if the first two phone calls you make are easy, you’ve got confidence. Then make your hardest phone call on the list. You don’t put it off till the end of the day; at your third or fourth call after you’ve got your confidence up and you’re really on a roll and you know what it is you have to say, you’ve really greased up and fueled, make the hardest call of the day. The biggest catch. The most important person you need to reach.
* * *
Passion points keep changing as you keep growing in life.
Ralph MacDonald’s second passion point, when he was reborn all over again: he was 17 years old. He was out of high school. Well, most of the kids in his neighborhood didn’t even bother to graduate from high school. The kids in his neighborhood were on the way to killing themselves with drugs and gang wars. And burning their own homes down. I mean his block was a wreck when he took me up to see it. There was nothing left of it! It was like Dresden, after World War II. Burned out.
Ralph was working on Roosevelt Island, working in the kitchen. Just simply chopping things. He saw an ad that said Harry Belafonte was auditioning and needed a new percussionist.
200 people showed up for that audition. But Ralph had been percussioning since he was three and a half years old. And beyond that, Ralph had this uncanny sense of timing. When he hit a beat, he mastered that beat. He had that beat so precisely that even an atomic clock could not possibly compete with him. He had the lock on the tick-tock of the cosmos and the tick-tock of your heart and muscles too. So, when Ralph played, he got the gig.
Harry Belafonte is a teacher who finds passion points and builds on them. He did this with a guy named Martin Luther King.
Harry Belafonte remade Ralph MacDonald. It was a second major passion point in Ralph’s life, going to the university of Harry Belafonte. And the first lesson in that university was,
“You know the word ‘fuck’ that you use 17 times in every sentence? You know that word ‘shit’ that you use about 13 times in every sentence? ‘Motherfucker’ which appears at least once in a paragraph? You’re not allowed to use any of those words any more. You’re talking to white people now. That’s not their language. You have to speak English. You have to speak it clearly and articulately.”
My job is to come in, if you’re John Mellencamp or Prince, and tell you,
“We’re going to find the self that writes itself on your pad of paper when you write lyrics. We’re going to find the self comes alive when you’re down in the basement with your guitar and your amps and your home studio equipment, and you don’t think another melody will ever come out of you and suddenly a melody tumbles into place, and you don’t know where the fuck it came from.
“But most especially, we’re going to find the you that comes alive when you’re on stage and something takes over every muscle of your body and every cell of your brain. You don’t know what the fuck it is. All you know is that with your will or without it, you will be moved out of the way.”
So my job is to dig into you and find a second narrative.
A narrative for your most passionate self. This is critical to you if you’re an artist. Your art depends on being true to that hidden emotional self. If you lose the thread of that self over the years, a self that changes and grows, you can become a caricature of what you once were. You’d no longer know why the hell you’re doing this anymore. It’s because you’d have lost touch with that internal you, that one based on passion points, which changes and evolves every year.
You’re looking for that story of that person within who makes the music. Your first task is: assemble a biography based on the things that this person has said in a bunch of scattered interviews. Take the really interesting points. The ones that you could tell to your grandmother over lunch, and would grab her attention. Put them together in chronological order so that you’ve got the story of the artist’s life.
Prince already had a platinum album. I had the privilege of taking on people who had already gotten their glider off the ground. Now it was my task to show them how to find the shafts of air that go up. Not the ones that go down. Those shafts of air are in yourself, and in your audience. And your self has to connect to your audience.
Once you’ve got your material organized, then you go back to the person you’re working with. Now remember, I am doing this for celebrities, and you are doing this for different purposes. But here’s how you do it for a celebrity. You go back to the celebrity and you say,
“Look. I’m going to have you doing sometimes as many as six interviews a day. There are a couple of things you have to know about interviews. The interviewer is looking for a really good story. But he’s not that bright. So, he’s going to ask you some really stupid questions. And you’ve taken in through osmosis some answers that are as stock and clichéd as the questions he’s going to ask you. For example, he’ll ask you:
‘How do you categorize your music?’
And you will answer, because you picked this up from God-knows-where – you will answer:
‘I try not to categorize my music. I try to be beyond category. I’ve taken a little influence from here, and a little –.’
It’s an island, it’s a dead end! Any question that he asks you, answer it with your story. Tell your story. And believe me, when the journalist goes home that night, he is going to say to his wife,
‘Wanda, I am the most brilliant interviewer in the world. I came up with this amazing question: “How do you characterize your music?” And I got this story out of this kid! I had to wrestle him in order to get it, but I got it. I’m great!’”
So the second lesson for a celebrity is that you have to have the skills of a prostitute. A prostitute cannot be successful unless she shows utter and complete attention, joy, absorption in the client of the moment. She performs as if there had been no other men ever in her life. Well, you have to do that with interviews. Every interview you have to come alive as if you’ve never done an interview before in your life! You have to show that person the life inside of you. And – at least in Western civilization – we’re not supposed to repeat ourselves. So we apologize when we repeat ourselves. We say,
“Well, as I told the guy who was just in a few minutes ago….”
No, there is no guy who was just in a few minutes ago. You’re only talking to this person. Erase all apologies for having repeated things from your life, and in the process, erase all references to other human beings that you’ve talked to.
We’re talking eyeball-to-eyeball with this journalist. We’re giving him your heart and soul. This journalist whose eyes you’re speaking to, no matter how unengaged he may seem to be, is your megaphone to your audience. So you are really speaking to your audience, the people you need to connect with most. This is your connecter. Don’t let the chance to speak to ten thousand or ten million people pass you by.
* * *
It only happens one day out of every four, but when you go on stage, the audience’s eyes connect with yours in a way that takes you out of yourself, that lifts you into an ecstasy, a standing outside yourself. And, you have what amounts to an out-of-body experience. Something begins dancing you, singing you, puppeteers you, you don’t know what it is, and your conscious self simply has to step aside and let this thing happen. Which is why sometimes you really do have an out-of-body experience. As your self produces the illusion that you’re on the ceiling, watching this whole thing taking place. I’ve had that happen in performance.
If you’re John Mellencamp, you walk off the stage a torn man, because you have no idea of who or what the hell that was for the last hour and ten minutes. Your normal personality with its normal narrative is gone! You don’t have it any more. You’re naked.
You’re in the empty concrete corridors behind the stage. You’re no longer in touch with the divinity that comes alive in you in response to the divinity of the audience’s eyes. You’re empty, and you’re no one and no where and totally disoriented because your normal self isn’t even there any more.
It takes you an hour. An hour, in privacy – where only your wife and a few very close friends can come in and see you – before you can recover the personality that your normal narrative is connected to. The one that knows that when I say to you,
“Hello, how are you?”
You are supposed to say,
“Fine, thank you, and how are you?”
That’s the you that knows the routines of daily life. But that is NOT the you you’ve been when you’ve been turned gold by attention, spot-lit by the suns of 34,000 eyes, and when you’ve incandesced and have returned that light a thousand times over.
* * *
Joan didn’t have a record company when we started working together. She had turndowns from 23 labels, a record that had been made for $20,000 in Sweden, but nobody to put it out.
She had no booking agent, no band, no anything. And I told her manager,
“Okay, get the band together. I will get you a booking agent.”
Booking was incredibly important. I worked very hard at building connections in the booking agencies.
Things went like this: You have an A-list of the people who it’s easy to place; those are the people you work on. You have a B-list, a C-list and a D-list; they don’t get any attention whatsoever. Joan automatically went on the D-list.
So my job then, because I had a very close relationship with the booking agent by this point, was to kick his fucking ass to move Joan from D, to C, to B, to A! And once Joan was at B, he started getting her club dates, all up and down the East Coast. The first set of club dates, the poor manager had to use all the savings in the bank – but he was saving for his daughter’s college education. His daughter was a year and a half old, at the time. He used the whole thing up! On the first two tours, going back and forth through the same clubs, going all the way from Florida up to Maine.
Then he got all excited because on the fourth pass they were selling out the place. The owners of the clubs were offering enough for him to put his money back in the bank! He was jubilant. Now he was looking forward to playing the clubs the fourth time and the fifth time.
I said,
“Kenny, you’re going to play those clubs the fourth time; then you’re going to abandon them utterly. Then you’re going to take another strip that’s just a little bit further to the west, and you’re going to do it from Canada all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. You’re going to do it four times, just like you did this time. Then when they start offering you big money, you’re going to pull out. You’re going to pull out. You’ve got to hit this country in strips, from one end of the country to the other. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Because we have a time limit. You have a hit record.”
This is another thing I’m good at, is hearing music.
“So, you have a hit record, ‘I Love Rock’n’Roll.’ And before that record hits –”
remember, we’re talking about an artist without a record company –
“Before that record hits, you have to cover every strip of this country all the way to the Pacific, so that people are hungry for the next Joan Jett appearance. If your record hits before, you’ll be a one-hit wonder or a two-hit wonder. But if your record hits after, you have the personal loyalty and the word of mouth that comes from people bonding to you in person. All the way across the country you will be an album artist, an icon selling albums for the rest of your life. It’s as simple as that.”
I was building a strategy for Joan that would have led to her doing a tour, first, only once a year, where every tour was very heavily art-directed and you never knew what kind of surprises were going to be in it, but they reflected Joan, and then where she only showed up once every two years, and it was a big thing. But unfortunately, Kenny didn’t realize what I was doing for him, and decided,
“Oh my god! Now we need a professional to handle touring strategy.”
And he got a guy named Steve Leber, who is a professional. But his technique is to book an artist into the ground.
So Joan got booked into the ground, when she could still be an international superstar today, instead of playing military bases. She could have been so much bigger and she could have given so much more. Every once in a while, Joan talks to me about conversations with God and all kinds of books. I know this means Joan’s heart is going in a new direction. And she needs to share that with her audience. Otherwise she’s the hollow men on stage.
That’s what’s happened to Joan, that dissociation. And no, I’m sorry, as an artist you can’t do that. Your audience is too important.
I should have said,
“Once a year, I’m going to come back into your home, your environment. No wives, no handlers, no intermediaries, no managers, nobody but you and me. Because the passion points inside of you are going to change every year. Your brain, the world and the people around you are changing. Every year there’s a new you, wrapped around that core of your passion points. And my job is to help you find who you are this year.
Your audience has been changing too. You’ve been giving your audience the deepest things inside of yourself, a mirror in which they see themselves and are validated. It’s a mirror that makes them feel,
‘I’m not crazy. I’m part of a group. I’m part of a movement!’”
The artists could call me.
John Mellencamp could call, and he could say,
“Heinz Ketchup has decided to make lemonade out of a lemon, and the fact that you can’t get the ketchup out of the goddamn bottle – would you capitalize on that? They had Carly Simon give them one of her songs for their commercials, and now they want me to give ‘Hurts So Good’ to them. For another commercial. They’re offering me a million and a quarter dollars.”
Well that’s back when a million and a quarter dollars was worth a lot more than it is today. And it’s still a nice sum. He said,
“What should I do?”
And I said,
“John, you can’t take it. I mean, if you want to be clipping coupons in ten years from your bonds, living off of your real estate investments and the public to have totally forgotten who you are and to show no excitement if you talk about showing up on a stage, then that’s what you want. If you want to take the million and a quarter dollars, put it in the bank, take care of it very well. But if in ten years you want to be on a stage in front of audience that’s absolutely electrified by your presence still making music?
Fuck the million and a quarter dollars – because here’s who you are, John. You are a little man standing outside the gates of a great, fortified city. It’s its own kind of Oz. And you are out there in the ooze, the mud, outside. And no matter how much this society disregards you, no matter how small it makes you feel, you are the person who says,
‘I will put my finger to the sky and I will say, “Fuck you. I have a right to be.”’
You are saying that on behalf of tens and hundreds of millions of other human beings right now. You take that Heinz Ketchup money; you’re inside the gates of the fortress. You are the fortress.”
To be able to tell a person who he is, periodically, by knowing who he is now, is vital in making really critical life decisions. If John had taken that money, it would have been all over back in 1984.
What greater compliment can you pay to somebody than to sit there for six to seven hours with your eyes glued to them, taking notes on everything that they say, and then putting together the story of their life, bringing the story back and showing them how to tell the story of their life so they become the center of attention and gain the kind of recognition that they need – for the rest of the year, at least?
The vital moment when you were five, the vital moment when you were ten, the vital moment when you were eighteen, see how those things are growing inside of you by getting the story of what’s happening this year. After looking at all the lyrics that you’ve just written this year:
“What is this all about? Tell me the story of this year.”
Without that, people stall. And you get the hollow men. You get the mass of men leading the lives of quiet desperation. Because what they do on stage no longer reflects who they are.
What happens when you become a caricature of yourself? You feel profoundly alienated; extremely disturbed because the thing that you’re doing on stage every day doesn’t reflect you or capture your emotions or your passions any more. It’s something you simply do for the sake of making a living.
If you’re doing something simply for the sake of making a living, people aren’t going to call that much attention to you. Because the flame is gone. The passion is gone. So it really is very important to have a secular shaman, a Yoda, a person who can reflect you, who has the skills to intuit the things that count inside of you.
We’re talking about how, by finding who you are, and revealing who you are, you can reveal others to themselves.
Look, all these passion points are about people we ingest. Konrad Lorenz was the person that these goslings ingested. So their most deep, personal, profound and inexpressible passion point was another creature. Another being! Well that’s bizarre, that their most personal, private thing should be somebody else. But it is.
One year, John’s major concern he wanted to show me was the film Hud. Paul Newman movies had been very much passion points for him when he was a teenager. He wanted to show me Hud to show me a message. And the message in Hud was, that you start out as a rebel, a kick-ass, a son-of-a-bitch, and trouble for everybody. The women you’re involved with, the father you’re involved with, you’re just nothing but trouble.
Your dad represents a man who has managed to master reality somehow. Who works within a discipline, and understands the boundaries of his obligations to other human beings. You are trying to kick against every one of those boundaries that your dad represents. And over the course of time, you cease to be a rebel and you become your dad. That was the message of Hud.
Now why did John start our session with a movie? Because that’s his interpretation of the mythic meaning of this film. He’s telling me,
“This is what’s happening to me. I’m becoming my dad. How do I deal with that in the context of being a rock and roll artist? Doesn’t that mean I should stop doing rock and roll?”
“No, you motherfucker! Make more rock and roll for all you’re worth! Because other people are going through this too. Your whole generation is going through this, you stupid asshole!”
You don’t exactly put it that way, but in John’s case, you might have to. The following year, John’s major concern was – again, we’re talking about ingesting people here – that he was going to turn out to be like his Uncle John. His Uncle John was a guy who never settled down with a woman, he was a womanizer, a drunkard; screwed as many women as he possibly could. He took advantage of people; fucked them over. One after one. He was left, when he got old, a very lonely man. John did not want to become this. And what was he saying?
“I am becoming this. Please help me stop.”
I wasn’t there the following year to help him stop. He got rid of his wife, who was a source of immense strength. She was stronger than he was. He’s been through a succession of wives, and he apparently screwed a lot of women. Nobody was there to tell him who he is this year and how to express it in his music any more.
It’s an incredible thing. John taught me more than I ever taught him, despite the fact that what I was teaching turned out to be invaluable, something he put into place.
John’s invaluable too. Nobody would ever have sat me down with movies and showed me their mythic core before.
I miss John, because I’m not worrying from him any more.
* * *
The major point is you take the person through the story of his life in chronological order, because I’ve got research that demonstrates that the human memory works most easily in chronological order. What happens if you take things out of chronological order is, you get a person off on an island of thought. He explores that island, then realizes he has nowhere else to go. He’s cut himself off, surrounded by the sea. If you’ve got chronological order, there’s an archipelago, not an island.
At every step of the way, you want to be able to picture the scene. You want to be able to be a camera in the room. So, one thing that’s very important to know:
“What did your dad do for a living?”
This gives you a sense of where this kid was raised on the hierarchical-socioeconomic scale.
“What’d your mom do?”
I mean, there’s a big difference between kids who grow up with a mom who’s working, and kids who grow up with a mom who’s there! Or, kids who are raised by their grandmother, because they’re part of this black, matrilineal, matrilocal kind of thing. So you need to know these details:
“What did the room, your house, look like? What sort of neighborhood was it? But describe… no, no, I don’t mean characterize the neighborhood. I mean, describe to me, how big were the lawns? What people lived in the neighborhood?”
You’ve got to be able to picture all of this.
You’re getting the visuals and that helps you understand the person. Take that person chronologically through the story of his life, looking for where those passion points resurface, because that’s when things get so exciting that you could tell your grandmother about them just as fascinating interesting tales in themselves.
One of the things that I was taught that worked, is, Fuck these! Forget about these tape recorders. They make you lazy! Take notes. Learn the following words:
“I, write, very, slowly. Can you bear with me? You just said something really fascinating. Can we go back to that?”
People want to hear that they’re saying something fascinating. They’re uncertain with every sentence they utter about how they’re doing with you. But this concentrates your mind. You would think it distracts you. It does just the opposite. It gets you thinking about your next questions while you’re still absorbing all of the implications and vivid little details of what the person is saying. So don’t be afraid to say,
“Go back and say that again, so I can write it down.”
It’s very important.
Wherever you happen to be, go into isolation with your material. Take your notes. Find the most fascinating stuff. The stuff that would fascinate your grandmother. That stuff will be the passion points. I can’t explain to you why, but we’ll worry about that some other time. ‘Anecdotes,’ we call them in the writing business. They’re the key to success in writing.
Lay these anecdotes out in chronological order. But tell the story starting with something that Virgil invented, or was known for – it may have existed well before him – called the In Medias Res structure.
Start with a key point in the story that is an emotional, passionate highlight of this person’s life. Then move back to the beginning, and tell the story of how the person got to that point.
The reason that I could sit down and do this with Prince or Michael Jackson is because these were people from a culture that I could understand.
Prince had the only white rhythms section for a black lead artist that I’ve ever seen in my life! Sitting in this huge Minneapolis auditorium that was empty so Prince could do his practicing in it with his band, there was a woman sitting next to me who reminded me of my mother. So I started a conversation with her. Turned out she was president of Hadassah out in Minneapolis.
Well, my mother had been president of Hadassah in Buffalo, New York. So, bingo, right on target. Why was she here? She was here because her son Matt was playing the keywords.
The space for the interview has to be safe. You can do it in a hotel room if you have to.
When Lisa, of Wendy and Lisa, went to Prince to audition, she was flown out to Minneapolis. She’s a keyboard artist. She walked into Prince’s house. He had two grand pianos set up so the curves meshed and so they could sit across each other, each with a keyboard, and talk for four straight hours musically, without ever saying a word. And at the end of the interview, she was hired.
Learning these things about people, they expand me. When Ralph MacDonald would sit down with John Storm Roberts, who had written a book on the music of two continents, Africa and the Americas, and they would start to have conversations not in words, but Ralph would say,
“Harry Belafonte wanted us to learn the music of every culture on the planet. He had us learning Indian music. Indian music has this beat that goes like, ‘Bow kuh pukh,’”
and then he’d tap out the beat on the side. Then John Storm Roberts would say,
‘Yeah, but it also has this ‘d’sharita’ bop to it….”
I was lost! This was territory I just couldn’t grok. But it taught me something. It taught be that there was some territory I couldn’t grok, and made me very interested in it.
All these things expand you. If you don’t bring yourself into this process, not only are you not going to do anything for you; you’re not going to do anything for the people you’re working with.
The mass of men who lead hollow lives of quiet lives of desperation, the Hollow Men, are working in corporations and there’s no reason in hell that they can’t be walking in their full passion and life, because that’s what they have to be to resonate to the frequency of their audience and their customers.
It’s like a clutch. You know a clutch in an old engine? So you know that one plate spins, and the other one is disengaged, but when the two engage, the clutch moves things. Well, this part is the public. And this part is your soul. And you have to find the place where your soul can interface with the public to make the whole thing spin. To make the transmission go. To take you through the rest of your life. To give you what was called in the nineteenth century a ‘career.’ A brand-new word. Or, a vocation.
You make a living by doing things that shine in the eyes of other human beings.
“That fumbling beast with 88 teeth” is the phrase Billy Joel used when complaining about how painful songwriting was for him. What a stormily emotional bastard Beethoven was; what a gloriously angry crank. The fury in his music is divine. That anger is what you’ll hear in the voices of all the rock and rollers I’ve just mentioned. In the voice of Billy Joel when he was writing his best songs, his songs of anger at his wife, Elizabeth.
I worked with Billy and had breakfast with him the morning after he met a woman who changed his whole notion of womanhood. He couldn’t wait to explain it. It confused and awed him—that a woman could be not just a chick but a human with an