Martin Torgoff has been writing books and making films about sex, drugs and rock and roll for thirty years—The New Yorker
True enough…
As a child of the 50s and a teenager of the 60s, I naturally gravitated to telling stories about the cultural forces and elements that shaped me as I came of age—and I love telling them on big canvasses—but my interests have always ranged far and wide. I’ve had the kind of career where one thing has invariably led to another and the good fortune to find myself at junctures of various new trends and currents in media at just the right time.
Case in point: At the beginning of my career, I was hired as Associate Editor at Grosset & Dunlap at the age of twenty two just as trade paperbacks and coffee table books were really taking off, so that’s what I specialized in: oversized illustrated books with interesting texts about pop cultural subjects. Among them books were about Woody Guthrie, Liberace, Harry Houdini, Reggie Jackson, and shark attacks (the movie Jaws was all the rage)—quite a varied lot that set a kind of template for me.
One of the books I published at Grossett was The Illustrated Elvis, which happened to be in the bookstores when Elvis left the building of life in August of 1977—and this was how I found my way to Graceland and my first book when I left publishing to begin my career as a writer.
I was in my mid-twenties when the best-selling Elvis: We Love You Tender was published, which brought me to the attention of Andy Warhol, whose fascination with Elvis and his fame predated his celebrated silkscreens of the star—and that was how I began writing for Interview during the apogee of Studio 54.
At Interview, where I became a Contributing Editor, my interests were allowed to roam free. Among my subjects were Jack Nicholson, Yoko Ono, Joan Didion, Don King and Harvey Fierstein to name a few—another mixed bag of characters, no?
When I interviewed John Mellecamp for the magazine, he liked the piece so much that he invited me to work on a documentary about him, and that was how I found myself behind the camera for the first time just as film and music were combusting into the age of MTV.
The book I wrote about Mellencamp, American Fool, was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism. I rode the music video revolution pretty much all through the 80s, using the camera to tell stories about artists as diverse as Prince, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, the Highwaymen, Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross, Ravi Shankar and Phillip Glass.
It was all of the above that led to collaborating with Alan and Susan Raymond to make a classic documentary about one year in the life of Elvis Presley— Elvis ‘56.
In the 90s I set out on a twelve year odyssey to tell the story of how the use of illicit drugs shaped the whole cultural landscape of post-war America. The result was a landmark book, Can’t Find My Way Home: America In the Great Stoned Age, and a groundbreaking tv series based on the book, The Drug Years.
In the new millennium I did a headlong deep dive into hip hop; the result was an Emmy-nominated documentary: Planet Rock: The Story of Hip Hip and the Crack Generation.
It’s been a very rich and interesting journey. Over the span of forty years my work has encompassed music, art, film, theater, literature, media, politics, biography, history, race, religion, sports, sociology, lifestyle, humor, travel, drug culture, sexuality, recovery, and celebrity culture. But alas, I feel like some of my best work is still ahead of me…
Reeling In The Years…
