At the time of his death from brain cancer in 2022, Peter Goddard was compiling what was intended to be a 20-essay compilation to be titled My Private Rock ‘n’ Roll.Carol Ann Goddard/Supplied
I recently saw the Who play London’s Royal Albert Hall. It was a benefit concert for the Teenage Cancer Trust − the “hope I die before I get old” band raising money so that the young could get old.
Guitarist Pete Townshend cut his finger while thrashing his instrument in windmill fashion. Still bleeding for his audience at the age of 79, he sang Eminence Front, from 1982.
Drinks flow,
People forget
That big wheel spins, the hair thins,
People forget
Forget they’re hiding
In the new book One Foot on the Platform: A Rock ‘N’ Journey, a posthumous release from legendary Toronto rock critic Peter Goddard, are a pair of old stories on the Who (from 1970 in the Toronto Telegram and 1980 in the Toronto Star), as well as a recent essay on the band.
There’s also a sharp piece from 1970 on hype − before the word was even in the dictionary. “Probably a diminutive of hyperbole,” Goddard guessed back then. The column is on the “hyped generation,” and a counterculture that wasn’t rejecting commerce, but using it, subverting it. Hype no longer communicated a product, according to Goddard, “it communicates what we think is our belief.”
So, a generation was told the Moody Blues’ To Our Children’s Children was “perhaps the greatest musical achievement of the past decade!” Or that the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper was a “concept album” and that only the Who’s rock opera Tommy could satisfy one’s intellect.
In other words, it was an eminence front: “A put on,” in Townshend’s words.
If Townshend was the thinking man’s rock star, Goddard was the thinking man’s rock critic.
At the time of his death from brain cancer in 2022, Goddard was compiling what was intended to be a 20-essay compilation to be titled My Private Rock ‘n’ Roll. The intention was to explore how rock is “idiosyncratic and personal and unfathomable at its best,” in his words.
What we have is a colourful collection of writing brimming with intelligence, edited by J.A. Wainwright and published by House of Anansi Press.
Because he didn’t finish the project, the book is fleshed out with archived columns from the Telegram, the Star and The Globe and Mail that not only make for great reading but offer a glimpse into an era when pop-music critics had the access and budgets of which today’s music journalist can only dream.
“It’s two hours after the show, and he’s pacing nervously in a small concrete dressing room,” Goddard wrote in 1980. “There’s a platter of food nearby. He looks pale and tired.”
The “he” was Bruce Springsteen. A newspaper had sent him to Chicago to interview the Boss.
In one of the recent essays, Goddard writes about walking past the Toronto building where the famed Riverboat folk club once lived. It was about to be torn down. Seeing that an historic cultural landmark was about to be demolished and sensing a story, Goddard called the Star’s city desk.
“Never heard of it,” the editor said of the music venue that spawned Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell and Murray McLauchlan.
The wrecking ball Goddard saw dangling over the site of the Riverboat is a metaphor for the effect of rock music in the 1960s and 70s. In rock’s wake, genres such as blues, jazz and folk quickly became nostalgia.
He covered the other music, though. Blues lovers will appreciate Goddard’s concert reviews from The Globe and Mail on Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Muddy Waters and the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
While others considered rock to be invincible, Goddard looked for cracks in the foundation. As early as 1971, he asked if genre had burned out and if the culture had fizzled.
“Three years ago, I walked into a little underground paper, found the place swarming with freaks, but it was a casual, joyful sort of chaos, and things got done,” he wrote. “Just a week ago, I walked into another underground pop magazine, and it seemed like the entrance to a mausoleum. A promoter walked in, then out. So did an agent. Then a record company executive. And, in the corners, were piles of the magazine, still unsold.”
Goddard said he didn’t want this book to be about nostalgia. Neither is it an encyclopedia. Rather, it is an interpretation of a history still unsettled. The columns and concert reviews on Fats Domino, Miles Davis, Anne Murray, Lightfoot, Neil Young, Janis Ian, the Monkees, the Band, David Bowie, Neil Diamond and dozens of more stars serve as context.
And although the recent essays do look back, his analysis was continuing. He has been writing this book since 1967. Shame he didn’t get to complete it, but what he left is worth any hype you might hear.