One Foot on the Platform: A Rock 'n' Roll Journey (Paperback)

The final word from one of popular music's greatest critics.

In the summer of 2020, acclaimed music critic and journalist Peter Goddard began work on a new book that would take readers on a journey back through his fifty-plus years spent writing professionally about rock music and the musical styles circling it―everything from blues and jazz to country and classical. His plan was to revisit his old haunts and their habitués, scenes and figures he first wrote about starting in the mid-1960s when he became Canada’s first on-staff popular music critic, to show how ongoing revisions continually reframe first impressions.

Tragically, Goddard died in 2022 before work on the manuscript was complete. But many of the core essays―on Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Who, k.d. lang, David Bowie, Liza Minelli, The Band, Neil Diamond, and others―are here. Accompanying these new essays is a collection of some of the best writing of Goddard’s career―ranging from interviews with B. B. King, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and Janis Joplin to reviews of classic albums by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Neil Young, to close readings of Leonard Cohen, Anne Murray, Led Zeppelin, and Gordon Lightfoot. Taken as a whole, One Foot on the Platform represents more than fifty years of thought and writing by one of Canada’s foremost cultural critics.

PETER GODDARD (1943–2022) was a leading Canadian music, arts, and cultural commentator for more than five decades. A trained ethnomusicologist, he covered everything from rock ‘n’ roll to fashion, including classical music, movies, video, advertising, opera, and visual arts.

After serving as music critic for The Varsity newspaper at the University of Toronto from 1965 to 1967, he became the first on-staff popular music critic in Canada at the Toronto Telegram until the newspaper closed in 1971. He was freelance music critic for the Globe and Mail in the late sixties and joined the full-time staff of the Toronto Star in 1972, where he remained for over thirty years. During this latter period, he contributed music columns to Maclean's and Chatelaine, as well as cultural pieces to Saturday Night and Le Monde. In 1982, he won a National Newspaper Award for criticism, the first Canadian critic of popular culture to do so.

Goddard wrote about a wide range of pop and rock acts. Ronnie Hawkins: Last of the Good Ol’ Boys was cowritten with Hawkins in 1989. In 1973, his Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Myth and the Music appeared. The Rolling Stones: The Last Tour with Philip Kamin (1982) was a national bestseller. He also wrote a futuristic fiction, The Sounding, in 1988. Some of his other books (with Philip Kamin) have focused on the Who, David Bowie, Genesis, the Police, Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, and Bruce Springsteen. in 2017, his biography of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, The Great Gould, was published to critical acclaim.

J.A. WAINWRIGHT is the author of six novels, five books of poetry, two critical biographies, and an opera libretto. He is McCulloch Emeritus Professor in English at Dalhousie University where he taught for thirty years, including a class on the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan.