Michael Goldberg (born July 3, 1953) is a novelist, journalist, animal rights activist, and pioneering digital music entrepreneur. He is known for his work (1983-1993) at Rolling Stone, where he was first a senior writer and later West Coast editor, and for envisioning and co-founding the first web music magazine, Addicted to Noise, in 1994, for which Newsweek included him in its 1995 "Net 50" list of "the 50 People Who Matter Most on the Internet." Between 2014 and the fall of 2016 he published the Freak Scene Dream trilogy of '70s coming-of-age novels (True Love Scars, The Flowers Lied, and Untitled), and worked actively in animal rights causes. His nonfiction book, Wicked Game: The True Story of Guitarist James Calvin Wilsey (HoZac Books), was published in June of 2022. Early years Born in Oakland, California, Goldberg grew up across the San Francisco Bay in Marin County. He started writing short stories in elementary school, but seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show turned him into an obsessive rock 'n' roll fan—as he later recalled, "It was like being hit by lightning or something." In 1967, while still in middle school, he launched a psychedelic poster business with a friend and photographed Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek of the Doors and other artists at the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival on Mount Tamalpais. That same year he bought the first issue of Rolling Stone and decided to become a music journalist. As a student at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, Goldberg pursued both journalism and entrepreneurial ventures, serving as the school newspaper's arts editor, writing a music column, organizing a light show troupe, and promoting dance concerts, convincing then-guitar god Mike Bloomfield to perform at a school dance. Inspired by Rolling Stone, he and a friend published a rock magazine, Hard Road, interviewing Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who lived nearby; Goldberg photographed Garcia for the cover. Some of these experiences were the foundation for events in his first novel, True Love Scars. During his undergraduate years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Goldberg wrote for the local underground paper, Sundaz!, interviewing The Realist magazine’s founder/editor, Paul Krassner, for a cover story. Working as a copy person at the San Francisco Chronicle after graduation, he broke into professional journalism with a feature story, co-written with his wife, Leslie Goldberg, on New Orleans band The