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CounterPunch Exclusives

Master Blaster: the Dave Marsh Experience

Dave Marsh at the Stony Pony club in Asbury Park, extolling the virtues of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)

They like to get you in a compromising position They like to get you there and smile in your face They think they’re so cute when they got you in that condition Well I think it’s a total disgrace I fight authority, Authority always wins I fight authority, Authority always wins I’ve been doing it since I was a young kid I come out grinnin’ I fight authority, Authority always wins – John Mellencamp, The Authority Song

They like to get you in a compromising position They like to get you there and smile in your face They think they’re so cute when they got you in that condition Well I think it’s a total disgrace

I fight authority, Authority always wins I fight authority, Authority always wins I’ve been doing it since I was a young kid I come out grinnin’ I fight authority, Authority always wins

– John Mellencamp, The Authority Song

Writing is fighting, Ishmael Reed said, and to know the writer Dave Marsh was to fight with Dave Marsh. To have been friends with Dave Marsh was to fight even more fiercely with Dave Marsh. Most of these disputes were trivial to the outsider, but vital to the combatants, such as: who was the supreme bluesman, Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters.

A typical conversation I dug out of an old email file…

Marsh: Wolf didn’t even have a competent guitarist. JSC: He had Hubert Sumlin.
Marsh: Sumlin couldn’t even play lead.
Me: He had Willie Johnson, who invented the power chord. Marsh: He did not. And even if he did, power chords aren’t lead. JSC: He had Jody Williams. Marsh: Well, I like Jody Williams.

Marsh: Wolf didn’t even have a competent guitarist.

JSC: He had Hubert Sumlin.
Marsh: Sumlin couldn’t even play lead.
Me: He had Willie Johnson, who invented the power chord.

Marsh: He did not. And even if he did, power chords aren’t lead.

JSC: He had Jody Williams.

Marsh: Well, I like Jody Williams.

These disputes could linger and ferment for years. The longer they went on, the deeper in his trench Dave tended to burrow. I admired him for that. It was a sign of his loyalty—a loyalty to Muddy Waters and to his own view of Muddy Waters.

In going back over nearly two decades of emails and journal entries, our debates often sounded less like a Marvin Hagler vs. Ray Leonard bout than Abbott versus Costello. More often than not, they involved baseball, eventually.

Marsh: What are you listening to? JSC: The Kinks. Marsh: Why them? JSC: Why not? Marsh: They’re too fey. JSC: Define “too fey.” Marsh: Anything fey is too fey. JSC: Even Fay Vincent? Marsh: Especially Fay Vincent.

Marsh: What are you listening to?

Marsh: They’re too fey.

JSC: Define “too fey.”

Marsh: Anything fey is too fey.

JSC: Even Fay Vincent?

Marsh: Especially Fay Vincent.

And on it would go, circles in the round, as Miles Davis might say.

Of course, that fit Dave’s reputation: irascible, contentious, querulous, and there’s certainly truth to the caricature. But Dave Marsh couldn’t be pigeonholed. He wasn’t just a pugilistic critic. He was a man in full, as Tom Wolfe said. Maybe a man overfull. He was certainly overflowing with ideas, passions and biases, but also with curiosity, compassion and empathy. If you were Dave’s friend, you were entitled to fight with him, but it also meant that he would come to your defense, even when few others would. He came to mine several times: after gratuitously hostile reviews of books, after threatened libel actions, after being smeared as Putin’s fool on the front page of the Washington Post, a paper I used to write for on occasion!

Yes, Dave was a battler. But he saved most of his ammo for the bigger fights, real ones, not just squabbles, against real enemies who Dave wanted to recruit you into battle against: the death penalty, the cancer merchants, apartheid and Sun City, war mongers and war profiteers, Tipper Gore and the music censors, union-busting corporations and racist cops,  Ticketmaster and the larcenous nature of the music industry, which ripped off artists and fans alike. The intramural verbal sparring was a kind of training session for the larger, more consequential battles that united us.

Our friend Daniel Wolff once said, and likely said more than once, that he chafed at being referred to as a “music writer.” I know what he means and I feel the same way about Marsh. Yes, nearly all of Dave’s books, of which there are several shelves worth, take music as their jumping-off point. But what he was really writing about was life in America. He was a writer whose interests–political, aesthetic and economic–extended far beyond clickbait-like disputes over what bands were better, the Dead or Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, The Who or The Clash. He wanted to explore what artists like Springsteen and the Dead said about the culture that produced them and the fans who embraced or rejected them and why. Music for Marsh was a gateway to writing about American culture in the age of neoliberalism: its systemic racism, its social and economic inequalities, its prisons and cop-haunted streets, its war-making machines and, perhaps most vitally, how people, especially America’s youth cultures, were fighting to take control of their own future and throw off the shackles that circumscribed their lives, even as the odds were stacked heavily, even lethally, against them.

I’ve been reading Dave Marsh since I was 12, an awkward kid in Indianapolis who liked baseball, comic books, horror movies and rock music. Not necessarily in that order. My grandmother managed a small drugstore on the city’s southside. She didn’t deal Big Pharma’s products, but she sold everything else in the store, from candy to condoms to magazines. Each week she’d grab a few comics, like MAD and Tomb of Dracula, for me to read on Saturday nights. One week her haul included a copy of CREEM, sandwiched between a volume of Creepy and Vampirella. She probably thought CREEM was a horror magazine. She probably wasn’t wrong. After all, they published Lester Bangs.

They also published Dave Marsh. As the Detroit writer Michael Jackman told me, “To grow up in a Detroit where you could drop out of Wayne State University, walk down the street, and start writing for Creem magazine.” Not only write for it, but edit it.

Marsh wrote about music the way I talked about music or wanted to talk about music, when I could find someone who liked or even heard of the MC5 or Iggy Pop and the Stooges or The Who. Mostly the kids I knew listened to country or slop rock, like Rush, Journey or REO. Marsh didn’t write in fancy prose. His sentences were raw and unadorned. It got right to the point. His reviews and essays were pared down, direct, stiletto-sharp and driven home with a vengeance. Which isn’t to say that he didn’t have style. But the style was like the music or paintings or films that he favored, shorn of pretense and artifice and filler.

When I first started writing about music at age 15 for microscopically small local rags in Indy, some of them printed on pages of mimeographed paper stapled together, handed out usually for free at record stores and head shops, I tried to write like Dave Marsh and quickly proved that imitation isn’t necessarily the sincerest form of flattery, especially when the writing of the imitator is crap, which mine surely was. Most of the pieces had Marsh’s punkish attitude (in excess), but lacked the knowledge and skill for how to deploy it.

A few years ago, a friend sent me a copy of a story I’d written on Bob Seger, based on an interview I’d somehow managed to worm my way into before Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s gig on the same bill with Queen at the Convention Center in Indianapolis, one of the nation’s worst concert venues, whose acoustics resembled the Ford Rogue River engine plant. The interview lasted about three minutes max, but I turned it into a rambling 3,000-word piece filled with gratuitous insults and snide asides about an artist and band that I really enjoyed. I was trying to be tough, but it came out sounding almost puerile in its conceit.

I told Marsh about it and read him a few of the more overblown passages. He laughed. How many thousands of kids had tried to mimic his style and fallen on their faces? The style was one thing, the mind behind it another entirely. “You know there was a lot more to Seger than you might think.” This from the man who trashed Seger’s Against the Wind album in a review which led to punches being thrown and even landing, depending on which account you believed or wanted to believe.

But Seger was from Detroit. Of course, there was more to him.

“You had to know how Seger started to understand how far he’d fallen,” Marsh said. “After all, he did write one of the best anti-war songs.”  I nodded like I knew what the hell he was talking about. That was news to me. But a few days later a CD of early Seger arrived in the mail, containing the song Dave was referring to: “2 2,” which also rocked harder than almost anything else Seger recorded.

I probably saw Seger six or seven times. He never performed it. Apparently, he’d left those sentiments far behind. But Dave hadn’t. War was always on his mind, largely because America hadn’t stopped making them and people hadn’t stopped dying or being maimed in them.

“Didn’t you write about Queen?” Marsh asked.

“No, I couldn’t listen to them.”

“Then you missed the story, St. Clair”

But Dave had already gotten the story on Queen. He had dubbed them “the first truly fascist rock band.”  Marsh was a one-man Antifa strike force of record reviewers. Consider this acidic takedown of Queen’s Jazz album:

The guiding principle of these arrogant brats seems to be that anything Freddie & Company want, Freddie & Company get. What’s most disconcerting about their arrogance is that it’s so unfounded: Led Zeppelin may be as ruthless as medieval aristocrats, but at least Jimmy Page has an original electronic approach that earns his band some of its elitist notions. The only thing Queen does better than anyone else is express contempt…….. Whatever its claims, Queen isn’t here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, “We Will Rock You,” is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas.

The guiding principle of these arrogant brats seems to be that anything........

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