The Flowers Lied

by Michael Goldberg

Remember back when you first wanted to become a rock critic? Or when you first started to read music reviews? Those are the days of The Flowers Lied, Michael Goldberg's new rock ‘n’ roll coming-of-age novel.

Writerman, the narrator, is a rock critic wannabe obsessed with music – favorites include Captain Beefheart, the Blue Oyster Cult, the 13th Floor Elevators, John Coltrane, Pearls Before Swine, Slim Harpo, Neil Young, Sam Rivers and, of course, Bob Dylan.

This novel is for anyone who grew up in the ‘60s or '70s—or anyone who wondered what it was really like to be a teenager back then.

Witness Writerman fighting his record buying addition at Odyssey Records as store owner Lucky Larry guzzles Green Death and applies the “upsell," attending a Neil Young concert in 1973 and confronting Neil backstage, pursuing the Visions of Johanna chick of his dreams and ending up naked at the top of a Ferris wheel, alone with his best friend’s girl.

Genres: Music, Fiction

342 pages, Paperback

Published November 29, 2015

About the author

So what do you wanna know?

My second novel, The Flowers Lied, a rock 'n' roll coming-of-age story, is now available. It's the second book in the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0990...

"If Lester Bangs had ever published a novel it might have read like this frothing debut..." – Rolling Stone

“Radioactive as Godzilla" – legendary rock critic Richard Meltzer

“Kerouac in the 21st Century.” – Jack Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally

“Penned in a staccato amphetamine grammar…” – Simon Warner, author of "Text And Drugs And Rock 'N' Roll: The Beats And Rock Culture"

“Holden Caulfield meets Lord Buckley?” – founder of The Realist Paul Krassner

And so is my first novel, True Love Scars.

http://www.amazon.com/Scars-Freak-Sce...

Culture Critic Roy Trakin picked True Love Scars as one of the ten best books of 2014. Read his review here:

http://www.daysofthecrazy-wild.com/cu...

Praise about True Love Scars:

“Michael Goldberg is comparable to Kerouac in a 21st century way, someone trying to use that language and energy and find a new way of doing it.” – Mark Mordue, author of Dastgah: Diary of a Head Trip

“True Love Scars reads like a fever dream from the dying days of the Summer of Love. Keyed to a soundtrack of love and apocalypse, Writerman pitches headlong into a haze of drugs, sex and confusion in search of what no high can bring: his own redemption. Read it and be transformed.” – Alina Simone, occasional Op/Ed columnist for the New York Times, author of Note to Self and You Must Go and Win

Some of my background:

When I was a kid, rock ’n’ roll and literature made life worth living.

Or rather, it was literature that rocked my world—“Treasure Island,” “Crime and Punishment,” the Hardy Boys books, the Oz books, all those sexy 007 novels—until I turned 12, and then rock ’n’ roll—The Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, The Yardbirds—blew my mind.

Well girls trumped both, but that’s another story.

Beginning in 1984 I spent 10 crazy years talking to everyone from George Harrison and George Clinton to Brian Wilson and Stevie Wonder for Rolling Stone where I was an Associate Editor and a Senior Writer. My writing has also appeared in Wired, Esquire, Vibe, Details, Downbeat, NME and many more.

In 1994 I’d founded Addicted To Noise (ATN), the highly influential music web site. Newsweek magazine called me an “Internet visionary.”

I joined forces with SonicNet in 1997. I was a senior vice-president and editor in chief at SonicNet from March 1997 through May 2000.

I currently publish the video-and-audio-intense culture blog, Days of the Crazy-Wild at www.daysofthecrazy-wild.com.

Any other questions?

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Normally when I win a book on Goodreads I read and review it rather quickly. This didn't take me a while to read, I just had to wait for my mailbox robbing best friend to finish it first. She was getting my mail for me at the time this was delivered, saw that it was a book (she reads even more than I do), opened it, and had to read it. She loved it. For me it was good, but not the same love she had, but I think part of this is due to her love of all things rock and roll. At 34 she is still a groupie for husband's band, ran naked at the last Ozzfest.

This is the second book in what will be a trilogy. I do feel that I may have liked this more had I read the first as it is a continuation of the first. This follows "Writerman," a young man obsessed with all things rock and roll. This is a coming of age story not for teens due to the content; drug and alcohol use.

This story is almost chaotic at times the way it bounces around, but I think this is intentional to help with the overall feel of the book. The writing itself is solid, and no editing errors stood out to me.

Recommended to anyone who is curious, or wants a flashback of the 70's and it's rock and roll culture.

[Silas Valentino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thumb through any college student newspaper and you’ll read them there. Making the cases for music no one thought to make: is Lemmy God and if so does that mean God just died? Sure 'Exile' was when The Stones solidified themselves but doesn’t 'Beggar’s' do it in half the time – plus with the mighty clout of “Stray Cat Blues”?

Whatever esoteric dribble that pours out of these young music journalist’s fingertips, seldom told is the tale behind their keys. Crowe gave us cinema with 'Almost Famous' but Goldberg gives us depth.

Book two, 'The Flowers Lied,' is 'Empire Strikes Back'…'Godfather Part II'… 'Aliens' – well, this claim can’t really be made for the trilogy will conclude next year and I have yet to read the final book, but the essence of a trilogy is always in the sequel. This when all bets are off and right hands are chopped off in the name of dignity. In this case, it’s love – because it typically always is about love – and how our young, Caulfieldian narrator edges closer to youth’s inevitable clearing and adulthood’s abandonment.

Here he’s a sophomore at a U.C. circa ‘72 in a lifestyle utterly sophomoric; falling in love to Dylan’s romantic betrayal “It Ain’t Me, Babe” while dissecting the complications of his best pal’s lady friend via lyrics found in a Cat Stevens single. Music is all our humble Writerman knows and it’s the very lens Goldberg uses to color his year-in-the-life tale of “love, truth, innocence and loyalty” – each of which are tested or squandered.

A fictional quote from a fictional character begins our novel (“Turn on, tune in, drop out my ass. It was a utopian pipe dream” – Theodore Lardusky) and the following pages are spent confirming this myth’s validity. Morals tested and laurels rested, rock ‘n’ roll may have been here to stay but the stench lines sizzling out of its room indicate a bloated bust. Not the kind of truth easily fed to a wide-eyed romantic in search for his version of a vision chick: Dylan’s “Johanna.” The arrogance of our subject is the very thing keeping this rock ‘n’ roll dream from an abrupt awakening, an ethos that has continued to ring all the way to journalism college graduations circa 2014.

As 'The Flowers Lied' draws to its climatic conclusion (on top of a classic Santa Cruz landmark of all places), the fluid in the stolen Zippo lighter used to ignite our Writerman’s fire begins to dissipate. He remembers his story the way Vonnegut remembered the war: unstuck in time collecting various flashes between future’s past. Directing his lover in a class project film, he fancies himself an illustrious director, tinkering and manipulating his love into something that fits his ideological frame. Tragedy abounds – though when does it not?

For anyone who has ever classified themselves as a music journalist, rock critic or pen, the story of our hero is the making of a fate dictated by 33⅓ rotations; destined to be flipped at the half and turned over for Side B. But if anything else, it’s worthy of another play or reread.

[Michele Swide · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Goldberg's new book, THE FLOWERS LIED is a wild party with sacred eyes.
Writerman is neither bad or good, Buddha or saint. He's real. And he's a searing read. Why?
Because he sees behind the mask where human psychology and errant freakster bro meet. He's kind and funny. He's wanton and reckless and tender. Writerman's misspent youth is his own Homer's odyssey. Rilke says one must live the questions. This book is all about the pathos in between and beyond good and evil. The author has the force to look inside. Characters are gutted like fish and put back together again. This is a crazy but worthwhile voyeuristic cave of desires acted out in a seductive decade fraught with mystery and glamour. Wrtierman will steal your heart and force you to look inward. You might even think twice before you reach for your own mask. This book might charm you enough to buy a black bowler hat and sit in front of a gilded mirror naked, and peer into your own soul. What do you see?

[Motazz Soliman · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.0 -2.5

Thank you to the author and the publisher for graciously providing a copy, as part of a Goodreads Giveaway.

For a reader of a younger generation, The Flowers Lied had an interesting pull of showing how colorfully much rock music influenced (from the viewpoint of the protagonists) the ethos and the spirit of the pop culture scene and the main youth environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s America. Far from passive-agressive, the tensions, aspirations, sentiments are bared out in the open, stewed in a concoction of resentment to the mainstream societal norms, utopic youth isolationism, and a confused blending between "freakster bros" and flower power/counterculture of the late 1960s and the glammed-up personas of excessive makeup and cross-dressing beginning to taking root in the proceeding decade. Indeed, are so many references made to mainly emerging and already major rock artists/albums (coupled with nods to earlier and contemporary jazz greats) that a reader could've assumed the novelist wanted his work to double as ode to, and compendium of, a few music genres. The spirit is also captured in the novel's (predominantly) colloquial diction mimicking everyday conversation. That writing style helps to contextualize characters in a way perhaps similar to what Steinbeck achieved in Of Mice and Men , [however more easily digestible than Steinbeck's.] Although, continuous use of repetition in words and phrases for emphasis, generosity of sentence fragments and run-ons, era-specific jargon, superfluous articles and prepositions, and crude language may likely not appeal to everyone.

Two central plot-lines emerge in The Flowers Lied . One involves main protagonist's Michael Stein's stumbling through murky waters of youth angst, from self-absorption to a more thoughtful disposition while starting his college sophomore year. The nerve-bone and heart of this unsettling transition finds itself in a budding attraction for Elise, a troubled art student afflicted by a past relationship who opens up slowly to Michael. Tribulations wrought out in Elise's "beautiful sadness" of wanting to regain enough trust in men to connect with Michael and her fear of physical proximity intersect with Michael's own internal struggles between his lusty selfishness for self-gratification and his pursuit of a deeper connectivity . With multiple scenes of tenderness, arguments, hesitations, doubts, longing, consolations (and very suggestive graphic phases---definitely not for teens!), this roller coaster is the novel's greatest asset. An especially poignantly evocative scene towards the end restructures its multifaceted and multi-paced complexities, re-framed as a class project. This moment, in particular more than any other, forces Michael to peer "beneath the surface of the surface" for the "authentic real", while all scenic elements living and inanimate become characters in their own right. Yet, in the broader scheme of the novel, this only receives a temporary, albeit significant presentation.

The other, lesser-pronounced central plot-line to emerge follows Michael's pursuit of all things rock. Near-obsessive purchases of albums accompany debates with fellow fans over personal preferences to artists and efforts to report on trends and events in the rock music world. Revealed through a few flashes of interactions with an established rock music critic exists in occasional fragments throughout the book, disappointment (perhaps, disillusionment) over what he learns about the rock world---the idolized rock music critics' world--- eventually and ultimately sets in for Michael. A prelude to some final further cascades, that disillusionment ironically serves as a incongruent focal point in passing to tie the two plotlines together. A confusion of rejection and final explicit epiphany whose abruptness seems a little forced after several hundred pages of the novel suggested a regular contrarian pattern of behavior and attitude (not warranting or facilitating epiphany) .

Thus, sandwiched between these two narratives are various sorts of happenings, ruminations, themes, and ideas: hard drugs and alcohol; loyalty to oneself versus authenticity towards, and/or pressure from, others; the pitfalls and the highs of the grasp for freedom and risks; inter-generational tensions and questions over masculinity, identity, and self-discovery. However, these elements create an impression of contributing to a meandering structure for the novel. Except for Elise, Michael, Sausalito Cowboy, and Jim, the characters seem to function as merely antagonists or pivots---the "anti-Mikes" or "anti-Elises" in Michael's world. Punctuated by mini-climaxes mini-troughs, and split-second almost-afterthought assessments, some narratives are abruptly left hanging with no further conclusive actions or developments. Interesting hints of conversations and observations are teased out in the twists of such interactions, but in the overall framework of the several-hundred-page novel they appear as faint episodic blips. Despite the length devoted to Elise's story and background, one gets the impression that it, too, remains unresolved in the grand scheme of things. Finally, some behavior on the part of some characters that would be inconsistent or unreasonable with their experiences, backgrounds, or personalities as laid out. Then again, maybe that was the exact purpose: dazed, confusion, awe, steps forward, many steps backwards, sideways steps. Dynamics that provide enough challenges, which were for the most part captured, but with some clunkiness and dragging.

If the underlying motif or style of The Flowers Lied could be personified, it might as well be imagined as a bit of The Wonder Years' Kevin Arnold sprinkled with a little American Pie's Van Wilder.

[Simon Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delivered in a sparky, yet splintered, patois, falling somewhere between Beat spontaneity and punk insolence, Michael Goldberg's The Flowers Lied picks up where 2014’s True Love Scars left off, as the second part of the ‘Freak Scene Dream’ trilogy carries his narrator protagonist Michael Stein into further labyrinths of neurotic insecurity, a campus caper where boy might meet girl but where the roses of romance are snared with the jagged thorns of rejection and betrayal.

Not that this is any mere love story: it's the tale of the would-be rock 'n' roll writer who still believes that his new journalistic prose, and his passion for Dylan and Beefheart, can lead him towards some kind of elevated self-fulfilment. But will an enthusiasm for the Stones or the New York Dolls, a blind belief in the existential promises of the electric guitar, be enough to compensate for wretched affairs and failing friendships?

Achingly self-conscious, riddled with agonising self-doubt, Stein has the flavour of a re-cast Holden Caulfield, as this raw-nerved rite of passage travels some way from Salinger’s immediate post-war world and places itself in the early 1970s at a moment when the hippie dream seems to have lost its enticing glow.

The very title of the novel is a comment on the fact the hopes and dreams of the Sixties have largely evaporated and Stein feels caught on the lip between the fading utopian buzz and a decade hurtling towards a state of nihilistic disillusion. Writerman, as he styles himself, is keen to reject the cynicism of the age but the pallor of personal crisis tends to cloud his day-to-day judgement.

Goldberg's skill in this dark comi-tragedy is to energetically convey his feelings – the gauge on the emotional candour button is set to 9 – and he does this through a variety of techniques: a version of the gonzo syntax, occasional stream of consciousness ramblings and a secondary internalised narrative providing commentary on his own inner curdlings.

For readers who recognise the names – the rock stars, of course, but also the great rock writers of the day, like Christgau and Willis, who also pepper the pages from time to time – this is an engaging affair, as hot music, the powerful influence of music criticism and the spice of emotional turbulence become entangled in a tornado of twisting moods: the brief elation of a Fender lick is quickly balanced by a carousel of catastrophe; the ups are fleeting, the downs last longer.

The Flowers Lied, like its predecessor, has an edgy, fractious manner, but once you get used to the frenetic style, the prose moves forward with impressive vigour and the story, quite self-indulgent in many ways, has a definite resonance for a certain generation. The fact that this second instalment ends somewhat in mid-air might be a criticism, but it certainly leaves you hungry for the concluding episode, due in early 2017.

[Frank Tortorici · Rating 5 out of 5]

Headline: Hard-learned Lessons About Growing Up

For Michael Goldberg's alter-ego Michael Stein it is always the Nixon era. Fortunately for his readers, this also means the time of the greatest and most seminal rock music. Throughout The Flowers Lied are references to Goldberg’s musician heroes (Dylan, Captain Beefheart, The Who, Led Zeppelin) and their greatest works. In this novel, the second of his Freak Scene Dream Trilogy, Goldberg charts Stein's growth in handling relationships and his struggles to become a rock critic. And he does it with the freakster bro humor that can come only from the Goldberg mind. If you're a music lover, you have to love a book that describes a character as having Black Oak Arkansas hair. But it's not all for laughs. Stein's interaction with his parents and the college girls in his life provide finely observed character studies that say a lot about the differences between the generations and how twentysomethings view the peaks and valleys of life. Enter Stein's world to be entertained, but be prepared to come away with hard-learned lessons about growing up. And in what other work of fiction will you find a meaningful encounter with Neil Young? I say bring on part three.