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For Immediate Release
February 7, 2025
HIGH MOON RECORDS ANNOUNCES THE RETURN OF
LEGENDARY NYC SINGER-SONGWRITER-PRODUCER LOTTI GOLDEN’S
MIND-BLOWING ALBUM, MOTOR-CYCLE
1969 SOUL-BEAT-PSYCH MASTERPIECE LAUNCHED
NOTEWORTHY SONGWRITING/PRODUCING CAREER
AND GROUNDBREAKING WORK IN NYC’S NASCENT HIP-HOP AND ELECTRO SCENES
OUT-OF-PRINT FOR 55 YEARS — THIS UNDERGROUND CULT CLASSIC
TO BE REISSUED ON LP AND RELEASED ON CD FOR THE FIRST TIME
GORGEOUS LP AND CD BOOKS, FEATURING EXCLUSIVE ESSAYS BY RICHARD HELL AND
DAVID TOOP, AND A TROVE OF NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOGRAPHS
BY PIONEERING ROCK PHOTOGRAPHER BARON WOLMAN
“DANCE TO THE RHYTHM OF LOVE (BRILL BUILDING DEMO),” A NEWLY-DISCOVERED SONGWRITING DEMO — SUNG, WRITTEN AND PRODUCED BY LOTTI GOLDEN IN 1968,
JUST PRIOR TO THE MOTOR-CYCLE ALBUM SESSIONS —
PREMIERES TODAY – LISTEN
OFFICIAL “DANCE TO THE RHYTM OF LOVE” MUSIC VIDEO
STREAMING NOW ON YOUTUBE – WATCH
MOTOR-CYCLE ARRIVES VIA HIGH MOON RECORDS ON FRIDAY, MARCH 28
PRE-ORDERS AVAILABLE NOW
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“An extraordinary song suite provoked by a teenager’s six months immersed
in New York’s late-’60s underground…visionary, hypnagogic”
– UNCUT 9/10 Reissue Of The Month - February, 2025
The LP features big downtown production and
Golden’s awesome vocals – she can really belt. Imagine if Ronnie Spector made a bonafide psych LP later in the ‘60s and that gives you some idea.”
– POPSIKE
“Motor-Cycle transported me back to the ’60s in a way not many records do…
There’s no irony or second-guessing: Golden’s all in, a psychedelic daughter of the Beat generation, among her equally hippie cohort, in swirls of free-loving, drug-chasing,
multiracial, pan-sexual abandon… The album is a mother lode for its multi-level fascination.”
– RICHARD HELL
“As if The Velvet Underground recorded for Motown.
In short: debauchery with a beat. Dig it.”
– TINY MIX TAPES
High Moon Records is proud to announce the return of legendary NYC singer-songwriter-producer Lotti Golden’s landmark debut album, Motor-Cycle, arriving Friday, March 28 on CD and vinyl LP, joined by lavish, 32-page LP and 48-page CD books with extensive liner notes on the astonishing story of the how a 17-year-old Lotti Golden came to make an album as singular and audacious as Motor-Cycle, exclusive essays by Richard Hell and David Toop, and a wealth of archival photos, including more than 30 never-before-seen photographs by pioneering rock photographer, Baron Wolman. Along with the original album track listing, the Motor-Cycle CD includes the rarely heard Atlantic single “Sock It To Me Baby/It’s Your Thing” b/w “Annabelle With Bells (Home Made Girl).”
The story of the “Dance To The Rhythm Of Love (Brill Building Demo)” single, which premieres today as a digital single, officially kicking off the lead-up to the Motor-Cycle album release, as well as a seriously groovy music video (made in collaboration with Lotti), now streaming on YouTube — is almost as compelling as the story of the album itself: Ten years ago, a colleague of High Moon Records’ was working to help archive and clear out the warehouse of Original Sound — the record label that, in the 1950s, came up with the concept of releasing compilations of “Rock Oldies,” thus being the progenitor of the entire music reissue phenomenon. Hundreds of thousands of recordings, on all imaginable formats, that had accrued over sixty years, were occupying an immense warehouse in Los Angeles. The owners of the label did not want to continue to pay to store these recordings, especially since they had no idea of what half of them actually were. So, our intrepid colleague spent countless hours identifying, inventorying and decluttering, until all was well.
At one point, he came upon a few hundred acetates of songwriting demos that were marked for disposal. Scanning the titles, he noticed “Dance To The Rhythm Of Love” typewritten on the faded yellow and blue label of a long-defunct New York recording studio. There were no songwriters’ names on the label, only the name of an obscure publishing company. But being the inveterate music historian/scholar that he is, the colleague immediately knew that “Dance To The Rhythm Of Love” was written by Lotti Golden and then recorded as a single for Atlantic in 1969 by the one and only Patti LaBelle & The Bluebelles. He saved the acetates from imminent destruction, carefully cleaned up the Lotti Golden demo, transferred it to digital, and sent it to the mutually thrilled and stunned High Moon Records staff and Lotti Golden.
Astonishingly, Lotti hadn’t heard her demo in the nearly 50 years since she’d made it. “Dance To The Rhythm of Love (Brill Building Demo)” was recorded in 1968, when Lotti Golden was just 17, and had recently been hired as a staff songwriter for Saturday Music, owned by superstar producer-arranger-songwriter Bob Crewe (Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, The Walker Brothers, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels). Golden wrote, arranged, produced, and sang lead, with a ripping Brill Building studio band. Golden cut the song just a few months before beginning the recording sessions for Motor-Cycle.
We are honored to be able to share this slice of Lotti Golden’s inimitable pre-Motor-Cycle artistry. Calling it rare would be an understatement, as it has been heard by no one, save a handful of music industry insiders, six decades ago. And were it not for our colleague, “Dance To The Rhythm Of Love (Brill Building Demo)” would have been lost to the trash bins of history. All of the vitality, attitude, and no-holds-barred, soul-verging-on-proto-punk vocals, and this classic song (the first song of Lotti Golden’s to be covered) which is far beyond Patti LaBelle & The Bluebelles Atlantic recording — it’s an entirely different genre, packed with insouciant, unbridled energy. All of this was nearly silenced. But unbelievably, this song was salvaged, and it proves an ideal introduction to Lotti Golden’s vast arsenal of talents in their raw form — right before they were to move a few galaxies further out, and used to fill the widescreen opus that she and Bob Crewe were about to concoct and render for her debut album.
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LISTEN TO “DANCE TO THE RHYTHM OF LOVE (BRILL BUILDING DEMO)”
WATCH “DANCE TO THE RHYTHM OF LOVE (BRILL BUILDING DEMO)”
OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO
PRE-ORDER MOTOR-CYCLE
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An ambitious suite of phenomenal pop power and originality, Motor-Cycle chronicles Lotti Golden’s immersion in New York City’s late-Sixties counterculture. Underscored by a genre-bending soundscape, the action plays out from New York’s East Village and Lower East Side all the way to North Carolina and back, populated with a coterie of faux gurus, malcontents, misfits, drug freaks, and groupies. Golden would later say that she wrote her memoir as music and lyrics, because “a book is too flat.”
Born in Brooklyn, Golden inherited a passion for music and art from her parents, who gifted her with a guitar on her 11th birthday. She soon began writing her own/original songs, discovering a distinctive talent as both wordsmith and vocalist. Brimming with drive and charisma, by the age of 14 Golden started making the long trek from her home in Canarsie, to midtown Manhattan, shopping her songs. It wasn’t only Golden’s songwriting ability that got her noticed – her powerful, soulful vocals landed her work as a demo and session singer in New York’s busy music scene. In 1966, 16-year-old Golden landed a publishing deal with Bob Crewe’s Saturday Music as a staff songwriter – a dream gig that would give her the opportunity to collaborate with top musicians, hone her songwriting skills, and produce songwriting demos, all while earning a weekly paycheck of $100.
Even with this early success, Golden had other plans. She was not just a songwriter – she was an artist, with her own story to tell. Since her early teens, Golden had chronicled her journey into adulthood through diaries, poems, and lyrics, industriously writing what Look Magazine hailed as “songs rich in metaphor, and starkly descriptive of people and places.”
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Golden was studying Theater at the Lower East Side’s historic Henry Street Settlement when she met Michael, a darkly handsome rebel without a cause and quintessential bad boy. Michael became her ersatz guru, introducing Golden to the seedier side of the East Village. Riding into the night, Golden chronicled her mind-bending, ecstatic, kaleidoscopic trip on the back of his motorcycle. Golden well knew that every good story needs an antagonist, and she found one in Michael.
Though only 16 when she started writing the songs that would become part of Motor-Cycle, Golden wrote candidly and compellingly about a world quite different from the fading norms of 1950s America and the flower-power clichés of the 1960s, with vividly personal accounts of street life that presaged urban troubadours like Jim Carroll, Bruce Springsteen, and Patti Smith. Indeed, the transgressive characters inhabiting Golden’s songs would be right at home in a Lou Reed lyric or Jack Kerouac novel.
“You feel immortal at that age,” she says. “You feel you can take a chance and it won’t burn you. Of course, it does end up burning you in many ways, but you can’t be afraid of it. If you fear it, then you won’t be able to tell your story or learn anything. So you try to stay true to who you are, and write the story. But I didn’t write a book; I wrote an album.”
In the early fall of 1967, Golden was singing in an elevator on her way to a recording session. The door opened and Golden immediately recognized the strikingly handsome man who stepped in; Bob Crewe, owner of Saturday Music, and a legend for his work with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, for whom he co-wrote, arranged and produced a string of #1 hits including “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like A Man,” and “Sherry.”
Intrigued by her voice, Crewe set up a meeting. Golden brought her material to Crewe, who upon hearing the outrageous characters populating her songs, exclaimed, “Good God, who are your friends?” (prompting what later proved Golden and Crewe’s only shared co-writing credit on Motor-Cycle, “Who Are Your Friends”) Crewe was sold on the project and began shopping demo tapes to a major label with just the basic rhythm tracks and Golden’s vocals. After just one listen, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, industry giants and co-founders of Atlantic Records, bought the demo tapes, with Wexler declaring that Golden would be the greatest single pop artist since Aretha Franklin. Golden’s impromptu elevator audition had netted her a high profile, major label signing, and sky-high expectations.
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After signing the deal, Golden and Crewe set to work at the famed Studio A at Atlantic Recording Studios, 1841 Broadway, completing the LP in eight sessions. Though Golden had worked out the songs with a “sparser concept of what would be added to basic guitar and vocals,” Crewe had something far bigger in mind, an elaborate production that would rival Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” approach to recording. The producer brought a sprawling, multi-dimensional approach to the Golden’s song-craft, layering funk grooves, rock riffs, psychedelic soul, Southern blues guitar, and big band sounds along with horns, strings, bells, timpani, a boys’ choir, and more.
“One of Bob’s contributions was adding more music than I ever imagined!,” Golden says. “The songs could have been arranged a million ways. But this is the way it happened.”
In certain respects, Motor-Cycle was meant to challenge the listener, especially during an era when pop singles rarely topped the three-minute mark. All of the original album’s seven tracks are over five minutes and none contain a typical verse/chorus/bridge structure, instead employing radical changes in tempo, genre, and mood. With its ambitious and eclectic musical arrangements, extended instrumental interludes, vivid cast of characters, and storylines that span multiple songs, Motor-Cycle may well be the first rock concept album by a female artist, chronicling the ecstasies and tribulations of a scrappy cohort of outsiders as a metaphor for resurrection and redemption.
The combination of Golden’s poetic temperament and Crewe’s bold vision was truly unique. Crewe wanted the vocals raw and real, true to Motor-Cycle’s story, and Golden unflinchingly held her own in the studio. Crewe insisted on recording Golden’s vocals live in one take, an experience she had described as akin to “performing an entire Broadway musical, live in the studio.” By pushing Golden’s voice to its physical and emotional limits, Crewe achieved the desired effect, a spontaneous authenticity that remained true to her poet-outlaw narrative. From her R&B inflections and velvety rock intonations to gospel riffs, Golden’s vocals are powerful, nimble and dynamic, giving every song exactly what it needs.
Motor-Cycle was poised to make a grand entrance upon its 1969 release, with Atlantic Records placing a full-page ad in Rolling Stone, and hosting an extravagant launch party for Golden at Bob Crewe’s Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment. With high-profile pieces in Look and Newsweek, photoshoots appearing in Vogue, a rave review from well-respected music journalist Nat Hentoff, and a slew of laudatory advance press in the trade magazines, the scene was set for a breakthrough from an important new artist whose star was ascendant. But that’s not how the story goes. Despite the auspicious conditions that all the advance hype and critical acclaim had put in place for a seemingly guaranteed high-profile release, that would engender a commercially successful album from a newly-minted rock star, Atlantic somehow managed to horribly mishandle the release, almost as if they willfully sought to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. The label dropped the ball and dropped it hard. Everything they did in relation to Golden and the album was inexplicably misbegotten — from trying to keep her “mysterious” by drastically limiting her visibility, nixing plans for a concert tour with a full band, and releasing a single, months after the album’s release, that didn’t have any album tracks on it. In addition, Atlantic had begun changing direction. Led Zeppelin’s first album was released a few months before Motor-Cycle. Jerry Wexler, Lotti’s mentor at the label, moved to Miami and Muscle Shoals and immersed himself in Blues and R&B. The Atlantic single that followed their non-Motor-Cycle Lotti Golden single was Led Zeppelin’s first, and biggest hit, “Whole Lotta Love.” So, it seemed that Atlantic was no longer willing to take the financial risk of promoting and marketing artists as singular as Golden, especially those with albums as genre-defying as Motor-Cycle. By the end of the year prospects for Motor-Cycle’s success had completely evaporated.
“It was very frustrating, really disappointing and difficult,” says Golden. “I didn’t know how to deal with it because I was so young.”
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Golden went on to a hugely successful songwriting and production career that spans a dizzying array of artists and projects: Diana Ross, Al Green, The Manhattans, Jimmy Cliff, Sheena Easton, Exposé, The O’Jays, Arthur Baker, Celine Dion, Taylor Dayne, Little Steven’s star-studded, 1987 anti-apartheid project “Sun City”, and her groundbreaking electro/hip-hop work with Warp 9…among many others.
Out of print for more than 50 years, Motor-Cycle has come a long way from its genesis as Golden’s “musical autobiography.” The album started to resurface in the early 2000s as the information age ushered in a renaissance for music fans mining the past for gold. Praise for Motor-Cycle began to appear in blogs and articles, as did admiration from such fellow artists as Stephen Malkmus (Pavement, The Hard Quartet), all of which helped lift Golden’s work back into the public eye. In a fitting bit of kismet, considering Golden’s contributions to hip-hop as part of electro pioneers Warp 9, Motor-Cycle has been sampled many times, most notably by influential producer Madlib, Amon Tobin, and Eels singer-songwriter Mark Oliver Everett (aka “E”). Motor-Cycle continues to inspire new evangelists with every mention or appearance. Starting out as a heavyweight major-label project, the album became a lost curio, an underground cult legend. Now, with High Moon Records’ long-overdue CD and vinyl reissue, Motor-Cycle is finally affirmed as the singular piece of pop-art that it’s always been.
High Moon Records’ CD reissue of Motor-Cycle includes two additional tracks that did not appear on the album, from the Atlantic single that came out three months after the album's release. “Sock It To Me Baby/It’s Your Thing,” b/w “Annabelle with Bells (Home Made Girl).” The latter was eliminated from the original pressing of the album due to the time constraints of the vinyl format. Of its inclusion here, Golden says, “I’m delighted that fans will be able to hear it, perhaps for the first time. It’s a special treat – a girl group homage. Most of all, Annabelle gets her day in the sun, which she always deserved.”
# # #
LOTTI GOLDEN
MOTOR-CYCLE
(HIGH MOON RECORDS)
RELEASE DATE: FRIDAY, MARCH 28
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TRACKLIST:
Motor-Cycle Michael
Gonna Fay’s
A Lot Like Lucifer (Celia Said Long Time Loser)
The Space Queens (Silky is Sad)
Who Are Your Friends
Get Together (With Yourself)
You Can Find Him
Sock It To Me Baby / It’s Your Thing *
Annabelle with Bells (Home Made Girl) *
* CD Only Bonus Tracks
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