Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the 60s by Richard Goldstein

by
November 2015, no. 376

Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the 60s by Richard Goldstein

Bloomsbury, $29.99 pb, 224 pp, 9781408858127

Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the 60s by Richard Goldstein

by
November 2015, no. 376

Richard Goldstein, one of the first rock critics, has always occupied a weird place in the history of music criticism. His memoir could have sat uneasily as an attempt to justify and reconcile his position, but instead, Goldstein taps into a strangely confessional vein, tracing his history from the Bronx to the Ballroom, finding his home at the Village Voice, with honesty and wit.

The honesty is welcome, even though Goldstein suffers at times from a want of humility. This see-saws throughout: dryly bullish about his role in the countercultural wars, he will just as readily empty the insecurities of the unconscious onto the page. As his engagement with rock'n'roll and pop culture intensifies, so do his cutting rejoinders. His encounters with intellectuals – flinching from Susan Sontag's dry barbs; seeing Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary as the hucksters they are – are hilarious.

Jon Dale reviews 'Another Little Piece of My Heart' by Richard Goldstein

Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the 60s

by Richard Goldstein

Bloomsbury, $29.99 pb, 224 pp, 9781408858127

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.