Metro Pulse/Pulp/Nick Tosches

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Two Nick Tosches tomes take on a boxer and other American icons

by Lee Gardner

Like his friends and colleagues Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches started out as a music critic in the early '70s, when the form was still an infant. Along with Bangs and Meltzer, he pioneered a blend of smart-ass rock attitude, well-read intellectual savvy, autobiography, street knowledge, and literary ambition that introduced a whole new way of writing about pop culture. While his cohorts became perhaps the two most esteemed rock-writing stylists ever, they ended up trapped in the rock-writing ghetto. Tosches worked on his prose like a boxer works on his body—trimming and toning, building up deftness and power—and began applying a high-literary style to other forms of "low" culture. As such, he has forged an unparalleled career as a chronicler of late 20th-century American from the vantage of the alley rather than Main Street. Tosches may be the only writer ever to appear in both Chemical Imbalance fanzine and Vanity Fair.

Tosches is perhaps best-known for a pair of biographies: Hellfire, his 1982 bio of Jerry Lee Lewis, still the most visionary and furiously poetic rock book ever written; and 1992's cult favorite Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, which transformed the life of boozy entertainer Dean Martin into a tragic epic. In both cases, the author researched exhaustively and then projected himself into his subjects, omnisciently narrating the books from inside their heads. Tosches' latest book, The Devil and Sonny Liston (Little Brown, $24.95), attempts a similarly novelistic portrait of the title's reviled boxer, the man from whom Muhammed Ali first won the world heavyweight championship in 1965. It's the first such effort that delivers Tosches a defeat.

In theory, it's a dynamite match-up: Liston, the man 1960s Americans—black and white—feared and hated, and perhaps the most punishing heavyweight fighter since Jack Johnson, meets Tosches, the Boswell of disrespected pop-culture icons. Certainly The Devil and Sonny Liston carries plenty of explosive power. The book, like Dino, amounts to another de facto installment of the author's ongoing underground history of the Mob. Born the grandson of a slave in the grinding poverty of the rural deep South, Liston traded in one set of psychic chains for another, Tosches contends, letting his entire career be run by a behind-the-scenes cabal of organized-crime fixers and moneymen. Most explosive of all, Tosches makes a compelling case that the hitherto unstoppable Liston threw his two title fights with Ali. As to the circumstances behind the boxer's mysterious 1971 death, the author admits it's still an open question.

Ultimately, however, The Devil and Sonny Liston seems to swing wild. Tosches' baroque style and authorial intrusion worked in Hellfire and Dino because Tosches convinced readers that he knew the subjects better than they knew themselves. He does his usual thorough detective job here, bringing the reader along on a fascinating troll through the dank and brutal world of mid-century boxing. But despite some of the author's most visceral writing yet, Liston—brooding, taciturn, illiterate, wary of the press and never their darling—remains opaque. It's as much of the whole story as anyone's ever likely to get, yet for Tosches it constitutes a letdown.

A better example of Tosches' power and reach can be found in the new The Nick Tosches Reader (Da Capo Press, $18.95), an anthology that follows his career chronologically via poetry, fiction, song lyrics, correspondence—even what looks like an expense report—interspersed with magazine pieces, excerpts from his novels and non-fiction works, and his own pithy running commentary. Even with its juvenilia and the idiosyncratic mix of forms, the book is difficult to put down. Unlike writers who attempt to cover the entire cultural terrain and end up spread thin, the Reader shows that Tosches returns over and over to the same touchstones he knows by heart—womanizing, drinking, hardcore country and the darker strains of rock, the criminal underworld, the Greek classics, and Hubert Selby Jr. Tosches' takes on these obsessions won't be for everyone—the book offers a warts-and-all portrait of a proud survivor from a less politically correct time—but his fierce intelligence and the elegant swagger of his mature style makes almost anything he writes worth reading, whether he's slyly hitting on Patti Smith, speculating on the fate of Elvis' ostensibly dead twin brother, or dragging shadowy mob powerbrokers into the light.