Tag Archives: novel

Another 5 Star Review: “‘True Love Scars’ adolescent narrator burns the pyre of hippie idealism”

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Pixilated Cheap Hooch logo.

This was a great weekend for True Love Scars, my rock ‘n’ roll novel.

First Andrew Phillips, ex-Editor-in-Chief of Mog and a former editor at Flavorpill, posted this excellent five star review at Goodreads:

True Love Scars’ adolescent narrator burns the pyre of hippie idealism as a revelation to the dark face of its excess. His coming of age is not without its grand revelations, but, can any summer be one of love when the price of admission is friends, family, and sanity?

Any piece by Michael Goldberg has a post-beat, hippie-savant poetry all its own, but this is a rare work, a passionate, immersive experience in the sound, attitude and language of an era.

Then on Sunday afternoon I was interviewed on the very cool Cheap Hooch radio program on San Francisco’s underground Radio Valencia station by DJ Holly.

Cheap Hooch, which airs every Sunday from 4 to 6 pm, features a laid-back fluid crew led by DJ Holly. She plays the coolest obscure Punk, Garage, Trash, Soul, Rockabilly and Primitive Rock n’ Roll. To get a feel for the show, stream it here.

Here is a huge list of Cheap Hooch shows you can stream or download.

Soon the show I was on (October 5, 2014) will be available to stream and I’ll do a post with the link.

Finally, I’ve been meaning to post this cool review of True Love Scars by Days Of The Crazy-Wild follower John Dunne:

Just finished the novel and, apart from minor reservations about the protracted sex scene with Michael’s (NOT MIKE’S!) friends and the sisters, I devoured every page. I feel that, in a novel already fairly steeped in sex, that scene was gratuitous. That’s the bad news out of the way.

Otherwise, I was moved to laughter and, occasionally, something near tears by the narrator’s misguided antics. I loved all the music allusions and, rather childishly, felt proud of myself for ‘getting’ them all. It’s great to read someone unafraid to write in great depth about something he clearly loves, in this case, music. This is extra welcome in a literary world that too often panders to publishers’ demands and readers’ expectations.

As a Dylan fan – my wife would say nutcase – the references, both obvious and oblique, added another layer of enjoyment and satisfaction. If you have any interest in Dylan at all, read this book. If you haven’t, read it anyway. I loved it nearly as much as Angelina, my all-time favourite Dylan song.

—

[There’s info about True Love Scars here.]

— A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post —

World’s Best Roots Music Record Store Now Carries Rock ‘N’ Roll Novel ‘True Love Scars’

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Known around the world for carrying the best in roots music (and world music) – and rootsy world music.

While you can always order my rock ‘n’ roll novel, “True Love Scars,” from any physical book store, I’m thrilled to have the book carried and in stock at one of my favorite record stories, the irreplaceable Down Home Music, located in the down home capital of the world, El Cerrito California.

El Cerrito, which is located between Berkeley and Richmond, has a reputation for great music.

Both Down Home Music and Arhoolie have been based in El Cerrito for decades.

Arhoolie was founded in El Cerrito in 1960, when the late Chris Strachwitz released Mance Lipscomb’s Texas Sharecropper and Songster.

Down Home Music, Strachwitz’s record store, has been at 10341 San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito since 1976, and the folks there can be reached by phone at (510) 525-4827. The store is open each week Thursday through Sunday, from 11 am – 7 pm.

Also worth noting: the great John Fogerty grew up in El Cerrito, which is where Creedence Clearwater Revival formed and were based during their ’60s and early ’70s heyday.

Les Blank, the award-winning filmmaker who made many important music documentaries including “The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, lived in El Cerrito. Bob Dylan thinks enough of Les Blank that he has included “The Blues Accordin’ To Lightnin’ Hopkins” as the only film recommended on his website.

The excellent community world music radio station, KECG, which is based in El Cerrito, can be listened to here.

And James Brown, of course, played in nearby Richmond in the ’60s.

For more on “True Love Scars,” head here.

Is ‘True Love Scars’ the Great Rock Novel? Simon Warner Considers the Pros & Cons

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“True Love Scars” rises to #18 on the Amazon Bestselling Literary Satire chart.

Fantastic review by Simon Warner, author of “Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture.”

TRUE LOVE SCARS
Michael Goldberg (Neumu Press)

Review by Simon Warner

The great rock novel? The pursuit of that ultimate piece of fiction that distils the primal energy, the ecstatic power, the neurotic craziness, of popular music has been something of a holy grail in recent decades and, in True Love Scars – a deeply ironic nod to Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’ – one-time Rolling Stone journalist Michael Goldberg is the latest contender for this Lonsdale Belt of rock‘n’roll writing.

His protagonist Michael Stein is a Californian teenager in the later 1960s, tangled to distraction in the sound and image of his hero Bob Dylan, a paradoxical blend of cocksure kid and deluded hipster, bruising his fragile ego in the choppy shallows of high school romance, then sabotaging his increasingly complicated love tangles in a haze of drug indulgence and casual disloyalty, and all to a backbeat of Highway 61 Revisited, the Stones and the Doors.

It’s the story of a disaffected geek and self-imagined king of cool who turns out to be much more naïve nerd, as his promising upward trajectory hurtles into reverse. But True Love Scars, the first part of Goldberg’s ‘Freak Scene Dream Trilogy’, is as much about style – the way he tells the tale – as it is about content. Penned in a staccato amphetamine grammar, its narrative is fractured and deranged, often unsettling but frequently compelling, an unsparing portrait of the teen condition: assured then despairing, would-be sex god then impotent has-been, from erection to dejection, an only child battling the wills of his domineering father and interfering mom in the anonymous, suburban fringes of Marin County.

Goldberg’s work recalls a number of those post-war stylists who have tried to capture the uncertainties of adolescence into adulthood, the lure of escape and the quest for forbidden fruit. It has elements of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, a flavour of Richard Fariña and his smart college satire Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me, and more than a dash of that frenetic gonzo gabble that Hunter S. Thompson utilised to frame the madness of the modern world as the American dream unravelled, around the very time that Stein is doing his incompetent best to grow up. The great rock novel? Perhaps we still await it but, for sure, this writer has made a creditworthy tilt at this literary crown, and produced a very good one.

Simon Warner is the author of Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture. He’s a lecturer, Popular Music Studies, School of Music, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

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

— A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post —

Review: Rolling Stone magazine digs ‘True Love Scars’ Novel – Goldberg Compared To Lester Bangs

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Rolling Stone TLS review

In a review of my novel, True Love Scars, in the new Rolling Stone (Taylor Swift on the cover), reviewer Colin Fleming compares me to Lester Bangs!

Too much!

Here’s the review:

Getting Lost in the ‘Real’ Sixties

A veteran rock writer explores the crazy side of Sixties nostalgia

True Love Scars

Michael Goldberg Neumu

If Lester Bangs had ever published a novel, it might have read something like this frothing debut by longtime music journalist Michael Goldberg. (It’s part one of a series called The Freak Scene Dream Trilogy.)

The year is 1972, and the book’s chatterbox narrator, 19-year-old Michael Stein, is 
the kind of Sixties-besotted college kid who shaves his hair off because John Lennon and Yoko Ono did it. His quandary: trying to figure out how to reclaim the “authentic real” spirit of the 1960s as the decade fades into memory. Stein spends most of the book flashing back to one sex-and-drugs-steeped Sixties misadventure after another.

If you’ve ever obsessed over bootlegs or argued with your friends late into the night about which Beatles or Bob Dylan album is the best, True Love Scars will hit home.

Goldberg’s style recalls the rush of the earliest rock criticism. He was a senior writer at ROLLING STONE during the Eighties, and he founded Addicted to Noise,
 an important online music publication, in 1994. His intimacy with the classic records Stein fetishizes comes through again and again. Yet, unlike his protagonist, Goldberg doesn’t idealize the Sixties. Instead, he’s fascinated by the ways in which we crave authenticity.

Readers from any musical era will come away with a deeper appreciation of how nostalgia can shape our lives, for better and for worse. COLIN FLEMING

[There’s info about True Love Scars here.]

— A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post —

Audio: Listen as Michael Goldberg Reads From ‘True Love Scars’ at Book Passage

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There I am, reading at Book Passage. Photo by Sam Barry.

Last night (August 21, 2014) I read from my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars, for the first time in public.

Use the player below to hear the entire reading which consists of me being introduced to the audience, my brief intro about the novel, me reading for about 30 minutes, and then a question and answer session.

The reading took place at Book Passage, a fantastic book store located in Marin County.

I had quite a large audience and it was a great crowd. There were old friends, new friends and folks who I guess read about the reading in the Marin Independent Journal.

Dana Kelly, who works at Book Passage introduced me, and it was quite an introduction, You can hear it in the audio clip above. Dana really made things easy for me.

It’s quite an experience to stand in front of an audience, folks who have no idea what they’re about to hear, and start reading. I could not have gotten a better response. People laughed at the funny parts, got quiet during the section of the final sex scene that concludes the book that I read, and applauded when I finished reading.

Who could ask for more?

Questions were asked during the Q/A part of the reading, and many books were bought.

You can see some of the audience in this photo. Photo by Jeanne Lavin.

I was surprised and pleased that John Goddard showed up. All during my youth John owned the best record store in the world, Village Music in Mill Valley. I first heard Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith and many others in John’s store.

Me and my friends would hang out there and it was always an education. My openness to new music to some extent comes from hanging out at Village Music and hearing so much “new” to me music as a teenager.

John and his store are mentioned in my novel. It meant so much to me that John showed up.

That’s John waiting while I write something in his copy of my book. Photo by Jeanne Lavin.

The folks at Book Passage were fantastic. From the first time I contacted them, right through last night’s reading, they made everything so easy. Book Passage is an excellent store. I’ve bought many books there and if you’re in Marin, or passing through, they’re just off 101 in Corte Madera and I highly recommend you stop in. In addition to books, and readings almost every night, they have a cafe where you can get food and/or a glass of wine.

And they’re got autographed copies of True Love Scars for sale.

I’ve got a Goodreads. book giveaway going right now. Click here and enter.]

— A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post —

Audio: ‘Michael Goldberg On Dylan In True Love Scars!’ on Australian Radio – Listen Now – Plus David Kinney & Bill Wyman on Dylan

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Recently I was interviewed at length by Triple R radio’s Brian Wise, who DJ’s a three-hour show every week called “Off the Record.”

Last Saturday the first of four or five segments from the interview aired on “Off the Record.” That segment focused on Bob Dylan and included some discussion of why Dylan is so important to the narrator of my novel, True Love Scars.

As part of his show, Wise also interviewed David Kinney, author of The Dylanologists, and music critic Bill Wyman talking about Dylan.

I was also recorded reading from my True Love Scars, and two sections about Dylan are part of the first segment.

You’ll find a transcript of the interview here at the Australian Addicted To Noise site, but if you listen you’ll hear me read two excerpts from the novel that are about how Bob Dylan has impacted the narrator’s life.

The Kinney and Wyman interviews follow the one with me.

Listen to “Off the Record” here.

[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.]

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

Blurt’s Fred Mills Offers Moving Review of ‘True Love Scars’

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And Perfect Sound Forever has an excerpt in the latest issue.

I’ve gotten many wonderful reviews so far of my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.

This one by Fred Mills at Blurt blew me away.

Fred Mills writes:

Veteran rock journalist Michael Goldberg, of Addicted To Noise and Sonic Net fame, is clearly working through some personal demons in his debut novel, a kind of poetic-license memoir rendered in a vivid 1st person voice containing echoes of Holden Caulfield, Sal Paradise and Danny Sugerman (who of course was not a fictional person, being a member of the Doors inner circle, but certainly wrote with a definite ego swagger in his own memoir). And in a very real sense, True Love Scars contains echoes of my own voice, because in reading the book I felt some of my demons from that time being stirred up, including initial musical alliances with key albums/concerts, mixed feelings toward my relationship with my parents and friends and memories of my first few crushes (not to mention losing my virginity).

Indeed, Michael Stein’s recollections chart an emotional arc as striking as I’ve seen a novel’s lead character experience, from naïve and tender to streetwise and hip to cynical and wounded, with Dylan lyrics seeming, to him, laden with meaning and Rolling Stones tunes, likewise, churning with prophecy. When he meets, for example, the girl he calls Sweet Sarah and they embark upon a doomed courtship, Dylan’s there as their guide and their muse. Later, though, following a breakup and a dark descent into teenage debauchery, Stein’s haunted by mental echoes of the ominous slide guitar riff powering the Stones’ “Sister Morphine.” Similar musical reference points from the time abound, as befits novelist Goldberg, who cut his teeth as a rock writer and came of age in that same era; it’s tempting to play the is-it-or-ain’t-it-autobiographical game with the book, since Goldberg has a temporal, geographical and personal backstory that mirrors, to a degree, Stein’s. (Stein’s nickname in the book is “Writerman,” which should tell you something.)

Later in the review Mills writes:

Goldberg advises us that True Love Scars is the initial installment of his “Freak Scene Dream Trilogy,” full of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll plus the inevitable heartbreak and roadkill that comes with the whole package. “How the dream died and what there is left after,” he concludes. It’s worth noting that despite the timeframe outlined above, Stein/Writerman is actually narrating in retrospect from some as-yet-unspecified point in the near-present. So we know that despite the gradual sense of dread building up over the course of the book and present at its abrupt ending, he will manage to survive in some form and fashion despite whatever adventures—good, bad, ugly, tragic—will go down over the course of the next two volumes of the trilogy. I can’t wait to read ‘em.

Read the whole review here.

— A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blot post —

Books: Patti Smith Reviews (Loves) New Haruki Murakami Novel

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This is a first for Patti Smith.

After rave reviews of her memoir, Just Kids, she’s now on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Book Review with an essay about the new Haruki Murakami novel, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.”

Smith is an excellent writer, she knows Murakami inside and out, and her review is a joy to read.

Here’s the first few graphs”

A devotional anticipation is generated by the announcement of a new Haruki Murakami book. Readers wait for his work the way past generations lined up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan. There is a happily frenzied collective expectancy — the effect of cultural voice, the Murakami effect. Within seven days of its midnight release, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” sold over one million copies in Japan. I envision readers queuing up at midnight outside Tokyo bookstores: the alienated, the athletic, the disenchanted and the buoyant. I can’t help wondering what effect the book had on them, and what they were hoping for: the surreal, intra-dimensional side of Murakami or his more minimalist, realist side?

I had a vague premonition this book would be rooted in common human experience, less up my alley than the alien textures woven throughout “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Yet I also sensed strange notes forming, coiling within a small wound that would not heal. Whichever aspect of himself Murakami drew from in order to create “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” it lies somewhere among the stones of his mystical labors.

He sits at his desk and makes this story: a young man’s traumatic entrance into adulthood and the shadowy passages he must subsequently negotiate. His protagonist’s name, Tsukuru, means “to make,” a metaphor for the writer’s process. He is 36 years old and builds and refurbishes train stations, continuously observing how to improve them. He has the touching habit of sitting in them for hours, watching trains arrive and depart and the symphonic flow of people. His love of railway stations connects him with each stage of his life — from toys, to study, to action. It is the one bright spot in an existence he imagines is pallid.

In a sense, Tsukuru is colorless by default. As a young man he belonged to a rare and harmonious group of friends wherein all but he had a family name corresponding to a color: Miss White, Miss Black, Mr. Red, Mr. Blue. He privately mourned this, sometimes feeling like a fifth leaf in a four-leaf clover. Yet they were as necessary to one another as the five fingers of a hand. As a sophomore in college, without explanation, he is suddenly and irrevocably banished from the group, cut off and left to drop into a murky abyss. Belonging nowhere, he becomes nothing.

Read the entire review here.

[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 –-

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

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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

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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.