1 week Ago By Reviewed by Jim Millican
One Foot On The Platform by the late Canadian music critic Peter Goddard is an important collection of writing from the era when rock ‘n’ roll and rock music dominated the Western world. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * To continue reading, please subscribe: *$1 will be added to your next bill. After your 4 weeks access is complete your rate will increase by $0.
00 a X percent off the regular rate. One Foot On The Platform by the late Canadian music critic Peter Goddard is an important collection of writing from the era when rock ‘n’ roll and rock music dominated the Western world. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? One Foot On The Platform by the late Canadian music critic Peter Goddard is an important collection of writing from the era when rock ‘n’ roll and rock music dominated the Western world.
Goddard’s bonafides speak for themselves. He was a classically trained pianist with a degree in ethnomusicology who wrote authoritatively about rock and pop while also penning critically acclaimed biographies of, among others, pianist Glenn Gould (The Great Gould) and Frank Sinatra (The Man, The Myth and The Music). He could get up on stage and play boogie woogie piano with Ronnie Hawkins or skillfully analyze Fats Domino’s piano technique.
Goddard served a freelance apprenticeship at the in the late 1960s and then became Canada’s first on-staff pop music critic with the before settling into a staff gig at the in 1972 — a beat he owned for the next 30 years. Through the same period, he contributed music columns to and , and cultural commentary for and . He authored more than 20 books about rock and pop acts including the Who, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, the Police and Bruce Springsteen.
He wrote hundreds of articles, reviews, profiles, feature stories, and opinion pieces — many of them to a tight deadline that didn’t allow for second thought or reflection. John Storey / Canadian Press files In this 1976 photo, the Band (clockwise from top left: Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson) performs at San Francisco’s Winterland Auditorium. I trust you’ll allow this reviewer to deviate from form to include a couple personal reminiscences about Goddard from the 1970s and ’80s when our paths crossed, sometimes as colleagues and certainly as passengers on the rock ‘n’ roll journey.
Goddard was a jovial, friendly, somewhat rumpled and portly presence, with the air of a university professor observing life at pretty close to the centre of the popular music universe; I was a kid from Winnipeg producing and hosting shows for CBC Radio and writing columns and reviews for the , and the Canadian Press. Goddard was already a mythical presence in Canadian music — admired by a wide range of colleagues and readers, sometimes feared by the subjects of his reviews and profiles and covertly disliked by many on the promotional side of the music business for the negative effect his words could have on the careers of artists and bands they were pitching. Goddard began work on what he intended to call in 2020, but passed away in 2022 at age 79 before finishing the book he intended to reflect on his 50-plus years in “the business” when rock music, drawing creatively from blues and jazz to folk, country and classical, dictated popular culture.
The project was completed (and renamed) posthumously, edited by J.A. Wainwright, poet, novelist and professor emeritus in English at Dalhousie University, who made the decision to curate and add the best of Goddard’s newspaper journalism to the mix.
To call “all-encompassing” doesn’t come close to doing justice to the scope of Goddard’s writing. The insightful new essays on Bob Dylan, k.d.
lang, the Band, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie and many others Goddard identified as the most important artists from the halcyon years of rock come alive under his skilful pen. The encyclopedic gathering of his newspaper pieces dwells on the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. It’s divided into sections by genre — Blues, Fifties Footsteps, Pop/Country/Jazz, Singers-Songwriters and Performance Rock.
One Foot on the Platform The scope is wide and scholarly but passionate and personal. Goddard wanted his legacy project to come across like him “telling stories at a bar or party,” and it does. For the Baby Boom generation who lived it, this is the soundtrack of our lives in print.
There was one occasion during my days as a rock journalist that my path and Goddard’s intersected in a way I’ve never forgotten. It was the fall of 1975. Burton Cummings invited me to Roade Studio on Grosvenor Avenue to hear some tracks he was recording with a band of Winnipeg’s top players.
During Elections Get campaign news, insight, analysis and commentary delivered to your inbox during Canada's 2025 election. Cummings confided that he was unhappy with the direction of the Guess Who, and that these songs had finally given him the confidence to break up his famed band and begin a solo career. He was gracious enough to grant me the official scoop on the news of the band’s break-up — sure to be a huge national story — but asked that I hold off putting it into print at the until he gave the go-ahead, when the timing was right.
Some days later, without any signal from Cummings, as my story sat on the presses, I got a call from my editor at the . What was going on? The story of Cummings’ departure from the Guess Who had broken that day — not in Winnipeg, but in the , written by a guy named Peter Goddard. I never bothered to ask either Cummings or Goddard about how my big scoop went sideways; interestingly, all these years later, the Guess Who doesn’t even warrant a footnote in Goddard’s swan song.
The book’s title, , is lifted from the lyrics of — specifically the version Bob Dylan recorded in 1962. The entire line “One foot on the platform and the other one on the train” is meant to suggest going on a journey, somewhat reluctantly. Carol Ann Goddard photo Peter Goddard Peter Goddard’s 50-year musical odyssey was anything but reluctant.
He had two feet on the train from the beginning of his rock ‘n’ roll journey right to the end. Jim Millican is a Winnipeg writer with a rock music history. One Foot on the Platform: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Journey By Peter Goddard House of Anansi Press, 352 pages, $27 Advertisement Advertisement.
