Motor-Cycle was reissued In March 2025 by boutique label
High Moon Records under the auspices of
Warner Bros. Records/
Atlantic Records.
Rolling Stone rated
Motor-Cyclethe Top 5 reissue of 2025. The 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, liner notes and essays by renowned music critic
David Toop, punk legend
Richard Hell, and others, offering fresh perspective and critical analysis of the record's relevance and impact. Hell makes clear, Golden doesn't hold back and dubs her "the psychedelic daughter of the Beat generation." The 2025 reissue continues to garner a new round of reviews and critical commentary. Journalist
Michael Azerrad titles his
Substack piece on
Motor-Cycle "The Sgt. Pepper of the East Village," suggesting the late Sixties were a time when record companies would occasionally support experimentation in rock music and record like
Motor-Cycle which presaged the punk scene: "its 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 often written by the winners, our view of that time and place is shaped by the bands we know, like the
Velvet Underground. "But there were other ways of looking at it, other musicians who documented that community " like Golden. A case in point is the Velvet's iconic "Heroin," a dark depiction of the solitary aspect of drug use during that era. Compare Golden's "Gonna Fay's " an equally explicit description of a drug fueled party gone wrong, focusing on the social dynamics of drug use during that time. Music journalist Jeff Gage wrote of the reissue 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. (She told
Cosmopolitan magazine after its release that she wrote
Motor-Cycle "in music & lyrics because a book is too flat."). On
Motor-Cycle, Golden chronicles her wild excursions hanging out with a coterie of Lower East Side hippie outcasts living from party to party, casting herself as a kind of Alice in Wonderland, who falls into a bizarro rabbit hole, and spoiler alert, 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." 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. 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 in
Record Collector interviewing Golden for a six-page feature story titled "Golden: One in a Bullion," with photographs from the Warner/Atlantic archives. ==References==