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If ever there was a book to make you envious of the unremarkable time and place you were born into, this memoir is surely it. As rock and pop critic for hip New York weekly The Village Voice from the early 60s, Richard Goldstein was among the first to write seriously about rock’n’roll in the New Journalism-influenced style.

And great as his writing is as he recounts his part in the turbulent events of that pivotal decade, his first-person recollections of events such as Civil Rights riots, Andy Warhol’s Factory, the early folk scene and the gay rights movement are every bit as fascinating as his acute and snappy observations of the music and musicians he was obsessed with.

And rest assured that, unlike one early counterculture mag he worked for, each copy of this book is not sealed with a drop of the publisher’s semen…/o:p

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.