Nostalgia Kinky

In the bitterly cold Kentucky winter of 1972 just before I was born there, New York singer songwriter Lotti Golden’s masterful and mysterious Motor-Cycle briefly reappeared in the pages of small local paper The Glasgow Daily Times. Glasgow is located in Barren County, one step over from Monroe, County where I’m from. It’s a strange place that inspired John Carpenter’s Halloween, lost, rural and not the kind of area you’d expect to find a mention of a NYC cult album, but there it is in that paper my Grandmother used to subscribe throughout my frequently unhappy childhood. On a snowy KY day in 1972, local critics (we didn’t have this in Southern KY) Fred Ganter, John B. Smith and Jimmy Lowe took the opportunity for a panel discussion to wax poetic about what they were currently listening to. Most of their choices were fairly standard for ’72 like Laura Nyro, Buck Owens, Wings and the popular Godspell soundtrack but tucked in the middle of the article was John B. Smith absolutely going off on his love for a great out of print album from almost five years before:

“The neglect Lotti has been given is such a terrible thing that I felt someone should let just part of the world know she exists…she’s a cult symbol…her songs are autobiographical and freaky…it’s an experience.”

I must admit when High Moon Records contacted me about listening to and possibly reviewing a cult album from the late sixties I thought I was being punked. Was this some AI bullshit posing as music from the past, like all the destructive nonsense platforms like Spotify are adding? Then I saw the blurb by my friend, hero and fellow Kentuckian Richard Hell praising this album I feared might be a prank and it was like ‘ Woah, what the hell have I missed?”
As usual, a lot.

So who is Lotti Golden?
Well, after immersing myself in her world via High Moon’s exquisite package for the Motor-Cycle release and my own research I can answer the question with this:
Lotti Golden is a poet.
She might also be the missing link between the splintered characters of Lou Reed’s “Sister Ray” and Patti Smith’s opening proclamation, “Jesus Died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
Lotti Golden is the real deal and her debut album Motor-Cycle is one of the most thrilling and vibrant albums I have heard in a very long time.
But first there was the poetry.

Lotti was all over the Buffalo area press as a kid due to her skills as a blossoming young poet. A January 1965 edition of The Canarsie Courier recalled her reciting as a student poet Laurette “Ode” to a transfixed audience of her peers and instructors. High Moon’s beautifully curated booklet that comes with the reissue includes details about her time at Canarsie High and her childhood in New York. Her parents Seymore and Anita loved film, music and esoteric art and it was this incredibly vibrant environment Lotti was raised in, with each passing year giving her new influences to draw on forming her own work. She even recalled her dad’s habit of “jive talk”, so the language of poetry surrounded her youth. Dylan, European art films and classic Jazz all played into this poetical place a young Lotti came of age in. What a wonderful time.

Like Lou Reed, Lotti cut her teeth in the NYC songwriting world of the mid-sixties. Lou ended up over at Pickwick but Lotti, inspired by legendary Brill Building’s craft, landed a deal with Bob Crewe’s Saturday Music. Even as a teen Lotti’s incredible songwriting skills were enough to get her an impossible to land staff role with Crew’s group and it eventually led to Motor-Cycle.

Poets find different paths. Lou Reed and John Cale needed those early generic songwriting years for The Velvet Underground, Jim Carroll needed smack as a youth for The Basketball Diaries, Debbie Harry needed a series of often demeaning jobs for Blondie and Patti Smith needed to face the wall of factory life for Horses. For Lotti, it was not only her work with Crew and her own youthful obsession with the arts, for the eventual Motor-Cycle she’d (like Lou Reed) use the opportunity to draw inspiration from the many colorful figures she met and friends she loved during her time in mid-sixties New York.

High Moon details Lotti’s friendship with a number of characters that eventually find these way into Motor-Cycle’s grooves. Most appeared in Lotti’s life after graduating high school in ’67. She’d bat around NYC and California meeting people, gathering inspiration and stories. While she’s out in California for a year The Velvet Underground and Nico appears. The album, a notorious failure at the time, still immediately changed everything as did The Doors first album back in Cali. Things were getting dark and a new movement was on the horizon. Over on Staten Island a young up and coming young singer songwriter named David Johansen starting performing with Vagabond Missionaries and 15 year old John Anthony Genzale began playing guitar with local Queens acts The Reign. He’d be known as Johnny Thunders a few years after.
Something was happening.

Produced by Bob Crew and released by Atlantic Records, Motor-Cycle should have been a smash on par with the early work of Bib Brother and Holding Company out in San Francisco. Written entirely by the still teenage Golden, the seven track concept album is absolutely thrilling stuff. High Moon points out that it may very well be the first concept album by a female, but even more Lotti’s writing for the album predates both The Pretty Things S.F. Sorrow and The Who’s Tommy. Frank Sinatra might have invented the concept album in the fifties but these new Rock Operas (as my man Pete Townshend so eloquently named them) were an entirely different beast and Motor-Cycle was amongst the first. Hell the material even predates The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society by a year. Ultimately released in May, 1969, Motor-Cycle emerges as one of the first great Rock Operas, making it far more than just an essential lost album from the sixties.

Arriving like a strange collision between proto-punk and Jimmy Webb’s audacious song-cycles, Motor-Cycle is a frenetic and impossible to resist collection that immediately shows Golden as one of the great figures of the Sixties’ New York scene. Featuring the powerful and even at times overwhelming Crew arrangements and production, Motor-Cycle is a demanding listen that combines all kinds of avant-garde and commercial elements together. The songs are uncommonly long for the period mixing jazz, folk, acid-rock, soul and noise collages and throughout Lotti leads us through life in New York in the mid sixties surrounded by diversity, beautifully clouded in a druggy haze. It’s a muscular impressive collection of songs…super literate and powerful.

Opening with the eight minute messianic mindfuck “Motor-Cycle Michael”, Lotti’s album is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. It sounds futuristic and yet very of its time. In his typically incredible notes, Richard Hell mentions how much hearing this album took him back to the sixties, and it does very much belong to that decade but like the most subversive music of the period it transcends it. Listening to it feels like you have wandered into a strange NYC night club surrounded by beatniks, hippies, early goths and whatever other beautiful freaks you care to mention. Motor-Cycle is to my ears a real celebration of diversity with lofty spiritual ideas….personified by the albums’ jaw-dropping conclusion that hears Lotti machine-gunning her poetry to every spiritual guru out there as if she’s daring them to follow along:

“I found Jesus,
I found moses.
I found Aphrodite,
sweet Aphrodite.
I found Zoroaster,
I was digging Dionysius,
rappin with Isis,
talkin with Buddha,
walking with Buddha,
him, I found him,
I found Abraxas,
I found Che,
I found Moses,
I found Jesus,
I found Jesus,
I found Eldridge, oh yeah,
I found Eldridge, oh yeah,
where is he?
rappin with the angels,
I found Michael.”

I mean goddamn, that’s how you end an album. Fuck, that’s the stuff.

The whole album is like that, at times Lotti sounding like a deranged Maria McKee interrupting a church service with stories of meeting lucifer and hints of illicit sex and casual drug-use. The major highlight for me is “The Space Queens (Silky is Sad)”, a terrifyingly engrossing tale that sounds like an impossible meeting between Kentuckian Jackie De Shannon’s rural based poetry combined with Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen’s Northeastern packed character studies. Running over 7 minutes, “The Space Queen” is one of sixties rock great moments inviting any listening to the “party in 7 D, where everybody’s gonna be.” With Motor-Cycle, Lotti Golden creates a fantastical world based on her own unforgettable world experience and she communicates all of the confusion, joy and dark romance that youth can bring.

Of course, Motor-Cycle failed to sell. America sucks at nurturing our young artists and always has. That’s just the way it has gone for so many of our greatest and most daring figures. And Motor-Cycle is daring as fuck. Nearly sixty years after its release, it still sounds ferociously vibrant and utterly impressive. I was completely blown away by both Motor-Cycle and Lotti’s story, which ultimately found her back in the world of professional songwriter in the seventies. She’d cut another album in 71, perform in the Jazz world but Lotti, like her masterpiece, gradually slipped far out of view, making High Moon’s reissue of Motor-Cycle an especially welcome one.

High Moon’s Motor-Cycle is one of the best reissues I have come across in some time. Remastered immaculately for new vinyl and CD pressings, Motor-Cycle leaps out at the listening from the frantic opening to the final Lennon like mantra. Pressed on a high quality black vinyl, the collection includes a lyric sheet and a remarkable 30 page book packed with new writing, vintage pieces and beautiful photos from Lotti’s own collection. It is an absolutely awesome release and I’m so grateful to High Moon as this wildly unforgettable album most likely would have remained off my radar.

The CD and streaming version of Motor-Cycle includes two bonus tracks, the amazing “Annabelle with Bells (Home Made Girl)” and the studio-forced single “Sock It To Me Baby/It’s Your Thing”, released in a frantic effort to save the album’s failed release. It sadly didn’t work. These tracks are availble on a deluxe 45 as well, which can be ordered along with the vinyl over at High Moon. I’m grateful the company chose to leave these off the vinyl release, as its seven tracks are such a perfectly conceived song cycle on their own.

Motor-Cycle might have vanished for decades but Lotti Golden is back in a big way. On top of the reissue, Lotti is getting the chance for the live performances of the record she was robbed of back in ’69. Scheduled September 25 at 7 PM at New York’s Private Curtain Theater on 85th street, Lotti Golden will wow audiences lucky enough to see her. I only wish I was closer to NYC so I could attend.

Motor-Cycle is out now and, needless to say, I highly and strongly recommend it. For fans of New York, popular American music and great songwriting in general it has become seemingly overnight one of the essential recordings of the sixties, Never mind that the ‘overnight’ actually took nearly six decades, Motor-Cycle has arrived tanked-up awaiting the vanishing point.
Do not miss this chance to own a copy.
I’ll meet you down at Max’s where they are spinning it.
We’ll smoke, dance and look cooler than we’ve ever imagined.

-Jeremy Richey, September 2025-