Rock

A new anthology published today (Aug. 15) titled Kick Out the Jams: Jibes, Barbs, Tributes, and Rallying Cries from 35 Years of Music Writing makes the case for Dave Marsh as one of the most influential critics of popular music in recent decades.

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One of the first editors of Creem magazine; a veteran contributor to Rolling Stone and other publications; the author of 25 books (including two best-selling biographies of Bruce Springsteen); the co-founder of the newsletter Rock & Rap Confidential and a longtime host on SiriusXM, Marsh has redefined the the limits of music writing throughout his career. His criticism has offered insights into issues of community, class, race, politics, health, the environment, the music industry and more.

“Dave Marsh has always been a tireless advocate of justice, human rights, and rock’n’roll,” writes Tom Morello, co-founder of Rage Against The Machine, in his cover quote for this collection. “His pen and voice are an important player in the history of the music we love and the struggle for a more just and decent world.”

In this collection — edited by Daniel Wolff and Danny Alexander, with a postscript by Pete Townshend — Marsh writes as a historian, a skeptic, an agitator, a sentimentalist and, above all, a fervent fan and true believer in the power of music.

“Since 1969, Dave Marsh has been writing about music like our lives depended on it,” writes educator Lauren Onkey, the former senior director of NPR Music, in her introduction to Kick Out the Jams. (She references Marsh’s decades of criticism that precedes the work covered in this collection and Marsh published an earlier anthology, Fortunate Son, in 1985).

The opening piece in Kick Out The Jams illustrates how Marsh draws connections like few other critics. In “Elvis: The New Deal Origins of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Marsh writes: “Like everything else, Presleymania has a political dimension.” Observing that Elvis Presley and his family in Tupelo were “extraordinarily poor,” Marsh notes that, after moving in Memphis, the family benefited from the social safety net created by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation during the 1930s, that included income support and public housing. 

For all of Presley’s immense talent and vision, the opportunities he seized “were the result of living in a society which, by design, offered people as poor as the Presleys a chance for that breathing space,” writes Marsh in this 1982 essay — pointedly contrasting that era with the dismantling of the social safety net under by conservatives led by then President Ronald Reagan.

(This essay, by the way, is one of several here that was originally published in Musician magazine, one of the most acclaimed music publications of its time, under editor Bill Flanagan and, subsequently, Robert Doerschuk. Once owned by a former parent company of Billboard, Musician folded in 1999 and its rich content has never been archived online).

Marsh knows how to write a great lead. In 1989, Madonna courted controversy (again) by filming a video for her hit “Like a Prayer” in which, amid images of burning crosses, she caresses the statue of a Black religious icon, who comes to life to embrace her.

“The worst thing about the furor over Madonna’s Like a Prayer may be that it obscures a great album,” writes Marsh. “But that just proves that Madonna has entered the rarified ranks of those pop stars who function as lightning rods for a–holes.”

Stars at rarified heights have never escaped Marsh’s sharp pen. Bono’s Product (RED) campaign to raise awareness and funds to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa, drew the writer’s criticism — which Marsh extended widely to celebrity-driven causes. He quotes Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, who “observes that she met [Bono] ‘at a party to raise money for Africans—and there were no Africans in the room except for me.’”

In this summer marking the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, it is worth recalling Marsh’s comments about the genre in a 1991 essay “The Death of Rock,” in which Billboard’s Paul Grein makes a cameo appearance. Grein, who then wrote the magazine’s Chart Beat column, observed in his 1990 year-end commentary that no rock bands had topped the Billboard 200 albums chart in that year. However, Marsh writes that the music industry’s segregation by genre “means that the most exciting, rebellious, hardest-rocking music of the early 1990s — rap and hip-hop — can’t be considered rock.”

Marsh often has devoted his writing to celebrating music pioneers. Included here are his essays on John Hammond, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, among others. Just as often, he has sought to raise the profile of deserving musicians like those profiled in this collection: Ani DiFranco, Patty Griffin, Alejandro Escovedo, China’s Cui Jian, gospel singer Dorothy Love Coates, or the late Jimmy LaFave.

In May 2017, the month that Marsh’s profile of LaFave ran in the Austin Chronicle, the folk musician died of sarcoma, a rare form of cancer — the same cancer which took the life of Kristen Ann Carr, the daughter of Marsh and his wife, Barbara Carr, in 1993. She was 21.

“I need to eulogize Kristen Ann Carr because her death means I’ll never write about music in the same way,” Marsh wrote in the newsletter Rock and Rap Confidential in March 1993, noting that a decade had passed since he co-founded the newsletter.

“Kristen… belongs here because, however you may have received these past ten years of ranting and raving, I’ve seen RRC as an espousal of life against death. 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. You do so by choosing the spirit of hope and affirmation that Kristen held so completely that she awed even her doctors.”

In Kick Out the Jams, amid all the “jibes, barbs and rallying cries,” the work of Dave Marsh pays tribute to the spirit of hope and affirmation that the best music brings into our lives.

(Editor’s note: Thom Duffy is a former contributor to Rock and Rap Confidential and is a supporter of the Kristen Ann Carr Fund, which focuses on supporting research in the treatment and cure of sarcoma, and improving the lives of young adult cancer patients and their families).