“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
70th 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.
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| 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.”
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| 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.
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| 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 15th,
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.
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