“I had never met him before. I’d never seen him around the office. He was elusive,” Golden, now 75, says, looking back on that afternoon in the spring of 1967. “It was amazing. That moment stayed with me. And it’s a moment. We have very short amounts of time to make a decision. You know, should I introduce myself?”

She did, and it worked. Three weeks later, Golden sat in Crewe’s office, guitar in hand, ready to play him the songs that would make up her debut album, Motor-Cycle. “He was blown away,” she recalls. “The very first song, he said, ‘My God, who are your friends?’”

Golden’s friends, it turned out, were a motley band of misfits, underground outcasts who slummed around the East Village and Lower East Side. Drag queens, drug dealers, wannabe artists, and soon-to-be burnouts, all slouching toward Bethlehem and the edge of oblivion — the grimy underbelly to the coming Summer of Love.