#Power publicist reveals sad, lonely story of Bob Marley’s last days

During the 1980s, Howard Bloom ranked among the biggest and most influential rock ’n’ roll press agents in the world.

He influenced media trajectories for arena-packing performers including Bob Marley, Prince, Kiss and Billy Idol. In his recently published “Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll” (Backbeat), Bloom takes readers on a wild ride that has him going from a high-school misfit in Buffalo, NY, to Circus music magazine editor, which led to his becoming a confidant and strategist for rock royalty.

Here are some of the 76-year-old Brooklynite’s greatest hits — and one miss.

Mr. Idol? Your son is a drug addict …

When taking on a new client, Bloom typically began by reading everything that had been written about the person. Then he’d meet them for sit-downs on their turf — in the case of Michael Jackson, it was a compound in San Fernando Valley; for ZZ Top it was a modest house in Houston — but Billy Idol wanted none of that.

“He insisted on meeting me in my office,” says Bloom, recalling a day in 1983, two years after the release of “Dancing with Myself,” which would become Idol’s signature hit. “He walked in, looking the way he does in all his pictures” — wearing a leather vest, chains and crosses. “He had a tattoo of a 16-year-old girl on his arm, was very smart and was doing too many drugs. He was nearly incomprehensible.”

Idol’s career was beginning to fly high, but, according to Bloom, so were his excesses. In the mid-1980s, the publicist made an appointment to meet his spiky-haired client at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village. “I walked through the corridor, heard high-pitched screaming and realized that Billy was drugging himself into oblivion. He was freebasing with his manager and losing it.”

Soon after, Idol’s parents visited New York to check on their successful offspring.

“Everybody else told them how great Billy was doing,” says Bloom. “I said, ‘Your son is killing himself and we have to do something about it.’ I told them that I don’t care about money but I do care about human souls.”

They all shepherded Idol to new management and “somehow got him into amazing shape,” remembers Bloom. “On Jan. 31, 1985, we got Billy on the cover of Rolling Stone. It took him from pop-music ephemera to iconic status. That was my job.”

Bob Marley death watch

After six months of working toward breaking Bob Marley in the United States — the reggae god was already selling out stadiums elsewhere in the world — Bloom received a heartbreaking call in late 1980.

“I was told that Bob was dying of cancer in a Swiss clinic and that nobody could know because the paparazzi hunted him,” recalls Bloom.

Marley, he added, monitored the chase as obsessively as other stars tracked album sales: “Every morning Bob came down from his room, looked at newspapers from around the world and checked to see if anyone wrote about his illness. If they didn’t, he spent the day playing soccer outside. If there was one mention of his cancer, Bob stayed in his room, sitting in the dark. My job was to make sure Bob received every day as [one to live].”

Bloom did it by feeding Marley stories to the media while obscuring his location and medical condition.

After eight months of subterfuge and barrels of desirable ink, he says, “I got a call from a woman who told me that Bob doesn’t need me anymore. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. It meant that Bob had given up on living. The pilot light inside him went out and he was dead two weeks later.”

Bette Midler’s miraculous transformation

The first time Bloom encountered his new client Bette Midler in New York City, it was 1987 and Miss M was anything but divine.

“She was at the Plaza Hotel, shooting a film with Lily Tomlin [“Big Business”],” remembers Bloom. “I stepped into her trailer and she was dressed like a bag lady. I asked how she was doing and she said she had a cold and it was hard to get over. I heard the personality of a bag lady coming out of her as a crew of 150 people set up for her shot.”

He struggled to flesh out a p.r. plan. “Disney was betting on a film star who was having a nervous breakdown,” he says.

When a call came for Midler to hit the set, “She had six steps to walk,” Bloom says. “As she walked, she grew in stature and transformed utterly. By the end of those six steps, she was no longer Bette the bag lady. She was the Divine Miss M. Bette went off like a quasar. There are two Bette Midlers, and they are both completely real: the subdued person of everyday life and the one who gets energized by the attention of strangers.”

Kiss and don’t makeup

In 1983, Bloom was given a Herculean task: promote a makeup-free version of Kiss.

“I accomplished nothing for that band,” he now admits. “They wanted to come out from behind their makeup and be taken seriously. I was unable to help them do that. It’s entirely possible that it was impossible.”

Looking back, he says the band’s kabuki-on-a-bender makeup was too big of an identifier to wipe away. Without it, he said, the music lost its power.

“They were not Freddie Mercury, who was a f - - king genius,” Bloom says. “The authentic Gene Simmons is the guy with a tongue hanging between his knees, but not the others. Paul Stanley was a recluse.”

Unable to generate straight-faced coverage for a cleaned-up Kiss, Bloom stood by for the release of “Lick It Up,” which went platinum despite a tepid critical reception and alienated fans. The band splintered, with a revolving door of members, and spent 13 years performing without makeup before going back to the face paint in 1996.

“I should have talked them out of it,” says Bloom. “But I wasn’t smart enough at the time.”