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.

The new issue (#19) of Twisted Pulp magazine includes an eight page interview with me (Michael Goldberg) about my new book, “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey,” and my career as a writer. The feature includes cover art from my three novels, “True Love Scars,” “The Flowers Lied,” and “Untitled” (all available from Amazon), as well as the cover of “Wicked Game,” and my upcoming collection of music journalism, “Addicted To Noise: The Music Writing of Michael Goldberg” (to be published by Backbeat Books on November 1, 2022).

You can get the Kindle version of Twisted Pulp here. Soon you will be able to get the print version here.

As for my latest book, “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. Photo of Goldberg by Roni Hoffman.

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.

Former Rolling Stone Senior Writer/ Addicted To Noise founder Michael Goldberg (above, photo by Leslie Goldberg) — that’s me — read from his new book, “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey,” at The Beat Museum in North Beach, San Francisco, on the evening of Saturday, June 18, 2022. A crowd of over 40 people attended the reading, mingling beforehand among historic Beat era artifacts including a painting by Gregory Corso and a 1949 Hudson Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady used to drive across the US and into Mexico, a journey fictionalized in “On the Road.”

A lot of great folks showed up for the reading including novelist Charlie Haas, 49ers photographer Michael Zagaris (below), former John Lee Hooker manager Mike Kapus and record producer Erik Jacobsen (above, photo by Leslie Goldberg), who produced 7 top ten hits for the Lovin’ Spoonful in the mid-60s, discovered and produced Tim Hardin and produced the Chris Isaak international top 10 hit “Wicked Game,” with Jimmy Wilsey’s haunting guitar intro.

Although I had planned to read for about 40 minutes, the audience indicated that they wanted to hear more, so I read for over an hour. You can watch a video by Michael Engle of me reading here.

Top photo of rockin’ audience by Leslie Goldberg; bottom photo by Michael Zagaris

I will be doing an online event at Book Passage on Thursday, July 21, 2022. Former Creem managing editor and music critic Robert Duncan will be questioning me about my Jimmy Wilsey book. More info here. My book on Jimmy Wilsey will be available for purchase at Book Passage online and at the Corte Madera store beginning July 4, 2022.

You can also get my book, which Bill Bentley wrote “is the rock & roll book to read this year,” at the HoZac Books website.

Derk Richardson will be interviewing me on his Thursday, June 16, 2022 show, which starts at 10 pm pt. He’ll be asking me about my new book, “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey.” The show airs Thursday night but it will be archived so if you miss the original broadcast, you can listen after the fact here. It will take a few days before the show is added to the archive. During the show Richardson will be playing recordings that Jimmy played on, including at least one previously unheard recording. Be sure to check it out.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a great feature on me this week written by James Sullivan. Titled “Writer had a ringside seat at S.F. music scene through Chris Isaak’s guitarist, who died homeless,” Sullivan captures what the book is about and why I wrote it.

“’I didn’t want Jimmy to be forgotten,’ he [Goldberg] says. ‘That’s kind of what happened when he was alive.’

“Goldberg’s new book, ‘Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey,’ traces the sound innovator from his childhood, growing up in suburban St. Louis listening to his parents’ country music records, to his arrival in San Francisco to study painting at the Academy of Art College (now the Academy of Art University), just as the punk scene around the Mabuhay Gardens was sprouting. It ends tragically, with homelessness and an underreported death.

“’He was a brilliant creative person,’ Goldberg says. ‘The tone he got, the atmosphere he created was unique.'”

Read the rest of the story here.

You can get my book, which Bill Bentley wrote “is the rock & roll book to read this year,” at the HoZac Books website.

I will be doing a reading/book signing and answering questions about the book at The Beat Museum in San Francisco at 7pm on Saturday, June 18, 2022. More info here.

I will also be doing an online event at Book Passage on Thursday, July 21, 2022. Former Creem managing editor and music critic Robert Duncan will be questioning me about my Jimmy Wilsey book. More info here. My book on Jimmy Wilsey will be available for purchase at Book Passage online and at the Corte Madera store beginning July 4, 2022.

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In his review of my book, “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey,” music journalist and author Bill Kopp writes, “… Wilsey’s life story – one filled with soaring highs (of the good and bad kind) and plummeting lows (albeit only of the bad variety) forms a chilling narrative. And that story is expertly told by longtime music journalist and first-hand observer/participant in the Bay Area’s music scene, Michael Goldberg. Across 400-plus pages, Goldberg’s Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey charts the musician’s life, an ultimately doomed story line that runs from his troubled childhood to his punk years to his time with Isaak and beyond.”

You can read the entire review here at Kopp’s Musoscribe website.

Plus a great podcast conversation with me at Guitar Radio Show.

Also, I’m interviewed at Patrick Michael’s cool “8 Questions” Youtube podcast.

And you’ll want to check out this interview with me by Hobart Rowland at Magnet magazine.

You can get my book at the HoZac Books website.

I will be doing a reading/book signing and answering questions about the book at The Beat Museum in San Francisco at 7pm on Saturday, June 18, 2022. More info here.

I will also be doing an online event at Book Passage on Thursday, July 21, 2022. Former Creem managing editor and music critic Robert Duncan will be questioning me about my Jimmy Wilsey book. More info here. My book on Jimmy Wilsey will be available for purchase at Book Passage online and at the Corte Madera store beginning July 4, 2022.

The Only Three Lads podcast and the Sketched Sounds podcast were nice enough to interview me. If you check them both out, you’ll find in-depth conversations about the great guitarist James Calvin Wilsey, the San Francisco punk scene of the late Seventies, the legendary punk band, the Avengers, Jimmy’s days in Silvertone and working with Chris Isaak and much more. And, of course, we talk about my new book, “Wicked Game: The True Story of James Calvin Wilsey,” and how I came to write it and how I got to know Jimmy Wilsey during the ’80s and early ’90s.

You can get my book at the HoZac Books website.

I will be doing a reading/book signing and answering questions about the book at The Beat Museum in San Francisco at 7pm on Saturday, June 18, 2022. More info here.

I will also be doing an online event at Book Passage on Thursday, July 21, 2022. Former Creem managing editor and music critic Robert Duncan will be questioning me about my Jimmy Wilsey book. More info here. My book on Jimmy Wilsey will be available for purchase at Book Passage online and at the Corte Madera store beginning July 4, 2022.

In a wonderful review of my new book, “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey,” in the June 2022 “Bentley’s Bandstand” column at his Americana Highways website, Bill Bentley writes: “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. …”

You can read the rest of the review here.

You can get my book at the HoZac Books website.

The Sketched Sounds podcast just went live (June 6, 2022). Justin Bieggar interviews me about the Wilsey book, the San Francisco punk scene of the late ’70s and much more. Listen to it here at Spotify if you have Spotify, or listen here.

Last week Howie Klein published an essay that I wrote about how Jimmy Wilsey became a punk musician at his excellent “Down With Tyranny” blog. “My new book, “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey” (HoZac Books), tells Jimmy’s story, but it also details the San Francisco punk scene that began in December 1976, three months after 19-year-old Jimmy moved to San Francisco. During the summer of 1977 Jimmy became bass player for one of San Francisco’s greatest punk bands, the Avengers, and quickly became one of the stars of the small SF scene.

“Punk was initially not a particular sound, it was a concept, and the concept was this: anyone who wanted to could be in a band and play rock & roll, you didn’t have to know how to play your instrument, you only had to have something to say, and many times not even that was necessary.

“When the established record companies decided punk wasn’t commercial, punk fans like Howie Klein formed their own record companies. The first singles by The Mutants, The Nuns and The Offs were released as singles by Howie’s 415 label, and in the early ’80s, when Jimmy was in Silvertone, Howie told me, he wanted to release Silvertone’s “Blue Hotel” but that didn’t work out. …”

You can read all of “How The Patti Smith Group Inspired James Calvin Wilsey” here.

I will be doing a reading/book signing and answering questions about the book at The Beat Museum in San Francisco at 7pm on Saturday, June 18, 2022. More info here.

I will also be doing an online event at Book Passage on Thursday, July 21, 2022. Former Creem managing editor and music critic Robert Duncan will be questioning me about my Jimmy Wilsey book. More info here. My book on Jimmy Wilsey will be available for purchase at Book Passage online and at the Corte Madera store beginning July 4, 2022.

Poet Marc Zegans’s beautifully written review of my new book, “Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey,” was published today at the cool Pop Matters website/online magazine. Writes Zegans, “Goldberg’s meticulously researched biography delivers a deep-hearted and poignant account of the rare and extraordinary creative talent who—following his legendary entry into the music scene as bass player for San Francisco’s primeval punk band, the Avengers—crafted the incomparable yearning two-note opening to Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game.'”

Later in the review: “Worthy of prominent mention in Goldberg’s portrayal of Wilsey’s elusive life between the notes is the book’s method of exposition. Rather than pursuing a single sustained narrative line, Wicked Game operates as a biography by bricolage. Goldberg, Wilsey’s long-time friend with whom his son took guitar lessons, and photographer of the punk scene in which Wilsey came of age, layers intimate reflection and historical inquiry. Chapter titles are drawn from rock lyrics — ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’ (from Jim Carroll’s song ‘People that Died’), ‘Walk on the Wildside’ (following Lou Reed’s genderqueer classic). Goldberg takes a journalistic perspective and assembles richly quoted voices into a remarkable salade composée of this outsider musician’s life.  The author’s method of massing the voices of Wilsey’s contemporaries.”

Meanwhile, a PlanetLP podcast conversation with me went live this morning and it sounds great. It’s “Episode 50: James Wilsey’s Wicked Game.” Just short of 40 minutes of back and forth about Jimmy Wilsey.

And yesterday the important “Down With Tyranny” blog, where Howie Klein for many years has been making astute political observations and providing the facts about the dire straits this country is in, took a brief detour from politics to run an essay I wrote about why I spent three-plus years writing a book about Jimmy Wilsey. There is a contest and two winners will each get a copy of the book. The winners are the two people who donate the most to one of the political campaigns listed on a page that you can link to from the bottom of my essay.

And finally: I’ll be reading from the book and answering questions at The Beat Museum at 7pm on Saturday, June 18, 2022. Facebook event page here.