"Kick Out the Jams" and the Debt I Owe

 

“You can say what you want about any of those folks, if it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be here.”

After the 2021 Land of Hope and Dreams conference celebrating Dave Marsh’s work and ideas, someone complained about someone else’s performance. Marsh made the above comment in part to defend an old friend. He also wanted us to recognize the debt he owed.

On the eve of publishing the new Dave Marsh anthology Kick Out the Jams, I want to say the same about Marsh. I can put it even more forcefully. If you are not a member of my extended family, you know who I am because of him.

Most people Dave Marsh influenced wouldn’t put it quite that absolutely, but I bet many would have to think about it. That’s why the Land of Hope and Dreams conference came together relatively easily, and that’s why this new book came out of this discussion.

On Marsh’s 70^th birthday, half a dozen of his friends began to discuss how to celebrate such a significant career in our own life stories. He had not only kept pushing us to think over the past four or five decades, but he was also how most involved found one another.

A member of the group talking about all this, University of Wisconsin African American Studies professor Craig Werner, had a similar conference upon his retirement from the school. I wrote about that one here: https://takeemastheycome.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-only-light-we-see-craig-werner-and.html

Werner and Marsh are both community builders, and we knew a celebration of Marsh’s work would tell a unique story of people and ideas set in motion around popular music.

About eight of us started meeting regularly on Zoom and, within a year, pulled together three weeks of activities that featured five spotlight conversations and twelve different panels featuring seventy different participants. Each had something to say about what set this work apart and its implications for the world we live in today. You can still find the whole conference with panel descriptions and bios here: https://landofhopeanddreams.co/

There’s also a YouTube page which houses the video links: https://www.youtube.com/@landofhopeanddreamsatribut7061

The idea of a sequel to Marsh’s Fortunate Son anthology, published in 1985, grew alongside this project. Fortunate Son is a terrific book, but it covers a little over a decade in a career that has spanned five. Since leaving Rolling Stone in 1983, Marsh not only wrote or edited a couple of dozen books, each an important and unique contribution in its own way, but continued working as a journalist for Rolling Stone’s wonderful spin-off Record, and a great magazine called Musician, as well as everything from the Village Voice to TV Guide to Alexander Cockburn’s political newsletter Counterpunch. Most significantly, throughout Marsh’s post-Rolling Stone career, he collaborated with music and sports journalist Lee Ballinger, music industry insider Wendy Smith, my co-editor on this book Daniel Wolff, and editor and agent Sandy Choron (as well as everyone else they knew) to produce a rock and politics newsletter designed to eliminate the divisions between insiders and outsiders in the record industry, Rock & Roll Confidential (later Rock & Rap Confidential) or RRC. 

The first Rock & Rap Confidential

The history of Dave Marsh’s writing after the Rolling Stone era is a history of making connections between artists, music industry workers, and fans around our common struggles. RRC brilliantly reflected, clarified, and helped facilitate what was happening in the 80s when even mainstream musicians were regularly making statements (and making benefit records and throwing huge events) around issues like hunger and homelessness, basic human rights, and neocolonial human rights abuses in Central America, Africa, and throughout the world.

One thing RRC did so well was to always bring these struggles home.

In 1987, I found my voice writing for RRC by connecting the antiapartheid movement to the racial divisions on the airwaves and around my college campus in Oklahoma.

But that wasn’t the start of Marsh’s influence on my life.

It started back when I turned teenager reading his work in Rolling Stone. My brother first drew my attention to Marsh’s name, along with Greil Marcus, Mikal Gilmore, Cameron Crowe, and other stand-out rock critics of that time.

They all influenced me, but Marsh in a singular way. When I seemed to be the only person in the world who thought a sophomore album was better than the debut, he would be the one voice that agreed. When I heard a hitch in a vocal or a four-note guitar riff that defined the impact of a performance, Marsh tended to be the one who pointed it out. Even and perhaps especially when we disagreed, Marsh’s work struck so deep it taught me something else. His writing repeatedly reinforced the idea that I didn’t have to agree with what everyone else was saying. What I really needed to do was speak honestly my own perspective whenever it was important to do so.

That may seem obvious, but it wasn’t the message this 13-year-old was receiving much elsewhere in the world. It was liberating, and, later, when I was trying to pick a major in college, the idea of Dave Marsh flashed through my mind as I declared English. I didn’t know anything of his short-lived career at Wayne State; but it was an intuitive leap that paid off.

About three years later, I met him at my school. A friend of mine ran the speaker’s committee, and I saw a Dave Marsh flier on her desk.

I said, “Get him!”

She said, “Join my committee and fight for it.”  

Marsh on the back cover of Fortunate Son

I did, and that whole experience—helping to host the event, a packed house in our campus little theater—taught me more about myself than I ever would have guessed. We all had great discussions, and, for my part, he left me with a piece of paper that had his home phone number and address, as well as the names of imprisoned voting rights activist Spiver Gordon and imprisoned American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier. My Peltier cover story for the Kansas City alternative press The Pitch would help me land a second job writing for its chief competitor, The New Times.

But all that work started after I sent Marsh my term paper for the semester he visited campus. He was very complimentary and invited me to help with RRC, acknowledging that he had little to pay and comparing the offer to Tom Sawyer asking friends to help him whitewash his fence.

The line I remember verbatim guided my transition and the rest of my writing career: “What in hell does the last paragraph on page 11 mean that couldn’t have been said with half the words and none of the academic gobbledygook?”

“Nothing” was my answer, and that lit a fire in me. I started writing reviews of every record I was listening to that Marsh and Ballinger might use in the newsletter. Most of it didn’t get in, but I kept plugging away. Eventually, I became a regular.

I also began to pull together articles for an RRC-like newsletter I was calling The Red Dirt Runner, but that never got past an initial layout.

In October that year, I moved to Kansas City and started a newsletter called A Sign of the Times with other RRC subscribers in the area. We printed our local take on RRC for about three years, 2000 copies at a time distributed everywhere around town.  

Our first issue, every word that fit

The whole Sign of the Times bunch would collaborate with folks like Dirt Cheap Recycled Sounds owner Anne Winter, Carla Duggar and Katrina Coker of the ACLU, and Hollywood at Home video store owner Richard Rostenberg to form The Greater Kansas City Coalition Against Censorship, later called the Kansas City Free Speech Coalition. Marsh would visit and speak as an individual and as part of a panel at our first annual week-long celebration of free speech, Culture Under Fire, a tradition that lasted about a decade.

Because of the networks I inherited by working with RRC, I wrote music-related editorial columns for the Pitch, the New Times, the Note, and other area papers. Among other issues, I wrote about music censorship, racial segregation in our entertainment districts, and curfew ordinances aimed at east side youth.

One reason Marsh made so much sense to me was that he saw no division between journalism and activism. I could address questions of objectivity and professionalism by finding the right angle and stance to get the job done without compromising my ethics.

Though I was primarily a journalist, I helped Ron Casanova incorporate and raise awareness about his organization, the Kansas City Missouri Union of the Homeless. Together with the free speech coalition, we held a national Break the Blackout Summit to strategize practical solidarity among poor people’s organizations. This would eventually lead me to ongoing work with the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. Marsh was there, one way or another, each step of the way.

After the death of Dave Marsh and Barbara Carr’s younger daughter Kristen at 21, we all began to focus more on health care issues. We took what we learned and held panels on musician health care at Folk Alliance and SXSW. Locally, we founded the Kansas City Music Alliance to find local ways to work on such issues. Thankfully, before long, Abigail Henderson would build the Midwest Music Foundation which did such things far better than we ever could have managed, but the Music Alliance is a precious memory, as was my time with the hip hop collective Flavorpak (which continues to this day), all informed by the idea that there’s an inherent good in gathering together to tackle the problems we all face.

I could go on, but I won’t. What’s that great line from Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing”? “I will never total it all.”

In Marsh’s first anthology, he talked about how music opened the world to him, making him question everything he knew that held him back from the vision in music. “Looking over my shoulder,” he wrote, “seeing the consequences to my life had I not begun questioning not just the racism but all of the other presumptions that ruled our lives, I know for certain how and how much I got over….What was left for me was a raging passion to explain things in the hope that others would not be trapped and to keep the way clear so that others from the trashy outskirts of barbarous America still had a place to stand—if not in the culture at large, at least in rock and roll.”

Dave Marsh has always done that for me. He helped me find a place to stand and a way to work. That foundation contributed to everything else I have done.

This new anthology illustrates just how far Marsh carried that mission once he stepped away from Rolling Stone. In these pages, by looking closely at the realities of the music industry and the contradictory ideas it cultivates, he tackles common myths that keep musicians and fans trapped in a world where nothing can change. Among other stands, Marsh takes on Ticketmaster side by side with Pearl Jam. fights against the death penalty watching a friend’s execution, and frames the legacy of musicians like my Stillwater brother Jimmy LaFave who lost his own fight to the very same rare cancer that took Marsh’s daughter.

I love the fact that the MC5 song “Kick Out the Jams” which gave us our title, demands that we keep the music playing as key to overcoming all that we’re up against. In music, there’s a certainty that we can imagine a better world. Dave Marsh’s writing never quits pushing that dream toward a working reality.

On August 15^th, to illustrate that point, writers, artists, musicians, and activists will gather at the Warwick Theatre at 3927 Main for a book launch party. Doors will be open at 5:30, and at 7:00 at least a dozen local musicians, artists, writers, and activists will take the stage to read from the book and/or make statements about the vision I have outlined above. In this way, here and in other cities where we are planning similar events, we plan to build on Marsh’s ideas in the only way they can truly be addressed, through community.