Tag Archives: Addicted To Noise

Bob Dylan Sings From the Autumn of His Life

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fallen

Part two of his Sinatra sessions are heavy with meaning, and a whole lot of fun too

By Michael Goldberg

A fallen angel is an angel who has sinned and been cast out of heaven.

“Everybody knows that torch singers are ‘fallen angels,’…” – Torch Singing: Performing Resistance and Desire from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf by Stacy Holman Jones

Bob Dylan showed up at Daniel Lanois’ house in Los Angeles sometime in the later half of 2014 with recordings of 21 songs he’d made at the beginning of the year at the legendary Capitol Records Studio B in Hollywood where Frank Sinatra, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, the Beach Boys and many others once made records.

“He [Dylan] said, ‘Let me tell you, Dan: If you have the time, can I tell you how I grew up?’ So we sat in the kitchen. I hadn’t heard a note.
“He spoke for an hour and a half on how, as a kid, you couldn’t even get pictures of anybody [the artists],” Lanois, who produced two Dylan albums, 1989’s Oh Mercy, and 1997’s Time Out Of Mind, recounted to a reporter from the Vancouver Sun in February of 2015. “You might get a record but you didn’t know what they [the artist] looked like. So there was a lot of mystery associated with the work at the time. As far as hearing live music, he only heard a couple of shows a year, like the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra might come through.

“But the music he did hear really touched him and he felt that a lot of that music was written not only by great professional songwriters at the time, but a lot of it was written from the heart, from the wartime, and people just pining for a lover. He felt there was a lot of spirit in that music. He felt there was a kind of beauty, a sacred ground for him.

“After having said all that, we then listened to the music and I felt everything that he talked about. For one of America’s great writers to say, ‘I’m not gonna write a song. I’m gonna pay homage to what shook me as a young boy,’ I thought was very graceful and dignified.”

Ten of the recordings Lanois heard that day were released on Dylan’s wonderful 2015 album, Shadows in the Night. What happened to the others is something of a mystery.

Read the rest of this review at Addicted To Noise.

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Writer Michael Goldberg Interviewed: Dylan, Rolling Stone & More

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ATN MG int cover 2

Andrew Hamlin interviews me for Addicted To Noise.

Among other things I talk about how Bob Dylan, Captain Beefheart and Diane Arbus changed my life, some of the most difficult artist interviews of my rock journalism career, and how I wrote my latest novel. The Flowers Lied.

Here’s how the interview begins:

From his early rock writing, to a spot as a Rolling Stone mainstay, to a pioneering Web editor/publisher, to rock as literature, Michael Goldberg, founded of the original Addicted To Noise in 1994, keeps moving and keeps his thumb pushed down deep on the blurt.

Goldberg was immersed in the punk scene in the mid-1970’s, interviewing Patti Smith and The Ramones and the Talking Heads for stories that ran in the Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Clash nearly threw him out of a San Francisco recording studio, the Sex Pistols tried to break his tape recorder, and Frank Zappa said if Michael Goldberg was one of his fans he was in big trouble.

Prior to starting ATN, Goldberg was an associate editor and senior writer at Rolling Stone for 10 years. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Esquire, Vibe, Details, Downbeat, NME and numerous other publications.

Goldberg has recently published The Flowers Lied, the second of three books detailing the life, work, frustrations, and passions of his protagonist, Writerman.

Who were your earliest powerful influences, literary, musical, and otherwise?

It’s rare that something you read or hear has a direct, clear-cut influence…

Read the entire interview at Addicted To Noise.

– An Addicted To Noise blog post –

Essential Books: Robert Christgau on the Past, Carola Dibbell on the Future

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only ones

Dean Of Rock Criticism Robert Christgau Looks Back While Novelist Carola Dibbell Imagines The Future

By Michael Goldberg.

While it was likely coincidental that New York-based editor/rock critic Robert Christgau, who has been working on his memoir since 2007, and Carola Dibbell, a journalist who has been writing mostly unpublished fiction for decades and who is married to Christgau, had their books – his memoir, Going Into The City (Dey St./William Morrow); her debut novel, The Only Ones (Two Dollar Radio) – published almost simultaneously early last year, it was an interesting concurrence and I had to read both to see what this couple who have been part of New York’s counterculture since the ’60s had to say.

I have been reading Robert Christgau’s music writing since I was in high school. First I came across his Consumer Guide – capsule reviews of a dozen or so albums, each of which would get a letter grade, you know, like a school paper – in Creem. I devoured his collection of music articles, “Any Old Way You Choose It,” when it was published in 1973. A few years later, in the mid-‘70s, I subscribed to the Village Voice specifically to read the music section – Riffs – which Christgau edited.

Rock criticism began in the mid-‘60s, and while Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle who began writing criticism about Bob Dylan and The Beatles and others, was there first, Christgau was one of the early rock critics, and once he became music editor at the Voice in 1974, he had a profound influence, not only on the dozens of music writers he discovered, but also on writers like myself who learned how to write about music mostly from what we read in Creem, the Voice and Rolling Stone.

At one point when I was editing a San Francisco magazine called Boulevards, I wrote a monthly roundup of albums I called “Goldberg’s Consumer Guide” in tribute to Christgau’s column.

RC

Although Greil Marcus has likely influenced my approach to writing music criticism more profoundly than anyone else, I learned plenty from Christgau and his crew of Village Voice writers, as well as the gang at Creem. One of the many things I learned from the many writers in the pages of those publications, were ways of digging beneath the surface and finding the depth of emotion and ideas that were in so much of the music I loved. I felt it, and I heard it, but when I was younger I couldn’t articulate what I was hearing. Those rock critics brought an intellectual approach to music criticism. Albums as weighty as Exile On Main Street and Blonde On Blonde were windows into the mysteries of life, as much so as the novels, films and paintings that meant (and mean) so much to me…

Read the rest of this column at Addicted To Noise!

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Getting Personal With Bruce Springsteen

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The Boss1

by Michael Goldberg

Bruce Springsteen has always written about the past, and as I’ve spent time with The Ties That Bind: The River Sessions, a multi-CD/multi-DVD set that focuses on music Springsteen made during sessions for The River (and includes a fantastic live show from November 1980, three weeks after The River was released), I’ve been reminded of how a yearning for the past (the high drama of youth) was so much a part of Springsteen’s Seventies recordings.

At age 23, on his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, Springsteen was already looking back on songs such as “Growing Up’ and “It’s Hard To Be a Saint in the City.” Even on their release, Born to Run, Darkness at the Edge of Town and The River came across as romantic exaggerations of a time long gone. This wasn’t just due to the lyrics, which sometimes referred to events in the past tense.

Watch Springsteen and band do “Out In The Street” in Tempe, Arizona, 1980:

The sound of Springsteen’s music leaped back past the innovations of mid-to-late ’60s rock, a period that prominently included long-haired psychedelia complete with feedback, distortion and wah-wah pedal effects, to draw on Phil Spector’s Wall-of-Sound, the rhythm and blues of The Coasters, Sam & Dave and others, and party-rock hit-makers like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and Gary U.S. Bonds.

Watch Springsteen and band do “The River” in Tempe, Arizona, 1980:

Consider that in 1975, when Born to Run was released, including a saxophone in the lineup was akin to using a horse and buggy for transportation. Springsteen’s E Street Band, of course, proudly featured the great Clarence “Big Man” Clemons on sax, and the Big Man took a solo in practically every song.

Even when Springsteen wrote in the present, as he did for “Thunder Road,” his line about “Roy Orbison singing to the lonely” placed the time period of the action in the early/mid-‘60s …

Read the rest of this column at Addicted To Noise.

Watch Springsteen and band do “Thunder Road” in 1975:

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Culture Critic Roy Trakin Includes ‘True Love Scars’ in His Best Books of 2014 List

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Not that I can keep from letting it go to my head (that’s long been a lost cause), but it is exciting that culture critic Roy Trakin has included my novel, True Love Scars, in his best books of 2014 list. The book is #4 in his list.

Writes Trakin:

Just call it a portrait of the young rock critic as a freakster bro, coming of age in the glorious peace-and-love innocence of the ‘60s dream, only to crash precipitously, post-Altamont into the drug-ridden paranoia of a ‘70s nightmare, characterized by the doom and gloom of the Stones’ sinister “Sister Morphine” and the apocalyptic caw-caw-caw of a pair of ubiquitous crows. The one-time Rolling Stone journalist turned-Internet pioneer with his groundbreaking mid-‘90s Addicted to Noise site has always been on the cutting edge and here he perfectly captures a horny, but romantic, teenager growing up in Marin County back in what he calls the Days of the Crazy-Wild, where getting your parents to let you grow out your hair was proof alone of your manhood. If you lived through those momentous times, or even if you didn’t, Goldberg conveys that rush of ideas, music and literature that made it such a heady era, while still ruefully acknowledge its fleeting, self-destructive aftermath in what amounts to his version of fellow one-time Stone scribe Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous.

Read Trakin’s whole column here.

And here’s a short audio clip of me reading and Henry Kaiser riffing from my reading last weekend:

—

[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]

Audio: Patti Smith Talks About Singing With Bob Dylan – ‘like drinking the purest water’

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Bob Dylan and Patti Smith at the Beacon Theater, 1995.

I’ve been going through old interviews recently, putting together a collection of my music journalism, and I came across an interview that Jaan Uhelszki and I did with Patti Smith.

In August of 1996, two months after the release of her first album in eight years, Patti Smith sat down for an interview with us for my online magazine, Addicted To Noise.

Patti had a history with both myself and Jaan. She’d known Jaan when Jaan worked at Creem, and I’d interviewed Patti in 1975, before the release of her debut album, Horses.

We had a long conversation with Patti. I’ve pulled out the part where she talks about Bob Dylan. She had gone out on the road with Dylan at the end of 1995. At one point during the interview she said that she felt Bob Dylan was a big reason for why she became an artist.

Patti Smith: I’ve always felt that if there wasn’t a Bob Dylan I don’t know if… I think you have to give back what you’re given. I’ve been inspired and influenced by a lot of great people and I think it’s important, if you have any gifts at all, you have–if you’re given a gift, you have to give of it. One can’t hoard it. I think that is one thing Fred [‘Sonic’ Smith] and I were really talking about after being pretty reclusive for so long, that we did have a certain responsibility and I often, I deeply encouraged Fred, who was one of the most gifted people I ever knew to share his gifts with others and it’s regrettable it didn’t happen.

Some people are very comfortable with their gifts, somebody like Robert Mapplethorpe was very comfortable with them and used them daily. Worked daily. Other people are plagued by their gifts and I feel myself I have a little more of a better balance of comfortable plagued-ness, I have a little bit of plagued, I often feel dogged yet most of the time I feel blessed.

Jaan Uhelszki: The Dylan tour. How did it come about and did you stay in touch with him after you first met him at the Bottom Line in the seventies?

Patti Smith: No I hadn’t talked to him in some time. Really as I gleaned from Bob himself, he really felt that it would be good for me to come back out. He thought that I should come back out, and he said really nice things from onstage. I think that he feels I was a strong influence on things, and he thinks I should be out here–out in the front. He was very encouraging to me. I wasn’t really ready to work then, I really didn’t have a band. We’d been recording but I wasn’t really prepared to do anything. But I was so happy that he asked, that we decided to do it and you know we were a little rusty and rag tag but the people seemed happy and he was happy. My main mission on that small tour–it was only ten dates–was to crack all the energy, to crack all the atmosphere and get the stage ready for him. So we had our time before him and that was my prime directive was to get the night as magic as possible, so when he hit the stage, ’cause he hits a lot of them, that maybe it would feel a little more special than normal. And I think we did a pretty good job and I know that he was happy.

— continued —

Use this link or the one below below to get to the rest of this post.

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

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Time Tripping Back to 1970 with Neil Young: “Live at the Cellar Door”

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“Opening up and finding what’s inside me to write.”

By Michael Goldberg.

Neil Young bangs away at the chords. And there’s such sadness in his voice. He’s playing an acoustic guitar. He’s nearly finished his third song of the night. Banging away too hard. Or maybe the way he’s banging at those chords is perfect. And oh, the sadness.

In that quavering voice he sings:

Yes only love can break your heart, What if your world should fall apart?

Love broke my heart, and my world fell apart. I was 17. When you’re 17 you don’t know you’ll recover. When you’re 17 everything about love is the first time, even if it’s not the first time.

When you were young and on your own, How did it feel to be alone?

She had long brown hair, almost down to her waist. She wore white peasant blouses and worn denim overalls. It was 1970 and the world was so different. There are a lot of clichés about the ‘60s, which actually didn’t end until the early ‘70s (countercultural movements don’t conveniently end as a new decade begins), a lot of misunderstanding about what it was like back then.

There was a day in 1970 when we sat together, her and I, in the swing that hung from a huge tree in her family’s very private, very large front yard, and the wind was making the leaves in the trees shimmer, and the future seemed wide open, full of possibility, I mean anything was possible. Her body warm against mine as we swung back and forth. The whole world about to be remade, I just knew it.

I am lonely but you can free me, All in the way that you smile.

Yes, that was exactly it. Exactly.

Neil’s music was part of my soundtrack during the ‘60s and the ‘70s. He sang the sad songs and as a teenager I didn’t want to know the pain I heard in his voice. But I did know it. Every time her and I were apart, I knew it. Still I loved to hear Neil’s voice.

And later, after it was over, when we just couldn’t make it together — that girl and I — I knew for real how true Neil’s words were, and today they’re still true.

Neil’s new album, Live at the Cellar Door, was recorded in 1970, 43 years ago, at the Cellar Door, a club in Washington, DC. Listening to it I see, hear, feel, smell those days, a rush of moving images, as if my life was captured on film and these old recordings are the key to starting up the projector. All the ways I blew it, and how crazy it got. And she wouldn’t take my calls, wouldn’t see me when I came to her door, and I thought I’d explode.

Yes, love can break your heart — a cliché and so what, ‘cause it’s the truth.

Hearing Neil sing those old songs in that tenor voice, the tenor voice of a young man, it breaks my heart all over again. Neil was 25 when he played those songs at the Cellar Door.

For the rest of this column, head to Addicted To Noise.

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

Veruca Salt Reform, Enlist Brad Wood To Produce Album & Announce 1st Live Gig

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Veruca Salt, back in the day, circa 1995.

In 1994 Verruca Salt arrived in a blast of red hot punk energy. “Seether” was a hit, and their album American Thighs, produced by Brad Wood, was terrific.

“Seether”:

And then everything went wrong. They signed with the big New York management company, Q Prime (Metallica, Def Leppard) and recorded a glossy second album that had nothing to do with the indie rock of American Thighs.

“Number One Blind”:

Nina Gordon went solo, and the band wasn’t the same without her. And Verruca Salt faded away, a one-hit wonder.

“Victrola”:

This past March 15 the original lineup of Verruca Salt — Nina Gordon, Louise Post, Jim Shapiro, and Steve Lack — announced they were reforming: “or now let’s just say this: hatchets buried, axes exhumed” they posted on Facebook.

Now they’re recording a new album with Brad Wood (yes!) producing, Brooklyn Vegan reports.

And soon Nina Gordon and Louise Post with perform together for the first time in 15 years. On December 18 as part of Second City’s 2013 24-Hour Improv & Music Benefit in Los Angeles, Verruca Salt will once again rock the house. They hit the stage at 10 AM CST (11 AM EST) and, like the rest of the benefit, will be broadcast live online, Brooklyn Vegan reports.

I interviewed Veruca Salt for my online magazine, Addicted To Noise, back in 1995 following their success with “Seether.”

Overview: Veruca Salt Want To Tear Your Playhouse Down

Part 1: Veruca Salt’s Nina Gordon “Seethes” With Anger

Part 2: Veruca Salt’s Nina Gordon Tells All (Well almost)

Part 1: Veruca Salt’s Louise Post Discovers Her Calling

Part 2: Veruca Salt’s Louise Post Stands Tall And Rocks Out

— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post —

My 1996 Interview With Lou Reed

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I read the news today, oh boy. Fuck. Lou Reed dead. I can’t believe it. I know we all die, but Lou Reed? I remember as a kid listening to a used copy of the Velvets’ first album in the living room of my parents house and trying to hear all the words to “Heroin.”

I was fascinated by the Velvets long before I really understood what they were all about, and why they were so important. I have played their albums for decades, particularly the third album, The Velvet Underground, and Loaded.

Like for millions of other fans all over the world, for me this is truly a sad day.

In 1996, when I was editor and publisher of Addicted To Noise, I had the opportunity to interview Lou Reed. The interview is still online. Here’s part of the introduction, with a link to the rest of the story.

Lou Reed is dressed in black. Black leather pants. Black t-shirt. Black shoes. Electricity is, literally, crackling off him, as he stands in his elegantly cool, private sixth floor office at the back of Sister Ray Enterprises, overlooking Broadway in the Village.

“Did you hear that?” he asks, walking over to an open window and closing it.

I think he’s referring to the street sounds, but I’m wrong.

At Sister Ray, there are Lou Reed and Velvet Underground posters on the walls, as well as framed gold and platinum albums for New York. A rack holds copies of many of Reed’s older albums; boxes of the recent Velvet Underground boxed set sit on a bookcase. A photographer is setting up to shoot Reed up front. Reed’s publicist is on the phone, dealing from a couch at the back, just outside the room where Reed and I are talking. Nearby is Reed’s Internet expert, Struan Oglanby.

“I’m getting a shock every time I get up,” Reed says with a grimace, taking a seat back at his desk. “That was that snapping sound.” Then, in that classic Lou Reed monotone, “I conduct a lot of electricity. It’s really strange.”

Maybe not so strange. We are, after all, talking about Lou Reed, founder of the Velvet Underground. Writer of such highly charged songs as “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting For The Man,” “Sweet Jane” and, of course, “Rock & Roll.” And Lisa Says.” And “Walk On The Wild Side.” And “Satellite Of Love.” And “The Blue Mask.” And “Romeo Had Juliette.” And “Dirty Blvd.” And….

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Watch Lou Reed perform “Sweet Jane.”

New Column: Kim Gordon Steps Into Spotlight

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Body/Head pushes into the noise-rock frontier.

By Michael Goldberg

The bright lights shine on Kim Gordon. The New Yorker, which never profiled Sonic Youth during the group’s 30 years as one of New York’s most celebrated and influential bands, kicked things off by devoting six upfront pages to Gordon this past June.

body heat
(photo by Djil)

Since then, as the early October release date of Coming Apart, the album she recorded with her current musical collaborator Bill Nace under the name Body/Head, came and went, other major publications devoted space to Gordon. From the New York Times and Rolling Stone to Pitchfork, writers have been more than excited to talk to Gordon about whatever she’s willing to talk about, including her new, challenging noise rock.

“I wasn’t trained as a musician,” Gordon told the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff. “But I did grow up listening to a lot of jazz records, and John Coltrane.”

Coming Apart’s opening song, “Abstract,” Gordon said, has a structure similar to Coltrane’s Meditations: “You have a theme,” she said, “and it falls apart, and then it comes back.”

To read the rest of this column, head over to Addicted To Noise.