Haven't read the Dean Martin book but I remember reading
Tosche's columns
and reviews in Creem magazine back in the eighties, back when
it mattered.
Creem was (and might still be, somewhere out there) a
rock'n'roll mag with
an in-your-face 'tude, and a sacred vow to take the piss out
of about
everything pretentious, which seemed to include every
musician they ever
covered. What it all boiled down to was some of the best
writers in
rock'n'roll writing passionately about what really mattered
in rock'n'roll.
No fashion spreads, no ads for cologne, no cover page stories
on the
publisher's jet set buddies. One of the young turks at the
time was
Tosches, who wrote the regular reviews and interviews, and
also kicked in a
column on forgotten heroes of rock'n'roll. More impressionist
than
biographical, they were the real deal, and he peppered them
with right-on
similes and metaphors like he was Chandler's bastard son. I
still remember
him writing about Wanda Jackson, a rockabilly singer who sang
like "you
could fry an egg on her G-spot." I think these columns were
later collected
in a book, and I do know that he wrote a great book in the
same style about
Jerry Lee Lewis, called, I think, Hellfire. It reads like a
Jim Thompson
rewrite of Goodis' Shoot the Piano Player.
Forget Kinky Friedman as a private eye, I wanna see Jerry Lee
kicking down
doors and takin' down names...Ellroy did it for Dick Contino;
now let's see
him take on the Killer!
(actually, didn't Tosches write a crime novcel a few years
back, something
about Chinese gangs and drugs?)
In fact, a lot of rock writers in the seventies and eighties,
and even
today, display an attitude that could certainly be called
hardboiled. The
offbeat metaphors and similies, the terse cynicism, the
hyperbole, the
preoccupation with deflating pumped up pretensions. Lester
Bangs, Tosches,
Charles M. Young, early Dave Marsh, Paul Nelson, Marcus Greil
(who raved
about The Last Good Kiss), Robert Christgau and others seemed
to have all
spent a bit of time soaking up old Bogie movies and Chandler
novels...
I dunno why this is all coming back to me....maybe it's that
I'm reading
Pelecanos' A Firing Offense, and it's one of the first times
I've come
across rock'n'roll mentioned in a P.I. novel where it comes
out
right...Pelecanos says at one point that "The Long Ryders
sound like The
Eagles, but with testicles..." (Which is pretty dead-on)...I
wonder if he
spent some of his formulative years with his nose buried in
Creem, too...
Let's face it-having all these modern day, thirty and
forty-something P.I.s
listening to jazz is anachronistic...it's comparable to
having them wear
fedoras. Yes, some 30, 40 year-olds listen to jazz (there'll
be a couple of
hundred thousand of 'em on the streets of Montreal soon for
the jazz fest),
but most of 'em will go home and tune in to some radio
station that plays
rock...
Oh, and as for the "young whippersnappers" crack, I just did
that cos I was
starting to sound like an old fart...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kevin Smith
The Thrilling Detective Web Site
http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
No Business For a Lady? Women Detectives in this month's P.I.
Poll!
There's still some time to vote!
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