霍華德. 布魯姆：一年以後——紀念邁克爾
2010年6月25日自1976年共同創立霍華德. 布魯姆組織公司，霍華德. 布魯姆開始了他在音樂界公共關係的傳奇生涯。他幫助建立和維護以下名人的職業生涯：邁克爾.傑克遜，Prince, Bob Marley, Queen, Billy Joel, John Cougar Mellencamp, Simon & Garfunkel, Bette Midler, Joan Jett, AC/DC, Talking Heads, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five，以及大約100位其他70-80年代的明星。這裏他分享了對他的客戶邁克爾.傑克遜的回憶，帶領我們穿越所有喧囂，到達更寧靜的地方。
6月25日的晚上，淩晨1點，我正繞Prospect公園作 一英里 的夜行，然後返回褐石，我經過一對坐在門階上的18歲情侶，在這寂寞的時刻，街道和人行道通常都該是徹底無人了。男孩有著黑色的捲曲頭髮，女孩是金色的頭髮，穿著短褲。我經過時男孩對我說了些什麼，我走回去，拿掉耳機，叫他再說一遍。他說：“邁克爾.傑克遜去世了。”
我問他為什麼對我說這些。我不知他是否從聯合大街的Tea Lounge知道我（我在那裏寫作），或從街上，他是否知道我與邁克爾.傑克遜的聯繫。不，他不知道，他告訴每一個人，他不想讓任何人忽略這個消息。
他尤其強調要確保所有30歲以上的人都不會錯過或忽略這個消息。邁克爾.傑克遜去世了，他離開了，這是我們所有人的損失，不論我們是否意識到。
我如何涉及邁克爾和他的兄弟們？
那是1983年的春天，傑克遜兄弟聚在一起繼續他們的勝利巡演。全家都參加了巡演，包括他們的父親，原先管理傑克遜5兄弟組合，使他們達到頂峰。勝利巡演的經理4個月間給我打了一次又一次電話，邀請我和傑克遜兄弟一起工作。我一直說不。當時，我幫助大赦國際在北美建立；與“西蒙和加芬克爾”一起工作，他們重聚一起，在中央公園為50萬聽眾作了免費音樂會，然後他們出去巡演了；我還完成了皇后樂隊在南美11萬人足球場的大型巡演。
但我喜歡征戰，為別人看不見的真理而戰鬥。傑克遜的巡演感覺沒有挑戰性。巡演已經很成功了，邁克爾一張專輯——“顫慄者”就賣出了3千6百萬張。這幾乎是過去的記錄保持者——彼得.法蘭頓的3倍。我不覺得傑克遜需要我，所以我一直拒絕他們。但我感覺如果你要拒絕別人，至少你要敢於當面對他們說。於是當傑克遜家到紐約，請我在Helmsley Palace酒店會見他們時，我不得不去。即便會面是在星期六晚上午夜，而我從早上9點就開始工作，直至到週末才罷手。
我走進傑克遜家為會面準備的套房時，發現兩件事很明顯，第一……從這些兄弟的肢體語言，你可發現傑克遜兄弟是我遇到的人中最誠實、道德和開放的人之一。第二：他們處在麻煩當中。他們不知道是什麼，我也不知道什麼，但我知道的是：這裏面有挑戰，有需要修正的錯誤，看不見的錯誤，我們全都能感覺到但無法說出的錯誤。我不得不答應他們。
我和邁克爾的會面是在4個月之後。我與邁克爾的兄弟位於恩西諾馬龍的水池屋——一座小小的兩層樓建築，每層有一個房間，位於馬龍的水池後院。那時我已經做足功課。我讀了數千篇關於邁克爾的文章。我收集了有關傑克遜生活的檔案資料。這些文章都同意的一件事是：邁克爾不是正常的人類。這些文章稱他為氣泡寶貝，形容他為一碰即避開的人。
事實是邁克爾和我都不是在正常的童年中長大的，我們都不是在其他孩子中長大的。因此我不知道正常生活中通常的儀式。我不得不教自己去觀察其他人，仿佛他們是標本而我是從火星來的。我所見到的其中一個儀式是陌生人間的握手。你知道的，你見到從未見到的、別人想讓你見的人，你走向他或她，伸出手，說：“你好，我的名字叫…..”這是我幾乎從未用過的儀式。但當邁克爾打開水池屋的大門，我走上去伸出手，說，“嗨，我是霍華德。”
我知道會發生什麼，如果文章說的是真的，邁克爾會避開我的接觸。但那沒有發生，邁克爾伸出他的手，握住我的，回應：“嗨，我是邁克爾。”那如此平常又自然，媒體故事是假的。但成千的媒體人把那些當成真相一樣重複。在邁克爾的圈子裏發生了奇怪的事——媒體圈的認知被當成事實。最終那些錯誤會殺死他，但那是另外一個時候的故事了。
幾分鐘之後，邁克爾和我爬上狹窄的樓梯，來到樓上的小房間，馬龍在那裏放置了他的錄音設備。我寫了一份新聞稿，需要邁克爾的批准。我們在成堆的放大器和鍵盤中找到地方坐下來。我大聲地把新聞稿讀出來，此時，邁克爾的身體柔軟下來，“那很美，”我結束時他說，“是你寫的嗎？”事實是，是我寫的。對我來說寫新聞稿不僅是一份受雇的工作，而且是一門藝術。我編輯了一份文藝雜誌，獲得了兩項全國詩人學會的獎項。數十年間，華盛頓郵報稱我書中的寫作為“美麗”，但其他人不曾看出技藝中隱藏的藝術、平凡中隱藏的創造力。邁克爾顯然是看到了。
邁克爾批准新聞稿之後，我們回到樓下的小房間。靠牆放著的是遊戲機，是當時只有遊樂場才供得起的機器。房間的中央，占了很多空間的是一張檯球桌。傑克遜的日程中有和CBS藝術總監的會面，他們要決定勝利巡演專輯封面。他們希望我也加入。
藝術總監到來時，她帶來了5個畫家的系列作品，她把它們堆在撞球桌綠色表面的一邊。那可不僅僅是畫家家通常用來展示作品的黑膠套子，每一幅作品都有手工定制的皮革或櫻桃木展示箱。每一件都來自一個著名畫家，當時領域內非常頂尖的畫家。
我們都在撞球桌的另一邊聚集。邁克爾在中央，我坐在他的左側，兄弟們在周邊圍繞著我們。CBS的藝術總監把第一套作品滑向邁克爾。他打開了第一頁，慢慢地……僅夠看到畫的一寸。正當他領會作品時，他的膝蓋開始彎曲，他的手肘彎曲，他唯一說的就是“噢”，柔軟的、高潮般的“噢”是唯一的音節，在他的身體語言中，你能感覺他所看到的。
你知道威廉.布萊克的詩嗎？
一沙一世界
一花一天國
雙手握無限
刹那是永恆
詩中蘊含的熱切雄心、對奇跡的熱切渴望，在邁克爾身上活躍著，比我所見過的更有生氣。邁克爾在方寸之中看到無限。當邁克爾進一步打開畫面，一寸寸地，他的膝蓋和手肘更彎曲了，“噢”他的美學高潮般的聲音，更加熱切了。肩並肩、肘碰肘地站在他身旁，你能感覺他在繪畫和筆觸中發現藝術家都沒有看到過的東西。當他完全打開整個畫面，他的身體和聲音表達出一種狂喜，一種美學領悟。我從未遇到這樣的狀況，邁克爾身體的每一個細胞都感受到畫的美麗。
我曾和王子、鮑勃.馬利，彼得.加百利，比利.約爾和比蒂.米得勒一起工作，他們都是些我們這一代中最天才的人，但他們都沒有邁克爾身上體現的這種奇跡的特質。他在一切事物中看到奇跡。他的奇跡特質超越大部分人類所能想像。
瞧，首先我是科學家，科學是我的信仰，自我十歲起那就是我的信仰。科學的首二法則是：1. 不惜任何代價的真理包括你生命的代價；2. 看你眼前的事物，仿佛你從未看見過，然後從這裏開始。那不僅僅是科學的法則，也是藝術的法則。少有人知道這一點，更少的人以此法則生活。但邁克爾是那樣的，他在每一個細胞中具化這一法則。邁克爾是我遇到的人中最接近塵世天使的——塵世的聖人。
瞧，我是無神論者，而邁克爾不是。他相信上帝賜予他天賦。他相信他得到了脆弱的人類極少得到的天才和奇跡。因為上帝給予他巨大的天賦，他感覺虧欠人類奇跡、驚歎、敬畏、和布萊克詩歌中那種無限的體驗。但不像其他慷慨的人——如比爾.蓋茲和米琳達.蓋茲——邁克爾給予人們的不僅是一時之物。他每一天的每一個呼吸中都有著給予他人的需要。
邁克爾.傑克遜的整個生命就是接受和給予，接受的全部目的就是為了給予。他用身體的每一個細胞工作，為了給予人類神奇和驚歎的禮物。需要人們的讚揚是邁克爾和別人的聯繫，他最深刻的聯繫，比家庭和朋友還要深刻（雖然他們是不可或缺的），遠遠超越治癒。給予的行為維持了這樣一個標誌性的人物，一個從不知什麼是平常、活著的人。
我很樂意告訴你邁克爾如何做到這一切的故事，但等到另一個時候吧。
說起來可能奇怪，但邁克爾將永遠是我的一部分。和我工作過的其他超級巨星沒有一個能像他這樣深入我的內心。邁克爾打開了一扇奇跡特質的視窗，我一生中從未見過的。因為這禮物，我感覺虧欠他，我感覺我們都虧欠他。我們仍然虧欠他，我們虧欠對他誠實地看待，我們仍將虧欠他，除非我們能清掃掉一切胡說八道、聳人聽聞的新聞標題，清晰地看到為什麼那些愛他的人比任何專家和記者更瞭解他。那些記者和專家不懂邁克爾.傑克遜，但如果你愛他，你才有可能懂他。
Good Bye Michael 2009年12月14日，霍華德.布魯姆在另一次採訪中這樣評價邁克爾：
“他活著就是為了奉獻。他愛自己的聽眾。我感覺他的胸膛就像大門一樣打開，可以看到裏面有一萬個孩子，邁克爾不會讓任何人傷害孩子。他的征途已經被媒體殘害。邁克爾能在最微小的事物中看到無限。如果他不能為他人而活，一小部分的他就死去了。如果這個星球上曾經存在聖人，那就是邁克爾。邁克爾展示的奇跡特質無與倫比，是我生平所未見。”
原文：http://thehappiestmedium.com/2010/06/one-year-later-remembering-michael-by-howard-bloom/
One Year Later – Remembering Michael (by Howard Bloom)
by Karen Tortora-Lee on June 25, 2010
Today, in memory of Michael Jackson’s passing, we re-post a great tribute written by Michael’s friend and business associate, Howard Bloom, who shared his memories of Michael with me one year ago.
Guest Blogger Howard Bloom
Guest Blogger Howard Bloom began his legendary career in music public relations when he co-founded The Howard Bloom Organization Ltd in 1976, and helped build or sustain the careers of Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Queen, Billy Joel, John Cougar Mellencamp, Simon & Garfunkel, Bette Midler, Joan Jett, AC/DC, Talking Heads, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and roughly 100 other stars of the 1970s and 1980s. Here he shares some of his personal reflections on the passing of his client, Michael Jackson, and takes us past all the noise to a quieter place.
* * *
On the night of June 25th, when I was on my nightly mile-long 1 am walk that loops me up to Prospect Park then takes me back to my brownstone, I passed a pair of 18 year olds sitting on a stoop at this lonely hour when the streets and sidewalks are usually utterly devoid of human beings. The guy had long dark black curly hair and the girl had a short, blond haircut and was wearing shorts. The male said something to me as I passed. I walked back, took off my headphones, and asked him to repeat it. He said, “Michael Jackson is dead.”
I asked him why he said that to me. I wondered if he knew me from the Tea Lounge on Union Street , where I do my writing, or from the streets and if he knew my Michael Jackson connection. No, he didn’t. He was telling it to everyone. He wanted no one to ignore it.
He was particularly emphatic about making sure that no one over the age of 30 pass it by or dismiss it. Michael Jackson’s death, he felt, was a loss to all of us whether we realized it or not.
How did I get involved with Michael and his brothers?
It was Spring of 1983 and the Jacksons were getting together to go on the road for their Victory Tour. They were getting the whole family together for this tour, including their dad, who had originally managed the rise of the Jackson Five to the top. Their manager for the Victory Tour called me over and over again for four months, asking me to work with the Jacksons . I kept saying no. At this point I’d helped Amnesty International establish itself in North America, had worked with Simon and Garfunkel when they’d reunited for an audience of half a million in a free concert in Central Park, then when they’d gone out on tour, and I had done Queen’s massive tour of 110,000 seat soccer stadiums in South America.
But I liked to do crusades–to fight for truths others didn’t see. The Jackson ’s tour didn’t feel like a challenge. It already had it made. Michael had just sold 36 million copies of just one album–Thriller. That’s nearly three times as many as the previous record holder, Peter Frampton. I didn’t feel The Jacksons needed me. So I continued to turn them down. But I felt that if you’re going to say no to someone, at least you should have the courage to say it to their face. So when the Jacksons came into New York and asked me to meet with them at the Helmsley Palace hotel, I had to do it. Even though the meeting was at midnight on a Saturday night, and I worked from 9 am until I dropped during the weekends.
The minute I walked into the suite the Jacksons had set up for meetings, two things were obvious. One … from the body language of these brothers you could tell that The Jacksons were some of the most honest, ethical, open people you would ever meet. Two: They were in very big trouble. They didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what it was. But what I did know was this: here was a challenge. There was a wrong to be righted. An invisible wrong. A wrong all of us could feel but none of us could name. I had to say yes.
My first meeting with Michael didn’t come until four months later. I was with Michael’s brothers at Marlon’s pool house in Encino–a tiny two-story building with one room per floor in the back yard next to Marlon’s pool. By then I’d done my homework. I’d read thousands of articles on Michael. I’d compiled a dossier on the Jackson ’s lives. One thing all the articles agreed on was this: Michael was not a normal human being. The articles called him a bubble baby, described him as a person who would shrink from your touch.
But the fact is that neither Michael nor I had been raised in a conventionally normal childhood; neither of us had been raised among other kids. So I didn’t know the common rituals of normal life. I had to teach myself by watching other people as if they were specimens and I was a visitor from Mars. One of the rituals I’d seen was the handshake between strangers. You know, you see someone you’ve never met before but who others want you to meet. You walk up to him or her, you stick out your hand, and you say, “Hello, my name is ______.” This was a ritual I’d almost never used. But when Michael opened the pool house’s screen door, I walked up to him stuck out my hand and said “Hi I’m Howard.”
I knew what would happen. The articles had explained it. Michael would recoil from my touch. But that’s not what occurred. Michael put out his hand, shook mine, and replied “Hi I’m Michael.” It was as normal and as natural as could be. The media stories were false. But thousands of press people had parroted them as truths. Something strange was happening in Michael’s noosphere–in the sphere of press perception we are handed as reality. Eventually those mistakes would kill him. But that’s a story for another time.
A few minutes later Michael and I climbed the cramped stairs to the tiny room upstairs where Marlon kept his recording equipment. I’d written a press release and I wanted Michael’s approval. We found places to sit on the stacks of amps and keyboards. I read the press release out loud. And as I did, Michael’s body softened. “That’s beautiful,” he said when I was finished, “Did you write that?” The fact was, I had. And the fact was that writing press releases was not just a hack job for me, it was an art. I’d edited a literary magazine that had won two National Academy of Poets prizes. And in the decades since, the Washington Post has called the writing in my books “beautiful.” But no one else had ever seen the art hidden in the craft and the creativity hidden in the ordinary. Michael apparently had.
Album Cover
Once Michael had approved of the press release, we went back downstairs to the small single room on the first floor. Against the walls and lining the room were arcade videogame machines, machines only amusement arcades could afford in those days. And in the center of the room, hogging up most of the space, was a billiard table. The Jacksons were scheduled to have a meeting with an art director from CBS so the group could decide on the Victory Tour album cover. They wanted me to be in on it.
When the art director arrived, she bore the portfolios of five artists, portfolios she stacked at one end of the pool table’s green felt playing surface. These were not just the black vinyl portfolios most commercial artists use to display their work. Every one of these was a custom-made presentation case made of hand-tooled leather or rich cherry wood. And every one was from a legendary artist, an artist at the very top of his field.
We were all bunched together on the opposite side of the pool table from the art director. Michael was in the center. I stood next to him on his left. And the brothers were crowded around us on either side. The CBS art director slid the first of the portfolios toward Michael. He opened the first page, slowly … just enough to see perhaps an inch of the image. As he took in the artwork his knees began to buckle, his elbows bent, and all he could say was “oooohhhhh.” A soft, orgasmic “ooooh.” In that one syllable and in his body language, you could feel what he was seeing.
Do you know the poem by William Blake –
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour . . .
The intense ambition of that poem, the intense desire for wonder, was alive in Michael. More alive than anything of the sort I’d ever seen. Michael saw the infinite in an inch. As Michael opened the page further, inch by inch, his knees and elbows bent even more and his ”ooohs,” his sounds of aesthetic orgasm, grew even more intense. Standing elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder with him, you could feel him discovering things in the brush and inkstrokes that even the artist never saw. By the time he’d opened the full page his body and voice expressed an ecstasy. An aesthetic epiphany. I’d never encountered anything like it. Michael felt the beauty of the page with every cell of his being.
I’ve worked with Prince, Bob Marley, Peter Gabriel, Billy Joel, and Bette Midler, some of the most talented people of our generation, and not one of them had the quality of wonder that came alive in Michael. He saw the wonder in everything. His quality of wonder was beyond anything most of us humans can conceive.
Look, above all other things I’m a scientist. Science is my religion. It’s been my religion since I was ten years old. The first two rules of science are 1) the truth at any price including the price of your life; and 2) Look at the things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before and then proceed from there. And that’s not just a rule of science. It’s a rule of art. And it’s a rule of life. Very few people know it. Even fewer people live it. But Michael was it, he incarnated it in every follicle of his being. Michael was the closest I’ve ever come to a secular angel. A secular saint.
Look, I’m an atheist, but Michael was not. He believed he was given a gift by God. He believed he was given talents and wonders and astonishments seldom granted to us very fragile human beings. Because God had given him this enormous gift, he felt he owed the experience of wonder, astonishment, awe, and Blake’s infinities to his fellow human beings. But unlike other generous humans–Bill and Melinda Gates, for example–with Michael giving to others was not just a part-time thing. The need to give to others was alive in every breath he took every single day.
Michael Jackson’s entire life was receiving and giving and the whole purpose of receiving was so he could give. He worked with every cell in his body to give the gift of that amazement, that astonishment to his fellow human beings. Needing the adulation of crowds WAS Michael’s connection to others, his most profound connection, far more profound than family and friends (though those are indispensable), and far more healing. That act of giving keeps an iconic person, a person who never knows normalness, alive.
I’d love to tell you the stories of how Michael made these things clear. But, again, those tales will have to wait for another day.
It seems strange to say this, but Michael will always be a part of me. No other superstar I worked with wound himself into the threads at my core the way he did. Michael opened a window to a quality of wonder unlike anything I’d ever been exposed to in my life. For that gift, I felt I owed him. I felt we all owed him. And we still do. We owe him an honest view of who he was. We will owe him that until we finally sweep away the crap of sensationalist headlines and clearly see why those who love him know more about him than any expert or journalist who claims to have probed his life. Those journalists and experts do not know Michael Jackson. But if you love him, there’s a good chance that you do.
Good Bye Michael
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