Richard Meltzer: A Whore Just Like The Rest

While a great deal of arts criticism has appeared alongside the advent of its subject, it wasn't until well after the arrival of rock 'n' roll that writers began to take the genre seriously. Rock music had been around a good 15 years when magazines such as Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and Creem created a niche for themselves, announcing their arrival as counter-cultural forces by featuring such writers as Greil Marcus, Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer, and Lester Bangs. Partly inspired by the radical tenor of the late '60s and partly out of pure adventure, these writers were making (and breaking) standards of traditional journalism as they went along. There was no money to be had and endless space to fill, so is it any wonder that early, barely professional rock publications (a host of one-offs and where-are-they-nows) attracted the kind of cranks you'd avoid on the subway It's striking how obnoxious and full of contempt the formative forays into rock criticism often are: Lester Bangs, for example, would write epic, narcissistic essays on bands such as The Guess Who, Black Sabbath, and The Stooges, with the music almost an afterthought. More artful in their chaos, Nick Tosches and Richard Meltzer (both of whom have been impressively anthologized by Da Capo) infused their writing with the free energy and pretension of the beat poets as much as the New Journalism movement. Considering the bile and bitter self-loathing in his collection, is it any wonder Tosches seemed in a hurry to escape rock writing The Nick Tosches Reader contains hundreds of pieces, most with new introductions by the author, that flow chronologically from his music pieces to excerpts from his acclaimed biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin, through bits of fiction and poetry. While there's much to admire throughout the book, some inclusions stand out, such as the long profile of George Jones rejected by the Tina Brown-era New Yorker but cherished by just about everyone who has ever read it. Richard Meltzer seems in an even greater rush to escape, but he's still living life as a beyond-acerbic rock critic. His assaultive stream-of-consciousness pieces read like recorded rants, rarely addressing his subject directly and sometimes ignoring it altogether. Meltzer is interested mostly in Meltzer, which actually makes for some fascinating reads: Not only did Meltzer help "invent" rock criticism and encourage Blue Öyster Cult to recklessly utilize umlauts, but he also eerily presaged the wild, unfocused slop of Internet newsgroups. It can be tough to read material written with such a terrible attitude (or, for that matter, written under the influence), but it can be exhilarating. These collections are hit-and-miss but always compelling, and that's one of their pleasures: You get to see a new form, warts and all, shaping itself before any interlopers got their hands on it. The result is often closer to literature than criticism, but it frequently reads with the swagger of rock 'n' roll itself.