Nick Tosches - S&D

FYI: The Nick Tosches Reader is a good introduction to the pretty amazing breadth of his work, and demonstrates the development of his writing style from the '60s onwards.

That said, Hellfire's pretty essential too. And there's a recent compendium titled The Nick Tosches Reader that can give you the whole picture, warts and all. I blush to confess I haven't read Country, but from what most everyone who has read it says, we probably all should.

Speaking of warts, I didn't much care for his Sonny Liston book, hated his Emmett Miller books, and thought his searching-for-an-opium-den book was a first-class wank job. The only novel of his I've read, Cut Numbers, deeply annoyed me as well, so perhaps take it all with a grain.

hahaha! that's exactly why i liked dead voices - i knew next to nothing about the subject matter on beginning the book, but was totally captivated by how much work went into it, its rhythm, its density. as a result i grew more and more interested in the music as i went on and now own a few bits and pieces i'd never have heard of otherwise... admittedly, i'm big on quite really well researched writing, but you also really do get the sense that when doing this kind of work, tosches claims a place in history for many of his subjects and as such is an incredibly important and damned good writer...

Destroy: NT's deeply tedious Liston bk ('Night Train' in the UK) - Tosches really overdoes the 'deep' historical background stuff, and all the hell and damnation biz feels a bit tired by now. Also destroy: that deeply homophobic int. he gave w/ 'Chemical Imbalance' fanzine 15 plus years ago.

my dad gave me his copy of the reader cuz he couldn't read it - he didn't like all the four letter words - and so i thought i'd tackle it and i can't read it either. i just can't read the hepcat thing anymore. dated 60s/70s hepcat talk. i can't really read bangs or meltzer anymore either. i'm always afraid if i keep reading tosches' old stuff he's gonna call something spade faggot jive or something and that fear is enough to make me stop. all three of these guys were wrong about so much too. that's the other thing. they gave up so soon. and beginning your collection of work with something that is supposed to be a review of black sabbath's paranoid but is actually a review of a black widow album bugs me a lot. guess it doesn't matter who the hell he was writing about!

rolling stone doesn't care either:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/paranoid-19710415

clicked this thread w/trembling hand. expected an obit link

dunno, i think Tosches is pretty entertaining. he can be aggressively dumb at times but can also be awesome. his Country book is hilarious.
the reader thing is pretty bad tho.

i saw a thing in mojo with him and it was fairly standard stuff, just stuff about upcoming projects and shit like that...then at the end they ask this question (which i think they ask everyone in this section of the magazine as a last question): "Tell me something you've never told and interview before", and I'm sure they usually get like amusing anecdotes or fun facts or whatever, but tosces goes on this whole thing about how he had this painting of some female saint and spent a year jacking off on her face and the painting became all grossly discolored and stuff, anyway it was really bizarre and then it was like "Ok, thanks" and end of the interview. o_O

country book is the only tosches i've read--some good stuff in there--but his style is not my favorite type of thing to read.

can't hait on bangs too much, cuz reading psychotic reactions as a young teen & getting into the godz, tangerine dream and van morrison was definitely a good thing..

lmao @ tosches beating off story

he gave the interviewer "good copy"

i first read tosches when unsung heroes ran as a column in creem. those profiles of obscure musicians were great reads. they weren't about the music as much as the crazed lives led by these obscure musicians. they really stood out as narratives, NOBODY else did that kind of writing in music magazines.

so i don't read nick tosches looking to find out anything about music. he doesn't write *about* music he uses music as a springboard to other stuff. dino is his best book imo, where all his passions converge. drinking, the mafia, show-biz, sleaze, macho posturing. back in the late 90s he wrote an amazing long profile of ed sullivan back in vanity fair otherwise i haven't kept up with him.

I've only read Unsung Heroes which I enjoyed a lot.