Celebrating Nick Tosches’ birthday with Austin Brookner on Smart Rider Principles, October 23rd

On Friday, October 23rd, the anniversary of the late Nick Tosches’s birth, Smart Rider Principles (filling in 8-10pm ET) welcomes guest host Austin Brookner for a celebration of Tosches’s life and work through records he made with friends over the years.

Nick Tosches (1949–2019) was an acclaimed journalist, poet, novelist, and biographer whose writing moved restlessly between the sacred and the profane. His best-known books include Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982), which Rolling Stone called “the best rock and roll biography ever written,” and Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992), his biography of Dean Martin. He also wrote fiction and poetry and was a contributing author to Vanity Fair.

Sometimes a lyricist, sometimes a vocalist, Tosches always brought the same unruly sensibility to music that animated his writing. (Photo credit: Sante D’Orazio)