Description
An ambitious suite of phenomenal pop power and originality, Motor-Cycle chronicles Lotti Golden’s immersion in New York City’s late-Sixties counterculture. Underscored by a genre-bending soundscape, the action plays out on New York’s East Village and Lower East Side, populated with a coterie of philosopher-lovers, faux gurus, grifters, malcontents, and groupies. Golden would later say that she wrote her memoir as music and lyrics because “a book is too flat.”
Born in Brooklyn, Golden inherited a passion for music and art from her parents. As a teen, she began writing original songs, discovering a distinctive talent as both wordsmith and vocalist. In 1966, 16-year-old Golden landed a publishing deal with Bob Crewe’s Saturday Music as a staff songwriter – a dream gig which would give her the opportunity to hone her songwriting skills and produce song demos. Even with this early success, Golden had other plans. She was not just a songwriter – she was an artist, with her own story to tell.
Though only 16 when she started writing the songs that would become part of Motor-Cycle, Golden wrote candidly and compellingly about a world quite different from the fading norms of 1950s America and the flower-power clichés of the 1960s, with vividly personal accounts of street life that presaged urban troubadours like Jim Carroll, Bruce Springsteen, and Patti Smith.
“You feel immortal at that age,” she says. “You feel you can take a chance, and it won’t burn you. Of course, it does end up burning you in many ways, but you can’t be afraid of it. If you fear it, then you won’t be able to tell your story or learn anything. So, you try to stay true to who you are, and write the story. But I didn’t write a book; I wrote an album.”
In early fall of 1967, Golden was singing in an elevator on her way to a recording session. The door opened and Golden immediately recognized the owner of Saturday Music, producer-arranger-songwriter Bob Crewe. Renowned for his uncanny pop sensibilities and innovative productions, Crewe was already a legend for his work with such artists as Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
Intrigued, Crewe set up a meeting. Golden brought her material to Crewe, who upon hearing the outrageous characters populating her songs, exclaimed, “Good God, who are your friends?” Crewe was sold on the project and began shopping demo tapes to a major label with just the basic rhythm tracks and Golden’s vocal. After just one listen, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, industry giants and execs at Atlantic Records, bought the demo tapes, with Wexler declaring that Golden would be the greatest single pop artist since Aretha Franklin. Golden’s impromptu elevator audition had netted her a high profile, major label signing, and sky-high expectations.
After signing the deal, Golden and Crewe set to work at the famed Studio A at Atlantic Recording Studios, 1841 Broadway, completing the LP in eight sessions. Though Golden had worked out the songs with a “sparser concept of what would be added to basic guitar and vocals,” Crewe had something far bigger in mind. The producer brought a sprawling, multi-dimensional approach to the Golden’s grand songcraft, layering funk grooves, rock riffs, psychedelic soul, Southern blues guitar, big band sounds and myriad of other stylistic elements along with horns, strings, bells, timpani, a boys’ choir, and more.
In certain respects, Motor-Cycle was meant to challenge the listener, especially during an era when pop singles rarely topped the three-minute mark or strayed from a handful of well-worn song structures. All of the original album’s seven tracks are over five minutes and none contain a typical verse/chorus/bridge structure, instead employing radical changes in tempo, genre, and mood. With its ambitious and eclectic musical arrangements, extended instrumental interludes, vivid cast of characters, and storylines that span multiple songs, Motor-Cycle may well be the first rock concept album by a female artist, chronicling the ecstasies and tribulations of a scrappy cohort of outsiders as a metaphor for resurrection and redemption.
Motor-Cycle transported me back to the ’60s in a way not many records do…There’s no irony or second-guessing: Golden’s all in, a psychedelic daughter of the Beat generation, among her equally hippie cohort, in swirls of free-loving, drug-chasing, multiracial, pan-sexual abandon… The album is a mother lode, not unlike Daniel Johnston or The Shaggs, say, for its multi-level fascination. – RICHARD HELL
TRACKLIST:
- Motor-Cycle Michael
- Gonna Fay’s
- A Lot Like Lucifer (Celia Said Long Time Loser)
- The Space Queens (Silky is Sad)
- Who Are Your Friends
- Get Together (With Yourself)
- You Can Find Him
- Annabelle with Bells (Home Made Girl) *
- Sock It To Me Baby/It’s Your Thing *
* CD Only Bonus Track
