Lotti Golden wasn’t about to miss her big chance. At the age of 17, while still a senior at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn, she’d landed a staff songwriting job with Saturday Music, a song publisher in midtown Manhattan. But Golden had bigger ambitions. So, when her boss, Bob Crewe, stepped into a crowded elevator with her one day at work, she knew she had to pitch him on making a record.
“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.
Crewe, who made his name writing and producing pop hits for the Four Seasons and Frankie Valli, had never heard anything like it. He agreed on the spot to record the album.
Motor-Cycle was a daring way to make an entrance, a comedic rock melodrama that blasted Golden’s seedy world out in Technicolor. There were almost no bridges or choruses, just elaborate song suites that played like Motown on an acid trip. Atlantic Records signed her to a contract, and in the months leading up to the album’s release, in May 1969, the pieces all appeared to fall into place. She was profiled by Look magazine, was written up in Newsweek, did photo shoots for Vogue, and had one of her songs recorded by Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles.
“I was really expecting a push. But, you know, I was so young. I was 19,” Golden says. “I figured, ‘The biggest guys in the industry are behind me. I can’t lose.'”
Except it didn’t happen that way. Atlantic inexplicably fumbled Motor-Cycle‘s release, failing to promote it or release a proper single, and even refused to put a band together for Golden to play live shows. Virtually overnight, the dream evaporated. She never recorded for Atlantic again, and, after cutting one more album she’d just as soon forget two years later, never released more music, period.
Now, after 56 years out of print, Motor-Cycle has a chance to be rescued from obscurity by a deluxe reissue from High Moon Records, the boutique label known for reissuing cult favorites like Gene Clark and Love’s Arthur Lee. The album survived for decades as an exceedingly rare cult classic, a supremely strange and inspired snapshot of New York City counterculture. Its seven songs careen wildly from rock to jazz to R&B to show tunes, nearly half of them clocking in around eight minutes and none of them under five.
For punk legend Richard Hell, who first moved to Lower Manhattan in the late Sixties, Motor-Cycle comes as a revelation. “I lived among the people she writes about,” Hell marvels, people whom he calls “the drug heads and cheap street mystics” looking to drop out of society. He hadn’t heard the record until High Moon asked him to contribute liner notes nearly a decade ago. “This record is the first one I’ve heard that’s actually a person living that life on the streets, describing their environment,” he says. “So, that was really interesting. It was really evocative for me.”
It’s not for everyone, though, as Lenny Kaye points out. “It is one of the strangest records I’ve ever heard,” says Kaye, a founding member of the Patti Smith Group. “The tale she’s telling is so outré, the cast of characters is so strangely misbegotten, that the chances Bob Crewe takes in the arrangements and her own vocal interpretations really create a listening experience that is totally idiosyncratic and unique.
“It really leaves you off balance,” Kaye adds, “at every moment in time.”
Today, Golden still bears a clear resemblance to the girl in the leather jacket from her old press photos. She sits in the lobby of an Upper East Side hotel, her jet black hair matching her outfit, and wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses that she doesn’t take off. Golden was reared on jazz and experimental theater by her parents, who ran a lunch counter in Brooklyn. As a young girl, she pored over the playbills they brought home from the Jewel Box Revue, a traveling drag dinner show, or the off-off Broadway Theatre of the Absurd in Greenwich Village.
After getting a guitar for her 11th birthday, Golden started writing her own songs. She’d record herself on a reel-to-reel tape machine in her bedroom, trying to sing like Ronnie Spector or the Shangri-Las. It didn’t take long for her to work up the nerve to hop the subway and shop her songs to publishing houses in the city, including at the influential Brill Building.
“That’s how it was then,” she says, batting aside the fact that she was only 15 at the time. “You had to play your song live in their office, take a guitar, the whole thing. And then, if they liked it, they’d sign it, and you’d make a demo.” Her brassy, soulful voice made her a perfect candidate to cut demos, which helped land her the gig at Saturday Music. It paid $100 a week.
She was also keen to study theater, so, while in junior high, she enrolled in acting classes at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. It was there she met the cast of characters who populated Motor-Cycle, while trying her hand at playwriting and sharing the occasional class with the likes of Mia Farrow. Most important among her new acquaintances was an older boy named Michael, a would-be guru who rode a motorcycle and began taking her around to neighborhood parties.
“It was a crazy culture that I had no idea existed, but it was interesting to me,” says Golden, who also got a taste of the more glamorous scenes at Andy Warhol’s Factory and the Chelsea Hotel. “So, I’m approaching it like a journalist. But, you know, you could get caught up in it.”
As for how caught up she got, Golden just laughs. “It’s gradual. Like watching your hair and nails grow,” she says, wiggling her fingers to show off a clutch of large, silver rings.
The summer after graduating high school, Golden traveled to North Carolina to study at the Flat Rock Playhouse outside Asheville. While there, she befriended a pregnant single mother named Silky who’d been left by her husband for another man. Like Michael, Silky became a muse — and a close friend. The two of them formed the core of an ensemble cast that Golden originally envisioned for an absurdist play, but soon put to music. “They all liked being immortalized that way,” she says of her friends.
Work didn’t begin on the album until the fall of 1968, but once it did, Golden says the entire thing was recorded in an intense two days over two eight-hour sessions. Crewe insisted she sing her vocals live in one take, with no overdubs. “It was so difficult. It was like you had to be an athlete,” she says, twisting her limbs tightly at the memory. Golden tackles the marathon takes with sheer exuberance, scatting and improvising her way through the many abrupt shifts in style. One minute, she’s the soul vamp on “Motor-Cycle Michael.” The next, she howls with feral energy on “Gonna Fay’s.”
“She just has an amazing talent,” Hell says of Golden’s singing. He likens Motor-Cycle to the Velvet Underground, without the detachment or irony. “I got off on her enthusiasm,” he says. “It’s the earnestness. She’s just all-in throughout it. And she means it. You can feel that. It’s pretty lovable.”
The songs themselves were embellished to an outrageous degree, which Golden wasn’t always happy about. Crewe layered on guitars, pianos, strings, horns, and even a children’s choir with the schlocky verve of a Las Vegas music director. “You’d think 24 tracks would be enough,” Golden muses. “Not for Bob Crewe.” A recently unearthed demo of “Dance to the Rhythm of Love,” the song Patti LaBelle released in March 1969, gives an indication of how Golden envisioned Motor-Cycle — a wiry, amped-up soul-rocker that sees her play the belting band leader.
Yet, conceptually, Crewe’s approach works: The gleeful overproduction only enhances the absurdity of Golden’s lyrics. “A lot of the stories are satire, so he took that satire and translated it musically,” she says. “Looking back, I can respect that.”
Though not exactly a concept album, Motor-Cycle functions as a loose song cycle that follows Golden on a drug-assisted spirit quest. It starts with the cosmic joyride of “Motor-Cycle Michael,” takes a turn when “A Lot Like Lucifer” reveals Michael as a vampiric huckster, and bends toward self-actualization with the catchy kiss-off “Who Are Your Friends,” which was inspired by Crewe’s initial reaction to hearing Golden’s songs. The journey comes full circle with the full-throated gospel of “You Can Find Him,” where she decides no man, god, or substance holds the key to enlightenment.
Motor-Cycle is at its most audacious when it leans into Golden’s episodic storytelling, like on “The Space Queens,” her retelling of Silky’s search for “a real butch guy,” and “Gonna Fay’s,” a ghoulish tale of a night of partying gone awry. “The Space Queens” jumps from a shotgun wedding in Georgia to a drag party in New York, via a Central Park baptism and a ludicrous intercom exchange with a hungover drug dealer named Buzz. “Gonna Fay’s” simply kills off its main character midway through, leaving her party guests to callously seek their high at someone else’s pad.
Golden played the part of the delinquent flower child so convincingly that her reputation soon preceded her. When a then-unknown Bob Gruen was hired to do a photo shoot for the album, he found her to be nothing like the “wild girl” Crewe had told him about. “She was really sweet,” Gruen says. “She was a very strong, independent person. She had her own ideas.” One of his photos, in which Golden peers through Venetian blinds, was used on the back cover. It was his first professional music gig. “That was a huge moment for me,” he says.
Why Atlantic so badly mishandled Motor-Cycle‘s release remains a mystery. Larger forces at play within the company likely worked against Golden: The company’s recent acquisition by Warner Bros. had greatly altered its priorities, with co-founder Ahmet Ertegun — once a personal champion of Golden’s — particularly fixated on British hard-rock acts like Led Zeppelin. While Golden says it would’ve been easy to edit certain songs down as singles, Kaye believes the record may have been a hard sell for radio play.
“I mean, she went for it, and I applaud that — you know, let’s just do something as avant as you can within the boundaries of pop music,” he says. “But that’s a gamble.”
Arguably, Golden may have just been too weird for a major label of the day to know what to do with her, especially as a solo female artist singing her own rock songs. Gruen suspects as much.
“I don’t know if there’s a lot else she could have done. It was a very misogynistic period,” he says. “It was really up to the whim of an A&R man, and they had their prejudices. Certainly, it would have been difficult for them to figure out a way to promote a single woman, who was a powerful person, who was not, like, a sweet folk singer or something they could relate to.”
Golden is more pragmatic. She blames the fact that she didn’t have a manager, and therefore had no one to help fight when she needed it most. She points to the example of Laura Nyro and her then-manager, future record mogul David Geffen, whom she recalls seeing together at a party at Crewe’s apartment. “He was shadowing her everywhere at that point. He was so dedicated to her,” Golden says. “And I’m convinced now, with hindsight and my knowledge of the industry, that’s what I didn’t have.” (Not that Nyro was destined for stardom, either: She experienced only limited commercial success during her lifetime, with broader recognition of her work coming after her death in the Nineties.)
Distressed by the record’s flailing fortunes, Crewe tried pressuring Atlantic to throw more support behind it. A meek attempt to give Golden help in the form of hiring Barbra Streisand’s manager, Martin Erlichman, proved useless. “I was, like, on Mars to him,” she scoffs. Crewe himself made things worse when he coaxed the young singer to record a medley of the Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing” and Mitch Ryder’s “Sock It to Me, Baby,” which was then released as the album’s only single without her knowledge.
“That was a terrible mistake,” says Golden, who was asked to sing over a prerecorded track that wasn’t in the right key. “I would never do that as a producer.”
Motor-Cycle‘s failure proved devastating to Golden, who, still shy of her 20th birthday, was thrown into free fall. “It was absolutely soul crushing,” she says. For a brief moment, she slips off her sunglasses and wipes her eyes. In the months after, she admits, her social circle pushed her to dark places. “I had no other friends to fall back on. I put all of my energy into making the record.”
Though still under contract to Atlantic, she’d lost faith in her future there. She decided to break the deal and start afresh. “It was more than a one-album deal,” she confirms, “but I was so disappointed, and without a commitment to make a new album and a commitment to promote me, I wanted a release.” She allowed her Saturday Music contract to lapse, in the process cutting creative ties with Crewe. “I was more interested in my next record.”
In hindsight, trying to make a follow-up so soon after Motor-Cycle wasn’t in her best interests. “I should have grieved the full amount that I needed,” Golden says. “I was seriously depressed.” Instead, she turned her disappointment inward. “You start questioning yourself. So, I stripped all of that off. I stripped off the leather jacket, I stripped off my cat eyes, I stripped off my false eyelashes, and I pared myself down. I purified myself.” Seeing only her failure, she decided to change her music, too. “‘I guess I should, you know, write normal, regular songs,'” she recalls thinking.
She rushed into a new deal with GRT Records out of California, for which she released the bluesy, singer-songwriter-oriented Lotti Golden in 1971. Nothing went right with the experience: The producer showed little interest in developing her ideas, the songs came out half-cooked, and the label quickly hit financial trouble, going out of business entirely a few years later. Today, the album exists only in the odd YouTube rip.
“I wish I had only made Motor-Cycle and I could have left the legacy,” Golden says, “which is wonderful. I’m really proud of it.”
Not yet ready to give up on music, Golden dabbled in music journalism throughout the Seventies, writing for Rolling Stone and Creem, and took up residence singing jazz at Clifford’s Lounge on the Upper West Side. Then came an unlikely second act as a songwriter and producer. It started when she teamed up with Richard Scher to write the disco track “I Specialize in Love,” which, when recorded by Sharon Brown in 1982, reached No. 2 on Billboard‘s Hot Dance Club chart and the U.K. Top 40. “It was big in New York,” Golden remembers. “They would sell records out of the cars on the street.” The pair then founded the electro hip-hop group Warp 9, which went on to score further dance hits with songs like “Nunk” and “Light Years Away.” Those successes earned her a songwriting deal with Island Records.
“It was a happy place for me,” she says. Still, the memories of Motor-Cycle meant she never tried to record music again herself. “I wish that I would have pursued my artistry, but it was too painful for me, obviously,” she acknowledges. “And then when I had success as a writer-producer, I just went with it.”
To Golden’s surprise, Motor-Cycle began to make a reemergence online in the mid-2000s. She opened discussions with Light in the Attic Records about putting together a reissue, only to get a call from High Moon Records saying they’d secured the rights from Warner Bros. That was more than a decade ago. Despite it taking so long to see completion, Golden feels the timing is right: In revisiting her old songs, she was inspired to learn GarageBand in the hopes of recording new demos, which she hadn’t been able to afford to do since losing her home studio through a divorce 25 years ago. Now she’s reworking the album to perform it live.
“I didn’t know if I could do this material, if I’d relate to it,” Golden says. “But I realized there’s a way to connect it with who I am now.” She pulls out her phone and excitedly plays a video of her singing “The Space Queens” with her new band in a local club. “It’s fun to be able to do this. And creatively, it’s just a joy.”
For newer converts like Kaye, simply getting to hear Motor-Cycle in all its extravagance is rewarding enough — even if the album’s return is tinged with a sense of what might have been. “I’d rather have this Lotti Golden album, as bizarre as it is, than have something more predictable, less intriguing,” Kaye insists. “When I heard this record, it just made me happy that it could exist in the world. And if it took me over half a century to hear it, well, I’m glad it’s there for me to hear it.”
“I’m excited for it to be out there and for people to listen, because they should,” Golden says. “Even if the music isn’t your complete jam, you could appreciate it, because it’s so authentic. It’s a time capsule of that period. And I think that’s important.”