Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside Rock’n’Roll, by Danny Goldberg

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Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside Rock’n’Roll, by Danny Goldbery

Music business bios have proliferated in recent years, and one of the best was written by Danny Goldberg. He began as a rock critic at rock criticism’s ground zero, late ’60s New York, and parlayed his connections into publicity jobs, rising to the top as CEO of several labels including Mercury, Atlantic and Warner Bros. He can write and he’s got some stories.

Bumping into Geniuses, his 2008 memoir, is out in a new paperback edition, the original text intact with a few updates plus a new introduction and epilogue. For Goldberg, rock’s golden age began with The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and ended with Kurt Cobain’s death, a 30-year epoch of great music. (Cobain himself said that by the ‘90s, everything was derivative.) While acknowledging the ‘50s forerunners, Goldberg holds that “the genre got exponentially bigger, both commercially and culturally, after the Beatles emerged on the scene.”

Nostalgic? “My nostalgia is for the sense of optimism and possibility” as rock moved forward to new territories. Goldberg spends too many words justifying tribute acts performing note-by-note copies of golden age artists, and on justifying the continued run by some of those artists who have become their own best tribute bands. But he’s on track regarding Bruce Springsteen who puts himself at the front of resistance to the current administration. The Boss told Goldberg that he considers himself “a concerned citizen, not an activist,” adding that we’re in a “moment in American history that it’s hard to handle the amount of information, good and often very bad, that we’re allowing into our minds on a daily basis.”

Get Bumping into Geniuses on Amazon here.

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