Profile of a Rockstar-Turned-Author: Gary Lachman on Blondie to the Occult

Every Sunday, milk crate revisits an iconic piece of music history—artist, album, or otherwise—as a part of our weekly crate digging series.

Design by Sophie Parrish

By Heather Thorn

When Gary “Valentine” Lachman departed punk-rock group Blondie in 1977, he had no plan for what lay ahead. Since then, Lachman has formed his band The Know, toured with Iggy Pop, earned a philosophy degree from California State University, managed the famous new-age bookshop Bodhi Tree Bookstore, relocated to London, been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of Blondie’s lineup, and written 26 books—about consciousness, his time with Blondie, the occult, and other fascinations.

His memoir, Touched by the Presence: From Blondie’s Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult, was published by Inner Traditions on November 18, 2025. “It tells the story of how I became a writer,” says Lachman, now 69, on our Zoom call,“from playing music in the late 1970s and early ’80s to what I’m doing now.”

A computer screen away, Lachman’s life looks drastically different from his time playing bass guitar with Blondie, when he was known by the stage name Gary Valentine. He’s ditched his retro-sixties look (a style he popularized within Blondie’s lookbook) for gray hair and glasses, ever the writer as the bookshelves behind him show just how dedicated he is to his full-time writing career. 

“I’m an obsessive type,” he says. “[When] I’ve become interested in something I want to know as much about it as possible.”

Lachman’s first obsession was comic books. Born on Christmas Eve in 1955, he grew up during the Silver Age of Comics, a revival of comic book characters from the 1940s. By the time he was five years old, he was hooked. “They were 10 cents for the longest time,” he says. “I went to my grandmother and asked her for 10 cents; it was quite work getting it from her. She even said, ‘Don’t get one you have already.’ I went to the shop and pulled off The Flash and gave the fellow at the counter the dime. He said, ‘Sorry, they’re 12 cents now.’”

Cosmic Boy from The Legion Super-Heroes series caught Lachman’s eye. “I understood the other ones, but I didn’t understand why he wasn’t called Magnetic Boy or Magnetic Lad,’” says Lachman now. “What was cosmic?”

He’s been trying to figure out what that means ever since. In his adolescence, he was captivated by the revival of pulp literature, horror fiction such as H.P. Lovecraft, and film classics including the German silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and The Mummy (1932). “I love very atmospheric old black and white films from the ’30s and ’40s,” he says. “I grew up watching all that stuff on television.” Humor glints in his eyes as he raises a glass and quotes Dracula with a Hungarian accent. “I never drink wine,” he says, “you have a very strong will, Van Helsing.”

Flash forward to 1975: Lachman wound up in New York City searching for a place to stay. “When I was first playing with Blondie, for a while I was living with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein,” he says. “Debbie had a very, very small flat in an area called Little Italy. She let me sleep there until we realized we had to get another place.”

As Blondie’s bass guitarist, Lachman’s major contributions included the songs “X-Offender” and “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear.” Alongside Harry, Lachman wrote “X-Offender,” the band’s debut single, released in June 1976, that gained momentum and drew interest from a major record label. Blondie signed onto the British record label Chrysalis Records in 1977. The same year, Lachman wrote “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” which became a top-ten U.K. hit in ’77. 

“In the summer of 1975, we ended up getting this loft space a two-minute walk from CBGB,” he says. CBGB, located at 315 Bowery, opened its doors in 1973 and hosted music acts such as Iggy Pop, Television, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and of course, Blondie. Though originally founded as a country, bluegrass, and blues venue, CBGB soon became the heart of punk rock and new wave music in New York City. 

A quick commute away, Harry, Lachman, and Stein lived at 266 Bowery. “The fellow who had the lease was this wild, gay biker artist who was into the Hells Angels but also Aleister Crowley, whom I had never heard of before,” Lachman says. “[He] used to do these impromptu tarot readings with the Thoth tarot deck that Crowley uses, [which] at the time was relatively obscure and rare. He would read from Crowley’s novel Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922). It’s all about magic.”

“The book that really did it for me was The Occult (1971) by a British writer named Colin Wilson. I was reading it in 1975,” Lachman says. “The Occult tackles the evolution of human consciousness with lots of stories and theories about consciousness, altered states, and the paranormal. Reading Colin Wilson’s books, he’s sort of an encyclopedia,” Lachman says. “You can get what they used to call a ‘liberal arts education’ if you follow all the leads he starts. People tell me that about my own books; I love writers like that.”

“Books have always had the most impact. Books and music,” he says. “I became quite a fan of his writing and wound up getting to know him. We became friends and I [wrote] a book about him much later on.” 

The Occult was more than Lachman’s first introduction to the occult; it was a monumental step towards what would later become his career. “It was a wonderful time to become interested in this sort of thing in New York in ’75 and ’76,” he says. Weiser Antiquarian Books, for example, was a very well-known occult bookstore in Cooper Union—and remains the oldest occult bookstore in the United States. Lachman continued reading voraciously and indiscriminately—not only about the occult, but psychology, history, and literature. Mapping the mystical worlds of the occult and existentialist philosophy, Lachman followed wherever books took him. “That’s how I became interested in it then.”

He left Blondie in 1977 and was replaced by Nigel Harrison on bass. Lachman moved to Los Angeles, where he released a single, “The First One,” backed with “Tomorrow Belongs to You” on Beat Records. He then formed a group with Joel Turrisi and Richard d’Andrea called The Know; they were the first band to play Madame Wong’s (黃家園), the Chinese restaurant-turned-new-wave venue in Los Angeles. Though The Know earned large followings in New York and Los Angeles, they failed to secure an album deal and Lachman later disbanded the group. In 1981, he played guitar with Iggy Pop before deciding to stop playing music. 

“Eventually, about 1984,” Lachman says, “someone suggested, ‘Why don’t you go back to university?’”

His career choice after rock and roll was philosophy. “When my professors learned I had had a previous career in music, they thought I was out of my mind,” he says. “They said, ‘We want to do what you do. You don’t want to do what we’re doing.’” 

But Lachman was bitten by the philosophy bug. He nurtured his love of wisdom through his undergraduate courses, studying Wittgenstein, Hegel, and Plato. In Touched By the Presence, he mentions three professors who impacted his education.  

In the 1960s, the occult revival renewed interest in Western esotericism, Eastern religions, witchcraft, astrology, political activism, and New-Age Spiritualism. The Beatles and psychedelic drugs fueled the counterculture movement and mind-body-spirit places sprouted up across the country in the early ’70s.

While earning his philosophy degree, Lachman managed an independent New Age bookshop in Los Angeles called Bodhi Tree Bookstore. Founded in 1970, Bodhi Tree Bookstore specialized in world religions, wisdom traditions, and metaphysics, carrying scholarly works and books about tarot, astrology, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and various other religions. The bookshop’s namesake is the Bodhi tree, under which Siddhārtha Gautama sat, meditated, attained enlightenment, and became the Buddha. 

“In the mid-1980s, it was really put on the map,” he says. “An actress named Shirley MacLaine wrote a book called Out on a Limb (1983). She talks about going to this bookshop and how it changed her life.”

Suddenly, Lachman saw Bodhi Tree Bookstore’s clientele triple. “That was around the time I started working there, about 1987,” he says. “I worked there for seven years. The people were friendly. It was socially conscious; the people who worked there got a share of the profits from the shop.” New Age music also gained popularity during this time, which Lachman found absolutely insufferable. “I wanted to put the Ramones on,” he says, a nod to his CBGB start. 

After receiving his undergraduate degree, Lachman began an English program at the University of Southern California. Putting aside his interest in esoterism, Lachman learned about Foucault, Derrida, and deconstruction. “I was a fish out of water,” he says. “I’m an old humanist romantic. This isn’t how I see the world.”

In his last days at Bodhi Tree Bookstore, they started a catalog and asked Lachman to review books. He wrote about cultural historian Richard Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind (1991), a spiritual-friendly book about the history of the Western Intellectual Tradition. Tarnas liked Lachman’s review so much that he visited Bodhi Tree Bookstore and invited Lachman to write for a journal he was editing. 

Lachman began writing book reviews and articles for other magazines and journals, too, including Gnosis. “[But] I didn‘t have any ideas for a book,” he says. 

Destiny came to him in the form of a generous royalty check for “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” re-released on Blondie’s successful greatest hits collection. “I was surprised,” he says. “I hadn’t seen anything like that for a while.” The next months saw Lachman’s departure from the English program as he left academia and lived off the Blondie royalty check. “I tried to write a novel,” he says. Though perhaps an unsuccessful attempt, it wasn’t a lost cause. “I learned how to write.”  This is the story of his memoir Touched by the Presence: “My life in between that and doing what I’m doing now,” Lachman says. While his royalty check paid the bills, there was still something missing. His wife, whom he met while working at Bodhi Tree Bookstore, suggested he get a job. “I started to apply for jobs I knew I wouldn’t get,” he says, “that I might almost get. The L.A. Music Center in downtown L.A. put an ad in The Los Angeles Times. I sent them some samples of my writing.”

“I outsmarted myself,” Lachman says with a cheeky smile. “I got the job I didn’t want to get.” At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Lachman worked as a science writer alongside cutting-edge scientists in the molecular biology, astronomy, and marine science departments. He wrote grant proposals before putting together a newsletter for the department alumni. “I remember thinking, ‘Maybe this is it,’” says Lachman. “‘Maybe I’m not going to be the kind of writer I would like to be. I’ve already done things most people haven’t, played in all these rock bands, had my own band for a while. Shouldn’t I be happy?’”

“And then it just came to me,” he says, “no matter what I would do, I would never be happy doing this—no matter how well paid it was.”

“At that point, everything fell apart,” Lachman says. His marriage had ended and he lost his job—he knew something had to change. Newly 40 years old, Lachman got on a plane at Los Angeles International Airport on January 1, 1996, and landed in London with only a six-month visa. Leaving behind his shared life in a Los Angeles gated community, he now rented a one-room in shared housing.

“This can’t be my life,” says Lachman of his existential crisis during this time. His flat was rendered uninhabitable by noisy neighbors, but the British Library provided an oasis where he researched and wrote many of his books.

“People often ask me, ‘How do you go from playing in a rock band to what you do now?’” Lachman says. “This book is answering that question.”

“Gary is one of the foremost esoteric historians around,” says Jeffrey Mishlove, 79, on our Zoom call. “His books speak for themselves. They’re well-written; they’re understandable. He delves into complex historical and philosophical [movements].” Mishlove is the founder of the YouTube channel New Thinking Allowed and has interviewed Lachman 17 times. “He made quite an amazing transition from being a rock and roll musician,” Mishlove says, “even at one time virtually homeless on the streets of Manhattan and couch surfing. He’s clearly one of the favorite guests on our channel.” 

“[Lachman] was part of the punk rock culture,” Mishlove says. “He was exposed to what you might call the dark side of mysticism. “Out of that emerged a scholar willing to look squarely at the dark side. He was able to envision what you might call the higher self or truth. He didn’t get lost in the rabbit hole of darkness.”

Now, Lachman is opening up about his journey—from Blondie and the Bowery to spirituality and the occult—in Touched By the Presence.  “I had no plan for it,” he says. “I just sat down and started writing. For a long time, I just called it Notes. It became the book.”

“Here, I’m writing about myself—usually, I’m writing about other people, and usually they’re dead,” he says. Lachman has written over 26 books about notable figures including Rudolf Steiner, P. D. Ouspensky, Emanuel Swedenborg, Colin Wilson, and Madame Blavatsky, as well as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and more in The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides.

“The actual writing [of Touched By the Presence] began in January 2023, the 27th anniversary of me arriving here,” he says. “I finished it the following January. There’s a circularity of it—the end is my beginning.”

Lachman finds that necessity is the mother of production. “This is the only way I’ve learned to make a living [after] more than 10 years wanting to write and not being able to,” he says, his enthusiasm evident as he lights up just talking about writing. “I made myself into the writer I am today. I’m doing what I want to do.”