Excellent coverage from the Louder Than War and Best Classic Bands websites of my new book, “Jukebox: Photographs 1967 – 2023.”

Louder Than War critic Robin Boardman writes, “It soon becomes clear as you turn the pages of this Aladdin’s cave of photographs that Goldberg not only knows how to hold a camera, but he also has an instinctive eye for what makes a good shot, born of his wonderment at the world of icons and wannabes in which he operates. … it’s a cornucopia of musical delights celebrating the broad church of rock music in all its forms with treats at every turn.”

Meanwhile, the folks at Best Classic Bands note, “Music journalist and former Rolling Stone senior writer Michael Goldberg has published a new book, “Jukebox—Photographs 1967-2023,” featuring distinctive, full-page photographs of musicians taken between 1967 and 2023. Goldberg is best known as a writer, but for over 50 years he’s also been photographing musicians and the photos in Jukebox are drawn from the thousands he’s taken over the years.”

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Included are photos of the Sex Pistols, Crime, the Ramones, the Avengers, Debbie Harry, Devo, the Nuns, the Clash, Tom Verlaine, Lou Reed, John Cale and the Dils as well as Tom Waits, Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile, Janis Joplin, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Muddy Waters, Toots and the Maytals, Patti Smith, Bettye Lavette, the Who, Neil Young, Jonathan Richman, David Byrne, Eno, Townes Van Zant, the Flamin’ Groovies, and many many more.

“Text is kept to a minimum, restricted primarily to artist name, date and location,” writes Boardman, “allowing the photographs to do the talking, and that’s something they do very eloquently indeed. Jukebox is a thrill ride through the golden age of rock n roll which no fan will want to miss.”

Please note that the book can be purchased directly from the publisher, HoZac Records and Books. I will be doing an event at Grace Cathedral’s Forum on Sunday, August 11 starting at 9:30 am. Books will be available at The Forum and I’ll be around to sign them.

I will also be doing a presentation on “Jukebox” at Book Passage in Corte Madera on August 24 beginning at 4 pm and books will also be available there. And, nearly 40 photos from the book will be on display beginning July 25 through September 22 at the Haight Street Art Center, which you can also see “We Are the One: San Francisco Punk 1970s – 1980s,” an art exhibit that I’m curating. Books will be available there and there will be an opening party on August 2 from 6 pm to 9 pm.

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In a special summer Forum at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, I’ll be talking about my new book, “Jukebox: Photographs 1967 – 2023,” and projecting many photos from the book so the audience can get a good idea of the photos. Join Dean Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with me about my experiences with the musicians, the challenges of photographing musicians, and my pioneering career creating the first web music magazine, Addicted To Noise, and in writing about music for Rolling Stone. The Forum takes place downstairs from the main cathedral. Grace Cathedral is located at 1100 California Street. There are parking garages nearby including one under the church building.

Along with some of rock’s biggest stars (Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Neil Young), the collection features an impressive array of underground figures and outcast luminaries captured in their natural habitat, most seen here for the first time anywhere. Bridging the gaps between the late ‘60s psychedelic era, primitive first-wave ‘70s punk, and soul & reggae, as well as never-before seen images of country and folk iconoclasts and rule-breakers across the spectrum, and even including some modern artists still making waves, “Jukebox” is an acclaimed photography collection.

Photo of Debbie Harry copyright 2024 Michael Goldberg.

“A visual encyclopedic history of rock & roll and pop culture as it really was. Michael Goldberg was there and documented it as it happened. A behind the scenes and real look at icons through the ages.” – Laurie Kratochvil, award winning Director of Photography at Rolling Stone (1982-1994) and editor of more than a dozen photo books including 20 Years of Rolling Stone What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

I’m best known as a writer, but for over 50 years I’ve also been photographing musicians and the photos in “Jukebox” are drawn from the thousands I’ve taken over the years. The book’s Foreword is written by acclaimed music book author Joel Selvin: “Come for the big names – Stones, Dead, Van, The Band; stay for the beautiful faces from the distant past – Tim Buckley, Professor Longhair, Sal Valentino. An extraordinary portfolio from any shooter, let alone one we know primarily as a writer.”

“This is a book of musicians I’ve dug over the years, musicians whose recordings moved me (and still move me), musicians I was lucky enough to photograph. I think these particular photos are my best, and I hope you find them unique, and at times mysterious; there are many excellent photographers of musicians, but none of them took these photographs.”

Books will be available at The Forum and I’ll be around to sign them.

Please note that I will also be doing a presentation on “Jukebox” at Book Passage in Corte Madera on August 24 beginning at 4 pm and books will also be available there. And, nearly 40 photos from the book will be on display beginning July 25 through September 22 at the Haight Street Art Center, which you can also see “We Are the One: San Francisco Punk 1970s – 1980s,” an art exhibit that I’m curating. Books will be available there and there will be an opening party on August 2 from 6 pm to 9 pm.

An art exhibit celebrating the punk rock scene in San Francisco during the late 1970s and early 1980s will open at the Haight Street Art Center on July 25, 2024 and run through September 22, 2024. An opening party will be held from 6pm until 9 pm on Friday August 2.

I’m the curator of this exhibit and I’ve been working on it for the past six months with help from Haight Street Art Center staff curator Ben Marks. The show includes approximately 150 photographs from an amazing group of artists/photographers: Ruby Ray, the late Bruce Conner, Jonathan Postal, Chester Simpson, Richard Alden Peterson, James Stark (Stark’s photo of the original Avengers can be seen below), Kamera Zie, Vincent Anton Stornaiuolo, the late Bobby Castro, Jeanne Hansen, and the late Jeff Good. I will also have photos in the show. There will also be over sixty flyers and posters, mostly provided by Kareem Kaddah, drawn from his extensive collection. Some of the flyers are on loan from former Crime drummer Henry Rosenthal. Jonathan Postal, once of the Avengers and the Readymades, designed the poster for the show (see above) which features his photographs. Video of half a dozen key bands will play as part of the exhibit and there will be audio recordings by many San Francisco punk bands and bands that influenced them playing in the main exhibit room.

Among the exhibition’s many highlights are 22 of artist Bruce Conner’s photographs that he took during 1978 at the famed Mabuhay Gardens, where the S.F. punk scene began in late 1976. In addition to Conner’s stunning black-and-white photographs, “We Are the One” will include eight rarely seen color photos that Conner took at the club. “In its own way, it [the Mabuhay scene] reminded me of the energy of the poets, artists, filmmakers, and dancers who had been characterized as the Beat generation in the 1950s,” Conner said during a 2005 interview with journalist/publisher Mike Plante for his Cinemad magazine.

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As a complement to the exhibition, the Art Center will present a punk film night and panel on Friday September 6. “San Francisco’s First and Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Movie: Crime 1978” directed by Jon Bastian will be screened, along with the rarely seen, unfinished, “In the Red,” a documentary shot in 1977 and 1978 by Liz Klein and Karen Merchant. There will also be live performance clips shot by Target Video’s Joe Rees. Following the screening there will be a panel discussion of the films and the punk scene featuring V. Vale, Henry Rosenthal, Jon Bastian, Liz Klein, Karen Merchant, Avengers singer/songwriter Penelope Houston. I’ll be facilitating it.

Running concurrently with “We Are the One” will be “Jukebox: The Music Photographs of Michael Goldberg,” a selection of almost 40 photographs drawn from my new book, “Jukebox: Photographs 1967 – 2023.” Included in the “Jukebox” show are photographs of Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Jim Morrison, Debbie Harry, Tom Waits, Townes Van Zandt, George Clinton, Professor Longhair, Emmylou Harris, Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, Peter Tosh, Muddy Waters, Bettye LaVette, Bob Dylan, and Van Morrison.

In critic JD Stayfree’s Top Ten of 2022, he writes of my book,“Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey” (HoZac Books),” “If you have not yet read the Wilsey bio, do yourself a favor and get a copy as soon as you can. It is probably my favorite rock book of all time. Dirty story of a hard livin’ tone poet who was betrayed by his friends in the greedhead cut throat capitalist music business. …”

Earlier this year, Stayfree wrote this long gonzo review about the book. He ends that review like this: “I will be listening to those Chris Issak/James Calvin Wilsey records for the rest of my life, and I know many of my old garage band hombres will always be listening to the Avengers. I am ever so grateful that this sharp writer, Michael Goldberg put so much passion and dedication into telling Wilsey’s story–about 400 pages of highs and lows and winning and losing and heartbreak and the whole human drama. Only the lonely love Chris Isaak and James Calvin Wilsey like I do. Greatness to behold. Get the book, you’ll be glad you did.” 

 And, Americana Highways founder/editor Bill Bentley wrote of “Wicked Game”: “This is the rock & roll book to read this year. It is a thrilling, heart-breaking, mind-blowing, cautionary and in the end passionate tale of how a guitarist of infinite ability and absolutely addictive tendencies attains the highest success on the rock & roll merry-go-round, only to flame out in a desperate tale of heroin, homelessness and, in the end, suicidal escapades that killed him. Rock & roll can be the scariest game there is if the person isn’t wired for success. Failure is survivable, but for those not ready for it, success is the killer. …”

If you’re interested, the best place to get the Wilsey book, and it can make a great holiday gift, as can my newest book, “Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg” (Backbeat Books), is from the HoZac Records and Books website. I’ve giving 25% of my royalties from each Wilsey book sold to Jimmy’s teenage son, Waylon James Wilsey.

In an excellent review of my new book, “Addicted to Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg” (Backbeat Books), Houston Press critic Bob Ruggiero begins, “What is the state of Music Journalism today if it can even still be called that?” He goes on suggest that back in the heyday of music journalism, it was “art, but it was also war.” And then he continues, “And if that’s the case, Michael Goldberg is a Five Star Journalist General. He’s spent more than 40 years writing about music and musicians for a wide variety of publications (in print!) like Esquire, Creem, New Musical Express, Musician, The San Francisco Chronicle, and a decade at every writer’s wet dream job, Rolling Stone (albeit a bit after the Almost Famous years…).

“In 1984, Goldberg also developed and ran the first Internet Music Magazine. Its title is shared with his new book, and pretty much sum up his life’s motto. He has collected the best of his writing in the dense, expansive, and leapfrogging anthology Addicted to Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg. …” Read this great review here.

Covered in the book: Bob Dylan, Beach Boys/Brian Wilson and Dennis Wilson, Prince, Neil Young, Patti Smith, John Lee Hooker, Flipper, Frank Zappa, Crime, Townes Van Zandt, Michael Jackson, Rick James, James Brown, the Ramones, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Sex Pistols, San Francisco ’60s scene (Janis Joplin and others), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, John Fogerty, Chris Isaak, Gil Scott-Heron, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Richard Thompson, Flamin’ Groovies, Robbie Robertson, Tom Waits, Stevie Wonder and more. Also 30+ full page photos of some of the artists.

Greil Marcus wrote the foreword.

I’m featured on “The Whatever, Buddy?! Podcast.” Among the musicians we discuss are the Ramones, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Rick James, Michael Jackson, and much more. Please check it out here.

And at “Lew’s Book Reviews,” Lew Shiner writes, “His [Goldberg’s] forte is the extended profile, with a mixture of quotes from the artist, quotes from others, and commentary from Goldberg. … His Stevie Wonder profile is worth the price of the collection all by itself… Goldberg needs time and space to do his best work. When he has enough column inches and access to an artist for days at a time, he can come up with pieces like the one on Brian Wilson’s first solo album, where the walls come down and you really feel like you’re seeing into people’s hearts. He managed the same feat with Brian’s brother Dennis, even with the disadvantage of writing it after Dennis’s death. … Another highlight of the book is a close comparison of Dylan’s “Desolation Row” with Jack Kerouac’s DESOLATION ANGELS.” Read the entire review here.

_{Greil Marcus in his office, September 16, 2022. Photograph by Michael Goldberg}

By Michael Goldberg

Greil Marcus writing or talking about Bob Dylan is the holy grail. He is the leading authority on Dylan, and the best known and most respected rock critic in the U.S. (and probably the world). His first in-depth book about rock music, “Mystery Train” (the title coming from one of Elvis’ Sun Records recordings), published in 1975, established him as a leading authority on rock music, and his stature has only grown since then.

David Cantwell wrote in a December 2015 profile of Marcus published in the New Yorker, that nearly as soon as “Mystery Train” was published it was “short-listed as ‘the best’ or ‘the finest’ or ‘most compelling’ book ever written about popular music…”

After the book was first published, Frank Rich wrote in the Village Voice, “‘Mystery Train’ is determinedly and proudly in the tradition of such ground-breaking works of American cultural criticism as Leslie Fiedler’s ‘Love and Death in the American Novel,’ D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Studies in Classic American Literature’ and F.O. Matthiessen’s ‘American Renaissance’ (the first two of which Marcus draws from in his work); as his predecessors sought to understand Poe’s nightmares or the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in terms of our most substantial national myths, so Marcus attempts to place such songs as Randy Newman’s “Sail Away,” The Band’s “Across the Great Divide,” and Elvis Presley’s early efforts for Sam Phillips at Sun Records into the same broad cultural context.”

Although “Mystery Train” might have seemed to some to be about a handful of musicians—Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley—the book is about much more than that. As Marcus states in the intro, the book is “an attempt to broaden the context in which the music is heard; to deal with rock ’n’ roll not as youth culture, or counterculture, but simply as American culture. … [These musicians] share unique musical and public personalities, enough ambition to make even their failures interesting, and a lack of critical commentary extensive or committed enough to do their work justice. In their music and in their careers, they share a range and a depth that seem to crystalize naturally in visions and versions of America: its possibilities, limits, openings, traps. Their stories are hardly the whole story, but they can tell us how much the story matters.” This was the beginning of where Greil Marcus would go for the next 47 years, finding America, and so much more, within a handful of songs, sometimes a single song.

Born during the summer of 1945 in San Francisco, Marcus grew up in Menlo Park, a suburb south of the city; he attended U.C. Berkeley, where he earned an undergraduate degree in American studies. He saw Bob Dylan for the first time in 1963, when Joan Baez brought the determinedly scruffy singer/songwriter onstage at a show that took place in “a field in New Jersey.” One of the songs Dylan sang that day was “With God on Our Side” and, as Marcus told me during our interview, he was “absolutely stunned.” It was the beginning of an obsession with Dylan and his music.

 In 1968 Marcus wrote a review of an album by the Who, and, unsolicited, sent it to Rolling Stone, the rock magazine that had begun a year earlier; two weeks later it was published in the record reviews section. Soon he was on-staff and spent a year as Rolling Stone’s record reviews editor; he lost the job due to a dispute with publisher/editor-in-chief Jann Wenner over Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait; Marcus infamously began his review of the album this way: “What is this shit?”

Over the years Marcus wrote for Creem, the Village Voice, New West, Artforum, Interview, the Wire, Salon, The Believer and many other publications including the New York Times and the New Yorker. He has written 19 books and edited another six. Perhaps his most remarkable book (and a favorite of mine) is “Lipstick Traces,” which he spent nine years researching and writing; as Andy Beckett wrote in The Independent, “‘Lipstick Traces’ began as a book about the Sex Pistols; then expanded crazily back in time to Paris in 1968, Dada in 1917, the French Revolution, and ultimately to libertarian heresies in the Middle Ages. Marcus found himself writing ‘a secret history of the 20th century,’ a search for the origins and story of the nihilistic impulse that the Sex Pistols had stumbled upon.” 

_{Original cover of “Lipstick Traces.”}

Marcus wrote a monthly column, “Real Life Rock,” for New West magazine from 1978 into 1983; that column combined an essay with a top ten at the end. Three years later, Marcus was asked to take the top ten and turn it into a 700-word column for the Village Voice, which he titled, “Real Life Rock Top Ten.” The column “had room for anything,” Marcus wrote in his introduction to “Real Life Rock,” a book that collects every column he wrote from 1986 through September 2014 (a second book, “More Real Life Rock,” was published earlier this year), “music, movies, fiction, critical theory, ads, television shows, remarks overheard waiting in line, news items, contributions from correspondents… treating the column as a forum or a good site for gossip, or the everyday conversation it has always wanted to be.”

Over time, the “Real Life Rock Top Ten” moved to Salon, The Believer, Interview, Rolling Stone and some other publications. Most recently, Marcus wrote it for The Los Angeles Review of Books, where it was published until February 2022; he was about to move it to Substack when he became ill; he has been recovering for many months and the future of the column was up in the air when I spoke to him in mid-September.

His most recent book, “Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs” (Yale University Press), was published on October 1, 2022. It’s the fourth book Marcus has written about Dylan, the others being “The Old Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes,” “Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads,” and “Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings, 1968-2010.” Additionally, a third of his book “Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations” is devoted to Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” “Folk Music” is unlike any other book about Bob Dylan, and other than Dylan’s own memoir, “Chronicles,” it gets as close as may be possible to who Dylan the singer, songwriter, recording artist and performer is, and what can be found within his recorded… Continued at Rhythms Magazine.

On Friday October 21, 2022, a group of rock critics and music historians will read from their recent books at a Litquake event at the Make-Out Room in San Francisco. The evening will begin at 7:30 pm and end around 10:30 and there is a $15 charge. Appearing are Greil Marcus, Michael Goldberg (that’s me), Sylvia Simmons, Ben Fong-Torres, Joel Selvin, Rickey Vincent and Nadine Condon. The authors’ books will be available. Greil Marcus will be reading from his excellent new book about Bob Dylan, “Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.”

The bios as they appear on the Litquake website:

Greil Marcus is an author, music journalist, and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture. Marcus was born in San Francisco, and earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies from UC Berkeley, where he also did graduate work in political science. He has been a rock critic and columnist for Rolling Stone (where he was the reviews editor, at $30 a week), and other publications, including Creem, The Village Voice, and Artforum. Marcus is the author of Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces, and Invisible Republic, among many others.

Ben Fong-Torres is an American rock journalist, author, and broadcaster best known for his association with Rolling Stone magazine and The San Francisco Chronicle. He has published 11 books, on subjects ranging from a history of Top 40 radio, to Gram Parsons, The Doors, Grateful Dead, The Eagles, and Little Feat, among others. He has also worked in radio since the 1970s, and is currently a DJ and program director for the online station MoonaliceRadio.com. The award-winning documentary about his life and career, Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres (2021) is now streaming on Netflix.

Sylvie Simmons is an award-winning author and one of the foremost music journalists working today. Born in London, she moved to Los Angeles in the late ’70s to write about rock music for magazines such as Sounds, Creem, Kerrang!, and MOJO. She is the author of acclaimed fiction and nonfiction books, including bestselling biographies of Leonard Cohen (I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen); Serge Gainsbourg (A Fistful of Gitanes); and, most recently, Debbie Harry’s Face It. She is also a singer-songwriter and recording artist; her most recent album is Blue On Blue (Compass Records, 2020). She has lived at various times in England, the United States, and France, and currently lives in San Francisco.

Writer and photographer Michael Goldberg has been interviewing and photographing musicians since he was 17. He was a senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine for a decade. His writing has appeared in Esquire, New Musical Express, Creem, DownBeat, New York Rocker, Trouser Press, Musician, New West, Vibe, New Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. He has had three novels published: True Love Scars, The Flowers Lied, and Untitled. In May 2022, Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey was published. Coming Nov. 1: Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg.

San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin started covering rock shows for the paper shortly after the end of the Civil War. His writing has appeared in a surprising number of other publications that you would think should have known better. He has written more than 20 books covering various aspects of pop music, and his newest is Sly & the Family Stone: An Oral History.

Nadine Condon worked in the local music scene from 1979-89 with the Jefferson Starship/Starship, during the era of “We Built This City.” She then promoted artists like Melissa Etheridge, Steve Miller, and John Mayall, and eventually launched the “Nadine’s Wild Weekend” annual music festival, a legendary San Francisco showcase of “135 bands, 30 shows, 20 clubs, and four nights.” She is the author of Hot Hits Cheap Demos: The Real-World Guide to Music Business Success, and her new memoir is Confessions: Stories to Rock Your Soul. The Bay Area’s “Godmother of Rock” lives in the Sonoma Valley with her husband and two rescue cats, Bret and Bart.

Dr. Rickey Vincent is an author, music scholar, radio host and educator. He is author of the award-winning Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of The One, and Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers’ Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music. He writes and speaks on issues of race, culture, music and politics nationwide. Since 1997 he has hosted The History of Funk on KPFA radio, two hours of the strongest, stankiest, uncut funk anywhere on the airwaves.

It should be a great evening. More info at Litquake.

On November 1, 2022, my book, “Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg,” will be published by Backbeat Books.

Addicted To Noise collects the best interviews, profiles and essays I’ve written during my 40-plus years as a journalist. From combative interviews with Frank Zappa and Tom Waits to essays on how Jack Kerouac influenced Bob Dylan and the lasting importance of San Francisco’s first punk rock club, as novelist Dana Spiotta wrote, “Goldberg shows us how consequential music can be.”

Contained within these pages: interviews with Sleater-Kinney, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Flipper, John Fogerty, Neil Young and Rick James, and profiles of Robbie Robertson, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, the Clash, Prince, Michael Jackson, the Flamin’ Groovies, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Laurie Anderson, Brian Wilson, the Ramones, George Clinton, the Sex Pistols, Richard Thomson, Gil Scott-Heron, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Devo, San Francisco punks Crime and more. Plus short takes on Muddy Waters, Townes Van Zandt, Captain Beefheart, Professor Longhair and others. Also 50+ full page photos of some of the artists.

As Greil Marcus writes in the Foreword, “You can feel the atmosphere: someone has walked into a room with a pencil in his hand—as the words go in perhaps the first song about a music critic, not counting Chuck Berry’s aside about the writers at the rhythm reviews—and suddenly people are relaxed. … He isn’t after your secrets. He doesn’t want to ruin your career to make his. He doesn’t care what you think you need to hide. He actually is interested in why and how you make your music and what you think of it. So people open up, very quickly, and, very quickly, as a reader, you’re not reading something you’ve read before.”

The stories originally appeared in Rolling Stone, Downbeat, Esquire, New Musical Express, California magazine, Addicted To Noise, San Francisco Chronicle, Vibe, Creem, New York Rocker, and more.

You can pre-order “Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg” at Amazon, IndieBound, Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, or at your local bookstore.

Back cover blurbs:

“Throughout these interviews and essays, Goldberg shows us how consequential music can be. His stance is both as passionate fan and learned critic as he grapples with these artists on their own terms, capturing them at crucial moments, challenging their personas, and making the case for their work . He has written a captivating, essential, and personal history of the complications and revelations contained in the ideal of rock & roll authenticity.” – Dana Spiotta, author of “Eat the Document,” “Stone Arabia,” and “Innocents and Others”

“In Addicted to Noise, Michael Goldberg flies far above the pop/cult cliches of the rock journalist as sweaty fanboy or hyper-analytic smarty pants. The man just dug in and did the work as an informed, respectful, and engaged interviewer. It shows in this compilation of interviews and profiles. Even the wariest artists let him in—backstage, at home and deep in the midnight hour. There’s a piece for every fan’s passion, from Patti Smith to the Beach Boys or James Brown. Whether Goldberg is jousting with a twitchy Van Morrison or giving the riot grrrls of Sleater-Kinney some r-e-s-p-e-c-t, there’s a whole lotta love for the music, too. For the Goldberg and the reader, all those years “on the bus” make for one great ride.” – Gerri Hirshey, author of “Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music” and “We Gotta Get Outta This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock”

“Michael Goldberg has his finger on the pulse, his foot to the beat, his hip to the rhythm, and his ears peeled for the cadences of rock & roll’s raucous jibber-jabber in an outrageously entertaining rollercoaster through several decades of pop and punk, funk and blues writing: a bright, breezy, frenetic, and often funny, frolic covering the main streets and backwoods of backstage patter, pulsating performance, and everyday posing. In his wide ranging collection of rock journalism, Goldberg provides close to an A-Z – from Laurie Anderson, Captain Beefheart, the Clash, and Bob Dylan all the way through to Brian Wilson, Neil Young, and Frank Zappa – of the last 40 years or so of the music’s mercurial journey, profiling, and interrogating many of its biggest hitters – James Brown and Tom Waits, Van Morrison and Prince –  yet giving a gallery of more esoteric movers and shakers, like Flipper and Sleater-Kinney, Devo and Townes Van Zandt, space and time. With a byline peppering numerous major newspapers, newsweeklies, and magazines of the era, Goldberg is truly a star turn in a golden age of rock reportage.” – Simon Warner, author of “Text and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture” and editor of “Kerouac on Record”

In Addicted to Noise, Michael Goldberg writes authoritatively and sensitively about some of music’s most fascinating and, yes, bewildering characters. He takes you right into the lives and minds of Prince, Rick James, Van Morrison, Laurie Anderson, Gil Scott-Heron, John Lee Hooker, Flipper, Sleater-Kinney and several other true originals – and teaches you almost everything you need to know about them. – Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock’s Backpages and author of “God is in the Radio: Unbridled Enthusiasms, 1980 – 2020

“All through these pages, you can hear the people Michael Goldberg is talking to and talking about reach the same conclusion. I can trust this guy, they say.” – Greil Marcus, author of “Mystery Train,” “Lipstick Traces” and numerous others.

You can pre-order “Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg” at Amazon, IndieBound, Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, or at your local bookstore.

Kirkus Reviews just ran an excellent review of my book, “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey.”

“James Calvin Wilsey may not be a household name, but he’s certainly well known in some circles,” begins the review. “As a guitarist for Chris Isaak, he created a riff that not only helped make the song “Wicked Game” a hit, but also has gone down in history as one of the best rock song openings of all time. Yet Wilsey was a complicated man, and behind the scenes, he was dealing with a drug addiction that would ultimately lead him away from music and into a downward spiral. Music journalist Goldberg captures it all in this book, a gritty look at the guitarist’s success and ultimate downfall. Meticulously reported via hours of interviews with childhood friends, family members, fellow musicians, and the rocker himself, the volume paints a vivid portrait of all sides of Wilsey, a tormented soul who was revered by other performers. Though the author acknowledges a friendship with Wilsey, who died of organ failure at the age of 61 in 2018, Goldberg pulls no punches in his searing biography. And the author knows his subject matter. Consider his description of Silvertone, Isaak’s group that included Wilsey, as “a band that combined ’50s rockabilly with ’60s pop and ’80s punk nihilism—Elvis fronting the Beatles, only with the anxiety of Joy Division.” The book is filled with nuggets like that that show Goldberg’s knowledge of music history and Wilsey’s place in it. …”

You can read the rest of the review at Kirkus Reviews.

If you want to purchase “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey,” you can get a copy from Book Passage or order from HoZac Books. Also, you might be able to get a copy here. 

And I’ll be doing an online reading/interview at Book Passage starting at 5:30 pm on Thursday, July 21, 2022. It’s free. Former Creem managing editor Robert Duncan, a rock critic and novelist, will interview me after I read briefly from my book.