Heart On His Sleeve: Some Thoughts on Dave Marsh

David Cantwell on a new anthology from an old friend

Portions of the following were first delivered at the "On Listening" panel at the Land of Hopes and Dreams: A Tribute to Dave Marsh online conference on May 2, 2021 and at the Kick Out the Jams Book Release Party on August 15, 2023 at the Warwick Theater in Kansas City, MO

My favorite short piece by critic Dave Marsh might be “The Lonesome Death of Florence Thompson.” It originally appeared in Record magazine, late in 1983, but I didn’t encounter it until it was included in the first collection of his writing, Fortunate Son: The Best of Dave Marsh, in 1985. Florence Thompson is the woman in photographer Dorothea Lange’s famous portrait “Migrant Mother,” also known as “The Madonna of the Depression,” and Marsh’s essay is about our shameful ignorance of her life. Thompson’s image, though nameless, became literally iconic, Marsh notes, yet “[u]ntil just before her death, she lived not in luxury but in a trailer park. So does America honor genius and beauty.”

The essay is also about a song Dave felt summed up Thompson’s loneliness and alienation: “Rank Strangers,” by classic bluegrass team the Stanley Brothers. That essay marked the first time I’d ever encountered someone writing seriously and sympathetically about country music, the way I had often seen critics writing about rock. Marsh’s essay made a lasting impression upon me.

Personal inspiration aside, “The Lonesome Death of Florence Thompson” is most rewarding because it includes what could stand as a thesis statement for Marsh’s career—why he found rock and roll and other popular music to be so valuable and why he wanted to think about it so deeply and to spend his life writing about it.

“I’ve always felt that one of the secret strengths of rock and roll was that it provided a voice and a face for the forgotten and disenfranchised,” Marsh writes. “At least in its beginnings, rock was one of the few ways that poor people, country people, black people, and southerners had of making themselves visible in a country whose media increasingly depict it as solely urban, affluent, white and northern.” 

That’s Dave, in 1983, linking a 1936 photograph to a 1960 country recording and then, in a move characteristic of his radical, freedom-chasing criticism, using those artistic connections to draw attention to, as he later described it, the Reagan era’s “newly destitute—homeless, shivering, hungry, driven mad by callousness.” Forty years later, I’m confident Dave would insist on a few revisions. For instance, we need to think of rock and roll alongside hip-hop (indeed, in 1992, he updated the name of his rock and politics newsletter, Rock & Roll Confidential, to Rock & Rap Confidential). He’d be certain, as well, to expand that list of the forgotten and disenfranchised to include all people of color, all queer people, all disabled people—and not just in America.

Marsh is hardly the only music critic to make such radical political connections, but he foregrounds them so consistently, and with such power, that the point of view defines his work and distinguishes him from peers. As fellow critic Robert Christgau observed in his 2015 memoir, Going Into the City, Marsh has proven to be “the most politically committed of all the major early rock critics.”

A remarkable new collection of Marsh’s later work, Kick Out the Jams: Jibes, Barbs, Tributes & Rallying Cries from 35 years of Music Writing, boldfaces that conclusion. The book serves as a kind of long-overdue sequel to Fortunate Son while extending the spotlight onto Marsh’s big heart, big ears and big ideas. Co-edited by Daniel Wolff and Danny Alexander, titled for the fierce MC5 song that for years opened each episode of Marsh’s rock and politics show on Sirius XM, and featuring a biting, lovely postscript from Pete Townshend, Kick Out the Jams collects nearly 70 essays published from 1982 to 2017. “What shines through,” observes the music writer and scholar Lauren Onkey in her sharp introduction to the volume, “is the belief that rock and soul and rap and pop and folk are an opportunity for possibility, for hope… because the music—and the communal experience of making and listening to the music—gives us a chance to change ourselves and our communities.”

Or, to paraphrase Marx in a manner I think Marsh would appreciate: “Rock critics have hitherto only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.”

It seems to me that is what Dave Marsh has been trying to get us, his readers and other critics, to see and hear all along.

***

I hope Kick Out the Jams jumpstarts renewed interest in Marsh’s entire body of work. The new collection begins with a stunning 1982 Musician piece, “Elvis: The New Deal Origins of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” But it’s worth stressing that by that point in his career, Marsh was already on an extremely short list of rock criticism’s essential founding figures. These days, it seems Marsh’s significance has either been forgotten or wildly misapprehended and, as Onkey notes, his “work has faded from the critical conversation.” With that in mind, I think it’s worth taking a moment to review what he’d accomplished before Kick Out the Jams picks up the action.

When still only nineteen, Marsh became an early editor at Creem, helping to launch the magazine nationwide, then later working alongside (and sometimes fighting with) Lester Bangs. From there, he served two stints as the pop critic for Newsday, recommended both times for the position by predecessor Robert Christgau (in whose apartment Marsh stayed when he first relocated from Michigan to New York). Marsh was also briefly the music editor at The Real Paper, Boston’s influential alternative weekly, where he edited that famous Bruce Springsteen concert review (“I have seen rock and roll future…”) by his friend and future Springsteen producer/manager Jon Landau. In 1975, he was recruited to Rolling Stone, where at various times he served as review editor (his work there was syndicated in newspapers around the country) and as a contributor of artist profiles and a regular column, “American Grandstand.” Along the way, he also wrote for a variety of once popular but today mostly forgotten publications, including Circus, ZigZag, and the Boston Phoenix.

As a working journalist and critic who faced relentless deadlines in these years, Marsh took a minute to become an author. Before writing a book on his own, he made vital contributions to several anthologies. His 1976 essay on Sly and the Family Stone, in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, remains essential reading: “Sly’s sound was totally integrated, not just musically, but sexually and racially—here was a band in which men and women, black and white, had not one fixed role but many fluid ones.” (His long introductory essay for the sheet music collection, Paul Simon Greatest Hits, Etc., from 1978, is also worth seeking out.) And, of course, he co-edited, with John Swenson, the preposterously influential Rolling Stone Record Guides. I had the second “New”-and-blue edition, and like countless of my peers, I rejected plenty of its judgments—Marsh really didn’t like the band X at the very moment I was falling for them—but still studied the book like a textbook and used it like a shopping list.

When the books did come, they arrived in a rush. Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, in 1979, was an early version of a new breed of rock book and, as he boasted in the introduction to its second edition, “the first rock ‘n’ roll best-seller.” 1982’s Elvis remains, in my estimation, the most valuable Presley book available, among stiff competition. Ditto for 1983’s Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who, among much less.

Taken together, this is why Fortunate Son later claimed on its cover, unhumbly but not unreasonably, that it was written by “America’s best-known rock writer.”

***

I lived through all that work but had to play catch up as far as actually reading it. Honestly, Marsh was so prolific across the first decade and a half of his career that I may never catch up.

I was a Rolling Stone subscriber in the late 1970s, so I surely encountered the byline “Dave Marsh” many times through my high school years. But the name didn’t stick until I was an undergraduate and both Dave’s Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream (Chapter Two: “Dear Michael, What happened?”) and Fortunate Son were published in 1985. I devoured those books. I even assigned Fortunate Son’s intro as a model for the personal narrative assignment when I began teaching college composition in graduate school the next year.

That essay, a coming-of-age tale about Marsh’s white, blue collar, Michigan youth, is beautifully observed, sharply written, and it’s all about growing up in a world of limits that keep folks in their places—which is to say, keeps them down and unfree. Specifically, young Dave feels the limits of class: General Motors forces his family to move so the company can replace his neighborhood with a parking lot. He feels the limits of race: Dave had been taught by his dad and white supremacist America generally that black people are his inferiors and the cause of all his troubles. And he learns and feels the limits of traditional gender roles: Boys don’t cry; real men turn their every emotion into anger and violence. Dave shows us the world in which he was raised—some of the specifics would be different today, but it’s our world too—and then he shows how rock and roll prodded him to envision the possibility of a new one. The music helped Marsh to observe, as another of his heroes, James Baldwin, once wrote, that freedom lurked all around us and we could be free if only we would listen.

Late one night, Dave, 14 years old, is listening in bed to the radio when “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles comes on. The record had been a hit a year or so earlier, but on this night, he heard it.

With that recording, Marsh writes, Robinson “was putting his finger firmly upon a crucial feeling of vulnerability and longing. It’s hard to think of two emotions that a fourteen-year-old might feel more deeply (well, there’s lust…), and yet in my hometown expressing them was all but absolutely forbidden for men.”

Later: “The depth of feeling in that Miracles record, which could have been purchased for 69 cents at any K-Mart, overthrew the premise of racism, which was that blacks were not as human as we, that they could not feel—much less express their feelings—as deeply as we did.”

And then: “When the veil of racism was torn from my eyes, everything else that I knew or had been told was true for fourteen years was necessarily called into question. For if racism explained everything, then without racism, not a single commonplace explanation made any sense. Nothing else could be taken at face value. And that meant asking every question once again…”

This is the Dave Marsh origin story. He wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider; he was smitten by a Motown record. And his superpowers are multiple: a gift for close listening; an obsession with questioning bedrock assumptions; a great empathy that necessarily abuts with righteous anger on a routine basis. As Onkey says in the new book’s intro, “Marsh is quick to draw…He puts his dukes up fast. ” But what some identify as the angry chip on Dave’s shoulder is forever transforming into the heart on his sleeve. That transformation from anger to love, perpetually reenacted, is the hallmark of his work.

***

Marsh’s gifts and insights are on display all through Kick Out the Jams, though I realize I can’t be entirely objective about that. After I first met Dave when he visited the University of Missouri-Columbia, promoting his follow-up Springsteen biography Glory Days and sounding the alarm about a growing threat of music censorship, we developed a relationship and he began impacting my life off the page as well as on it. It was Dave who first suggested to Danny Alexander, my now longtime collaborator and dear friend, and Kick Out the Jams co-editor, that he should reach out to me; who tagged me to write my first little jewel-book-sized book, George Strait: An Illustrated History, as part of the Liner Notes series he edited; whose The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, in 1989, was a principle inspiration for my and Bill Friskics-Warren’s Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles; and who graciously blurbed my most recent book.

I mention all that to give credit where it is due, but also because the years that Kick Out the Jams covers coincide with my adulthood. And maybe because its subjects and themes overlap with a big chunk of your own. Put another way, the book serves as a turn-of-our-centuries chronicle, albeit necessarily incomplete, of popular music’s triumphs, controversies and preoccupations—some not-so recent but inevitably still relevant to right now.  

A few highlights: I hadn’t read “Freight Train Blues,” Marsh’s angry reaction to Neil Young’s support of Ronald Reagan, since it ran in RRC in 1985, but I never forgot its deadly kicker. No spoilers for that one, but I will share the closing line to a 1992 New York Times piece, “Just What’s Being Sold in Country,” about the way the Hat Act-era country biz succeeded by contrasting itself to hip hop: “[I]t’s a sad comment… if the best Nashville now boasts is a vision of what it isn’t.” The more things change…

Battling and listening across the years, the book finds Marsh taking on the PMRC and record labeling, “The Politics of File Sharing,” Ticketmaster, music copyright (in a piece centered on DJ/remixer Steinski), and “The Blacklisting of the Dixie Chicks.” He traces the progress of Americana with lengthy features on Patty Griffin and Alejandro Escovedo and in an especially poignant piece, “Jimmy LaFave in the Present Tense,” written while the singer-songwriter was dying; in a thoughtful review of Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Woody Guthrie project, Mermaid Avenue; and in “Starfolking,” a lengthy reconsideration of The Anthology of American Folk Music.

His “No Hiding Place,” written with KOTJ co-editor Daniel Wolff, is probably the best thing ever written about gospel singer Dorothy Love Coates. Marsh eulogizes Nina Simone, Chairmen of the Board’s General Johnson, singer-songwriter Carolyn Franklin, producer and talent scout John Hammond, Roy Orbison, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Frank Sinatra, and, in the epic “Suicide Notes,” Kurt Cobain—in every case, his appreciation crystallizes what made each of them matter, weaknesses and all. His “Since I Lost My Baby” strikes a hard, somehow hopeful note following the death of his daughter, Kristen Ann Carr, from sarcoma, in 1993.

Looking back over what I’ve written above, I can’t help but notice that in Kick Out the Jams, as throughout his career, Marsh writes a lot, and always urgently, about the dead and the dying. Those are the stakes. “I’ve seen RRC as an espousal of life against death,” Marsh writes in that piece about losing his daughter. “After watching my own child wage that struggle in literal terms, I know there’s a way to live that message to your final breath.”

Kick Out the Jams is filled with call after call embodying just that message and the changes that might come if we achieved them together: face death and celebrate life; get angry but turn it to love; listen; get to work. - DC

To learn more about the Kristen Ann Carr Fund, which supports sarcoma research and seeks to improve the lives of cancer patients, please visit this link.

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