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). She says:
You feel immortal at that age. 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.
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. Golden says:
One of Bob’s contributions was adding more music than I ever imagined! The songs could have been arranged a million ways. But this is the way it happened.
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.
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