DAVE MARSH, RIP

 

Dave Marsh—co-founder of Creem, perpetual combatant, and over five decades one of American rock criticism’s most uncompromising and infuriating voices—died August 22 at seventy-six. For nearly as long as he waged his wars on the culture, I fought him in my head. It can be truthfully remaked that I spent hours dreaming up sharp but nuanced counterarguments to his usually bellicose assertions. That admission shows to what degree this writer was important.His passing leaves an unexpected, jagged void, forcing a reckoning with an influence I was once too stubborn to admit. In 1969, at Monroe Music on Livernois Avenue in Detroit, I picked up my first issue of Creem and collided with Marsh’s bull-headed prose. From that moment on, he became my fixed point of resistance. To read him was to encounter an immovable wall of certitude—bombastic, frequently wrong-headed, but fiercely, urgently alive. I spent years sharpening my own syntax against his, fashioning counter-arguments to whatever decree or excommunication he had handed down in Creem, Rolling Stone, or Rock and Roll Confidential. In trying to tear down his house, I accidentally built my own.He was, as Alfred Kazin famously wrote of Norman Mailer, "...the necessary man to have around". Marsh refused to treat rock and roll as a mere stylistic playground or a commodity to be sanitized by polite society; to him, it was a crude, democratic instrument for forcing raw American experience into blunt words and hard chords. His endless crusade against the gentrification of the music was a moral demand, reminding anyone holding a pen why this noise mattered in the first place: because beneath the fashion and the polish, it still gets down.