How’s that for hyperbole? I could have said “my favorite book…”, but no. Thing is, I truly believe it. For me, Nick Tosches’ Unsung Heroes of Rock & Roll is as good as non-fiction gets, and because it’s about some of my favorite forms of music… It’s freakin’ perfect! Hilarious, profane, not afraid to offend, yet at the same time steeped in vast knowledge. Knowledge not gained at some prestigious nor party-oriented university, where today you can major in things like Bowling Industry Management and Technology or Bakery Science, but at the good old New York Public Library. Probably some record stores. Maybe some wise guys too.
Tosches (who as a youth taught himself Latin, Greek and medieval Italian just for kicks) knows his shit, and learned about it decades before it was easy to pull up anything and everything related to whatever in your web browser. How he was able to gather such a wealth of information on the early history of rock and roll at a time when there wasn’t much of it available even on import vinyl is anyone’s guess. This book came out in 1984 for fuck’s sake! Lots of hanging out at sleazy record stores would be my guess, listening to the original vinyl or shellac. At the time I was barely scratching the surface, thanks to reissue labels like Charly and Krazy Kat and Red Lightnin’, labels of dubious legality as it turned out.
But somehow Tosches was not only able to get his mitts on a vast breadth of this proto-rock and roll, otherwise known today as jump blues or rhythm and blues or rockabilly/hillbilly boogie, but he was able to put it in context. He had an innate ability to assign value to it, separate the wheat from the chaff, make fun of the crass and ridiculous while at the same time not taking even the greatest examples of it too seriously. After all, it’s not high art, is it? It’s music for dancing, for seducing your neighbor, for drinkin’ and carryin’ on. This music, by whatever name you choose, is fun! Remember fun?
You don’t really have to love or even be all that interested in the subject matter to enjoy this book. It’s that well written, that funny. Chapter titles alone are worth the price of admission: Big Joe Turner’s chapter is called Steak for Breakfast, Gal Meat on a Rainy Day. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins gets Horror and the Foot-Shaped Ashtray. You get sentences like “He (Turner) wasn’t always the big fat fuck that he became in later years.”, which come off as lovingly humorous rather than mean-spirited. Tosches loves this stuff, these people. He just has fun with it, and it’s infectious.
Who are these people about whom he writes? Mostly unknowns, even to music geeks. Ella Mae Morse, a voluptuous and bluesy white gal who helped get fledgling Capitol Records off the ground in 1942 with her smash version of “Cow Cow Boogie”, gets a chapter. She’s one of the more famous ones, though household names like Nat King Cole and Bill Haley also get covered. Other obscurities include Merrill Moore, Jimmie Logsdon, Stick McGhee, and the unlikely duo Ming and Ling, about whom nobody else on the planet (to my knowledge) has ever written.
One of my favorite chapters is on Jesse Stone, a consummate professional whose career spanned minstrelsy to swing to rock and roll to the rap era. Had a dog act in a minstrel troupe at age 4 in 1905, and by 1983 was investing in video equipment, aiming to improve MTV (“Too much montage!”). Tons of success in between, in just about every facet of the industry. A hugely influential, fascinating, and undeservedly obscure character.
On the fun side, there’s an entire chapter devoted to Elvis Presley’s presumed-dead twin brother. Is he alive? Did Tosches really meet him after having some conversations with mobbed up characters in sleazy bars? Is that recording he heard real? It’s probably bullshit, but it’s highly entertaining bullshit, and not totally implausible.
Best of all though, for a music snob like me that eschews the dross, seeks the visceral excitement at the heart of all the best music, Tosches is able and more than willing to turn his nose up at anything that smells like cheese, wax poetic in a fun way about the great stuff. In his view, Elvis was over by the time he made “Milkcow Blues Boogie” for Sun, with its schmaltzy and obviously rehearsed “Hold it, fellas, that don’t move me. Let’s get real, real gone for a change!” false start. Rock and roll had run its course by the time the white kids started buying it in bulk, increasingly in its sanitized form. The best shit had already been done, the rest would never scale the same heights.
Much of which I agree with of course, notwithstanding the future evolution of musical forms that would include this rock and roll crap as part of its DNA. Tosches is a stickler, a purist, but not immune from enjoying particularly pungent cheese flavors for the sheer ridiculousness of it. He seems to like Liberace for example. OK, I’m not completely on board with everything he likes…
However, as someone that’s spent many many years traveling down the same musical byways that Tosches did in researching this book, I’ve only grown to love what he has to say more. The guy’s right on the money! Every time I re-read this thing it’s a revelation. Something new sinks in, a piece of music I hadn’t yet heard when I last read it now makes it all more sensible, sensual. I probably read Unsung Heroes once a year, maybe more, and I love it harder each time. It’s a gift that keeps on giving!
So, do me and Nick and yourself a favor, and grab a copy of this thing, huh? I think it’s still in print, probably cheap. It’s got cool illustrations and a wonderfully useful discography too. Heck, nowadays all you need to do is YouTube the song titles as they come up. How cool is that?!? You feel the need for a deep deep rabbit hole and like this early rock and roll shit? You may never resurface…
You can even find this life changing collection of pieces on individual weirdos from the earliest days of that thing we call rock and roll music. It’s out there for free as an ebook in various formats. Pretty easy to locate too. Hint: use qbittorrent, search tosches. Voila!
You’d be surprised how much niche music and related stuff like this is available through torrenting. It just sounds weird. Really it’s just downloading from fellow users that are sharing things. The torrent magic lets you find and obtain things from multiple sources at once, using as much bandwidth as you give it. It’s pretty cool!
Tips for beginning music hoarders:
1 – Use qbittorrent! the built in search function makes it hard to beat. I get tons of shit from torrents, always have. No issues ever but I’ve had a VPN for a while now.
2 – Try words like discography in your searches. In fact, use that word alone. You can build a pretty great collection within hours with that one search. Other possibilities might be flac or mp3, genre names, years, anything you think someone would have named whatever it is you’re after.
3 – If you can’t find it as a torrent the next step is the soulseek network, which you can plunder using a few different clients. There’s the original, the new and improved Soulseekqt, or the nicotine+ client, probably the most flexible, and free in every sense. It’s in Linux, not sure about elsewhere and don’t care.
It takes a little getting used to, but once you’ve got things set up properly you’ll be able to find a whole new world of stuff. Pretty Much anything you can think of. This is where the sicko hard core music hoarders like me go to find that one weird album they loved as a teenager.
Just recently I found one of my last holy grail albums in flac form. I’d been seeking this for 20+ years! All I had was a few tunes, in 64 bit mp3 form! Who encodes to 64 bit, ever? My Richard Ruskin collection is now complete!
He is/was a fingerpicker on Takoma records, founded by John Fahey and home to Leo Kottke’s first album, They had a whole stable of great fingerpickers and did other things including blues and very weird looking stuff I’ve never heard.
Eventually they leaned into the new age guitar thing that got big for a while in yoga studios and health food restaurants, even Starbucks.
Ruskin’s version of Temptation Rag is pretty spectacular. I’ll write it up one day…
4 – Use Linux! It’s easier (and MUCH faster) to install than Windows and you can even test drive it first. Once installed it’s faster in every way. Start with Mint and see what you think before even installing it, which you should do immediately after discovering that all your shit is working and you didn’t lift a mouse finger.
Linux has come a long way since I first played with it in around 1998. I’ve been full time Linux since 2007 or so, though I do keep a copy of Windows installed too just to keep up with what it’s doing. Not enough, but better than it used to be.
It’s easy to tame now! Look into Wintoys. Install that before you even update, then you can get rid of a ton of garbage, make your shit faster and more secure, etc.. It’s very intuitive, even telling you what to do when you hover over an option. Best Windows app ever!
This post begs for a musical example. The problem is, there are way too many from which to choose. I settled on this one because it exemplifies the spirit of the book, and is quoted liberally therein. This quote is from Claude Trenier, twin brother of Cliff, who co-fronted this act that lasted into the 2000’s, becoming Vegas staples in their later years
“I remember we were playing the Riptide in Wildwood, New Jersey, in the summer of 1950. Bill Haley had a cowboy band, the Saddlemen, that played right across the street from us. He used to come in and watch us. He asked us what we called the music we were playing. And we told him. Hell, we told him.”
Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)! 
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