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. Yet 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 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.
