The Nick Tosches Reader

by Nick Tosches

Overview

Newsday has said that Nick Tosches "casts brilliant black light." The San Diego Reader has said that "Tosches's best sentences uncoil like rattlesnakes and strike with a venom that spreads poison through all the little Sunday-school ideas you've held dear." And Rolling Stone has said that "Tosches can write like a wild rockabilly raveup. He can be elegant as a slow blues." The Nick Tosches Reader is the author's own selection of his best work over the past thirty years, including fiction, poetry, interviews, rock writing, investigative journalism, and criticism. First published in major magazines, obscure underground periodicals, and his own best-selling books, many of these selections deal with rock 'n' roll and cultural icons—but there are also pieces on everything from William Faulkner to organized crime to heavyweight boxing, including the Vanity Fair feature that gave rise to Tosches's major new book on Sonny Liston, published by Little, Brown. Here is "a unique and darkly impressionistic cultural history" of the last three decades as only Nick Tosches could write it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780306809699
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	04/07/2000
Pages:	624
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nick Tosches is from Newark, New Jersey. He is the author of four previous novels, Me and the Devil, In the Hands of Dante, Cut Numbers, and Trinities. His nonfiction works include Where Dead Voices Gather, The Devil and Sonny Liston, Dino, Power on Earth, Hellfire, Country, and Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll. He lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

1949

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

High school

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

I was eighteen or nineteen years old, working days at the Lovable Underwear Company, when I came to know the poet Ed Sanders. Ed, who twenty years later would win an American Book Award for his poetry, was then the ringleader of the notorious band The Fugs, and he also ran the Peace Eye bookstore, which at that time was on Avenue A.

    Ed had a degree in classical languages, and could read fluently in their own Greek and Latin those ancient poets that I could only understand through the gauze of translation. I had tried to teach myself Greek from the two volumes of A Reading Course in Homeric Greek that I had robbed from a divinity student a few years before, and I had taken Latin in high school; but it was beyond me to truly delve the beauties and powers of the poetry of those tongues, as Ed could. He had even studied Egyptian hieroglyphics.

    We shared, he in his erudite way and I in my unlettered fashion, a love for those ancient fragments that were the wisps of the source, the wisps of origin, the wisps of the first and truest expression of all that since had been said. And we both had dirty minds, given as much to the gutter as to the gods.

    The Lower East Side was a different place back then. It was still a neighborhood. East Thirteenth Street was still known as the Street of Silence, a name I would bestow on another Mafia stronghold, Sullivan Street, in my novel Cut Numbers. The joints were still joints. We drank a lot in those joints.

    Ed was a great guy. He was about ten years older than I, and was the first real poet to whom I showed my poetry. "Hell, man," he told me, "you're a fucking poet." As I doubt he ever realized he was my first mentor, so I doubt he ever realized what a shove forward, what a turning point, this was for me.

    That poem, which bore the title "Still/Life," and which I later invoked in my novel Trinities, is long gone. Fragments of it follow.

Still/Life

A blunt shock to find your life in episodes on a Mochican vase
[...]
& the cool white tile
[...]
emergency room, 3 AM

---

Excerpted from THE NICK TOSCHES READER by Nick Tosches. Copyright © 2000 by Nick Tosches, Inc.. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Introduction	xiii
1. Still/Life	1
2. Review of Paranoid	3
3. Review of Good Taste Is Timeless	6
4. Review of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat	9
5. Absolutely Dead!	12
6. Leuk	14
7. The Heartbeats Never Did Benefits	20
8. God-Crazed Hippies Reap Boffo B.O	24
9. Be Bop A Lula	29
10. The Box	31
11. The 24-Hr Sound of Country Gospel and the Dark	33
12. Beyond Euclid: Pool!	38
13. The Real Avant-Garde	40
14. Review of Gately's Cafe	44
15. Muddy Waters Rarely Eats Fish	46
16. Eye: Disease	49
17. Review of The Mollusks of Tartura	50
18. Sex and Booze	53
19. Valerie	59
20. Screamin' Jay Hawkins and the Monster	61
21. Patti Smith	67
22. Country	80
23. Excerpt from Country	84
24. When Literary Lights Turn on the TV	86
25. Letter	91
26. Patti Smith: Straight, No Chaser	92
27. God Created Dean Martin in His Own Image, Then Stood Back	97
28. Jim Morrison: The Late Late Show	99
29. Blondie Plucks Her Legs	102
30. Review of Always Know	106
31. The Gospel According to Jerry Lee	108
32. Journal Entry	114
33. A Christmas Carol	115
34	The Sea's Endless, Awful Rhythm & Me Without Even a
Dirty Picture	124
35. The Sweet Thighs of Mother Mary	131
36. Pizza Man	133
37. Lust Among the Adverbs	134
38. Letter	146
39. Purity	147
40. Pizza Man	159
41. The Butt and I	166
42. Pleasant Brits and 180-Degree Spins	170
43. Excerpt from Hellfire	172
44. Felicity Opens Wide	175
45. Journal Entries	185
46. Good Book Made Better	189
47. Lust in the Balcony	192
48. Review of A Child's Adventure	197
49. Review of The Maximus Poems	199
50. Elvis in Death	203
51	Maybe It Was My Big Mouth—Carly Simon: Free, White,
and Pushing Forty	211
52. Review of A Choice of Enemies	215
53. Review of The Garden of Priapus	218
54. Review of A House in the Country	220
55. Review of Renaissance and Reform	222
56. Excerpt from Unsung Heroes of Rock `n' Roll	224
57. God Is My Cosponsor	232
58. Frankie: Part 1	234
59. Hillary Brooke's Legs	247
60. Elmer Batters	250
61. Review of Canned Meat	252
62. How to Pick Up Girls in Albania	254
63. Excerpt from Power on Earth	256
64. Excerpt from Frankie: Part 2	268
65. Pentecostals in Heat	276
66. The Short-Shorts of Satan	286
67. Excerpt from Cut Numbers	294
68. Exile on Twenty-first Street	308
69. Review of Killer: The Mercury Years	310
70. Miles Davis: The Hat Makes the Man	313
71. James Douglas Morrison, 1943-1971	317
72	The Singer Madonna Arraigned by the Ghost of Pope
Alexander VI	321
73. Lester	323
74. Excerpt from Dino	329
75. Oedipus Tex	335
76. J. Edgar Hoover: The Burroughsian Nightmare	345
77. Memories of Joe	349
78. My Kind of Loving	352
79. George Jones: The Grand Tour	353
80. My Overcoat, My Brains, and Me	385
81. Notebook entry	392
82. Nightmare Alley	393
83. Excerpt from Trinities	396
84. Letter	409
85. The Holy City	410
86. Ophis Ovum Opium Olé	414
87. There's a Woman Here, Baby	416
88. Who Holds in Her Belly the Power of Life	417
89. A Slab of Grease, a Bottle of Carbona, and Thou	418
90. Excerpt from "Entering the Barrens"	428
91. Requiescat Dino	431
92. De Niro	434
93. The Unfuckable	442
94. The Coin	447
95. Why I Am Great	449
96. Sea of Love	452
97. Faraglione 9/16/96	453
98. If I Were Robert Stack	454
99. Letter	458
100. Letter	460
101. Letter	461
102. Letter	463
103. Letter	465
104. Spud Crazy	466
105. The Things I Got	488
106. Ash Wednesday	491
107. The Devil and Sidney Korshak	493
108. Excerpt from Where Dead Voices Gather	526
109. Night Train	529
110. Dear Privileged Intimate	557
111. Hymn for Charlie	558
112. E-mail	559
113. Please Be Quiet-Please	560
114. From Chaldea	562
Hymn to Paean, Physician of the Gods
All of Gust and Sigh
Old Nick's Song of Songs
May the Gods without Names Redeem Me
Ptolemy II
Dante in Ravenna
Contrapasso
From the Dream-book of Artemidorus
Invocation
What the Coptic Guy Said
115. Excerpt from Scratch	567
116. Excerpt from In the Hand of Dante	584
Bibliographical Appendix	586

Editorial Reviews

New York Times Book Review, 7/15/10
“If you want to learn about the power and dangers of rock ’n’ roll, check out Mary Gaitskill’s incomparable novel Veronica or Marianne Faithfull’s cackling memoir or The Nick Tosches Reader.”

From the Publisher

The writing is intense, truculent, often inspired.

Sky Magazine

[Tosches] has accomplished that rare coup - becoming a rock critic with legitimate literary respectability.

New York Press

In the nearly 600 pages of The Nick Tosches Reader, one discovers an adaptable writer who is able to find the perfect pitch, tone, and authorial voice to address his subject.

LA Weekly

...guaranteed to keep the noses of rock-crit nerds...pressed to the page all summer long.

Toronto Globe and Mail

Tosches is best known for his 100-proof biographies of Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis, and his beautifully trenchant life of the prize-fighter Sonny Liston (see review above) will arrive to the timely accompaniment of this collection from his diverse writing career, showing Tosches to be more than a gifted, dogged chronicler of flawed public figures. The Reader contains more than 100 pieces, including excerpts from the author's nonfiction, his two novels (Cut Numbers, Trinities), dozens of magazine pieces that appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone, Esquire and Vanity Fair (to which Tosches is now a contributing editor) and riffs on Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, Sinatra's voice, Miles Davis's horn, Carly Simon's mouth and "The Singer Madonna Arraigned by the Ghost of Pope Alexander VI." While these pieces, taken together, show the arc of a successful career, they also give a glimpse of a period in magazine writing that is long gone, in which hell-bent editors such as Lester Bangs would assign a review of a new album and the reviewer could simply talk about how the packaging felt in his hands. Tosches, early in his career, paid his bills with small fees garnered as a music critic, and this lively era of no-holds-barred journalism (later to be dubbed "New") is on raunchy display here. Creem asked Tosches to interview Patti Smith, and the rock-poet says, "Hell, Nick, you know me. Just make it up." And he does. In Rock magazine, he reviewed an album that never existed ("It is indeed quite difficult to approach this album with the pedestrian sensibilities that suffice for most musical creations"). The term "pedestrian" will never be applied to Tosches--neither in his interests nor his prose style. In this carefully constructed collection, for which Tosches provides contextual links and anecdotes about the composition of each piece, readers will get a complex and satisfying portrait not only of a time but of a deeply reflective and probing writer who, beneath the din of music and gangsters and poseurs, hears what he calls "the wisdom and power of silence and wind." (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Best known for his classic Jerry Lee Lewis biography, Hellfire, Tosches has compiled his book and record reviews, articles, rock interviews, and other works that have appeared in magazines (under- and overground) in the last 30 years. While organizing this anthology-of-sorts, he also wrote funny and insightful introductions to each piece. The best parts are the short fiction and personal essays, which are often overtly sexual and hubristic but written with an Olympian mastery of language--it's like reading Bukowski by way of Tennyson. The resulting work would, in a just world, make Tosches the patron saint of literate, disaffected male college students with an ear for caustic, honest work. The music writings and book reviews are ultimately esoteric but help forge this collection into a fascinating document of New York City subculture and the dissipation of the Altamont generation. Recommended for larger social science collections.--Colin Carlson, New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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