Most people who know the name Howard Bloom know it from the music business. He is the press agent who helped shape the public images of Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley and Billy Joel, and who ran what was described as the largest public relations firm in the record industry. But to understand how one man could sit at the center of rock and roll’s most powerful machinery and then walk away to write books placed alongside the great scientific thinkers, you have to start with the brain that was there long before the first platinum record.
Bloom was born in Buffalo, New York, on June 25, 1943, and by his own account he was a boy scientist before he was anything else. At 12, he has said, he was debating the Big Bang against the Steady State theory with the head of the University of Buffalo’s graduate physics department. He co-designed a game-playing computer that won science fair awards and built a Boolean algebra machine. At 16, he was working as an assistant researching the immune system at Roswell Park Memorial Institute, and it was during that period, he says, that he worked out a theory of how the universe begins, unfolds and ends, one he believes anticipated ideas like cosmic inflation and dark energy decades before mainstream physics arrived at them.
That restless, pattern-hunting mind is the key to everything that followed. After graduating from New York University, Bloom co-founded Cloud Studio, an avant-garde commercial art studio, in 1968, and became editor of the rock monthly Circus in 1971. He went on to head public relations at ABC Records in 1974, and in 1976 he founded The Howard Bloom Organization. Columbia Records brought him in to make Billy Joel more media friendly. His roster grew to include Styx, Cyndi Lauper, Talking Heads, Lionel Richie, ZZ Top, Bette Midler, AC/DC, Simon & Garfunkel, John Mellencamp, Earth, Wind & Fire, Kiss, Hall & Oates and Run DMC. In 1986 he co-formed Music in Action with Bob Guccione Jr., Ted Nugent, John Waite and Sheena Easton.
What made Bloom different was that he never stopped thinking like a scientist. He was not simply placing stories. He was studying crowds, watching how a single performer could pull tens of thousands of people into one shared passion, and asking what that told us about human beings in groups. The arenas were his laboratory, and the stars were, in a sense, his research partners.
Then, in 1988, the laboratory closed. Bloom developed chronic fatigue syndrome, an illness that left him housebound. For most people, that would have been the end of the story. For Bloom, it became the beginning of a second career, as the ideas he had been gathering in the power pits of rock and roll poured onto the page.
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History arrived in 1995, examining how groups compete and how they recruit the individuals inside them. Global Brain followed in 2000, tracing how life on Earth evolved into a vast, innovation-sharing network. The Genius of the Beast, published in 2010, took on capitalism as a form of mass behavior. The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates came in 2012, The Muhammad Code in 2016, and the memoir How I Accidentally Started the Sixties in 2017. Bloom describes the whole body of work as a single search for the soul of groups, from friendships and subcultures to nations and civilizations, a field he calls mass behavior.
The book that ties both lives together is Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock & Roll, published in 2020 with a foreword by Joan Jett. It is where the publicist and the scientist finally share the same page, using his years beside the biggest names in music to explore how people lose themselves in music and in crowds, and how that personal fire feeds the larger forces of history.
The recognition has been extraordinary. Britain’s Channel 4 placed him in the company of Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Freud, and Gear magazine called him the next Stephen Hawking. He has served as a Visiting Scholar at New York University and as a member of the National Space Society’s Board of Governors, founded the International Paleopsychology Project, and in 2006 founded the Space Development Steering Committee, a coalition that brought together the National Space Society, the Mars Society and the Space Frontier Society. He has been listed in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since its inception.
Look closely and the two careers were never really separate. The boy who stared at the stars in Buffalo and the man who stood in the wings while Prince and Michael Jackson held stadiums spellbound were asking the same question: what moves us, together, and why. That question is the brain behind Howard Bloom, and more than six decades after he first asked it, he is still chasing the answer.
The official website for Howard Bloom may be found at https://www.howardbloom.net