Yesterday afternoon, Saturday December 13, 2104, I read from my novel, True Love Scars, as the acclaimed, Grammy-winning experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser improvised. And then Henry did a short, brilliant instrumental. The reading took place at Down Home Music in El Cerrito, CA.
I called the event a “post-beat happening.”
It was thrilling to read as Henry’s music lit up the room. When you’re on a stage and you’re in the groove, and the music, music you’ve never heard before, is exactly right for what you’re doing, you levitate.
Two sections I read were about how Bob Dylan’s music changed the narrator’s life. I’ve included both of those and then another excerpt which is the first few pages of the novel. Plus an instrumental improvisation by Henry that concluded the reading.
Down Home Music was an incredible environment for a reading. A room filled with CDs and vinyl and a wall of music books and music posters on the walls and incredibly knowledgeable folks running the place.
Where else is an impulse buy going to be a Roscoe Holcomb DVD?
Yep, I now own that DVD.
There was a nice write-up in advance of the reading in the East Bay Express and that brought a great group of folks into the store to hear me and Henry do our thing.
I read about 30 minutes while Henry utilized a guitar, a whammy bar and more than a dozen pedals to create a sonic backdrop for my words. Actually, it was more than a backdrop, as you’ll see if you listen to the first excerpt, below.
1) The impact of “Like A Rolling Stone”:
2) “It was Dylan, man!”:
3) How the book begins:
4) Henry’s concluding instrumental:
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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.]
Big surprise today when I opened the latest East Bay Express and discovered that my reading Saturday with Henry Kaiser at Down Home Music is their pick for “Lectures & Lit” this week, and one of this weekend’s “Top Five Events.”
How cool is that!
I’ll read from my novel, True Love Scars, and experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser will improvise on electric guitar.
It’ll happen at 3 pm at Down Home Music, 10341 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito, CA. And it’s free, of course.
Writes Arts and Culture Editor Sarah Burke:
True Love Scars is a rock ’n’ roll novel about harboring nostalgia for the 1960s, getting lost in a drugged-up dream-world, finding love, and then losing it tragically.
[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.]
This article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel about my novel, True Love Scars, was published recently.
I think the article does a great job of conveying some of what the book is about.
Writes journalist Wallace Baine:
The period of the early 1970s isn’t just a setting for Michael Goldberg’s new novel “True Love Scars.” It’s the orientation for everything in the book, the language, the tone, the references, the narrative.
“I was trying to get at the experience of being young in that time period,” said UC Santa Cruz grad Goldberg, a long-time writer for Rolling Stone. “Not just the drugs and the sex, but the deeper stuff, trying to figure out who you are in the world. I was trying to take the rock & roll of that time and get it on the page.”
The result is an unusual story, fueled by a prose designed to evoke the rambunctious, radical music of the era, with a rhythm and poetic sensibility much more like the rock records of the time than many other novels.
And at the end of the story:
[Goldberg] talks about one scene in the book taking place on the houseboats of Sausalito. “I was listening to the Stones’ (1971 album) ‘Sticky Fingers’ over and over again while I was writing that, really trying to get the mood of that album on the page. I wanted the chapter to feel like what it was like to listen to some of those songs in that period.
“Frankly, I think the ‘sound’ of the narration is quite original. The big idea that I kept in mind as I wrote was that anything goes, that this was as if a 24-year-old and his friend went to a bar in 1975, had a few drinks and then the 24-year-old turned to his friend and said, ‘Let me tell you how my heart was broken…’”
I’ll be doing a very special reading in the Bay Area on Dec. 13 at 3 pm. As I read, Grammy-winning experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser will improvise on guitar.
The event, titled “a post-beat happening – words + guitar,” will take place at Down Home Music in El Cerrito, CA. Be there!
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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.]
Noted Dylan expert Greil Marcus has been writing his “Real Life Top 10” column since the ’70s, when it ran monthly in New West magazine.
The column has appeared in a variety of publications since then including Artforum, Salon, and most recently, The Believer.
Although I was able to reprint older columns at Addicted To Noise during the late ’90s and early 2000s, it wasn’t until Salon picked the column up in the mid-2000s that new columns appeared online each month.
And once Greil located it at The Believer, it was only available in print.
Well now that’s changed, and the column is currently available for all to read online each month at the Barnes & Noble Review.
Marcus is the author many books including The Old, Weird America: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes,Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads and Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010. His most recent book is The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs.
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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.]
In early October I was interviewed about my novel, True Love Scars, on this cool punk radio show, Cheap Hooch, that’s broadcast online every Sunday from 4 pm ’til 6 pm.
I talk about some of the themes in the book and more. Plus you’ll get to hear “Hey Bartender,” one of the songs that shows up early in the book, as well as artists referenced in the book including The Stooges and Mott The Hoople. Holly Hooch, the DJ, also plays some great songs by David Bowie, the Flamin’ Groovies and much more.
The show begins with Holly Hooch talking about how she messed up and didn’t get directions to the studio to me in time, but then I end up calling in Holly and her friends in the studio interview me on the phone. It’s a good interview and theres good music too. I’ve become a big fan of Cheap Hooch Radio.
[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.]
Yesterday the pop culture site PopMatters, posted a terrific review of my novel “True Love Scars.”
PopMatters contributing editor Greg M. Schwartz writes:
…the novel is a whirlwind tale of a young music fanatic’s quest for true love, high times and “the authentic real” (not necessarily in that order).
Teenage protagonist Michael Stein, aka “Writerman”, lives in Marin County and longs to be a musician, or at least a music writer. He’s into almost all of the musical icons of the era, especially Bob Dylan. Writerman is obsessed with finding his “Visions of Johanna” chick, who eventually appears in the form of Sweet Sarah. But conflict is ordained from the start. Chapter One begins with Writerman speaking in a sort of fever dream about how he betrayed and lost Sarah and has been on a quest to redeem his crushed soul ever since.
And later in the review, talking about the narrator’s obsession with Bob Dylan, Schwartz writes:
He can analyze those Dylan lyrics all day. He and a girl who’s charmingly fond of speaking in Dylan lyrics pore over Dylan’s albums in a scene from 1965, going over his evolution as an artist. “First time I heard that Dylan song it saved my life,” Writerman says of “Like a Rolling Stone”. It’s a sentiment that speaks for several generations of rock ‘n’ rollers, from those who came of age in Goldberg’s era to the present. They get deep into Dylanology in the scene as Writerman speaks of how Dylan opened his eyes to “how almost nothing is what it appears to be and I think that’s when I got it in my head I got to figure out the authentic real, see the world for what it is and not the facade of delusional humans erect in front of the truth.”
That’s what great rock ‘n’ roll can do, and True Love Scars is deeply dialed in to rock’s dichotomy of enlightening powers versus stonered party time.
Yeah that’s me, reading at LitQuake 2014. Photo from video shot by Jackie Bryan.
What a night!
It was billed as the “Rock ‘n’ Soul Circus: A Cavalcade of Stars,” and it featured a great group of music journalists, rock critics and musicians who each read from recent books or from books that haven’t been published yet.
It was held at The Make-Out Room, an atmospheric rock club in San Francisco’s Mission District, and that club was the perfect venue.
I’d never read in a club before, and it was a thrill.
A video excerpt of me reading — the first word, “She,” is cut off (video shot by Jackie Bryan). I had to sub in audio for the last part of this clip and so the audio and video stops syncing. But you’ll get the idea. Or just list to the entire audio clip below.
Reading at a book store is great, don’t get me wrong, but a cool club is really set up to highlight the performers.
When you’re standing on that stage, the stage lights making it impossible to see the audience, a microphone in front of you, it’s hard not to feel like a rock star.
Crazy I know, but it did feel a bit like that.
A stage, stage lighting, a PA system, a near capacity crowd of over 100 people fueled by alcohol — perfect for rock ‘n’ roll stories about the guy who discovered Van Morrison, the importance of Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville, the trials of making Dino Valenti’s 1968 self-titled solo album, Motley Crue’s crazy antics and more.
I read from my new novel, “True Love Scars,” and you can listen to the audio below.
I love how author Denise Sullivan, who organized the event, introduced me:
He interviewed everybody, everybody you’d want to read an interview with, he interviewed them. OK, so that’s part of his story. Another part of his story. Does anyone remember the dawn of the Internet? We didn’t have Internet and then we had the Internet? Remember that? He basically invented music journalism on the Web. OK, so that’s another distinction of our next author, whose latest book is ‘True Love Scars.’ But the reason that he lives large in my imagination, and this is true, he is the guy – he doesn’t know I’m going to say this — he snuck recording equipment past security so he could do the jailhouse interview iwht Rick James. Can I get a hand for him for that. Michael Goldberg!
Audio of my reading:
The other writers: University of San Francisco professor/ former rock critic Gina Arnold (author of the book “Exile In Guyville”), former San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin (“Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues”), Kerouac/Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally (“A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead”), musician Bruce Cockburn (“Rumours of Glory”), rock journalist and author Denise Sullivan (“Shaman’s Blues: The Art and Influences Behind Jim Morrison and the Doors”), rock historian and college teacher Richie Unterberger (“Jingle Jangle Morning: Folk-Rock in the 1960s”) and best-selling authors Keith and Kent Zimmerman (“Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire”).
Camper Van Beethoven cofounder Victor Krummenacher performed a short but tremendous two-song set. After hearing his transformation of Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home,” I immediately bought his CD with that song on it.
Some of the rock critics and music writers and musicians who read at the LitQuake event.
Thanks to Jackie Bryan for the video!!!
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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.]
Don’t know how I managed to miss this, but last month my friends at R.E.M.H.Q. did a cool post about an interview with Peter Buck I did prior to the release of New Adventures In Hi-Fi, back in 1996.
And they included a nice plug for my novel, “True Love Scars.”
You can check out the post and read the interview with Peter Buck here.
Coming up this Friday, August 17, 2014 at the Make-Out Room in San Francisco is the momentous LitQuake “Rock ‘N’ Roll Circus: A Cavalcade of Stars,” an evening of music critics reading from their latest books.
The lineup: Gina Arnold (author of the book “Exile In Guyville”), former San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin (“Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues”), Kerouac/Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally (“On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom”), Addicted To Noise founder/former Rolling Stone Senior Writer Michael Goldberg (“True Love Scars”), musician Bruce Cockburn (“Rumours of Glory”), rock journalist and author Denise Sullivan (“Shaman’s Blues: The Art and Influences Behind Jim Morrison and the Doors”), rock historian and college teacher Richie Unterberger (“Jingle Jangle Morning: Folk-Rock in the 1960s”) and best-selling authors Keith and Kent Zimmerman (“Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire”).
Providing music will be Camper Van Beethoven cofounder Victor Krummenacher.
The evening starts at 7 pm and admission is a cheap $10.
And finally, for today and maybe Tuesday the Kindle version of “True Love Scars” is available for $2.99. A bargain at three times the price. Soon it will be again priced at $9.99, so get it on the cheap now.
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[Rolling Stone has a great review of “True Love Scars” in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Kim Gordon, formerly a key member of Sonic Youth and now half of Body/Head, will have her memoir, “Girl in a Band,” published on February 24, 2015.
From the press release:
Often described as aloof, Kim Gordon truly opens up in Girl in a Band. Telling the story of her childhood, her life in art, her move to New York City, her love affairs, her marriage, her relationship with her daughter, and her band, this is a rich and beautifully written memoir. At the heart of the book is the examination of what partnership means—and what happens when it dissolves. An atmospheric look at the New York of the 80s and 90s that gave rise to Sonic Youth, as well as the Alternative revolution in popular music that Sonic Youth helped usher in, paving the way for Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins and many other acts. One of the most revered people in modern rock and roll, Kim Gordon is also a highly regarded fashion icon, visual artist, and the source of much fascination.
[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.]
On October 28, 2014 the first complete book of Bob Dylan’s lyrics will be published in a limited edition of 3500 copies. Priced at $200 for the 960 page, 13.3 pound book, Amazon is currently taking advance orders for the book at a discounted price of $126.74.
The New York Times can a story today, which said, in part:
The songs are presented chronologically, including alternative versions released as part of Mr. Dylan’s archival “Bootleg Series.” The album covers, front and back, are reproduced.
The way the songs are laid out is meant “to help the eye see what the ear hears,” Mr. Ricks said. “If you print the songs flush left,” he added, “it doesn’t represent, visually, the audible experience.” So refrains, choruses and bridges are indented. And where Mr. Dylan intended a line, however long, to be unbroken, it sprawls across the 13-inch-wide page.
How did the editors know which lines were meant to be unbroken? Did Mr. Dylan provide feedback or comments? Mr. Karp said he had heard that Mr. Dylan provided notebooks and manuscripts. Mr. Ricks refused to elaborate.
“I think the right thing for us,” he said, “is not to go into the question of the particular kinds of help and assistance and advice that we were in a position to receive.”
From Amazon.com:
“The Lyrics: Since 1962” (Hardcover – October 28, 2014)
by Bob Dylan (Author), Christopher Ricks (Editor), Lisa Nemrow (Editor), Julie Nemrow (Editor)
Hardcover: 960 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (October 28, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1476797706
ISBN-13: 978-1476797700
Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 12.4 x 2.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.3 pounds
A major publishing event—a beautiful, comprehensive collection of the lyrics of Bob Dylan with artwork from thirty-three albums, edited and with an introduction by Christopher Ricks.
As it was well put by Al Kooper (the man behind the organ on “Like a Rolling Stone”), “Bob is the equivalent of William Shakespeare. What Shakespeare did in his time, Bob does in his time.” Christopher Ricks, editor of T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Tennyson, and The Oxford Book of English Verse, has no argument with Mr. Kooper’s assessment, and Dylan is attended to accordingly in this authoritative edition of his lyrics.
In the words of Ricks: “For fifty years, all the world has delighted in Bob Dylan’s books of words and more than words: provocative, mysterious, touching, baffling, not-to-be-pinned-down, intriguing, and a reminder that genius is free to do as it chooses. And, again and again, these are not the words that he sings on the initially released albums.”
This edition changes things, giving us the words from officially released studio and live recordings, as well as selected variant lyrics and revisions to these, recent revisions and retrospective ones; and, from the archives, words that, till now, have not been published.
The Lyrics, edited with diligence by Christopher Ricks, Lisa Nemrow, and Julie Nemrow. As set down, as sung, and as sung again.
While you wait, here’s Dylan, Ry Cooder and Van Dyke Parks performing Woody Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” at the Malibu Performing Arts Center in January 2009:
[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.]
