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 GODDARD (1943–2022) was a leading Canadian music, arts, and cultural commentator for more than five decades. He was a staff writer at both the Toronto Telegram and the Toronto Star, and a regular contributor to the Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, and many other publications. Additionally, Goddard was the author of more than fifteen books about popular music, including works on Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Genesis, and Glenn Gould. In 1982, he became the first Canadian critic of popular culture to receive a National Newspaper Award for criticism.

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J. A. Wainwright has lived in Spain, Greece, and England, and for the last twenty years has lived in Nova Scotia where he teaches. He edited Notes for a Native Land, coedited Soundings, is the author of Moving Outward, The Requiem Journals, After the War, Flight of the Falcom: Scott's Journey to the South Pole 1910-1912, and Landscape and Desire: Poems Selected and New. He received a B.A. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Canadian Literature from Dalhousie University where he is McCulloch Professor in English.  

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