Dave Marsh in his office during an interview with Daniel Wolff, 2021. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)
The day after Dave died, I wrote a couple of paragraphs that I shared with friends. “There remains in the world a Marsh Diagram. It’s like the Venn diagram, only better. It’s the vast network of people Dave connected during his life.
The concept was captured by an inadvertently hilarious formulaic line from one of the many tributes and obituaries online. “A complete list of his survivors was not immediately available.” (From “Dave Marsh Dies: Pioneering Rock Critic, Bruce Springsteen Biographer Was 76” by Greg Evans.)
What an understatement. I am one of those survivors. Me and Dave go way back. We met in the mid-sixties at the Fifth Estate newspaper in Detroit and have stayed friends ever since.
As a consequence, thanks to Dave and Barbara, I’ve been to a lot of Springsteen concerts. One of them captured a significant aspect of Dave’s work that hasn’t shown up in other obituaries and tributes. We were backstage at a Bruce concert at the Fox Theater in downtown Detroit in 1995.
The city was getting deep into a strike by the journalists at the Detroit News and Free Press. The papers were then operating under a “Joint Agreement,” which meant they were both under the same hyper-union-hostile management. It was an especially bitter dispute and remains so to this day. People of a certain age still remember who was a scab and who wasn’t.
(Here’s where Dave would want me to plug an excellent 2012 book about the strike, Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor by Chris Rhomberg.)
At the time, I was the Communications Director of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Dave actively supported our efforts at the UAW to encourage writers at local union newspapers.
Naturally, people wanted Bruce to support the strike. He did.
I was a witness to Dave and Bruce before the show feverishly writing and revising on an old-fashioned analog “teleprompter” what Bruce would say. I suppose what he actually said is on YouTube, or somewhere. I remember it as tepid—but appreciated nevertheless by the strikers.
Bruce Springsteen is a political moderate. His enormous mainstream success at helping white people feel good about themselves would have it no other way. That he is sometimes seen differently is in part thanks to Dave’s ability to expose Bruce to things he would not otherwise have known about.
I’m fascinated to see Dave referred to as a leftist. As in his New York Times obituary. “In the early 1980s, Mr. Marsh was a founder of Rock & Roll Confidential, a left-wing monthly newsletter that billed itself as ‘the Voice of the Undesirable Element,’ exploring music, censorship and corporate greed.” (Emphasis added.)
I don’t think Dave was a “leftist.” It’s not that he was hostile to the left. As voracious a reader as he was, he probably read the Communist Manifesto at some point. But we never privately or, when I was a regular guest on his Land of Hopes and Dreams Sirius radio show or when we were in other public venues, much discussed or promulgated Marxism.
The leftist tag is instructive, nevertheless. What happens is that any deviation from the very narrow boundaries of permitted political discussion gets characterized as Left. At least since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, if not before, the White Empire machine has characterized any opposition whatsoever as “left.” A certain prominent leftist known as Chairman Mao Tse-tung called this sort of thing “cutting the foot to fit the shoe.”
It’s how the teeter-totter operates. That’s what I call it. The teeter-totter represents the narrow range of discussion and action that’s permitted. Left/Right; Republican/Democrat; Management/Union; MSNOW/Fox News…you get the idea.
What Dave brought to the political discourse in his music criticism and everything else is something downplayed within the left: a moral compass. In part, that’s frowned upon because morality, spirituality, the durability of white supremacy, patriarchy and all that woo-woo culture/identity stuff doesn’t reduce everything down to the primacy of “the dialectical material conditions.”
AKA everything is about money. As in one of the most despicable slogans of all time, “it’s the economy st***d.” Vile in part because it so conveniently gives whites permission to vote their racism in the name of the price of eggs.
As others have pointed out, when it came to welfare rights, unions, his consistent antiracism, anti-misogyny, all the things—with Dave, it often took the form of moral outrage. His anger often got the best of him. It’s a brutal culture within which we live. We are all damaged. Me included.
Another member of the overlapping Dave Diagram circles, Marsha Music, explored Dave’s point of view this way in a personal tribute.
I was first connected to Dave Marsh in the late ’70’s – during my rock chick days by Frank Joyce, my son Joe’s dad. He told Dave about me–by way of introduction–”She can write.”
He was so impressed with my writing, he published me in his national newsletter, Rock & Roll Confidential (later called Rock & Rap). He’d encourage, nudge, criticize and champion me over the years.
He was an icon of American letters, his milieu the world of music – the sounds and the business – as well as sports. A prodigious intellectual and prolific writer, he was uncompromising to a fault, and encouraged me to write my truth as well – even when it resulted in our ending up at loggerheads, with his occasional episodes of obstinate wrongheadedness (IMO).
I was proud to have held my own in those knock-down, drag-out virtual fisticuffs in our online music critic groups.
Nevertheless, we were great friends, and my admiration for his gifts knew no bounds. He was a staunch anti-racist, before that term became a trope. He had been ill for some time, not writing and off the airwaves (he had a weekly show on Sirius), so I’ve been missing him long before his recent passing.
After Dave became ill, I was honored to be asked to lead a conversation about him, with the late Wayne Kramer and John Sinclair; it’s on YouTube.
Now that he is really gone, I will revel in my memories of his ceaseless encouragement – suffice it to say, he’d mention me in the same breath as James Baldwin. I’ll pick up one of his many books here in the house and read a piece, just to experience his sharp literary bite again, and tighten up my chops in his memory.
Yes Ma’am. Expanding the conversation beyond the imposed boundaries with clarity and passion. Seeking and including the voices of the “undesirable element.” That’s one really big thing we’ll miss Dave for a lot.
