Lotti Golden
Lotti Golden is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, poet and artist. Golden is best known for her 1969 debut album Motor-Cycle, on Atlantic Records as well as her long career as a songwriter for other artists in collaboration with Tommy Faragher.
Winner of the ASCAP Pop Award for songwriting and RIAA-certified Gold and Platinum awards as a writer/producer, Golden has written and produced Top 5 hits in the US and abroad. Credited for her innovative work in early electro and hip hop music, Golden is featured in the Rap Attack 3: African Rap To Global Hip Hop by David Toop, and Signed, Sealed, and Delivered: True Life Stories of Women of Pop for her pioneering work as a female record producer. Golden's songs have been recorded by Grammy Award-winning artists: Diana Ross, Celine Dion, Al Green, Patti LaBelle, B. B. King, Patti Austin, Sheena Easton and more.
Early life
Childhood
Lotti Golden was born in Manhattan to Sy Golden and Anita Golden, the elder of two daughters. Golden's parents, a strikingly handsome and fashionable pair, were avid jazz aficionados and foreign film buffs. Golden soaked up the sounds of Billie Holiday and John Coltrane from an early age developing a lifelong passion for music and the arts.Golden grew up in Brooklyn, New York where she attended Canarsie High School, serving as the school's Poet Laureate. Voted Most Likely to Succeed, Golden graduated with honors in 1967, winning the Creative Writing medal, the Lincoln Center Student Award for Academic Excellence, the Scholastic Magazine Award for National Achievement in Art, and a New York State Regents Scholarship. Golden was awarded the National League of Pen Women Prize for poetry and went on to attend Brooklyn College.
1964–1968: Early music career
A birthday gift from Golden's parents at age eleven would chart her future course. Golden studied classical guitar and voice, but needing more of a creative outlet, soon found her niche as a singer-songwriter, using her abilities as both wordsmith and vocalist. To sing her compositions on demos Golden spent hours using a reel to reel tape recorder to perfect her vocal craft: "When women talk of their idols and influences...they tell stories about singing along with records, trying to emulate someone's voice...until they can begin to develop their own style." Golden explains: "I would practice singing to Aretha, Ray Charles, and the Marvelettes, till I could sing all of their licks and runs... the girls' bathroom in high school was a great place to try it out."By the age of fourteen Golden was making forays into Manhattan, singing on demo sessions and peddling her songs to publishers, eventually signing a contract with publisher Saturday Music as a staff writer and landing her first cover by Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles.
By the time Golden completed high school, she had the beginnings of a musical autobiography about her adventures in New York's East Village and Lower East Side where she was a resident member of the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse, honing her skills as an actress and playwright. This would become the basis of her Atlantic Records debut LP, Motor-Cycle.
Recording artist
1969: Debut LP: ''Motor-Cycle''
Released on Atlantic Records in 1969, Motor-Cycle is a chronicle of Golden's life informed by New York City's counterculture. "It was a strange, way out scene for pretty, 19-year-old Golden," who wrote her memoir in music and lyrics because, according to Golden, "a book is too flat." The songs on Motor-Cycle deal with subjects like gender identity, drug use, and urban alienation. So essential was Golden's poetry and lyrics to the project, that a lyric sheet insert was included with the original release. The back cover of the LP contains the poem, "Night was a Better Blanket," alluding to the LP's backstory.Golden was part of a new wave of female singers who began to shake up the status quo in the late Sixties. Breaking from the confines of pop they defined themselves by their confessional lyrics, taking on new controversial subject matter. In July 1969, Newsweek ran a feature story, "The Girls: Letting Go": "There has surfaced a new school of talented female troubadours, who not only sing, but write their own songs. What is common to them – to Joni Mitchell and Lotti Golden, to Laura Nyro, Melanie, and to Elyse Weinberg, are the personalized songs they write, like voyages of self-discovery, brimming with keen observation, and startling in the impact of their poetry"
Listed among the most influential albums of the era in The New York Times, "The Best of Rock: A Personal Discography," by music critic Nat Hentoff, Motor-Cycle is a synthesis of stream of consciousness confessional poetry, R&B infused vocals and a "sometimes satiric mélange of rock, jazz, blues and soul" with lyrics that evoke "a Kerouac novel."
On an album of "restlessly epic roadhouse suites" Golden uses the story-based format, featuring a cast of archetypal characters while playing the part of "emcee" of her own "aberrant cabaret." Golden's coming of age saga is likely the first rock concept album by a female recording artist.
Music critic Path, of Tiny Mix Tapes, explains how Motor-Cycle plays like a musical, transporting the listener to the late 1960s underground: "Golden gets help on Motor-Cycle from an impeccably arranged Atlantic Records session band... with a flawless, swinging rhythm team. Then, at key moments, the curtain goes up and they've got rows of saxes, trumpets, vibes...and you begin to realize that this is not the same song and dance... it's as if The Velvet Underground recorded for Motown." Golden writes of a "season in hell " she somehow manages to survive. "It's an extraordinary evocation of a life-style... and one girl's plunge into and out of it."
1968–69: The Making of ''Motor-Cycle''
Golden signed a publishing deal as a staff writer with Saturday Music during her senior year of high school. One afternoon as Golden was riding the elevator to her demo session, the company's owner, Bob Crewe stepped in while Golden was singing. When Crewe nodded his approval, Golden seized the opportunity, and in one breath told Crewe she was a staff writer at his publishing company and working on material for her own artist album. Intrigued, Crewe set up a meeting: "When Lotti brought her material to Crewe in the fall of 1967, he exclaimed, 'Good God, who are your friends?'" referring to the outrageous characters populating Golden's songs. Crewe was sold on doing the project, but asked Golden if she could wait one year while he cleared his schedule, and in 1968 the pair began recording Golden's autobiographical opus, Motor-Cycle, "a synthesis of funky singing and honest hip lyrics about urban teenage trauma." Atlantic Records moguls, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegün bought the tapes after one hearing, with Wexler "modestly telling his staff Golden would be the greatest single pop artist since Aretha Franklin."The release of Motor-Cycle in 1969 generated considerable media interest in Golden. Look magazine described Golden's songs and poetry as "rich in metaphor and starkly descriptive of people and places," stating: "Even in her musically precocious generation, she stands out as a singer composer of phenomenal power and originality." In addition to features in national publications, Lotti Golden was identified by Carrie Donovan of Vogue as a fashion trendsetter, making several appearances in the magazine. Though Golden made no TV appearances, her impact on the contemporary music scene was such that she is referenced in the cultural commentary on television, The Glass Teat. Still, Golden had concerns about the business side of her career, which she voiced in her Look magazine interview: "The easy part is to sit down and create. The hard part is trying to make yourself heard, the promotion."
For reasons that remain unclear today, Atlantic Records suddenly dropped the ball, failing to promote Motor-Cycle. It is curious that none of the songs,, were edited down to the standard 7" format for radio, and no single was released ahead of the LP, a standard Industry practice. Atlantic was going through a major corporate restructuring; its roster was packed in 1969, with Golden's mentors Ahmet Ertegun signing British rock bands, and Jerry Wexler dividing his time between Miami and Muscle Shoals moving on.
In the years since its release, Motor-Cycle continues to gain popularity via the Internet, and social media "thanks to the unusual persistence of her art, and the power of listeners' preferences."
The LP remains a rich source of samples, with Mark Oliver Everett using Golden's spoken voice from "Gonna Fay's" on his MC Honky project, to the original track from the LP, "Get Together ” appearing on the 2022 Hulu TV miniseries and soundtrack, Pam & Tommy.
''Motor-Cycle'' 2025 Reissue
Motor-Cycle was reissued In March 2025 by boutique label High Moon Records under the auspices of Warner Bros. Records/Atlantic Records.The lush reissue package consists of updated mastering, bonus tracks on both the LP and CD, booklets with Golden's story including 30 newly released photos by rock photographer Baron Wolman and liner notes/essays by renowned music critic David Toop and punk legend Richard Hell, offering fresh perspective and critical analysis of the record's relevance and impact; Hell writes, "Golden's all in, the psychedelic daughter of the Beat generation."
The reissue continues to garner a new round of reviews and critical commentary. Journalist Michael Azerrad in his Substack piece sums up Motor-Cycle as Golden's musical memoir, an "18-month sojourn in the East Village, then the darkling epicenter of the New York underground," while his title, "The Sgt. Pepper of the East Village,"
suggests the late Sixties was a time when the
Record Industry supported experimentation in rock music: "The record's streetwise poetry and Spectorian rock and r&b reflects the same sensibility that gave rise to the original New York punk community and beyond — hello, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen."
But because Motor-Cycle went out of print soon after its release and because Azerrad suggests that history is most often written by the winners, our view of that time and place is shaped by the bands we know, like the Velvet Underground, but he argues, "there were other ways of looking at it, other musicians who documented that community," --like Golden, case in point is the Velvet's iconic "Heroin," a dark, lonely, depiction of alienation and the solitary aspect of drug use during that era. Compare that with Golden's "Gonna Fay's" an equally explicit depiction of drug use using a debauched, substance fueled party gone wrong to articulate the social aspects of drug use during that time.
Music journalist Jeff Gage writes in Rolling Stone: "Motor-Cycle is at its most audacious when it leans into Golden's episodic storytelling.”
Golden makes use of the album format to feature her cinematic narrative..
On Motor-Cycle, Golden chronicles her excursions with a coterie of Lower East Side hippie outcasts living from party to party, casting herself as a kind of Alice in Wonderland character who falls into a bizarro rabbit hole, and spoiler alert, she manages to climb out within an
inch of her life. Gage, who interviewed Golden for the reissue piece, states: "As for how caught up she got, Golden just laughs. "It's gradual. Like watching your hair and nails grow,” she says..."
When Golden presented her songs to producer Bob Crewe, he was taken aback, exclaiming "Good God, who are your friends?" Gage continues, "Golden's friends, it turned out, were a motley band of misfits, underground outcasts who slummed around the East Village and Lower East Side. Drag queens, drug dealers, wannabe artists, and soon-to-be burnouts, all slouching toward Bethlehem," referencing Joan Didion's iconic depictions of the West Coast Sixties Counterculture as a kind of parallel to Golden's story.
While working on the article, Gage checked in with Lenny Kaye founding member of the Patti Smith band who describes Motor-Cycle as so outré that it only could have been produced in the Sixties on major label like Atlantic, when recoding companies would invest artistic experimentation and innovation supporting artists like Golden, echoing Azerrad's thoughts about how a record as out of the mainstream as Motor-Cycle could have been supported by a record company.
Additional press on Golden's Motor-Cycle includes articles in The Second Disk,Uncut, That Eric Alper, US Rocker,Bay Area Reporter, Psychedelic Baby, Ugly Things Magazine and more, including an in-depth piece by Charles Donovan of Record Collector interviewing Golden for a six-page feature story titled "Lotti Golden; One in a Bullion," with photographs from the Warner/Atlantic archives.