Tag Archives: Bob Dylan

Musician David Monterey Does Dylan at “The Dylan-Kerouac Connection”

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I got the call at 5:03, two hours before the event I was doing with singer/guitarist Johnny Harper was to begin. I was in my car, had just gotten on the freeway, and was heading to San Francisco.

Johnny was sick; he wasn’t going to make it.

The plan had been for me to read excerpts from my essay, “Bob Dylan’s Beat Visions,” and interspersed between those excerpts, Johnny would perform relevant Dylan Songs including “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Visions of Johanna.” My essay was recently published in the book “Kerouac On Record” (Bloomsbury). In it I delve into just how much the Beat Generation writers including Jack Kerouac influenced Dylan’s 1960’s songwriting. (A lot!) The show was divided into two sets, each lasting about 45 minutes. Key to making it work were Johnny’s musical performances — it’s one thing to read for, say, 20 minutes, but if you plan to read for 45 minutes, you better have some great music to break it up. But Johnny was sick. Those musical performances weren’t going to happen.

So what was I going to do?

First thought: We’ll just have to cancel. Second thought: But no, people are already on their way to The Beat Museum on Broadway. It would be a lot of people. Johnny and I had been on KPFA previewing the show. I’d promoted it on Facebook and blogged about. The Dylan news site, Expecting Rain, had included it in their Thursday night news.

And then it hit me. My longtime friend, singer/songwriter/guitarist David Monterey, was planning to attend. It was long shot but maybe Dave would bring his guitar and play some of the key Dylan songs.


David Monterey with guitar (left) and Michael Goldberg with guitar (right) out at the beach in West Marin in the late Sixties.

Dave and I have been friends since elementary school. As I recall, he turned me on to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. As teenagers we used to play Dylan songs on our guitars. Dave is as much a Dylan fan as I am (and as you likely know, I am obsessed with Dylan). Dave is a great singer and songwriter, and he currently leads the excellent Bay Area Americana band, the String Rays; he’s released numerous albums (both group and solo) and he’s a total pro. If anyone was going to fill in singing Dylan on less than two hours notice, it would be Dave.

I pulled off at the Gilman exit, parked by the side of the road, and got Dave on the phone. He hadn’t left the house yet. Whew! After a few seconds of silence, after he digested my request, he asked me which songs. Cool. He was in!

The Beat Museum is an incredible place. The ground floor has a huge book store (I bought a copy of the late Tom Clark’s Kerouac bio), as well as used vinyl for sale and many cool posters. Throughout the place are Beat items for viewing only including various first editions of classic Beat books, and one of Allen Ginsberg’s typewriters. The museum is located close to City Lights, Ferlinghetti’s legendary bookstore and not far from that classic Beat hangout, Caffe Trieste.

The performance space and the main museum area is upstairs, and up there it was cool to see, in a glass case, a plaid jacket that Jack Kerouac used to wear.

As it got close to 7 pm, folks started arriving — soon nearly every seat was filled.

The show itself was a blast. I began by quoting a comment Ferlinghetti had made to me in February of 2017: “He [Dylan] was a poet first. He wanted to be a published poet. But luckily he had a guitar and he knew how to make it into music. His early songs in the 1960s were long surrealist poems.”

And then a quote from Dylan’s friend and road manager, Bob Neuwirth: “Remember, Bob Dylan’s a poet, man. So when he writes, it’s a poet writing, and when he talks, it’s a poet talking.”

Right away I could tell the audience was into it, and things flowed smoothly from there.


David Monterey at a gig earlier this year. Photo by Michael Goldberg

When I got to the part about Peter, Paul and Mary scoring a hit with Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” I asked Dave if he’d play the song for us. He stood, strapped on his guitar and played an achingly beautiful version of the song. I’ve heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” countless times over the past 50-plus years. Yet hearing it in the intimacy of the Beat Museum performance space, it sounded brand new, and totally in tune with the horrific Trump years. These lines hit me hard:

“Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist

“Before they’re allowed to be free?

“Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head

“Pretending he just doesn’t see?”

Dave has a great voice. I hear a little John Prine sometimes, and Jesse Colin Young, perhaps some Jackson Browne and a little Paul McCartney. But really, Dave has his own unique voice. Sometimes there’s a slightly rough edge, other times it’s smooth as a billiard ball. There’s a passion in Dave’s voice, and compassion, but also a toughness. Dave is someone with true integrity. He was conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and he stands up for what he believes. Often he likes to quote the Elvis Costello line, “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?”

During “Blowin’ in the Wind” (and all the others that Dave sang), some members of the audience just couldn’t help themselves and they quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) sang along.

When Dave finished “Blowin’ in the Wind,” he got a great round of applause.

By the end of the show, Dave had also sung a heartfelt “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” as well as potent renditions of “Chimes of Freedom,” “Desolation Row” and a concluding “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

Meanwhile, I read excerpts from “Bob Dylan’s Beat Visions” that probably added up to about one third of the essay.

The audience dug it, and I was invited back! Can’t beat that.

— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post —

Live: The Dylan-Kerouac Connection

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Jack Kerouac (left) and Bob Dylan.

To celebrate Bob Dylan’s birthday, a very special event, “The Dylan-Kerouac Connection,” will be held in Berkeley, CA on Friday, May 18, 2018.

Former Rolling Stone Senior Writer/ West Coast Music Editor Michael Goldberg and acclaimed Bay Area singer/guitarist Johnny Harper will be collaborating on a night of words about and music by Bob Dylan.

Goldberg will read from his new essay, “Bob Dylan’s Beat Visions (Sonic Poetry),” which has just been published in the book “Kerouac On Record” (Bloomsbury). Harper will perform exciting solo versions of “Desolation Row,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” Mr. Tambourine Man,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and more!

The two set evening will begin at 7:30 pm at The Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA. Doors open at 6:30 pm.

Goldberg’s essay focuses on how Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers had a profound influence on the songwriting of Bob Dylan. In reviewing “Kerouac On Record,” Mojo magazine wrote: “Among the strongest in a strong lot are Michael Goldberg’s examination of Dylan’s lit roots and Kerouac’s own musicological piece — ‘The Beginning Of Bop’ – that attempts to capture jazz in words – and succeeds.”

Johnny Harper is a well-known Bay Area singer, lead guitarist, songwriter, bandleader, arranger, and producer of recordings and concerts.

Harper has been known, for many years, for leading rockin’ bands (Johnny Harper & Carnival and the earlier Hot Links) specializing in the joyous, upbeat, and funky New Orleans R&B sound – the music of artists like Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, the Meters/ Neville Brothers, Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, and many more. He lived in New Orleans for several years at one point, soaking up the Crescent City’s magic first-hand.

In addition to his work in bands, Johnny is a powerful solo performer, accompanying himself in complex lead/rhythm and finger-picking styles on electric and acoustic guitars. He is a veteran performer in a wider range of American roots music styles – blues and gospel, vintage rock and classic country, R&B/ soul, traditional and contemporary folk, and more. He is an expert on the music of The Band, and knows over 100 Bob Dylan songs! And he is a born storyteller whose comments on the music are by turns moving and highly entertaining.

The show will take place at: The Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA. Suggested donation: $15.00 – $25.00

For additional info, please contact Johnny Harper: jjmusic@ix.netcom.com

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild post –

Bob Dylan’s Beat Visions – A Rock’s Back Pages Excerpt

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We’ve known for years that Bob Dylan borrowed melodies from older songs, and that particular songs and poems inspired him to write his own lyrics. In a nearly 12,000 word essay in the just published book, “Kerouac On Record: A Literary Soundtrack,” I detail just how extensively Dylan made use of Jack Kerouac’s writing in some of the songs Dylan wrote for Highway 61 Revisited.  You can read an excerpt from my essay at Rock’s Back Pages.

Here’s a bit of what you’ll find there:

‘No rhyme, all cut-up, no nothing, except something happening, which is words’

I couldn’t have written those songs back then. If I had just come out and sung “Desolation Row’ five years ago I probably would have been murdered – Bob Dylan to Nat Hentoff, autumn 1965, unpublished interview for Playboy

Following the 3 May 1965 publication of Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, the publisher, Coward- McCann, a subsidiary of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, ran full-page ads in the Sunday Times Book Review, the daily New York Times, the New York Review of Books and elsewhere. If you were in New York, and dug Jack Kerouac, it would have been hard not to know that the “King of the Beats’ had a new novel in the stores.

Hi Lo Ha (the house Bob Dylan had just bought in Woodstock, New York, was where Dylan said he wrote the rest of Highway 61 Revisited in the six weeks between the 15 and 16 June sessions in Manhattan where “Like a Rolling Stone” (which he’d written in early June) was recorded, and the late July and early August sessions at which the rest of the Highway 61 Revisited album was completed. (Dylan, ever the poet, said that in one interview, but in another with Jann Wenner for Rolling Stone he said he wrote the Highway 61 song “Desolation Row” “in the back of a taxicab” in New York.)

More interesting than where the songs that comprise Highway 61 Revisited were written is that just six weeks after Desolation Angels was published, Dylan used the book as a major source of raw material for his new songs. “Desolation Row” took the first half of its title from Kerouac”s new book, and Dylan seems to have gotten the idea for the song’s main theme from Kerouac as well. In Desolation Angels, Kerouac writes about “Surrealistic Street,” and describes a wild cast of characters that he sees out on skid row. What is “Desolation Row,” as Dylan describes it in his song, if not a dark, at times horrific version of Kerouac”s “Surrealistic Street”?…

Read the excerpt here and buy the book here.

Cover of “Kerouac On Record.”
– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

How Jack Kerouac Influenced Bob Dylan & More

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Cover of the upcoming “Kerouac On Record.”

In a 12,000 word essay, “Bob Dylan’s Beat Visions (Sonic Poetry),” that appears in the upcoming book, “Kerouac On Record: A Literary Soundtrack,” I explore how Bob Dylan was profoundly influenced by the Beat writers, and especially Jack Kerouac.

The book is being published by Bloomsbury and will reach book stores online and off on March 8, 2018. Rock’s Back Pages will be publishing an excerpt from my essay, and the April issue of Mojo magazine (see full review below) includes a rave review that says in part: “Among the strongest in a strong lot are Michael Goldberg’s examination of Dylan’s lit roots and Kerouac’s own musicological piece — ‘The Beginning Of Bop’ – that attempts to capture jazz in words – and succeeds.”

Nice to be mentioned in the same sentence as Kerouac!

In addition my Dylan piece, I also have an interview with writer (and one time rock critic) Richard Meltzer in which he talks at length about Kerouac.

The book also contains essays on the influence of Kerouac on a number of musicians including Tom Waits, the Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison, Van Morrison, Patti Smith and others. And there are excellent pieces about the influence of jazz on Kerouac’s writing style.

As we get closer to the publication date I’ll share more about this fascinating book.

Here’s the Mojo review in full:

Review in the April issue of Mojo.
  • A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Michael Goldberg & Henry Kaiser at Octopus Literary Salon

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Celebrating ex-Rolling Stone Senior Writer Michael Goldberg’s new rock ‘n’ roll novel, “Untitled,” Goldberg and Grammy winning experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser will collaborate on “a post-beat happening” at The Octopus Literary Salon in Oakland, CA on Saturday, August 19, 2017. Goldberg will read from his new novel while Kaiser improvises on electric guitar. Plus a solo set by Kaiser. Note that no meat will be served during this event! Free.

This will mark Goldberg and Kaiser’s third collaboration. When they appeared at The Octopus last year it was standing-room-only. Come early!

If you think you can attend, please go to the Facebook event page and clock “going” or “interested.”

Cover art, “Untitled,” by Leslie Goldberg.

What the critics say about Goldberg’s novels:

“Michael Goldberg’s sharply drawn characters, vivid musical nods, and keen eye for detail transport us back to the post-countercultural mid-1970s when sex and drugs and rock & roll were a way of life. In this third installment of the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy, antihero Writerman takes us along for the rollercoaster ride – angel dust, anyone? – while he tries to make sense of a life littered with broken hearts. A page-turner.” – Holly George Warren, editor of “The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats” and the author of the acclaimed bio, “A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton”

“Oral prose. School of Twain and Salinger. It’s improvised, and its immediate and delayed echoes, its ellipses, its obsessions, make music.” – Larry Beckett, author of “Morning Glory” and “Paul Bunyan.”.
“Radioactive as Godzilla!” – Richard Meltzer, author of “The Aesthetics of Rock” and “Tropic of Nipples”

“Kerouac in the 21st Century.” – Dennis McNally, author of “Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation & America”

“Penned in a staccato amphetamine grammar…” – Simon Warner. author of “Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture”

“Holden Caulfield meets Lord Buckley?” – Paul Krassner, founder of The Realist

“Our hero drinks and drugs and dances to the nightingale tune while birds fly high by the light of the moon.” – Larry Ratso Sloman, author of “On the Road with Bob Dylan”

“Reads like a fever dream from the dying days of the Summer of Love.” – Alina Simone, musician, author of “Note to Self” and “You Must Go and Win”

“If Lester Bangs had ever published a novel it might read something like this frothing debut by longtime music journalist Michael Goldberg.” – Colin Fleming, Rolling Stone

Michael Goldberg at The Octopus. Photograh by Wayne Hsiung

Michael Goldberg was a senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine for a decade. He has interviewed Jerry Garcia, Patti Smith, George Harrison, Captain Beefheart, Stevie Wonder, Sleater-Kinney, James Brown, Frank Zappa, Berry Gordy Jr., John Fogerty, Neil Young, Lou Reed, Black Flag, The Replacements, Flipper, Robbie Robertson, Sonic Youth and many more. In 1994 Goldberg launched the first Web music magazine, Addicted To Noise, and “invented music journalism on the web,” as journalist Denise Sullivan put it. Goldberg currently writes an occasional column, The Drama You’ve Been Craving,” for Addicted To Noise. His 10,000 word essay, “Bob Dylan’s Beat Visions,” will be included in the book “Kerouac On Record,” due from Bloomsbury in February 2018.

“Untitled,” the third of the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy, is a story of love, friendship and the search for identity, set in the early ‘70s. Although it takes place in the past, themes running through the book — trying to live an authentic life, struggling against the powers that be, navigating the terrain between love and lust, loyalty and betrayal — are as relevant today as ever. Goldberg’s first novel, “True Love Scars,” was published in 2014; his second, “The Flowers Lied,” was published in 2016.

Henry Kaiser and friends. Photo by Michael Goldberg

Grammy winner Henry Kaiser is widely recognized as one of the most creative and innovative guitarists, improvisers, and producers in the fields of rock, jazz, world, and contemporary experimental musics. The California-based musician is one of the most extensively recorded as well, having appeared on more than 250 different albums and contributed to countless television and film soundtracks.

A restless collaborator who constantly seeks the most diverse and personally challenging contexts for his music, Mr. Kaiser not only produces and contributes to a staggering number of recorded projects, he performs frequently throughout the USA, Canada, Europe and Japan, with several regular groupings as well as solo guitar concerts and concerts of freely improvised music with a host of diverse instrumentalists. Among the numerous artists Kaiser has recorded or performed with are Herbie Hancock, Richard Thompson, David Lindley, Jerry Garcia, Steve Lacy, Fred Frith, Terry Riley, Negativland, Michael Stipe, Jim O’Rourke, Victoria Williams, Diamanda Galas and Cecil Taylor. Kaiser’s latest album, The Celestial Squid, was released last year.

The Octopus Literary Salon is located at 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland, CA 94612

Phone: (510) 844-4120

Songs From the West Coast Sixties, Part One

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Jim Morrison performing at the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, June 1967. Photo by Michael Goldberg.
Jim Morrison performing at the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, June 1967. Photo by Michael Goldberg.

My good friend David Monterey, a singer, songwriter and musician who leads the band, the String Rays, writes the Song Dog Music blog. Recently, the two of us had a long discussion about the Sixties West Coast Music Scene, particularly what we experienced as kids in the Bay Area.

You can read Part One of our conversation here.

Below I have posted video and song clips that compliment our words. Enjoy.

The Doors, Soul Kitchen, The Matrix, 1967 – the initial footage in this video clip is from the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, June 1967

Big Brother, Down On Me, 1968

Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit, 1967

The Byrds, Mr. Tambourine Man, 1965

Pete Seeger, If I Had A Hammer, 1956

Bob Dylan, Blowin’ in the Wind, 1963

Sly and the Family Stone, Dance to the Music, 1969

Grateful Dead, Jack Straw, 1972

Jefferson Airplane, Plastic Fantastic Lover, 1968

Grateful Dead, St. Stephen,1969

Grateful Dead, Dark Star, 1969

Grateful Dead, Black Peter, May 15, 1970

Grateful Dead, Friend of the Devil, 1970

Robert Johnson, Hellhound on my Trail, 1937

Grateful Dead, Sitting on Top of the World- 1966 Trips Festival SF

Howlin’ Wolf, Sitting on Top of the World, 1957

Jefferson Airplane, Chauffeur Blues, 1966

Memphis Minnie, Chauffeur Blues (probably written by Minnie but credited to her producer lester Melrose), 1941

The Charlatans, Alabama Bound, 1965

Leadbelly, Alabama Bound

Lynn Hughes (who sang this song with The Charlatans), Devil, 1969

Skip James, Devil Got My Woman, 1931

Quicksiler Messenger Service, Who Do You Love?, 1968

Bo Diddley, Who Do You Love?, 1956

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

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 –

Simon Warner Reviews ‘The Flowers Lied’: ‘Beat spontaneity meets punk insolence’

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tfl-fb copy

Great review by author Simon Warner, who wrote the excellent “Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture.”

Beat Spontaneity Meets Punk Insolence

By Simon Warner

4 stars

Delivered in a sparky, yet splintered, patois, falling somewhere between Beat spontaneity and punk insolence, Michael Goldberg’s The Flowers Lied picks up where 2014’s True Love Scars left off, as the second part of the ‘Freak Scene Dream’ trilogy carries his narrator protagonist Michael Stein into further labyrinths of neurotic insecurity, a campus caper where boy might meet girl but where the roses of romance are snared with the jagged thorns of rejection and betrayal.

Not that this is any mere love story: it’s the tale of the would-be rock ‘n’ roll writer who still believes that his new journalistic prose, and his passion for Dylan and Beefheart, can lead him towards some kind of elevated self-fulfilment. But will an enthusiasm for the Stones or the New York Dolls, a blind belief in the existential promises of the electric guitar, be enough to compensate for wretched affairs and failing friendships?

Achingly self-conscious, riddled with agonising self-doubt, Stein has the flavour of a re-cast Holden Caulfield, as this raw-nerved rite of passage travels some way from Salinger’s immediate post-war world and places itself in the early 1970s at a moment when the hippie dream seems to have lost its enticing glow.

The very title of the novel is a comment on the fact the hopes and dreams of the Sixties have largely evaporated and Stein feels caught on the lip between the fading utopian buzz and a decade hurtling towards a state of nihilistic disillusion. Writerman, as he styles himself, is keen to reject the cynicism of the age but the pallor of personal crisis tends to cloud his day-to-day judgement.

Goldberg’s skill in this dark comi-tragedy is to energetically convey his feelings – the gauge on the emotional candour button is set to 9 – and he does this through a variety of techniques: a version of the gonzo syntax, occasional stream of consciousness ramblings and a secondary internalised narrative providing commentary on his own inner curdlings.

For readers who recognise the names – the rock stars, of course, but also the great rock writers of the day, like Christgau and Willis, who also pepper the pages from time to time – this is an engaging affair, as hot music, the powerful influence of music criticism and the spice of emotional turbulence become entangled in a tornado of twisting moods: the brief elation of a Fender lick is quickly balanced by a carousel of catastrophe; the ups are fleeting, the downs last longer.

The Flowers Lied, like its predecessor, has an edgy, fractious manner, but once you get used to the frenetic style, the prose moves forward with impressive vigour and the story, quite self-indulgent in many ways, has a definite resonance for a certain generation. The fact that this second instalment ends somewhat in mid-air might be a criticism, but it certainly leaves you hungry for the concluding episode, due in 2016.

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

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 –

Rock’s Back Pages ‘Rock Critic Excerpt’ From “The Flowers Lied”

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RBP - final 2

Those awesome editors at Rock’s Back Pages have featured me and an excerpt from my new rock novel, The Flowers Lied, on the home page of their site.

In the excerpt. which is the third chapter of the book. the narrator, Michael Stein AKA Writerman, meets two of his rock critic heroes for the first time when he visits them at The Pad, the rather decrepit apartment where both critics live and work.

The introduction to the excerpt begins:

Michael Goldberg’s rock ‘n’ roll coming-of-age novel, The Flowers Lied, has just been published. Richard Meltzer wrote that Goldberg’s first novel, True Love Scars, was “Radioactive as Godzilla.” Goldberg has been called a “21st Century Kerouac” by Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally and compared to Lester Bangs by Rolling Stone. The new novel focuses on Writerman (Michael Stein) a sophomore at The University, which is located in Northern California on hill above a beach town not unlike Santa Cruz. He’s a music freak and wannabe writer – he struggles with a Captain Beefheart album review, and tries and fails to type a single word of the Great American Novel he is so desperate to write. He pursues a hip but traumatized 18-year-old artist named Elise, who introduces him to tequila and Almaden Red. And he becomes best friends with Jim AKA Thee Freakster Bro, the over-the-top, gregarious writer/poet/music obsessive stoner he first meets in True Love Scars.

Read the entire excerpt at Rock’s Back Pages. Enjoy!

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –