re: Endless Sleep - The Obituary Thread

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Holy shite, totally didn't realize that Mose Allison died this year too. Wow.

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Hasn't Cohen been dead for years?

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Posted on 11/10/16

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Nick Tosches, who started out in the late 1960s as a brash music writer with a taste for the fringes of rock and country, then bent his eclectic style to biographies of figures like Dean Martin and Sonny Liston and to hard-to-classify novels, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 69.

The exact cause has not been determined, but he had been ill, a friend, James Marshall, said.

Mr. Tosches (TOSH-ez) and his fellow music writers Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs were labeled “the Noise Boys” for their wild, energetic prose, a world away from fan magazines like Tiger Beat and Seventeen. Interviewing Debbie Harry of the band Blondie in 1979 for Creem magazine, he thought nothing of asking whether she shaved or waxed her legs. Neither, it turned out; she told him she plucked them, one hair at a time.

“We speak for many minutes of legs and their lore,” he wrote. “Each of us learns a great deal from the other. A mutual respect is born.”

In 1977 Mr. Tosches published his first book, “Country,” a well-researched look at some of country music’s lesser-known and often roguish figures. “Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll” followed in 1984, with chapters on Ella Mae Morse, Skeets McDonald and many more.

But by then Mr. Tosches had already begun to branch out. His first biography, “Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story,” came out in 1982, and in 1986 he ventured beyond music with “Power on Earth: Michele Sindona’s Explosive Story,” about an Italian financier who was involved in assorted scandals.

One of his most attention-getting biographies followed in 1992. It was “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,” about Dean Martin.

“Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man,” he wrote of Martin. “And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.”

For Mr. Tosches, Martin was a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths. (Martin himself died in 1995 at 78.)

“I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age,” Mr. Tosches told The New York Times in 1992.

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Canadian rock ’n’ roll pioneer Jack Scott, who placed four singles in the Billboard top 10 in the U.S., has died, according to several posts on his Facebook page. Wikipedia lists today (Dec. 12) as the date of his death, but a Facebook post from a friend claims that Scott’s wife, Barb, announced his passing two weeks earlier. No place or cause of death were cited. Scott was 83.

Scott’s biggest hits in the U.S. were “My True Love” (#3, 1958), “Goodbye Baby” (#8, 1958-59), “What in the World’s Come Over You” (#5, 1960) and “Burning Bridges” (#3, 1960). The first two of those were released on the Carlton label and the other two on Top Rank.

Another one of Scott’s hits, 1959’s “The Way I Walk,” only reached #35 in the U.S. but found favor with several bands of the punk-new wave era: it was covered by both the Cramps and Robert Gordon

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Kenny Lynch, OBE (18 March 1938 – 18 December 2019) was an English singer, songwriter, entertainer and actor. He appeared in many variety shows in the 1960s. At the time, he was among the few black singers in British pop music

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He is also known for a single release of "Misery", the first cover version of a Beatles song to be released. In early 1963, Lynch had been on the same bill as the Beatles on the group's first British tour; John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote "Misery" in January 1963, in the hopes that the artist on top of the bill, Helen Shapiro, would record it.Shapiro's record producer turned it down, but Lynch took the composition and gave it a much more pop oriented arrangement than the Beatles would use when they recorded "Misery" themselves on their debut album, Please Please Me.

Whilst on a coach with the Beatles (on tour with Helen Shapiro), Lynch reportedly offered to help them write a song, but quickly became frustrated and criticised their ability to compose music – at the time Lennon and McCartney were writing "From Me to You". Years later he appeared on the album cover of Wings' 1973 album Band on the Run, along with other celebrities.

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