THE NICK TOSCHES READER
By Nick Tosches
Da Capo, 593 pages, $18.95 paper
A WHORE JUST LIKE THE REST:
The Music Writings of Richard Meltzer
By Richard Meltzer
Da Capo, 591 pages, $17 paper
Richard Meltzer and a half-million hippies attended Woodstock. Most of the flower children hung out for three days in the mud. But Meltzer took one look around Max Yasgur’s farm and yawned. Early on the first day, he walked out of the youth happening of the century, and an iconoclast was born. His review of an album by the performer who prompted his exit (an unfortunate singer-songwriter named Bert Sommer), reprinted in a new collection of his writings, “A Whore Just Like the Rest,” is more inspired than most accounts of Woodstock itself.
Meltzer and his drinking buddy Nick Tosches, who also gets the retrospective treatment in “The Nick Tosches Reader,” were among the first writers to make a living as rock critics. Even in the we’re-all-in-this-together haze of ’60s youth culture, they reeked of every-man-for-himself attitude.
They were more rebellious than many of the purported rock ‘n’ roll rebels they were assigned to write about, and often funnier. Along with Lester Bangs, they weren’t just writers, they were larger-than-life personalitiesthe room-wrecking pranksters of the nascent critical Establishment that included more refined intellectuals such as Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus and devoted fans-turned-writers such as Paul Williams and Greg Shaw. The prankster critics reviewed albums that didn’t exist and eviscerated ones that they never actually bothered to play. Tosches once approached rock-poet Patti Smith about doing an interview and was turned down, so he made one up. Meltzer not only faked an interview with Andy Warhol, he wrote the piece as though the pale pop icon were interviewing him.
Facts never interfered with a good story in this gonzo approach to criticism, but then Tosches and Meltzer never pretended to be reporters. The distanced perspective of the journalist was, Tosches writes, a “curse and contagion” that repressed the honesty and feeling of great writing. Like the Beats, they didn’t just observe the moment, they immersed themselves in it, blurring the line between subject and author, truth and fiction, high art and low, vileness and beauty, music and noise.
Like his colleague Bangs, Meltzer figured the best way to cover rock ‘n’ roll was to be rock ‘n’ roll: “You’ve gotta go straight at your own jugular . . . and take furious notes while the blood is still fresh.” Not for nothing did the quintessential punk-era hucksters, the Sex Pistols, nominate Meltzer to emcee their notorious final concert in San Francisco, in 1978. On the stage at Winterland, Meltzer out-rottened Johnny Rotten by insulting the audience and was thrown out of the building by the legendary rock promoter Bill Graham (“what a rush,” the ousted author exults in “Whore”).
Yet a decade earlier, Meltzer and his intoxicated rants had given concrete shape to the emerging language of rock culture. Upon reading Meltzer’s review of his first album, Jimi Hendrix whispered to the author, ” `You were stoned when you wrote that . . . right?’ ” In ’60s-speak, this was the ultimate compliment, an acknowledgement that Meltzer, in his own way, was on the inside, creating art every bit as provocative and hip as the rockers he was covering. His first book, “The Aesthetics of Rock,” wasn’t the first long-form exploration of a once-trivialized subject, but it was the most audacious and made him something of a minor celebrity. Dense and daunting, a blend of drug-culture screeds, delirious wordplay and obtuse references culled from Meltzer’s philosophy studies in college, “The Aesthetics of Rock” is infuriating and inspired; in the span of one of Meltzer’s patented run-on sentences, it is often both. Like rock itself, the book is visceral, tactile. It demands to be read aloud, its meandering syntax and explosive epiphanies the equivalent of a long, psychodramatic album track like “The End,” by Meltzer’s beloved Doors.
But Meltzer’s open disdain for what he saw as increasingly greedy and self-important rock stars and their handlers did not sit well with a rock-journalism bureaucracy that itself craved mainstream legitimacy beginning in the ’70s. One of the closing essays in “Whore” is “Vinyl Reckoning,” in which Meltzer uses his record collection as a flimsy excuse to explain–What else?–the meaning and purpose of his life and work. He rants against the critical Establishment for denying him his true place in the rock-critic pantheon, only to wonder, “Was I ever a rockwriter?” Only Meltzer could turn a rock review into existential drama.
Next to Meltzer’s fevered self-obsession, Tosches practically reads like pulp fiction: pomposity-deflating staccato blows aimed at the egos of the famous. His interviews are hilariously blunt. To Jerry Lee Lewis: “Do you figure Elvis went to heaven or to hell?” To Patti Smith: “Were you a horny teenager?” To Muddy Waters: “Do you like getting drunk?”
As a self-acknowledged scoundrel, glue-sniffer, drunk, womanizer and thief, Tosches had the bad-boy credentials to match those of Meltzer, Bangs and the rest. He detested Elvis Presley and the Beatles. But he loved rock ‘n’ roll, the weirder the better.
He was not above the occasional hack assignment (he wrote the quickie bio “Hall and Oates: Dangerous Dances”) to pay the bills, but nobody profiled rock’s fringe characters with greater insight. His book “Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll” grasps the music’s essential chaos better than countless official rock histories.
But the last half of “The Nick Tosches Reader” finds the author exploring different terrain (everything from his sex life to Robert De Niro), no longer caring to wade through the unceasing barrage of record-company product for inspiration. He now concentrates on biographies (see review at right) and novels, for which he has been justly acclaimed.
Meltzer also has published numerous non-rock books. Whereas he once saw rock as “an ever-enlarging Sea of Possibility,” the last decade is “an empty room.” Perhaps it’s just as well. In today’s more serene climate for rock journalism, it’s doubtful that the brutally blunt first-person brand of criticism practiced by Meltzer and Tosches would be welcome. As these two anthologies demonstrate, that’s the readers’ loss.
