Tag Archives: Rolling Stone

Michael Goldberg’s Novel, The Flowers Lied, Due Soon

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Just wanted to offer a preview of the cover art from my upcoming novel, The Flowers Lied.

The book, a rock ‘n’ roll coming-of-age novel, will be available in October.

If you are interested in reviewing it, let me know and I’ll get you an advance copy. Post a comment letting me know and I’ll be in touch.

Here’s some advance praise:

“There was a time when (rock) music was the living pulse of a generation, when wanting to be a rock critic was a credible dream. That is the era of the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy, an ambitious and ultimately successful attempt at recasting the coming-of-age-in-the-wake-of-the-sixties-experience in innovative but authentic language, Kerouac in the 21st century. It jitters around in ever-accumulating fine detail that traces young love and desire and the pure true heart of the era, the music. It was a pivotal time, and Volume II, ‘The Flowers Lied,’ captures it.” — DENNIS MCNALLY, author of “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead” and “Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation & America”

“Goldberg presents us with a beautiful evocation of the Seventies where the music wasn’t just the soundtrack to our lives but the auteur of them. Writerman, our hero, drinks and drugs and dances to the nightingale tune while birds fly high by the light of the moon. Oh, oh, oh, oh Writerman!” — LARRY RATSO SLOMAN, author of “On the Road with Bob Dylan”

“Aspiring rock journalist Michael Stein (aka Writerman) returns in the second installment of Goldberg’s Freak Scene Dream Trilogy, picking up the narrative where he left off and fumbling his way across the countercultural landscape of the early Seventies like some less jaded, wannabe-hippie version of Holden Caulfield. This slightly-older-but-not-necessarily-wiser Stein, along with his inner circle of equally confused post-adolescents, is more fleshed-out as a character than in the previous (though superb) ‘True Love Scars.’ As a result the scenarios he finds himself thrust into, not to mention the occasional disaster of his own making, ring with an additional authenticity that will leave anyone who lived through the same era nodding with recognition. Some will even fidget uncomfortably in their seats, as I did—credit to Goldberg’s keen ability to channel his/our own misspent youth while sketching a series of remarkably believable portraits.

“Among the more memorable scenes: a hamfisted attempt to get his rock journalism published in the college newspaper, even more awkward attempts to get laid (that include at least one success, with his best friend’s girlfriend, no less, in a gondola at the top of a Ferris wheel), getting thrown out of a Neil Young concert by one of Bill Graham’s goons, navigating a surreal Halloween party while peaking on LSD, and kibitzing with a popular Lester Bangs-esque rock-crit. Along the way we get cameos from Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Captain Beefheart, the New York Dolls, Slim Harpo, James Brown, John Fowles, Sartre, Dostoyevsky and Godard. Settle in, crack open a bottle and/or spark a doob, and get ready for an emotional rollercoaster ride. Oh, and don’t touch the Thorens.” — FRED MILLS, editor, Blurt magazine

And a few excerpts from reviews of my previous novel, True Love Scars:

“If Lester Bangs had ever published a novel it might have read something like this frothing debut by longtime music journalist Michael Goldberg… 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, Rolling Stone

“Michael Goldberg is comparable to Kerouac in a 21st century way, someone trying to use that language and energy and find a new way of doing it.” — MARK MORDUE, author of “Dastgah: Diary of a Head Trip”

“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, an only child battling the wills of his domineering father and interfering mom in the anonymous, suburban fringes of Marin County.”
 — SIMON WARNER, author of “Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture”

“Just call it a portrait of the rock critic as a young freakster bro, coming of age in the glorious peace-and-love innocence of the Sixties dream, only to crash precipitously, post-Altamont into the drug-ridden paranoia of the Seventies, characterized by the doom and gloom of the Stones’ sinister “Sister Morphine” and the apocalyptic caw-caw-caw of a pair of ubiquitous crows.” — ROY TRAKIN, Trakin Care of Business column

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Bruce Springsteen’s Manager Jon Landau’s Review Of ‘Blood On The Tracks’ – March 13, 1975

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Forty years ago, just after rock critic Jon Landau became Bruce Springsteen’s manager and record producer, his review of Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks appeared in the March 13, 1975 issue of Rolling Stone.

What is most interesting to me about the review, some of which is printed below and the rest of it you can link to, is how, what complains about in critiquing Dylan’s recording style and records — that Dylan makes records too quickly, that he doesn’t use the right musicians, and so on — are the things he made sure Bruce Springsteen didn’t do. What I mean is, Dylan might record an album in a few days and record just two or three takes of a song; Springsteen sometimes would spend a year on a record, recording an infinite number of takes with musicians he worked with for years and years.

Anyway, today we can read Landau’s review of an album that has certainly stood the test of time.

Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks

Reviewed by Jon Landau (for Rolling Stone)

Bob Dylan may be the Charlie Chaplin of rock & roll. Both men are regarded as geniuses by their entire audience. Both were proclaimed revolutionaries for their early work and subjected to exhaustive attack when later works were thought to be inferior. Both developed their art without so much as a nodding glance toward their peers. Both are multitalented: Chaplin as a director, actor, writer and musician; Dylan as a recording artist, singer, songwriter, prose writer and poet. Both superimposed their personalities over the techniques of their art forms. They rejected the peculiarly 20th century notion that confuses the advancement of the techniques and mechanics of an art form with the growth of art itself. They have stood alone.

When Charlie Chaplin was criticized, it was for his direction, especially in the seemingly lethargic later movies. When I criticize Dylan now, it’s not for his abilities as a singer or songwriter, which are extraordinary, but for his shortcomings as a record maker. Part of me believes that the completed record is the final measure of a pop musician’s accomplishment, just as the completed film is the final measure of a film artist’s accomplishments. It doesn’t matter how an artist gets there — Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie (and Dylan himself upon occasion) did it with just a voice, a song and a guitar, while Phil Spector did it with orchestras, studios and borrowed voices. But I don’t believe that by the normal criteria for judging records — the mixture of sound playing, singing and words — that Dylan has gotten there often enough or consistently enough.

Chaplin transcended his lack of interest in the function of directing through his physical presence. Almost everyone recognizes that his face was the equal of other directors’ cameras, that his acting became his direction. But Dylan has no one trait — not even his lyrics — that is the equal of Chaplin’s acting. In this respect, Elvis Presley may be more representative of a rock artist whose raw talent has overcome a lack of interest and control in the process of making records.

Read the rest of this review here.

Bob Dylan – Tangled Up In Blue (New York Version 1974 Stereo)

Bob Dylan – You’re A Big Girl Now (New York Version)

Bob Dylan – Idiot Wind (New York Version 1974 Stereo)

Bob Dylan – Lily, Rosemary & The Jack Of Hearts (New York Version Stereo 1974)

Bob Dylan – If You See Her, Say Hello (New York Version 1974 Stereo)

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
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[I published my novel, True Love Scars, in August of 2014.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book. Read it here. And Doom & Gloom From The Tomb ran this review which I dig. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]

Seven Things I Learned from Rolling Stone’s Bob Dylan & the ‘Basement Tapes’ Cover Story

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The new issue of Rolling Stone features a fascinating cover story by David Browne about the Basement Tapes.

Here are seven things I learned from the story that I didn’t know before I read it.

1) In late 1967 Garth Hudson gave a pine box full of the seven inch reel-to-reel tapes he’d made of the recordings Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Hudson had made during the previous six months or so to Dylan’s manager’s wife, Sally Grossman, for safekeeping. “Garth said I was to guard these tapes because he was going away for a while,”Sally Grossman told Rolling Stone.

One of the Basement tapes.

2) Some of the musicians who made the tapes, and some of their friends who heard some of the songs didn’t get it — including Bob Dylan.

“I never really liked the Basement Tales,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1984.”I wouldn’t have put them out.”

“We would do these songs and fall on the floor laughing,” Robbie Robertson said in 1998.

“Frankly, I didn’t quite get it at the time because it was a bunch of guys messing around,” Happy Traum told Rolling Stone.

As for Sally Grossman, it’s hard to figure out what she thought.

“It sounded like throwaway stuff. Nonsense stuff. Bob and the guys were hanging out, playing and having fun,” Grossman recently told the British paper, the Observer. “The titles alone are enough of a clue. The Mighty Quinn, Mrs Henry, Lo & Behold! Bob wasn’t playing the songs live. The Band wasn’t. They weren’t thinking these were songs for release.”

But Grossman told Rolling Stone that when she listened to some of the tapes Hudson left with her including “Lo & Behold!” and “Quinn the Eskimo,” “They were great.”

“Lo and Behold!”:

3) Before the motorcycle accident, when Dylan was spending time at the Hotel Chelsea in New York, partying with Robertson and Edie Sedgwick, there was one party where he wore black-and-white striped pajama bottoms and a red, brown and gold polka-dot top.

4) The Big Pink house — where members of what would become The Band lived, and where the Basement Tapes were recorded — rented for $125 a month.

5) One reason why Dylan stopped the sessions in the “Red Room” of his own house (a room with burgundy walls) and moved to Big Pink was to get away from the wife and kids. “It was his house,” Hudson told Rolling Stone. Dylan probably didn’t want his young kids to be around a bunch of pot smoking musicians.

6) Donald Fagen of Steely Dan fame now lives in the 11-room house in the Byrdcliffe Colony where Dylan once lived.

Garth Hudson back in the basement, 2014.

7) Canadian music archivist and producer Jan Haust, who worked on getting the just released Basement Tapes Complete to sound as good as possible, bought the actual seven inch reels from Garth Hudson for around $30,000, a source told Rolling Stone. “I have an arrangement with Garth Hudson, and we’ll just leave it at that,” Haust told Rolling Stone.

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[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.]

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 —

Watch: Lyle Lovett Does Jackson Browne’s ‘Rosie’

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Photos via Jackson Browne’s Facebook page.

A Jackson Browne tribute album, Looking Into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne, is coming in 2014, and here’s a preview. Lyle Lovett performing “Rosie.”

Thanks Rolling Stone!

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

Robert Christgau On ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

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Robert Christgau, who knows what the New York folk scene was like way back when has a great story about the new Cohen Brothers film, “Inside Llewyn Davis” that just went online. The piece is mostly about the authenticity of the film, and what that means.

Christgau writes:

“When you read about the scene you see this mania for authenticity,” says Joel Coen, describing what enticed him and his brother Ethan into making Inside Llewyn Davis, a film about folksingers in Greenwich Village just before Bob Dylan touched down and took off. But Coen isn’t really praising the folksingers’ authenticity — it’s their mania that fascinates him. In the very next sentence he goes on: “You have these guys like Elliott Adnopoz, the son of a neurosurgeon from Queens, calling himself Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. In the film we have a character who sings and plays a guitar, wears a cowboy hat and calls himself Al Cody. His real name is Arthur Milgram.”

For the rest of the story, head over to Rolling Stone.

— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post —

Best of 2013 Dept.: Rolling Stone Picks Year’s Best Albums

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Reflektor made the cut.

Rolling Stone’s Top 50 LPs of 2013

1. Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City
2. Kanye West – Yeezus
3. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories
4. Paul McCartney – New
5. Arcade Fire – Reflektor
6. Queens of the Stone Age – …Like Clockwork
7. Lorde – Pure Heroine
8. The National – Trouble Will Find Me
9. Arctic Monkeys – AM
10. John Fogerty – Wrote a Song for Everyone
11. Parquet Courts – Tally All the Things That You Broke
12. Jake Bugg – S/T
13. Disclosure – Settle
14. Drake – Nothing Was The Same
15. Atoms for Peace – AMOK
16. David Bowie – The Next Day
17. Danny Brown – Old
18. Ashley Monroe – Like a Rose
19. Nine Inch Nails – Hesitation Marks
20. Laura Marling – Once I Was an Eagle
21. Sky Ferreira – Night Time My Time
22. Phoenix – Entertainment
23. My Bloody Valentine – MBV
24. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP 2
25. Elton John – The Diving Board
26. Chance the Rapper – Acid Rap
27. Miley Cyrus – Bangerz
28. Kacey Musgraves – Same Trailer Different Park
29. Bombino – Nomad
30. Tegan & Sara – Heartthrob
31. Haim – Days Are Gone
32. CHVRCHES – The Bones of What You Believe
33. Pusha T – My Name is My Name
34. Neko Case – The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
35. Best Coast – Fade Away EP
36. Waxahatchee – Cerulean Salt
37. The So-So Glos – Blowout
38. Kurt Vile – Walkin on a Pretty Daze
39. Keith Urban – Fuse
40. Pearl Jam – Lightning Bolt
41. J Cole – Born Sinner
42. Earl Sweatshirt – Doris
43. Savages – Silence Yourself
44. Valerie June – Pushin’ Against a Stone
45. Avicii – True
46. Franz Ferdinand – Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action
47. MIA – Matangi
48. Fuck Buttons – Slow Focus
49. The Flaming Lips – The Terror
50. Beck – Song Reader

— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post —

Memorial For Lou Reed To Be Held At Lincoln Center Thursday

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A memorial for Lou Reed, who died Sunday October 27, 2013 in Southampton, New York, will be held at Lincoln Center beginning at 4 PM. The public is invited.

On Lou Reed’s Facebook page a new post reads:

“New York: Lou Reed at Lincoln Center”
A gathering open to the public – no speeches. no live performances, just Lou’s voice, guitar music & songs – playing the recordings selected by his family and friends.

The Paul Milstein Pool & Terrace at Lincoln Center
Thursday November 14th. Time 1:00PM to 4:00PM

Bono offered a tribute to Lou Reed in Rolling Stone that begins:

The world is noisier today, but not the kind of noise you want to turn up. The world of words is a little quiet and a good bit dumber, the world of music just not as sharp.

Lou Reed made music out of noise. The noise of the city. Big trucks clattering over potholes; the heavy breathing of subways, the rumble in the ground; the white noise of Wall Street; the pink noise of the old Times Square. The winking neon of downtown, its massage and tattoo parlors, its bars and diners, the whores and hoardings that make up the life of the big city.

New York City was to Lou Reed what Dublin was to James Joyce, the complete universe of his writing. He didn’t need to stray out of it for material, there was more than enough there for his love and his hate songs. From Metal Machine Music to Coney Island Baby, from his work in the Velvet Underground to his work with Metallica, the city that he devoted his life to was his muse more than any other. Until Laurie Anderson came into his life 20 years ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that Lou had no other love than the noise of New York City. If he thought people could be stupid, he thought New Yorkers were the smartest of them.

Lou Reed’s final performance, a reworking of the sad ballad “Candy Says” (from the Velvets third album), which took place at Paris’ Salle Pleyel in June of this year. Reed is joined by Antony.

Listen: Wanda Jackson Covers The White Stripes’ “In the Cold, Cold Night”

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Wanda Jackson back in the ’50s (left) and a more recent photo.

Click to hear Wanda Jackson’s version of “In the Cold, Cold Night.”

Jackson tells Rolling Stone:

Jack is such a talented songwriter, and a lot of his songs are done in a much different style than my own. But when I heard “Cold, Cold Night” for the first time I knew it was a song that I wanted to record some day. When the opportunity came around to pay tribute to Jack on this album I thought it was the perfect opportunity to lay it down in the studio. Shooter came in and played piano and later added all of the other instruments. I’m very pleased with how it turned out and I hope Jack approves of the job we did.

Laurie Anderson On Lou Reed

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Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.
Photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino.

The new issue of Rolling Stone pays tribute to Lou Reed. Laurie Anderson, Lou’s companion for the past 21 years, and wife for five of those years, reflects on Lou and their relationship. It’s a beautiful essay.

Here’s some of what Ms. Anderson wrote:

As it turned out, Lou and I didn’t live far from each other in New York, and after the festival Lou suggested getting together. I think he liked it when I said, “Yes! Absolutely! I’m on tour, but when I get back – let’s see, about four months from now – let’s definitely get together.” This went on for a while, and finally he asked if I wanted to go to the Audio Engineering Society Convention. I said I was going anyway and would meet him in Microphones. The AES Convention is the greatest and biggest place to geek out on new equipment, and we spent a happy afternoon looking at amps and cables and shop-talking electronics. I had no idea this was meant to be a date, but when we went for coffee after that, he said, “Would you like to see a movie?” Sure. “And then after that, dinner?” OK. “And then we can take a walk?” “Um . . .” From then on we were never really apart.

Lou and I played music together, became best friends and then soul mates, traveled, listened to and criticized each other’s work, studied things together (butterfly hunting, meditation, kayaking). We made up ridiculous jokes; stopped smoking 20 times; fought; learned to hold our breath underwater; went to Africa; sang opera in elevators; made friends with unlikely people; followed each other on tour when we could; got a sweet piano-playing dog; shared a house that was separate from our own places; protected and loved each other. We were always seeing a lot of art and music and plays and shows, and I watched as he loved and appreciated other artists and musicians. He was always so generous. He knew how hard it was to do. We loved our life in the West Village and our friends; and in all, we did the best we could do.

Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be – strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together.

For the entire essay, head to Rolling Stone.