Rock journalist praised for his offbeat biographies of showbusiness legends
Nick Tosches, who has died aged 69, was an eccentric, incendiary critic during the heyday of American rock music magazines in the 1970s, and went on to be no less idiosyncratic as a novelist and biographer, notably of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin.
Even Tosches’ admirers admitted that his baroque prose could often be self-indulgent – the New York Times once called him a ‘‘gifted blowhard’’ – and emulating him proved the ruin of many younger journalists. But at his best he could convey the essence of a performer with rare acuity.
He made his name as one of a group of writers dubbed the ‘‘Noise Boys’’ on account of their penchant for fast living and their iconoclastic critiques in Rolling Stone, CREEM and other countercultural magazines.
His reviews were often more impressionistic than informative – he boasted in later life that he reviewed some records ‘‘without even opening the shrink wrap’’ – and some of the ‘‘records’’ he wrote about were entirely invented. When he and another journalist decided to amuse themselves by each filing under the other’s byline, it proved a prank too far for Rolling Stone and Tosches was sacked.
Yet despite the larkiness, Tosches took a scholarly approach to 20th-century music. His first book, Country: The Biggest Music in America (1977), celebrated the bawdy spirit of the pioneers of country, hillbilly and blues, in contrast to the piety of contemporary stars (‘‘Johnny Cash and his God are a particularly tedious act’’).
Another book, Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll (1984), declared that Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Bill Haley rode the coat-tails of earlier, less well-marketed performers such as Louis Prima, Hardrock Gunter, Rondalis Tandy and Ella Mae Morse. In typically inventive fashion, he devoted the final chapter to an imagined interview with Elvis’ twin brother Jesse Garon Presley, whose pursuit of a less mainstream music career ended in failure (in reality, Jesse Presley died at birth). In 2002, Tosches summed Elvis up as ‘‘the great mediocrator’’.
In stark contrast to Elvis, in Tosches’ view, was Jerry Lee Lewis, whose authentic talent was forged in the torments he suffered as he struggled to reconcile his devout Pentecostalism with his thirst for worldly pleasures. Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982) began with a glorious setpiece in which a drunken, gun-toting Lewis tried to ram his car through the gates of Elvis’ mansion at Graceland, yelling: ‘‘Tell him the Killer is here!’’
The book combined an almost obsessive depth of factual research with attempts to render Lewis’ thought processes, couched in a mixture of the language of the King James Bible and William Faulkner. Nevertheless,
Tosches did not trouble the bestseller lists until his biography of Dean Martin, Dino, became a huge success in 1992. ‘‘Tosches insists that Dean Martin was the coolest man who ever wore a tuxedo. Most of all, says Tosches, he embodied ‘America’s holy trinity of flash, trash and cash’,’’ observed British music writer Tony Parsons, declaring Dino to be ‘‘one of the greatest books ever written about showbusiness’’.
Nicholas Tosches was born in Newark, New Jersey. His grandfather was an Italian immigrant and his father worked as a bouncer in burlesque houses before going on to run a bar, where the young Nick got to know the denizens of a neighbourhood that boasted ‘‘few books, many bookies’’.
He scraped through high school and tried a variety of jobs. At 19 he was living in New York where he was encouraged to write by Ed Sanders of the rock group The Fugs.
Tosches’ other biographies included Mafia financier Michele Sindona, boxer Sonny Liston, minstrel singer Emmett Miller, and mobster Arnold Rothstein. He was latterly a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, where in 2007 he wrote an article about his quest to find the real whereabouts of the rustic scene on his computer’s default screensaver.
He published his collected music criticism in The Nick Tosches Reader (2000) as well as volumes of poetry and several crime novels about low-life gangsters. He taught himself Latin and Italian for his novel In the Hand of Dante (2002), which combined a fictional portrait of the medieval poet with the modernday adventures of a writer called Nick Tosches who falls foul of mobsters.
Ian Penman, reviewing the novel in the Guardian, observed: ‘‘He is not dissimilar from the Nick Tosches I know: 53, mentor of bad behaviour and good prose . . . (ex) boozehound, (ex-ish) drug fiend, skirt-chaser, autodidact.’’
Tosches was briefly married in the 1970s. –
In 2002, Tosches summed Elvis up as ‘‘the great mediocrator’’.