“I’ve always felt an affinity for both the high and the low,” Tosches said in a 2001 profile in the Boston Phoenix. When Tosches’ “Reader” collection came out, “dean of rock critics” Robert Christgau considered his reputation alongside that of rogue rock critics or ex-critics like the late Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer, “all partisans of rock at its noisiest - culture as ecstatic disruption.” Christgau said all three “dreamed of escaping rockcrit and becoming a ‘real writer.’ Tosches has succeeded royally,” he said, calling him “a master crime reporter whose manner yokes Homer, Hemingway and some ’60s tit magazine I’m not literate enough to ID.” His run of novels ran from 1988’s “Cut Numbers” to 2015’s “Under Tiberius.” A compilation, “The Nick Tosches Reader,” was published in 2000. Tosches’ other biographies included accounts of a Mafia-linked banker (“Power on Earth”), boxer Sonny Liston (“The Devil and Sonny Liston”), minstrel singer Emmett Miller (“Where Dead Voices Gather”) and a reported World Series fixer of the 1910s (“King of the Jews”). “Marc considers him to be an indispensible tour guide through the darkness in life,” the introductory copy for the episode read.
His legend was large enough in recent years that he appeared on an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” show in 2009 and was interviewed by Marc Maron for a “WTF” podcast in 2015. Serious fans of early rock ‘n’ roll also revere two early books: his first, 1977’s “Country: The Biggest Music in America,” which found greater acclaim when it was re-released with a subtitle that got more specifically to its true subject, “The Twisted Roots of Rock and Roll” and “Unsung Heroes of Rock n’ Roll: The Birth of Rock in the Wild Years Before Elvis” in 1984, which endeavored to prove that Jerry Lee Lewis was not the burgeoning artform’s only seminal loose screw.
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