The final word from one of Canada's greatest cultural critics and music writers.
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 was an award-winning music and culture journalist, active from the mid-1960s until his death in 2022. In 1967, he joined the now defunct Toronto Telegram, becoming Canada's first on-staff popular music and culture critic.
• During his career, Peter worked in-house at the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and freelance for many other publications.
• In addition to his regular newspaper and magazine work, Peter published over 20 books about artists ranging from Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, and Michael Jackson, to the Police, David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, and Bruce Springsteen. In 2017, his biography of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, “The Great Gould”, was published to critical acclaim and commercial success.
