One Foot on the Platform: A Rock ’n’ Roll Journey

This diverting collection of concert reviews, essays, and other writings by Toronto Star music critic Goddard (The Great Gould), who died in 2022, covers more than 50 years of music history, though the bulk of the pieces were written in the 1960s and ’70s. Goddard contends that saxophonist Cannonball Adderley’s rock-inflected jazz proves that the two genres grow “from the same set of musical roots,” and frames Fats Domino’s “boisterous, raw” sound as an emblem of “an age when rock ’n’ roll was simple and unpretentious... with none of the air of impotent and static rage it has today.” Goddard also shows how perceptions of rock bands shifted as they became mainstream. For example, his 1969 concert review praises a “lack of polish” in Led Zeppelin’s music that, by 1971, had become almost a caricature of itself (their songs are “always loud, always wham-bag, always overbearing,” he wrote). Goddard shines with surprisingly intimate portraits of some of music’s most famous personalities: Johnny Cash was “tough, a bit crude, direct, and unambiguous as a bullet,” while an introspective, reverential Bruce Springsteen observes that rock is “like a pact. A vow. And you have to honor it.” It adds up to an illuminating record of rock’s coming-of-age. (Mar.)