Category Archives: book

Michael Goldberg Interviewed on Triple R Radio about ‘True Love Scars,’ 4 p.m. Today!

I”ll be on Brian Wise’s “Off The Record” Triple R radio show today.

The show airs from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. (U.S., Pacific Time) and somewhere in those three hours will be a 15 minute segment in which Brian Wise talks to me about my novel, True Love Scars.

Wise will be airing additional 15 minute segments from an interview he did with me a bout a week ago every week for the next three weeks following today’s show.

Check it out!

You can stream the show here.

Note that David Kinney who wrote The Dylanologists will be on the show as will Bill Wyman who just wrote an article for New York magazine, “How Did Bob Dylan Get So Weird.”

Plus this story that ran about my novel and me in the Marin Independent Journal was reprinted in the Contra Costa Times (http://www.contracostatimes.com/…/former-rolling-stone…) and Inside Bay Area (http://www.insidebayarea.com/…/former-rolling-stone…) today.

[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.

Or watch an arty video with audio of me reading from the novel here.

Of just buy the damn thing:

–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Marin Paper Features Michael Goldberg’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Novel, ‘True Love Scars,’ On Front Page

My book and me on the front page of the Marin Independent Journal.

Pretty crazy.

On Saturday morning I got an email from a friend telling me I was on the FRONT PAGE of the daily newspaper for Marin Country, the Marin Independent Journal.

I just about fell over.

The article, by Paul Liberatore, begins like this:

There’s a scene in Michael Goldberg’s new rock ‘n’ roll novel, “True Love Scars,” that takes place in Mill Valley’s Depot Bookstore and Cafe, where the author was sitting one recent sweltering afternoon, sipping a hot coffee, despite the heat, and talking about this first book in what he’s calling his “Freak Scene Dream Trilogy.”

An ex-Rolling Stone associate editor and senior writer cum online music pioneer, the 61-year-old author describes the narrator of his coming-of-age story, 19-year-old Michael Stein, aka “Writerman,” as “a caricature of his teenage self,” a rock-crazed kid with raging hormones who’s obsessed with Bob Dylan and the “Visions of Johanna chick,” Sweet Sarah, he meets and falls in love with at a meditation center in Woodacre.

In Goldberg’s tragic love story, set in Marin County in the late ’60s and early ’70s, young Writerman begins his betrayal of Sweet Sarah at the Depot and its downtown plaza.

“It’s the first time he looks at another woman,” Goldberg explained, noting the parallels between the arc of his fictional tale and the maturation of the music he’s spent his career writing about. Novelist Tom Spanbauer calls Goldberg “a total rock ‘n’ roll geek,” a characterization that’s borne out in the rock references on just about every page.

“There are so many songs about teen love in the early days of rock n’ roll, and that’s a big theme in the early portion of this trilogy,” he said. “Then things change and get more sophisticated and evolved as the books progress, just as rock music did. I was taking emotion from songs and from albums and manifesting that into my fiction.”

If you want you can read the whole thing here.

And this fantastic review was posted by Gigi Little at her wonderful blog, ut omnia bena…, yesterday.

Here’s an excerpt:

This is sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, folks, which normally you probably wouldn’t think would be my thing, but Goldberg’s book is full of a voice that is so breathless and particular and, what attracts me the most, innocent. There is such a sweetness in the narrator, such youthful naive charm under all the F-bombs. (There are lots of F-bombs. Sometimes when he read pages in the Dangerous Writing basement, we’d count the F-bombs.) Michael Stein knows everything there is to know about music and the music scene. He’s a walking encyclopedia of rock ‘n’ roll. But there’s so much that he doesn’t know. And it’s in what Michael Stein doesn’t know that the story finds its heartbreaking charm – and, of course, its danger.

Read the rest here.

For more on the book, head here.

In The Dylan Zone: How Bob Dylan Changed My Life – Rock’s Back Pages Excerpts ‘True Love Scars’

Today the British music site, Rock’s Back Pages, features “In The Dylan Zone,” a long excerpt from my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.

The excerpt is all about what it’s like to hear Bob Dylan for the first time, how it changed the narrator’s life, and the life of the girl he is dating. It’s powerful stuff and if you’re a Dylan fan, I think you’ll be able to relate.

You’ll find the excerpt here at Rock’s Back Pages.

So I have a favor to ask of any of you who have enjoyed posts at this Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog during the near-year that I’ve been posting here. I’m asking for your support, and the way you can support me is to buy a copy of my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars. The Kindle version is cheap — $2.99 — which is less than a penny a day. And if you do buy a copy, please leave a comment on this post so I can thank you. And if you read the book and like it, please post a short review at Amazon.

Here are the Amazon links:

Amazon US True Love Scars (Freak Scene Dream Trilogy Book 1)

Amazon UK

Amazon DE

Amazon FR

Amazon AU

There’s also a different, shorter excerpt in the latest issue of the online music zine, Perfect Sound Forever, which also went live yesterday.

You can read that excerpt here.

Introducing the excerpt, Perfect Sound Forever founder/editor Jason Gross writes:

“Writer/editor Michael Goldberg has had a pretty storied career. After working as an editor at Rolling Stone for 10 years, he went on to found the first online music magazine, called Addicted To Noise, and later became an editor and VP at another pioneering music site SonicNet (which would later fall under MTV’s umbrella).

“Goldberg is now turning his attention to fiction, coming up with the first book of a projected trilogy – True Love Scars, a stream of conscious coming-of-age story of a 19-year-old California kid who crawls through the refuse of the early ‘70s with an obsession for music, writing and women.”

Perfect Sound Forever has been covering great music since the mid-‘90s.

Gross has also been involved in getting some great compilation reissues released including two Kill Rock Star albums; one for Kleenex and one for Essential Logic.

Rock’s Back Pages excerpt.

Perfect Sound Forever excerpt.

Awesome Early ’60s Bob Dylan Photos Get Show in South Haven — See the Photos Now!

Bob Dylan and John Sebastian at Village Cafe in Woodstock, New York in 1964. Photo by Douglas R. Gilbert.

In 1964 Douglas R. Gilbert got the once-in-a-lifetime assignment to photograph Bob Dylan up in Woodstock, and elsewhere, for Look magazine.

Look never ran the photos, but now they will be exhibited at the South Haven Center for the Arts at 600 Phoenix Rd, South Haven Charter Township, MI 49090.

You can see four of them here.v

But the mother lode is at Gilbert’s website, where you can view 46 of the photos right now!

There are superb photos of Dylan with Allen Ginsberg, John Sebastian, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Sally Grossman — wife of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman — who was later in the cover photo for Bringing It All Back Home.

Here’s what’s on Gilbert’s website about the photos:

In July of 1964, one year before his music changed from acoustic to electric, I photographed Bob Dylan for LOOK magazine. I spent time with him at his home in Woodstock, New York, in Greenwich Village, and at the Newport Folk Festival. The story was never published. After reviewing the proposed layout, the editors declared Dylan to be “too scruffy for a family magazine” and killed the story.

Some of the photos were used for The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall.

And they appeared in the excellent book: “Forever Young: Photographs of Bob Dylan‚ by Douglas R. Gilbert.”

[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.

Or watch an arty video with audio of me reading from the novel here.

–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

The ‘True Love’ Scars Soundtrack, Playlist #1 – ‘Visions of Johanna,’ ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ & More

In August I’m publishing my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.

Music is referenced throughout the book, and so I’ll be posting Spotify playlists of songs that are featured in some way in the book.

Playlist #1 includes songs from the first two chapters.

By the way, I will be on a panel at Lit Quake’s Digital Publishing Conference on June 21, 2014. My panel, Reinventing Your Career in the Digital Age, is from 4 to 5 pm. The conference is being held at Snodgrass Hall, 198 McAllister at UC Hastings Law School in San Francisco’s Civic Center. For more info head over to the LitQuake site.

And: I will be reading from True Love Scars at Book Passage in Marin County on August 21, 2014 at 7 pm. It would be great to see you there. Book Passage is located at:

51 Tamal Vista Blvd
Corte Madera, CA
(415) 927-0960

And now, the True Love Scars Soundtrack, Playlist #1:

–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Books: Killer Rock Books For Summer – Alex Chilton, Bob Dylan, Kiss, Allman Brothers & More

There’s a great overview of recent music books by Howard Hampton at the New York Times today.

He covers books about the Allman Brothers, Alex Chilton, Kiss, Bob Dylan and Earth, Wind & Fire, plus rock journalist Lisa Robinson’s memoir.

All rock biographies/memoirs agree on one point. As Gregg Allman tells it in “One Way Out,” an exhaustive oral history of the Allman Brothers Band by Alan Paul, escaping the workaday lot of “a shock-absorber washer-jammer in Detroit . . . is why I became a musician in the first place.” Or as Joey Ramone sang: “It’s not my place in the 9-to-5 world.”

Whatever form the music might take, it promised a palatable alternative to the routine assembly-line life. Learn how to play an instrument, be able to clutch a mic and project some personality or attitude, and you too might ascend from the pits of menial-labor, desk-job drudgery, or the “Do you want fries with that?” service industry. Not only were shimmering nonunion perks like sex, drugs and fame on the table, but you could sleep until the afternoon, not be penalized for lapses in hygiene or deportment and, with luck, get paid to be utterly irresponsible. What wasn’t to love?

You didn’t even have to be a musician to tap into that life. In 1969, you could be a young substitute teacher in Harlem who started working after school in the office of a syndicated music writer/D.J./would-be record producer named Richard Robinson, and in no time find yourself skating down a yellow brick road of free record albums, concert tickets and record company buffets straight into the spanking new field of rock journalism (while marrying the boss in the process, a union that would also stick). As Lisa Robinson says in her winning THERE GOES GRAVITY: A Life in Rock and Roll (Riverhead, $27.95), she wasn’t like the “boys who had ambitions to become the next Norman Mailer”: She took over her new husband’s column and was off to the races.

A dedicated Manhattan girl, she adopted a very laissez-faire, New Orleans attitude to the rock circus — let the good times roll over you and leave the existential-metaphysical-political implications to others. Robinson wasn’t a partyer, though. She came for the music and the warped conviviality of the milieu (a professed “drug prude,” she passed on the cocaine hors d’oeuvres). Observing Mick Jagger or Robert Plant in their offstage habitats was almost as entertaining as seeing Keith Richards or Television’s Tom Verlaine play sublime guitar licks.

By the ‘70s, Robinson was writing a cheeky gossip/fashion column she called “Eleganza” for Creem magazine. This led to her being hired as the press liaison for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 Tour of the Americas…

Read the rest of this review here at the New York Times.

–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Audio: Liel Leibovitz Talks About the Evolution of Leonard Cohen, Songwriter

Liel Leibovitz, a senior writer at Tablet Magazine, has a new book out this week: A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen.

Below he talks about Leonard Cohen, songwriting, and the breakthrough moment of Cohen’s career.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –

Definitive New Bio Depicts William Burroughs ‘Battle With the Ugly Spirit’

This Tuesday sees the publication of British writer Barry Miles biography of William Burroughs, “Call Me Burroughs.”

Reviewing the book in Bookforum,Jeremy Lybarger writes:

William S. Burroughs lived the kind of life few contemporary American novelists seek to emulate. A roll call of his sins: He was a queer and a junkie before being either was hip; he was a deadbeat father and an absent son; he was a misogynist, a gun lover, and a drunk; he was a guru of junk science and crank religion; he haunted the most sinister dregs of Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, London, and New York; he was an avant-garde writer with little affection for plot and none at all for epiphany; he wore his Americanness like a colostomy bag, shameful but essential. When he died at age 83 in 1997, his last words were: “Be back in no time.” At least he wasn’t a liar.

This year is the centenary of Burroughs’s birth and the occasion for Barry Miles’s new biography, Call Me Burroughs: A Life. Miles specializes in Beat literature and is arguably the definitive biographer of Ginsberg and Kerouac, as well as a devout Burroughsian whose 1993 book, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, remains a mainstay of academic bibliographies. Call Me Burroughs eclipses everything else he’s done in terms of breadth, erudition, and sheer narrative combustion. If you’re one for literary gamesmanship, note that it also trumps Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw (1998) as the authoritative record of Burroughs’s life.

Let me suggest that a fair barometer of biographical writing is how well it resists hyperbole. Miles is successful in this regard, which is impressive given that Burroughs’s life yields so much that is extreme. There’s the foggy childhood incident in which his beloved nurse either aborted her baby in front of him or forced him to suck her boyfriend’s penis (years of psychoanalysis never fully recovered the details). Or there’s the murder of Burroughs’s friend David Kammerer, about which Burroughs “showed no emotion.” Or there’s the afternoon that Burroughs, desperately in love with a teenage hustler but also desperately possessive, sawed off his own finger joint with poultry shears in an act of lurid chivalry. Or there’s his smorgasbord of addictions—to heroin, alcohol, marijuana, Eukodol, morphine. Above all, there’s the horrific event he spent endless doped years and infinite harrowing pages trying to exorcize: the shooting incident in which he killed his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City, 1951.

Joan Vollmer is something like the Tokyo Rose of Beat literature; her presence is subliminal but toxic…

For more, head to Bookforum.

Burroughs on using heroin:

Burroughs reads his novel, “Junky”:

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Read: Morrissey Gives It to Carnivores Loud and Clear in New Essay

Today at the Morrissey fan site True To You the former frontman for The Smiths has posted an intense essay attacking carnivores.

Here’s some of it:

The world won’t listen
18 November 2013

The world won’t listen

I am not ashamed to admit that newspaper photographs in recent days of American TV presenter Melissa Bachman laughing as she stands over a majestic lion that had been stalked and shot dead by Bachman herself left me tearful. Although I have previously felt enraged by the asininity of U.S. congressman Paul Ryan, and political fluffhead Sarah Palin – both of whom also kill beings for fun, there is something especially lamentable about the Bachman smile of pride as the lion – a symbol of strength, heraldry and natural beauty, lies lifeless in answer to Bachman’s need for temporary amusement. The world struggles to protect the rhino and the elephant – both being shot out of existence, yet Bachman joins the murderous insanity of destruction without any fear of arrest. This comes in the same week that Princess Anne condones horsemeat consumption – since she is evidently not content with eating pigs, sheep, cows, birds and fish. Although her slackwitted view is reported with mild surprise by the British media, there is no outrage since the crassness and international duncery of the British so-called ‘royal family’ remains the great unsaid in British print. It is spoken of, of course, but it is not allowed to go further than that. Why does Anne approve of slaughter of any kind? Has she ever been inside an abattoir? Does she actually know what she’s talking about? Similarly, on October 5, the Daily Mail newspaper gave us all an “amusing” report of thickwit Pippa Middleton laughing as she stood over 50 birds shot dead by her friends and herself after a “busy day’s shooting”. We are reminded by the Daily Mail that Middleton is a ‘socialite’, which tells us that she is privileged and can more-or-less kill whatever she likes – and, therefore she does. The sick face of modern Britain, Pippa Middleton will kill deer, boar, birds – any animal struggling to live, or that gets in her socialite way. This is because her sister is, of course, Kate, who herself became ‘royal’ simply by answering the telephone at the right time, and this association allows Pippa’s kill, kill, kill mentality to be smilingly endorsed by the British print media, to which only the mentally deficient could join in with the laughter. The right to kill animals is endorsed by Prime Minister David Cameron who shoots stag whenever he feels a bit bored. In the Queen’s Honors List, awards have been bestowed upon musicians Bryan Ferry and PJ Harvey – both of whom allegedly support fox-hunting. There is not one single instance when an animal protectionist has found themselves knighted or applauded by the Queen. That animals are an essential part of our planet (that they are, in fact, the planet) and must be protected, is a shatterbrained concept to the British ‘royals’. Historically, we all remember Prince William proudly killing the baby deer, Prince Harry bravely giving the thumbs-up as he pointlessly ended the life of a water-buffalo, the Queen loading her shotgun in readiness to shoot birds out of the sky. How terribly regal.

To read more, head to True To You.

Thanks Consequence of Sound!

Miles Davis The Painter? Who Knew?

Turns out Miles Davis painted and drew for many hours each day.

His art is damn good. Some reminds me of Basquiat.

A book, “Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork,” was published recently.

You can see 12 examples of his painting and drawing at The Daily Beast.

Miles’ heirs are working away at keeping the legendary jazz musician in the spotlight, and bringing Davis’ music to younger generations. Some of their plans — remixes by hip DJs — seem sketchy, others — ties and scarves? — seem sacreligious. But a biopic is a great idea, and I welcome more music.

A story in todays New York Times details some of what his three heirs are up to.