Escape From L.A.

Thirty years ago, on 1 January 1996, I boarded a jet leaving LAX en route to my new life as a writer in London. I had just turned forty. Touched By The Presence, released in the UK today, is my account of how I came to make the fateful decision to pull up roots in America and put down stakes in Merry Olde England. Michael Dirda at the Washington Post found the book "engrossing," and paid me the welcome compliment of saying that, although it would most likely find its place in the New Age section of a bookshop, it could just as easily fit into a section devoted to "books about books." Although filled with incident and encouters - I'll drop no names - much of my life has been and continues to be devoted to reading. Books changed my life. I'd like to think that some of mine, while perhaps not changing anyone's life, may have added something to it.

There will be a launch for the book on 20 January at the notorious Colony Room Green; details to follow. I will also be siging copies of the book on 19 February at Watkins Bookshop; details, again, to follow. In the meantime, here's a link to the short film my son Max Jones-Lachman made to promote the book, and another to an interview about it with Jeffrey Mishlove.

Here's how the book opens. If you're not compelled to see how it continues, I may well have to look for other work - a theme, in fact, of a section of the book.

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet

I am often asked how I went from being a ‘rock star’ – 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. I was a musician from 1975 to 1982, performing on guitar and bass with Blondie, Iggy Pop and my own band, the Know – the name inspired by my interest in Gnosticism. I later returned to music for a few years in the late 1990s, from 1996 to 2000, stopping with the birth of my second son and the beginning of my career as a writer. I received a contract for my first book, Turn Off Your Mind, a revisionist view of the 1960s, in 1998 – the year my first son was born - and by 2000 was working on my second, New York Rocker, an account of, as the subtitle says, “my life in the Blank Generation.”

In recent time I returned to playing music once again, for several months in 2022. All told I worked as a musician, songwriter and performer for roughly ten years.

My Secret Identity. Photograph by Lisa Jane Persky

I became a full-time writer in 1996, when I moved to London, and I have been one ever since. I had written some articles and book reviews in the early 90s in Los Angeles, but was not yet making my living as a writer. If I count my years growing up in New Jersey, just across the Hudson from Manhattan, I lived in the New York area for roughly twenty-four years; five of those were spent in NYC proper. I lived in Los Angeles for a total of sixteen years. The rest of my life – at least up until now - I have spent here in London, aside, of course, from periods of travel. I came to London shortly after I turned forty; the anniversary of my arrival here recently passed. I am now sixty-seven. I have been a writer for twenty-seven years and have twenty-five books to show for it.

I should mention that along with being a musician and a writer, I worked for several years in retail, first at a video rental shop, then at a metaphysical bookstore, both in Los Angeles, in the 1980s and 90s. After this I started a PhD track in English Literature at the University of Southern California, but dropped out after a year. I found academia severely limiting and by then the ‘political correctness’ craze, now well established, had begun and I saw that as white male of a certain age who had no interest in deconstructing anything, I would most likely never get a job. 

I then worked for a year as a Science Writer for the University of California Los Angeles. Given I have no background in science, this was a position I should never have occupied. I did on the strength of my writing and ability to transmute dry, unappetizing scientific reports into readable prose, singing the praises of the molecular biology department and the great advances made by our astrophysicists to alumni and foundations targeted for donations and grants. I got the job after my wife saw an advertisement for it in the Los Angeles Times and insisted I apply for it. I left it after the collapse of our marriage, which lasted from 1992 to 1995 – the marriage, not the collapse, although it, too, was protracted. It was following the breakup of my marriage that I left Los Angeles and moved to London. As should be obvious, my sons are the product of a later relationship.

My Alma Mater

From 1984 to 1990 I earned a degree in Philosophy from California State University Los Angeles. I had intended to carry on and eventually teach philosophy, my career move after rock and roll, something my professors found incomprehensible. But my marriage – to a colleague at the bookstore – got in the way.

I should point out that I am not an academic and that I hold no academic position, although I have taught online courses based on some of my books for the California Institute of Integral Studies. As an independent thinker, however, I have lectured quite a bit, in the UK, Europe, the US, and as far afield as South America and Australia.

Words, words, words

For some reason that remains obscure, I always wanted to be a writer. I was always fascinated by and interested in words – I read the dictionary when I was young - and English was my best subject in school, with History and Art close runner ups. I did well in philosophy in later years – I won awards while studying it - but my interest was always in what is known as ‘Continental Philosophy’, the European variety that brought literature and art into the discussion – think of existentialism – rather than the Anglo-American analytic tradition of Logical Positivism and Linguistics Analysis, which I found rather dull and superficial. I remain abysmal at any math more complex than adding up a grocery bill. This meant that I did not do that well in Symbolic Logic, which is a kind of philosophical algebra. Aside from astronomy, I was bored by science.

Comic books were my introduction to reading and early on I wanted to be a comic book artist and write and draw my own comic. I did have a character, The Raven, and did draw a few panels and fill in the speech bubbles. But although I could draw, this didn’t get very far.  I did continue to draw intermittently in later years; when on tour as a musician I brought along a Rapidograph pen and a sketch book and some tattered sketches from that time remain in a box in a closet. My last attempts at graphic art were some woodcuts I made during my marriage in the early 90s.

Later, when I started reading science-fiction and fantasy – I was a great fan of H. P. Lovecraft and the Weird Tales set - I wrote stories. These, with much else, have vanished in the void. Actually my first attempt at writing was a school play for Thanksgiving. In it, students working on a school play about Thanksgiving share a collective dream in which they are all transported back in time to the first Thanksgiving, an early sign of both the interest in dreams and the strange character of time that would inform my later work. This was in 1964 and I was in the third grade; I would have been eight going on nine.

But something happened in my adolescence. It was then that I began to want to be a poet.

A lyrical life

I can’t say why. The lyrics to rock tunes – Bob Dylan’s, John Lennon’s – no doubt played a part in this. I was yet to learn how to play guitar – when I did I was self-taught – and I can remember coming across a paperback at a school book fair, an attempt to encourage my fellow students to read, something not needed in my case. I was – am - an unrepentant obsessive reader, having picked up the habit at least at the age of five, possibly earlier. The worst torture I can think of would be to lock me in a room bereft of anything interesting to read.

The book I found at the fair had song lyrics on one page and poetry on the other. So the lyrics to Procol Harum’s “Homburg” – written by Keith Reid - were on one page, and T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” were on another. The opening line of that poem still sends a shiver down my spine. “Let us go then, you and I…” ( A similar frisson accompanies Coleridge’s “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…”) Similarly there were lyrics to, say Lennon and McCartney’s  “A Day in the Life” facing something by e.e.cummings or Ezra Pound or Yeats. I was twelve at the time.

Pop music was all the rage and I must have felt that if I couldn’t play I could at least write lyrics.

For a time I re-wrote the lyrics to pop tunes.[1] The melody would come into my head and I accompanied it with stream of consciousness impromptu lyrics of my own. I did write these down in a notebook that, again like much else, has since disappeared. Years later, when, at eighteen, I left home and started living in New York, I began writing songs on a broken down piano that made up part of the furniture in the storefront turned studio on East 10^th Street where I lived. Any poetry I was still writing turned into songs and soon after this I joined a band and became a musician.

The piano has been drinking

I had no musical training. In high school many of my friends were musicians; one of them later went on to become the drummer in the very successful band of which I, too, was a member. This of course was Blondie. There were guitarists, bassists, keyboardists, drummers, and singers among these friends. Aside from myself and my drummer friend, I don’t think any of them made it to a professional level. It is ironic that I did, given that I wasn’t a musician and was more or less tolerated and allowed to hang out with those who were.

How did it happen that I was part of a musical movement – the New York CBGB scene - that, as the cliché goes, ‘changed the face of pop music’? That I recorded albums, went on tours, met and worked with some big names in the business, wrote a hit song, earned gold records and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, while the friends who were much better musicians than I was didn’t? That’s a good question. Writing this memoir will, with any luck, go some way to answer it. But here I’ll just say that I was willing – eager – to take the risk involved in, as Joseph Campbell used to say, “following your bliss.” I was happy to give up safety and security – i.e. living at home and staying in college - and, as Nietzsche advised, “live dangerously,” by throwing myself into an adventure that, 99% of the time, ends in failure and disappointment, if not drug addiction, alcoholism or worse.

Living dangerously

Even with the success I’ve had – modest but not negligible - failure and disappointment have not been foreign to me. Neither, for that matter, have drugs and alcohol. I have had to deal with the failure of my own band to secure a recording contract and with the fact that songs of mine that are just as good as the ones that were successful will most likely remain known only to the relatively few people who came to my performances; that is, they will remain unknown. One of these songs, “Amor Fati,” became our signature tune and my own life’s motto. I borrowed it from the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a powerful influence on me then and remains so, although at sixty-seven I have a somewhat different appreciation of his work than I did when I came across it at sixteen. Amor fati means “love of fate.” It was Nietzsche’s “formula for greatness.” It means more than an acceptance of life; it is an affirmation of it, even in its most painful, tragic, and uncertain forms.

A rare edition

This, of course, is easier said than done. I have certainly had quite a bit of fate to love. One such portion is the fact that the song in which I express this sentiment is among those that most likely will remain unknown. If I were superstitious I might think that fate itself arranged this as a test, to see if I really could love a fate that included a large helping of disappointment. Fate and its fellow traveller destiny turned up in more than one of my songs as they later did in my books. They will also make more than one appearance here.

[1] I can remember bringing 45s into gym class in the third grade and dancing to Chubby Checkers’ “The Twist.” Among his many jobs, my father was a caterer and he would often bring 45s home from the juke box at the tavern where he worked. Gary US Bond’s  “Quarter to Three,” Frankie Vaughan’s “Tower of Strength,” both hits in 1961, and various girl group numbers made up my early listening. Later, following the British Invasion which brought the Beatles, Dave Clark Five, Zombies (a favourite) Herman’s Hermits and many other British pop groups to America’s shores, on Friday afternoons, just before the end of class, our teacher allowed us to perform a kind of karaoke to their songs, strumming the pretend guitars we had cut out of plywood in shop class.