Gary Lachman

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. He has written several books on consciousness, culture, and the western esoteric tradition and has written for journals in the US and UK.

Early life Gary Joseph Lachman was born December 24, 1955, in Bayonne, New Jersey, to Lorraine Kochanski and Alfred Lachman. His family was Catholic, and he was christened January 22, 1956.

He was known in high school for being a poet. When Lachman was 17, he got his girlfriend, who was 16, pregnant; her parents waited for him to turn 18, and then had him arrested for statutory rape. As a result, he left Bayonne and moved to Manhattan, technically a violation of his probation. and amid founding bassist Richard Hell's departure,

While in Blondie, Lachman began to develop an interest in the occult; Stein and Harry owned several books on the subject, though their interest in it was mostly surface level. Several of his songs written for the band have occult themes. He read Colin Wilson's The Occult in 1975, which he said "changed [his] life". and Annie Lennox. The song received three gold records. It is about the telepathic connection Lachman believed he had with his then girlfriend Lisa Jane Persky.

After Blondie, Lachman moved to Los Angeles and in 1978 released a few singles, including "I Like Girls" and "The First One" backed with "Tomorrow Belongs to You" on Beat Records. Shortly after this, he formed The Know, 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, Turrisi left the band and was replaced by drummer John McGarvey. In 1980, The Know released a single "I Like Girls" backed with "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. Writing career and reunion After leaving his music career behind in 1982, aged 26, Lachman went back to school and received a philosophy degree from California State University, Los Angeles, and later began a doctoral program in English literature for a short period. He worked professionally for a time as a science writer for the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1997, he performed with Blondie at several major festival concerts in the US. A compilation of Lachman's work in music, titled Tomorrow Belongs to You, featuring recordings by The Know and Fire Escape, was released in 2003 on the UK label Overground Records.

Lachman moved to London in 1996 and became a full-time writer, The Independent, and other journals. His first book was Two Essays on Colin Wilson: World Rejection and Criminal Romantics and From Outsider to Post-tragic Man, published in 1994 in London by Paupers' Press. He followed this with Colin Wilson as Philosopher, coauthored with John Shand, in 1996. Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, was published 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 and Los Angeles music scene in the 1970s.

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 as they had already rehearsed their set.

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.

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.

Personal life He was married for a time, but divorced. Lachman has two sons.