Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The author of "Dino," "Hellfire" and the forthcoming "The Devil and Sonny Liston" talks about the Mysterious Pig Iron Man, Hollywood and snake wrangling in Florida.
Nov 12, 1999 | Choosing a place to meet Nick Tosches for lunch in New York is a foregone conclusion. Every day he eats at the same table at the same restaurant, Da Silvano. Routine helps to minimize chaos and distraction. With two books due out next year, magazine feature stories near completion, a screenplay plus a couple of developing novels on the horizon, Tosches has been remarkably productive the last few years. There is no time to sample the revolving door of restaurants in the West Village. Go with what you know.
Tosches emerged roughly 30 years ago from music magazines like Creem and Fusion where he placed the fringe figures of rock 'n' roll history in proper perspective. Providing a reminder to those at Woodstock that the party started years earlier with R&B giants like Joe Turner. Long before acid there was bootleg liquor. Long before free love there was Hank Ballard who let us know what working with Annie was all about. Along with Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and a handful of other noble notables from the era, Tosches elevated rock writing to a new plateau.
Sadly, few from the short list have flourished quite like Tosches has since his breakthrough biography of Dean Martin in 1992. "Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams" was a big-time bestseller and helped to expand shelf space for Tosches' earlier books in stores across the country. But that is not the immediate topic at hand. Nor is his forthcoming biography of boxer Sonny Liston, "The Devil and Sonny Liston," to be published by Little Brown in April 2000. No, I want to talk footwear with the man privileged intimates know as Pope Nick.
What is foremost on my mind is the pair of leopard-skin loafers I noticed Tosches wearing a few weeks ago when we met with a mutual friend from out of town (at Da Silvano, natch). When I inquire whether the shoes were for special occasions only, Nick waves off my speculation. "No ... no ... those are just my prized shoes. Everyone should have some prized shoes. They were six years in the making. The only illegal shoes in New York."
Like wearing sunglasses after dark, Tosches carries this kind of stuff off. Similarly, he knows how to work a cigarette for optimum dramatic impact, delivering offhand remarks and sly observations through a cloud of smoke, all without a hint of affectation. Tosches methodically alternates between Camels and some filtered brand for the next couple of hours, both packs neatly placed next to each other on the table for quick access.
After the shoes are dealt with, conversation turns to a rare record Tosches recently purchased - a monumentally bizarre 45 by the Rockateers titled "I'm Gonna Feed My Baby Poison," originally released back in 1953. The price tag for the single rivals what I paid for my used Volkswagen. I ask how Tosches ended up listening to things like "Poontang" by the Treniers (a record he refers to in print as a "two-sided affront to decorum") instead of the Big Chill baby-boom bullshit that claimed the ears of most his age. He shrugs. "Probably overhearing my cousin Dorothy's records or transistor radio or something, maybe. Who knows? I might have heard it lying on the floor for six months. I don't know. It's just there."
Nick's passion for oddball records and overlooked and arcane cultural detritus are of significance in that they provided the basis for the inspired and groundbreaking research that made up his first two books on American music, "Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll" and "Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll: The Birth of Rock in the Wild Years Before Elvis."
I suggest that the real reason pre-Elvis primordial pop music produced so many interesting and bizarre surprises was the wide-open, unrestricted marketplace from which it emerged. A place where any entrepreneur, delusional or otherwise, could grab a piece of the action. Tosches agrees. "Back then it was not only free-market capitalism, I mean, it was really freedom. You were able to lie, steal, cheat and use unpaid slave labor. In terms of cultural stuff, specifically, it wasn't only a free market, it was blind. They just didn't know what they were selling or to whom. These small record companies would put out polar opposite product in one breath. It was great; a lot of amazing stuff emerged in the process."
Picking out records by Stick McGhee or Hardrock Gunter (whom Tosches bills as the "Mysterious Pig Iron Man") from the morass, dusting them off and placing them in the pantheon of American music was what Tosches did best in his early work. Finding value and merit in what has been cast off by the culture at large may very well be the core initiative to Tosches' research agenda. It has had its personal rewards.
"I wrote about Hardrock Gunter and actually got a letter from him. And the guy's great. He's like insurance salesman of the year, three times in a row out there in Phoenix, Ariz. somewhere." There are also occasional financial and professional rewards as well. Tosches' first book, "Country," is back in print again and is widely recognized as a vital, though resolutely sleazy, cornerstone of country music scholarship. The cover of the new edition, featuring the homely, rheumy-eyed singer Riley Puckett, quickly serves notice that "Country" is anything but a conventional history. While Tosches is somewhat dismissive of much of the writing in the book, it was where he first explored his long-standing passion for Jerry Lee Lewis. Tosches eventually wrote "Hellfire," a book-length biography of Lewis in 1984. It's been published in several languages and flatly referred to by Rolling Stone as the greatest rock 'n' roll biography ever written.
Get Salon in your mailbox!