Michael Goldberg - WICKED GAME - The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey - New Paperback book 2022 Hozac Books

Advance praise for Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey:

“Here’s the story of an unsung genius that, in many ways, is the story of every working musician, a cautionary tale of crappy apartments and cool guitars, of untold temptations, abject surrender and the pawnshop at the beginning and end of the arc. It’s a story of youth, beauty and inspiration on the razor’s edge, of love and compulsion, solidarity and betrayal, of a quiet man who played loud. Of a dark song and darker fate. And of San Francisco in the era of the Mabuhay Gardens, $150 rent and Persian Brown. Michael Goldberg’s book about his friend Jimmy Wilsey will give you chills. Not since Ben Fong-Torres’s biography of Gram Parsons (one of Wilsey’s musical forebearers) has there been a more heartrending portrait of a rock star.”
– Robert Duncan, former Creem Magazine writer and author of Loudmouth and The Noise

“A riveting biography of a brilliant but doomed guitarist who helped usher in San Francisco punk, played haunted guitar for Chris Isaak, then remade himself as a Downtown LA loftista musician and IT guy before self destructing as a homeless junky. This reads like a classic noir spiral and is hard to put down. Goldberg describes the twisted path of addiction and life’s dark side but also wild joy, inspired creation and for a time, unlimited possibility in the life of James Wilsey. Filled with local color, music history, and eyewitness interviews.”
– Denise Hamilton, author of the Eve Diamond crime novels and editor of the “Los Angeles Noir” collections

“Wicked Game is the story of a song, leading through the beginnings of San Francisco Punk Rock, the Avengers, and Silvertone/Chris Isaak to find that riff and the price paid.”
– James Stark, editor of Shut up You Animals!!! A Remembrance of Dirk Dirksen and author/photographer, Punk ’77

“Author Michael Goldberg presents a labyrinthian portrait, intensely detailed, wrenchingly empathetic, of the rise and fall of the tragic Jimmy Wilsey, the brilliant but troubled guitarist behind Chris Isaak’s biggest hit in Wicked Game: The True Story of James Calvin Wilsey.”
– Joel Selvin, author of Hollywood Eden and Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day

“An addictive biography, this portrait of James Wilsey’s musical genius is also a striking and indelible story of a Los Angeles whose past is portrayed as vividly as a Nan Goldin photograph blown up large, while Wilsey’s songs and friends move through the streets.”
– Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon, Take One Candle Light a Room, Between Heaven and Here and other novels

“An almost-Shakespearean-tragedic narrative of the rise-and-fall of a promising young musician-pioneer in the early ‘Punk’ music movement. Goldberg has written a personal, heartfelt biography (he personally knew the ‘better side’ of Jimmy) that is hard to put down. It’s charming, funny at times but also tragic and thought-provoking. Recommended as an instructional moral fable for all who want to become professional musicians and artists in a global capitalist world.
– V. Vale, publisher of Search & Destroy and RE/Search magazines (1977 to the present)