 |
|
| photo: Sante D'Orazio | |
Music writer and biographer Nick Tosches, "who started out in the late 1960s as a brash music writer with a taste for the fringes of rock and country, then bent his eclectic style to biographies of figures like Dean Martin and Sonny Liston and to hard-to-classify novels," died October 20, the New York Times reported. He was 69. Tosches and fellow music writers Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs "were labeled 'the Noise Boys' for their wild, energetic prose, a world away from fan magazines like Tiger Beat," the Times noted.
In 1977, Tosches published his first book, Country, and followed it up in 1984 with Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll. He then branched out into biography with Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982), Power on Earth: Michele Sindona's Explosive Story (1986) and his well-received Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992), portraying Dean Martin as "a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths."
"I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age," Tosches told the New York Times in 1992, adding: "Life is a racket. Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything's a racket."
Through the 1970s and into the '80s Tosches wrote for magazines like Fusion, Rolling Stone and Creem, "practicing a free-ranging brand of journalism that fell under the label 'gonzo,' " the Times wrote. In 1988, he published his first novel, Cut Numbers, followed in 1994 by Trinities. Tosches became a contributing editor to Vanity Fair in 1996, and an article on boxer Sonny Liston became the 2000 biography The Devil and Sonny Liston. That same year, The Nick Tosches Reader was released
His "most acclaimed and most audacious work of fiction," In the Hand of Dante (2002), "centered on a previously unknown manuscript of Dante's masterwork, The Divine Comedy, and a more or less fictional character named Nick Tosches who is called upon to authenticate it," the Times said. Me and the Devil (2012) "also featured a character named Nick who bore similarities to the author."
An interviewer said of Hellfire: "At the end of the book, you leave him very much alive, still roaming the earth, but pretty much facing the abyss." Tosches replied, "It's the way we all live. Shallow life, shallow ditch. Big life, big abyss."