Nick Tosches (1949–2019)

I went into this book expecting to like it more than I ultimately did. Tosches, who died just last year, was one of the first "rebel" music writers on the rock music scene of the 1960s. He was credited, along with Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and a few others, with elevating rock journalism to a more literary and raucous level. In fact, Bangs, Meltzer and Tosches became known as the "Noise Boys." By 2001, when this book was published, Tosches had expanded into all sorts writing, from novels show more to very well received biographies of Sonny Liston, Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin. I, however, had never read any of these books, and I was looking forward to this one. So what is this book?

Where Dead Voices Gather is Tosches personalized and opinionated account of the life of Emmett Miller a by-now very obscure black face performer who had a brief moment in the sun in the 1920s, when minstrelsy was already beginning its decline, leaving behind a handful of recordings that have since been rereleased. Miller had a singular vocal style, full of leaps and whoops. He is considered one of the earliest yodeling singers and it is known (according to Tosches) that he was an influence on Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams. There is, however, very little known about Miller's life. What was known, however, was enough to create an obsession for Tosches that he spent decades indulging, finally tracking down enough information to write this book, sort of.

I say, "sort of" because this book is not just about Miller, or about Tosches' search for Miller, which was really what I was expecting: sort of a travelogue that would take us through the American south with Tosches as he did his research, followed up leads and reported not just on what he'd found out but also on the experiences he'd had, the people he'd met and places he'd seen, along the way. What the book is instead is mostly Tosches' presentation of the research he, and others, have done on Miller and his life and career. What we get for much of the book are details about recording dates, songs and bandmates. Tosches will often then spin out the narrative to provide information about the careers of those bandmates, and then about the careers of people they've performed with, across the realms of minstrelsy, blues and early jazz, black and white. This all could be quite dry if one doesn't already come to the material with one's own love of music and fascination with American music history. The effect of all this is a tapestry of information, a weaving together of the almost infinite strands of influences and counter-influences in American music. Tosches, in fact, is not shy about bringing his strands all the way back to the ancient Greeks, to Homer and his unknown influencers. The dead voices of the book's title are all of those unknown ones, the musicians, particularly American, who's names and faces are lost to our recorded national history and to our memory, the ones who came before and created the foundations of all we now know. Tosches relatively frequently writes quite rhapsodically, and quite wonderfully, about all these threads, connections and reverberations.

But in fixating about Miller, Tosches also comes to identify very strongly with the era of minstrelsy, wherein white singers appeared in blackface and created a false nostalgia for a South that never was and a compliant, easy-go-lucky, sly but ignorant black people who certainly never were. Tosches sees this as benign, more or less, it seems. After all, says he, there were black musicians who also put on blackface to perform in these shows, so how bad could it have been? And anyway, most of the most famous minstrel songs ("Dixie" and "Swanee," for example) were actually written by northerners. Tosches, instead, reserves his strident contempt for basically anything to do with the 1960s (other than Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones). The folk movement of the 60s was fraudulent, in itself the worst kind of "minstrelsy," as middle class kids dressed up in working class clothes and pretended to be poor, and those who promoted the "blues revival," whereby dozens (if not more) bluesmen were rediscovered and recorded because they insisted (says Tosches) that these musicians don the trappings of poverty, regardless of what their real life situations might have been. We can agree to the fact that there was a level of disingenuousness in all of this without insisting, I think, that it was just as bad as the decades long, nationwide, show biz objectification of blacks as ignorant and shambling. Tosches draws, toward the end of the book, direct lines between minstrelsy and the modern, corporation-dominated music industry. Well, OK. Point taken. So it's only hypocrisy, then, to react with distaste toward minstrelsy. There, he loses me.

As mentioned above, Tosches came of age professionally in the 60s, making his mark as a music writer on the rock scene. Like quite a few people who experienced those days first hand, he seems to have eventually reacted quite strongly against the era and the people and all that the times have come to represent. There is "nothing to be said for them." So instead of trying to tell us what there was about the culture of the days of minstrelsy's heyday that would have led talented musicians--people who were used to working with and, one would guess, respecting--their black musical peers, to be so blind to the harms brought about by the music they were making and the performing group they were touring with, Tosches lands instead on a "how is that any worse than this" misdirection which gives him an opportunity to rail against the source of his own cultural aversions. Unfortunately for Tosches, and for the reader, here, nobody likes a know-it-all.

I learned a lot, a whole lot, about music history, about minstrelsy, and about the confluence of musical influences that have worked together to create the great, expansive body of American music. I've even come to appreciate those dead voices that Tosches evokes. But in the end I'd only recommend this book to people with a very focused interest in the subject matter. show less

Dino! Yeah, this is the biography that re-shaped the way celebrity biographies were written. It also brought Dean Martin back to the forefront, just three years before he died. This is the type of book that can polarize fans, but there is no doubt that it breaks the barriers. After this, Dino became a cult god, the Swinger of Swingers for the Generation X crowd.

I actually read this again, about 15 years after the first read-through. It still stands up, although I've read so many other Dean show more Martin biographies since then that some of the information is old news. But lordy, it truly rocks. In essence, Tosches tackled a subject that could not be tackled. Dino wasn't Frankie. Dino presented a mask to the outside world, so he could enjoy his own world. Work was work and play was play, even if 'play' constituted a night in front of the telly. Martin never wanted to be the best of anything, yet he became a giant without a whole lot of effort. Tosches has to create something out of nothing and he succeeds. Whether you like it or not doesn't make the book any less compelling.

Funny. As a kid, I always thought it was "Dean-No." I yelled that at the book whenever I found another incident not to my liking. In the long run, I ended up admiring the Deanster even more for being able to tell Hollywood, and the world, to sit on it and twirl.

Book Season = Year Round (bio classic) show less

Tosches effectively describes a musical (d)evolution, as country music's affinity for violence and raunch gives way to God, Mother, Sin, Guilt, and Sorrow. These then are the dying metaphors of Country's subtitle.

I never much cared for country music, my understanding of it defined by radio play while living in Texas and Tennessee. It was only after college that I could appreciate some country, though never the Nashville Pop stuff. The music that resonates with me I tend to tag as "roots", show more everything else from the genre I relegate to the "country & western" label.

Tosches' ruminations appeal precisely because they're interesting cultural commentary. I took his country music examples as illustrations of general musical trends, for the most part uninterested in the particular artists or subgenres. Tosches on the other hand is keen on the specifics, lamenting a lost rebel side of country, which I admire mostly as a matter of principle, and from afar. The rebel myth is hard enough to swallow in rock n roll, put a rhinestone cowboy hat on it and I'm most apt to snigger.

What's clear is that the commercial juggernaut warps and pressures all music. Following along in an unfamiliar musical tradition --one in which I have little interest-- helped me see the generic forces at work. They're targeting music I like, too, of course (and a lot more besides music), so while it's always been fairly easy to see, Tosches helps identify some less-evident trends at play. The biggest was obvious but not always clear: transform the unorthodox into something more easily commodifiable, the trappings of rebellion without the threat. show less

As with Tosches' other books, Dino is about a lot more than its titular subject, though the life of Dean Martin is covered in thoroughly-researched detail. Dino is a key piece of Tosches' larger project of illuminating the darker corners of the American 20th Century, and especially its popular culture. Gamblers, mobsters, sleazy movie execs, and their various associates all play a role here, alongside the big names - Sinatra, Marilyn, the Kennedys, Reagan, John Wayne, and, of course, Jerry show more Lewis, who apparently granted Tosches a very open and uncensored interview.

Tosches gets great mileage out of colliding highbrow and lowbrow, the sacred and the profane, and out of these collisions produces a cracking style. An amazing portrait. Truly the life AND times of an (Italian-) American original. show less