In 1966, at just twenty-two, Richard Goldstein approached the Village Voice with a novel idea.
'I want to be a rock critic,' he said.
'What's that?' the editor replied.
It was a logical question, since rock criticism didn't yet exist. In the weekly column he would produce for the Voice, Goldstein became the first person to write regularly in a major publication about the music that was changing everyone's lives. He believed deeply in the power of rock, and, long before it was acceptable, he championed the idea that this music was a serious art form.
From his unique position in journalism, Richard Goldstein witnessed the full arc of events that shaped culture and politics in the 1960s ? and participated in them, too. He toured with Janis Joplin, spent a day at the Grateful Dead house in San Francisco, got stoned with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, and was in the front row when Jimi Hendrix burned his first guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival. He was present for Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech, the student uprising at Columbia and the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He was challenged to a boxing match by Norman Mailer and took Susan Sontag to her first disco. Goldstein developed close relationships with several rock legends ? Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, to name two ? and their early deaths came each time as a wrenching shock, fuelling his disillusionment as he watched the music he loved rapidly evolve from a communal rite into a vast industry and felt the sense of hope for radical social upheaval fade away.
Another Little Piece of My Heart is an intimate memoir of the writer as a young man. It is also a sweeping personal account that no one else could provide ? a deeply moving, unparalleled document of rock and revolution in America.
'I want to be a rock critic,' he said.
'What's that?' the editor replied.
It was a logical question, since rock criticism didn't yet exist. In the weekly column he would produce for the Voice, Goldstein became the first person to write regularly in a major publication about the music that was changing everyone's lives. He believed deeply in the power of rock, and, long before it was acceptable, he championed the idea that this music was a serious art form.
From his unique position in journalism, Richard Goldstein witnessed the full arc of events that shaped culture and politics in the 1960s ? and participated in them, too. He toured with Janis Joplin, spent a day at the Grateful Dead house in San Francisco, got stoned with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, and was in the front row when Jimi Hendrix burned his first guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival. He was present for Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech, the student uprising at Columbia and the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He was challenged to a boxing match by Norman Mailer and took Susan Sontag to her first disco. Goldstein developed close relationships with several rock legends ? Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, to name two ? and their early deaths came each time as a wrenching shock, fuelling his disillusionment as he watched the music he loved rapidly evolve from a communal rite into a vast industry and felt the sense of hope for radical social upheaval fade away.
Another Little Piece of My Heart is an intimate memoir of the writer as a young man. It is also a sweeping personal account that no one else could provide ? a deeply moving, unparalleled document of rock and revolution in America.
