Gary Joseph Lachman (born December 24, 1955), also known as Gary Valentine, is an American writer and musician. He came to prominence in the mid-1970s as the bass guitarist for rock band
Blondie. Since the 1990s, Lachman has written full-time, often about
mysticism and
occultism.
After Blondie, Lachman moved to
Los Angeles and in 1978 released a single, "The First One/Tomorrow Belongs to You" on
Beat Records. Shortly after this he formed The Know,[4] with Joel Turrisi and Richard d'Andrea who were the first band to play the infamous
Madame Wong's Chinese restaurant-turned-new wave venue. (Lachman's claim to this distinction has been verified by several eyewitnesses.) After a year and a half Joel left the band and was replaced by drummer John McGarvey.[5] In 1980 The Know released a single "I Like Girls/Dreams" on Planet Records and were the only bi-coastal US "power pop" band, developing large followings in New York and Los Angeles. Failing to secure an album deal, he disbanded The Know and in 1981 played guitar with
Iggy Pop.[6]
In 1996, after moving to
London, he was asked to participate in the Blondie re-union, and in November of that year he recorded one of his songs, "Amor Fati", with Blondie, for their 'comeback' album. In 1997 he performed with Blondie at several major festival concerts in the US. Back in London Lachman worked with former
X-Ray Spex saxophonist
Lora Logic. In 1998 he formed Fire Escape together with violinist Ruth Vaughn and performed songs he had written for the Blondie reunion album (they had not been used due to the band ultimately excluding him from the recording process and the reunion tour). They released an EP to little fanfare and went on a permanent hiatus after two years.
A compilation of Lachman's work in music entitled Tomorrow Belongs to You featuring recordings by The Know and Fire Escape, was released in 2003 on the UK label Overground Records.[7]
In 2006, he was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a former member of Blondie, although vocalist
Debbie Harry prohibited Lachman and other ex-members from performing with the current line-up at the ceremony.[8]
Literary career
Lachman moved to London in 1996 and became a full-time writer,[9] contributing to The Guardian,[10]Mojo, Times Literary Supplement[11] and other journals. His first book, Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, appeared in 2001. It was followed in 2002 by New York Rocker: My Life in The Blank Generation, an account of his years on the New York (
CBGB) and Los Angeles music scene in the 1970s. In 2003 he produced A Secret History of Consciousness, a study of non-reductive, non-materialist accounts of consciousness, with detailed discussions of
Owen Barfield,
Julian Jaynes,
Jean Gebser,
Jurij Moskvitin,
hypnagogia, and related themes. The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse (2004) charted the influence of the
occult on western literature since the Enlightenment.
The following years saw several more books, on the related themes of
consciousness, the
counterculture, and the influence of the occult and esoteric thought on mainstream western culture, including biographies of the Russian philosopher
P.D. Ouspensky (2004), the Austrian "spiritual scientist"
Rudolf Steiner (2007), the Swedish religious thinker
Emanuel Swedenborg (2006), the Swiss psychologist
Carl Jung (2010) and
Colin Wilson (2016). Recent works include a study of writers and suicide, The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters (2008), with essays on
Walter Benjamin,
Yukio Mishima,
Hermann Hesse, and others, and a history of occultism and politics, Politics and the Occult: The Right, the Left, and the Radically Unseen (2008), which addresses the theme of
fascism and the occult through the work of
Julius Evola,
Rene Schwaller de Lubicz,
Mircea Eliade, and others.
He is a regular contributor to the Independent on Sunday, Fortean Times, and other journals in the US and UK, lectures frequently and occasionally broadcasts on the
BBC. His work has been compared to
Colin Wilson, and has been translated into German, Finnish, Czech, Russian, French, Dutch, Spanish, Norwegian, Italian and Portuguese. In 2014 Lachman took part in the annual Engelsberg Seminar held in Avesta, Sweden, lecturing on
gnosis and the evolution of consciousness in the 21st century. In 2015 Lachman lectured on "Rejected Knowledge" to the Marion Institute as part of their "Living in the Real World" seminar. Recent years have seen Lachman lecturing on a variety of esoteric and cultural topics in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States.
Bibliography
Books
Two Essays on
Colin Wilson: World Rejection and Criminal Romantics AND From Outsider to Post-Tragic Man (Colin Wilson Studies) (1994, paperback
ISBN0-946650-52-7, hardcover
ISBN0-946650-53-5)