Master Blaster: the Dave Marsh Experience

They like to get you in a compromising position
They like to get you there and smile in your face
They think they’re so cute when they got you in that condition
Well I think it’s a total disgrace

I fight authority, Authority always wins
I fight authority, Authority always wins
I’ve been doing it since I was a young kid
I come out grinnin’
I fight authority, Authority always wins

– John Mellencamp, The Authority Song

Writing is fighting, Ishmael Reed said, and to know the writer Dave Marsh was to fight with Dave Marsh. To have been friends with Dave Marsh was to fight even more fiercely with Dave Marsh. Most of these disputes were trivial to the outsider, but vital to the combatants, such as: who was the supreme bluesman, Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters.

A typical conversation I dug out of an old email file…

Marsh: Wolf didn’t even have a competent guitarist.

JSC: He had Hubert Sumlin.
Marsh: Sumlin couldn’t even play lead.
Me: He had Willie Johnson, who invented the power chord.

Marsh: He did not. And even if he did, power chords aren’t lead.

JSC: He had Jody Williams.

Marsh: Well, I like Jody Williams.

These disputes could linger and ferment for years. The longer they went on, the deeper in his trench Dave tended to burrow. I admired him for that. It was a sign of his loyalty—a loyalty to Muddy Waters and to his own view of Muddy Waters.

In going back over nearly two decades of emails and journal entries, our debates often sounded less like a Marvin Hagler vs. Ray Leonard bout than Abbott versus Costello. More often than not, they involved baseball, eventually.

Marsh: What are you listening to?

JSC: The Kinks.

Marsh: Why them?

JSC: Why not?

Marsh: They’re too fey.

JSC: Define “too fey.”

Marsh: Anything fey is too fey.

JSC: Even Fay Vincent?

Marsh: Especially Fay Vincent.

And on it would go, circles in the round, as Miles Davis might say.

Of course, that fit Dave’s reputation: irascible, contentious, querulous, and there’s certainly truth to the caricature. But Dave Marsh couldn’t be pigeonholed. He wasn’t just a pugilistic critic. He was a man in full, as Tom Wolfe said. Maybe a man overfull. He was certainly overflowing with ideas, passions and biases, but also with curiosity, compassion and empathy. If you were Dave’s friend, you were entitled to fight with him, but it also meant that he would come to your defense, even when few others would. He came to mine several times: after gratuitously hostile reviews of books, after threatened libel actions, after being smeared as Putin’s fool on the front page of the Washington Post, a paper I used to write for on occasion!

Yes, Dave was a battler. But he saved most of his ammo for the bigger fights, real ones, not just squabbles, against real enemies who Dave wanted to recruit you into battle against: the death penalty, the cancer merchants, apartheid and Sun City, war mongers and war profiteers, Tipper Gore and the music censors, union-busting corporations and racist cops,  Ticketmaster and the larcenous nature of the music industry, which ripped off artists and fans alike. The intramural verbal sparring was a kind of training session for the larger, more consequential battles that united us.

Our friend Daniel Wolff once said, and likely said more than once, that he chafed at being referred to as a “music writer.” I know what he means and I feel the same way about Marsh. Yes, nearly all of Dave’s books, of which there are several shelves worth, take music as their jumping-off point. But what he was really writing about was life in America. He was a writer whose interests–political, aesthetic and economic–extended far beyond clickbait-like disputes over what bands were better, the Dead or Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, The Who or The Clash. He wanted to explore what artists like Springsteen and the Dead said about the culture that produced them and the fans who embraced or rejected them and why. Music for Marsh was a gateway to writing about American culture in the age of neoliberalism: its systemic racism, its social and economic inequalities, its prisons and cop-haunted streets, its war-making machines and, perhaps most vitally, how people, especially America’s youth cultures, were fighting to take control of their own future and throw off the shackles that circumscribed their lives, even as the odds were stacked heavily, even lethally, against them.

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I’ve been reading Dave Marsh since I was 12, an awkward kid in Indianapolis who liked baseball, comic books, horror movies and rock music. Not necessarily in that order. My grandmother managed a small drugstore on the city’s southside. She didn’t deal Big Pharma’s products, but she sold everything else in the store, from candy to condoms to magazines. Each week she’d grab a few comics, like MAD and Tomb of Dracula, for me to read on Saturday nights. One week her haul included a copy of CREEM, sandwiched between a volume of Creepy and Vampirella. She probably thought CREEM was a horror magazine. She probably wasn’t wrong. After all, they published Lester Bangs.

They also published Dave Marsh. As the Detroit writer Michael Jackman told me, “To grow up in a Detroit where you could drop out of Wayne State University, walk down the street, and start writing for Creem magazine.” Not only write for it, but edit it.

Marsh wrote about music the way I talked about music or wanted to talk about music, when I could find someone who liked or even heard of the MC5 or Iggy Pop and the Stooges or The Who. Mostly the kids I knew listened to country or slop rock, like Rush, Journey or REO. Marsh didn’t write in fancy prose. His sentences were raw and unadorned. It got right to the point. His reviews and essays were pared down, direct, stiletto-sharp and driven home with a vengeance. Which isn’t to say that he didn’t have style. But the style was like the music or paintings or films that he favored, shorn of pretense and artifice and filler.

When I first started writing about music at age 15 for microscopically small local rags in Indy, some of them printed on pages of mimeographed paper stapled together, handed out usually for free at record stores and head shops, I tried to write like Dave Marsh and quickly proved that imitation isn’t necessarily the sincerest form of flattery, especially when the writing of the imitator is crap, which mine surely was. Most of the pieces had Marsh’s punkish attitude (in excess), but lacked the knowledge and skill for how to deploy it.

A few years ago, a friend sent me a copy of a story I’d written on Bob Seger, based on an interview I’d somehow managed to worm my way into before Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s gig on the same bill with Queen at the Convention Center in Indianapolis, one of the nation’s worst concert venues, whose acoustics resembled the Ford Rogue River engine plant. The interview lasted about three minutes max, but I turned it into a rambling 3,000-word piece filled with gratuitous insults and snide asides about an artist and band that I really enjoyed. I was trying to be tough, but it came out sounding almost puerile in its conceit.

I told Marsh about it and read him a few of the more overblown passages. He laughed. How many thousands of kids had tried to mimic his style and fallen on their faces? The style was one thing, the mind behind it another entirely. “You know there was a lot more to Seger than you might think.” This from the man who trashed Seger’s Against the Wind album in a review which led to punches being thrown and even landing, depending on which account you believed or wanted to believe.

But Seger was from Detroit. Of course, there was more to him.

“You had to know how Seger started to understand how far he’d fallen,” Marsh said. “After all, he did write one of the best anti-war songs.”  I nodded like I knew what the hell he was talking about. That was news to me. But a few days later a CD of early Seger arrived in the mail, containing the song Dave was referring to: “2+2,” which also rocked harder than almost anything else Seger recorded.

I probably saw Seger six or seven times. He never performed it. Apparently, he’d left those sentiments far behind. But Dave hadn’t. War was always on his mind, largely because America hadn’t stopped making them and people hadn’t stopped dying or being maimed in them.

“Didn’t you write about Queen?” Marsh asked.

“No, I couldn’t listen to them.”

“Then you missed the story, St. Clair”

No, shit. Again?

But Dave had already gotten the story on Queen. He had dubbed them “the first truly fascist rock band.”  Marsh was a one-man Antifa strike force of record reviewers. Consider this acidic takedown of Queen’s Jazz album:

The guiding principle of these arrogant brats seems to be that anything Freddie & Company want, Freddie & Company get. What’s most disconcerting about their arrogance is that it’s so unfounded: Led Zeppelin may be as ruthless as medieval aristocrats, but at least Jimmy Page has an original electronic approach that earns his band some of its elitist notions. The only thing Queen does better than anyone else is express contempt…….. Whatever its claims, Queen isn’t here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, “We Will Rock You,” is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas.

Over the top? Maybe. But the invective is delicious to read. It’s why I started calling him the Master Blaster, after Stevie Wonder’s tribute to Bob Marley and the role music played in the black liberation movements of post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean.

I have multiple copies of the Heart of Rock and Soul and the first two editions of the Rolling Stone Records Guide because I have consulted them so obsessively over the years that the spines cracked and the pages are falling out. They also tend to disappear, as in being swiped. I found a lost copy of both, along with Dave’s rollicking book on “Louie Louie,” on Cockburn’s shelves down on the Lost Coast, a couple of months after he’d set up shop in our house for a week. “Oh, yes, meant to return those, Jeffrey. Tell Marsh good stuff. Very good stuff.” First the “borrowing,” then the praise. Both high compliments from the Master.

Dave’s writing seemed immediate even when he was writing about the past, especially when compared to some of the other notable rock critics of his era, Christgau, Marcus and Guralnick, whose prose often seems moribund even when writing about the present, as if the music they were writing about were a corpse on the table awaiting their dissection. Check out one of his last books, a slim volume on The Beatles’ Second Album, where he made music we’d all heard hundreds of times sound fresh, vibrant and capable of speaking to our own turbulent moment. 

The rankings don’t mean much to me anymore. Marsh’s taste was idiosyncratic and often contrary to the point of insolence. But his acerbic and concise assessments of the music meant everything, rivaled as artifacts of late-capitalist cultural criticism only by David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film.

And that’s not to say Marsh couldn’t get it wrong, sometimes spectacularly so, as in his critical assessment of Neil Young, who in one of the longest and most zig-zagging reviews in the New Rolling Stone Record Guide, he dismissed as “a minor artist.” I suspect Dave’s “mind-made body” will be wandering a few extra years in the Bardo to purge that misjudgment.

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Marsh rating records from the window of the CREEM offices. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)

In a not-so-simple twist of fate, two decades after I’d churned out my juvenile imitations of Dave Marsh, Dave Marsh was writing for me at CounterPunch.  In fact, three of my favorite writers as an adolescent (a developmental stage I rigidly clung to until about the age of 30) ended up writing for publications I edited: Cockburn, Marsh and Ishmael Reed. The day Ishmael Reed’s first submission to CounterPunch landed in my inbox, I was more excited than Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk when he found his name in the phone book. I went running down the hall, waving a printout of his piece, yelling, “A story from Ishmael Reed, the Ishmael Reed!!” Fortunately, only the cat and the dog were around to observe this sorry spectacle. I felt much the same way when Marsh’s first story for us hit my email box.

As you might expect, Dave’s copy was usually pretty clean, certainly cleaner than Cockburn’s, especially when Alex was submitting typewritten pieces by fax with ink-smudged hand-scrawled corrections. Still, Marsh’s submissions weren’t immaculate. Yet like many editors, Dave took light–and I’ll emphasize “light”–edits graciously or at least sedately.

Of course, turnabout was fair play and once Dave entered the CounterPunch stable of writers, he didn’t hesitate to offer his own editorial advice on my pieces.  I recall being sternly admonished for using the word “transgression” in a sentence.

Marsh: It’s pretentious.

JSC: It’s part of the common language.

Marsh: It’s French.

JSC: It’s Latin. Trans means “to step.” Gress means “over.” To step over.

Marsh: You proved my point. Why get complicated and Latinated? Just write “cross” or “violate” or “trespass.”

JSC: Trespass sounds kind of French, Dave.

Marsh: Touché.

In his pieces for us, Marsh attacked Clear Channel for banning “questionable music.” He denounced the “orgiastic patriotism” of “God Bless America.” He skewered the “vigilantism” of the RIAA and its collusion with the FBI. He wrote a heart-wrenching plea to save the life of death row inmate Byron Parker. He mocked the music industry’s inane and self-defeating war on cassette tapes. He ridiculed Jann Wenner’s decision to hire editors at Rolling Stone who believed that “people didn’t have time to read.” He exposed the hypocrisy, thievery and “stupid folklorist purism” of the widely (and absurdly) venerated Alan Lomax. He recalled hearing a 10-year-old boy sing all of the lyrics to Springsteen’s “41 Shots” (about the police killing of Amadou Diallo), writing, “Kids learn songs like ’41 Shots’ only at home. That song got played a lot by people who know that it could also be their kid lying on the cement.” He heaped righteous abuse on Bono, as the useful tool (and fool) of the global elites, dubbing him the “mascot of neoliberalism.”

Dave wrote more than 75 essays for CounterPunch before veering off forever into that diabetes of the mind called podcasting. I say this as a writer and a reader. I say it as someone who loved hearing Dave, and his cohost on Live From the Land of Hope and Dreams, Kevin Alexander Gray, talk. But I preferred their writing. Their books and essays are something I can, and do, go back to again and again. Podcasts are ephemeral; writing endures (so far). Its meaning deepens over time. Both of their lives were cut too short and I miss what they could have put down on the page. As it is, the last piece Dave wrote for us was published on May, 3, 2016. It was a prescient warning about the false allure of the Bernie Sanders campaign that served as something of a template for the themes and tone of my own book on Sanders published later that year.

The meaty, beaty and bounciest of Dave’s essays were collected by his pal Daniel Wolff into Kick Out the Jams: Jibes, Barbs, Tributes and Rallying Cries from 35 Years of Music Writing.

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We hit it off, at first, for reasons having (almost) nothing to do with music. We were both from the industrial Midwest. We both loved dogs and baseball. We liked many of the same writers, especially Ross MacDonald and Dashiell Hammett. We both despised the Clintons and Clintonism. The fractures, such as they were, came later, even on these mutualities, like active fault lines on shared terrain.

The fireworks between us didn’t flare up until 1997 or 98 when we started the CP email list for CounterPunch writers and friends. It had some heavy hitters, few heavier than Dave, though when it came to debating something, anything really. We posted new stories, editorials, interviews, celebrity gossip, jokes, drafts of stories and generally gave each other’s writing a good-natured slagging. Cockburn once described it as like “an editorial meeting of the New Left Review, but for people who had a sense of humor and knew what the hell they were talking about.” I’m not sure about that assessment, but it was lively and free-ranging and usually fun, with Marsh often the center of the action, ripping Bono’s “execrable doggerel” and Al Gore’s “monosyllabic mush.”

Marsh was a world-class name-dropper, a veritable B-52 of dropping names, which often served as the knock-out blow in many arguments, especially with me. But then Dave knew a lot of names. And I mean “knew” them, not just how to spell them. Even so, he was an incredibly generous person. Generous with his time, generous with his knowledge and generous with money. And not generous in the way Hemingway described Scott Fitzgerald, as “always being willing to lend a helping hand to the person a step above him on the ladder.” Dave was generous to people who needed help: people who were sick, people in prison, struggling writers, new bands, old blues players without health care, young rappers whose music had been banned or stigmatized with warning labels.

I recall when CP-lister Christine Karatnytsky, a librarian at the NYPL for the Performing Arts, challenged Dave’s dismissal of Pink Floyd as self-indulgent and aimless art rock, Dave responded by asking her to write a piece for Rock and Rap Confidential defending the merits of the band. There was a chivalrous side to him even when he was mixing it up. With men, he would often leave no quarter.

Marsh used to say that the people on the CounterPunch email list were too polite. He told me he belonged to an “F List,” which required all of the members to use “fuck” at least once in each post. I guess that’s how he got his juices flowing in the mornings. He didn’t really need my help, though I enjoyed kickstarting anyway, because once he got started it was like hearing Bob Dylan go electric; the sparks would fly and you never knew what he was about to burn to the ground.

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Marsh and I didn’t meet in the flesh until the summer of 2000 when I came to New York City to promote the release of Al Gore: a Users’ Manual, a book which Dave had been an essential resource for, especially in our scathing account of Tipper Gore’s career as a moral prude and music censor.

We had lunch at a Spanish place on the Upper East Side and afterwards walked to the Frick Museum, perhaps the most significant contribution to American culture ever made by a union-busting robber-baron. My eyes tended to glaze over at the Renaissance paintings of Madonnas Dave found so fascinating (no Diebenkorns or DeKoonings in this stately beaux-arts mansion), but they finally lit up when we encountered the museum’s three small Vermeers, which, of course, Dave had informed notions about.

Then the conversation took a sudden swerve from Vermeer to Verlaine. Marsh was fully capable of Davesplaining about both. Not quite sure which Verlaine Dave was going on about, Paul or Tom, I diverted him towards Dylan’s fascination with the former (“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”) because being back in NYC for the first time in decades, where I’d heard Television play so many times in college, I wasn’t in the mood to hear him ridicule Tom for tuning his guitar like Jerry Garcia or some shit. (Any comparison to the Dead, no matter how tangential, meant Marsh was about to consign a band to Hell and I don’t mean Richard.)

According to my notebook, the conversation unfolded something like this…

JSC: So, you’re not a big fan of Blood on the Tracks?

Marsh: You’ve heard the original New York takes, right?

JSC: No.

Marsh: Of course, you haven’t.

JSC: I haven’t heard everything, Dave. I was only 15 and on a lawn-mower’s budget when Blood on the Tracks came out. Plus, I hadn’t had that much heartbreak in my life yet to relate to it.

Marsh: You haven’t heard it because Dylan didn’t want you to hear it. He’s the absolute worst judge of his own material. The New York band’s better, more electric and energetic than the amateurs he recorded the official release with in Minneapolis. But you can see his obsession with arcane symbolism creeping in that would metastisize full-blown esotericism in Street Legal. And why’d he leave “Blind Willie McTell” off Infidels? Who the fuck knows.

We went our ways. I was scheduled to give a talk that night with Cockburn at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in the Village. But instead of thinking about what I was going to say, I spent the remainder of the afternoon going from one record joint to another (back when NYC had record joints) trying, unsuccessfully, to track down bootlegs of the electric version of “Blind Willie McTell” and the New York sessions of Blood on Tracks.

When I got back to Oregon a week later, there was a parcel stuffed with CDs that Marsh had burned containing all of those tracks, along with the Complete Basement Tapes. He also included a bootleg of The Who’s scuttled Lifehouse project, which he assumed, correctly as usual, I hadn’t heard either. After our exchange in NYC, Dave had apparently concluded that my knowledge of music was deficient. He wasn’t wrong.

The beginning of my music education, courtesy of Dave Marsh, came through the mail. Once or twice a month, in boxes of CDs posted from Norwalk, Connecticut, arrived in Oregon City containing Delta blues, Chicago blues, R&B, doo-wop, bluegrass, 50s rock, soul, gospel, hip hop, you name it. It was Marsh’s version of the Columbia Record Club. Over the next few years, He turned me on to artists, contemporary and historic, I’d missed or prematurely dismissed: Charley Patton, Magic Sam, Clarence Carter, Clifton Chenier, Gatemouth Brown, Slim Harpo, the Five Royales, the Blind Boys of Mississippi, Dorothy Love Coates, The Kingsmen (naturally), Bobby “Blue” Bland, Otis Rush, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Rodney Crowell, Patty Griffin, Chris Buhalis, Iris Dement, Otis Taylor, Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise, and Stewart Francke. All of whom continue to be in heavy rotation on my playlists. Many of whom I couldn’t get through a week without hearing.

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Dave’s profound sense of loyalty and solidarity derived from the blue-collar workers and union members of his Motown milieu and the factories of Flint, Pontiac and Dearborn. He was a veteran of many pickets, in spirit if not always in body, and he loathed scabs. He was a fan of music and sports, but he understood these endeavors were industries not different in kind from the auto industry of his hometown and just as exploitative. When he wrote about his beloved Tigers or the Chicago blues, he examined the political economy of these enterprises, but thankfully not in the opaque language of the economist. He wrote with the verve and clarity of a shop steward.

In the late-90s, I remember Marsh being peeved at Jackson Browne, an artist we both admired for his music and political activism. (Marsh wrote the incisive liner notes for The Very Best of Jackson Browne album.) Marsh griped that Jackson spent too much time “on international” issues and not enough on “our various domestic crises.” I thought this was a pretty strained argument coming from one of the leaders of the Artists Against Sun City (South Africa) campaign, especially given the fact that US-trained death squads were still rampaging freely across Central America and US corporations treated all of the western hemisphere as their private fiefdom for human and environmental exploitation. Was Jackson’s disgust at this appalling state of affairs truly an international fixation? I don’t know how firmly Marsh actually believed this proto-America First! stance, but once he dug into his trench, it would take either mustard gas or someone bombarding him with the “Piña Colada Song” to drive him out. You have to admire that kind of stubbornness, up to a point.

This too, though, could be written down to his sense of loyalty, sticking doggedly to an editorial position that Rock and Rap Confidential had staked out in defense of a kind of class-based American economic populism that it found and celebrated in the music of Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp. In fact, Cockburn once asked after reading one particularly “homegrown” issue of RRC, “Do Marsh and (co-editor Lee) Ballinger really think John Mellencamp is going to lead the Revolution?” I was on shaky ground here. For seven years, Mellencamp had lived just down a few gravel roads from us in southern Indiana and I knew several of his band members. In fact, the toddler version of Nathaniel St. Clair refused to have his locks shampooed by anyone other than Mellencamp’s hairstylist, who lived in the forested hollow behind us on a former commune 15 miles from Bloomington.  “Well, he makes more sense than Howard Dean, doesn’t he?”

Cockburn could scarcely argue the merits of that point.

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Dave Marsh had a restless mind that ranged across a vast spectrum of subjects: the paintings of Arthur Dove, the cinema of John Ford, the novels of James M. Cain and Andrew Vachss, the intricacies of major league baseball’s collective bargaining agreement. He read voraciously: trade papers, memoirs, economics, cancer research, the congressional record, trial transcripts, the Baseball Abstract, unsolicited manuscripts, poems, performance riders, FBI files. You name it. He was a polymath, though he would have hated the word. Too Latin. Or too Greek, maybe. Certainly, too fey.

Dave and I talked about writing a book together, a dual biography of the two Willie Hortons, the slugger for the Detroit Tigers World Series champions and the Massachusetts man whose criminal history was exploited in racist attacks against Michael Dukakis, first by Al Gore, then by George HW Bush. The project never came to fruition. I wrote it off as being “too French” in concept.

After that crazy idea fell through, I told him I wanted to investigate the murder of the legendary Stax drummer Al Jackson, Jr. He warned me off. He said he knew enough about the case to realize “the real story still couldn’t be told.” Dave seemed to know where the trail led. But he wasn’t about to lead me there. “Dangerous places and dangerous people,” he said.

On the night of October 1, 1975, Al Jackson, Jr., the genius keeping time for one of the greatest rhythm sections in American music history, was shot and killed inside his home in Memphis. Stax Records died a few months later. Was there a connection? Jackson had a troubled domestic life. Two months before he was killed, his wife Barbara had shot him in the chest as the marriage was spiraling towards divorce. Jackson refused to press charges. The Memphis cops wrote it off as a case of self-defense. On the night of his murder, Jackson was returning home late from a boxing match when he was shot in the back five times. Police found him next to his estranged wife, Barbara, who was on the floor, her hands tied behind her. She told the police an intruder had forced his way into the house and restrained her, as he attempted to rob the house until Jackson arrived.

But there were many unanswered questions, uncomfortable questions about the killer and the cops. It looked more like a hit than a robbery. Nothing was taken from the house, which contained a stash of cash and jewelry. Jackson’s wife had ties to a local gang leader. The cops didn’t look very hard. Some say they were intimidated or, more likely, just didn’t care about the killing of another black man, even one as prominent as Jackson. No one was charged or even arrested and the case remains unsolved.

I ignored Marsh’s warnings and began to follow some of the sinister threads of the story, one of which led improbably to Seattle, where the darkness of the story didn’t end at the edge of town, but spread all the way down. But after six months, I hit a series of dead ends (fortunately I wasn’t one of them) and couldn’t pin down my suspicions about the hidden hands behind Jackson’s murder with any certainty and filed it away.

In this police booking photo released by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. showing Rock music producer Phil Spector after he was convicted Monday April 13, 2009, of second-degree murder in the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson at his mansion in 2003. (AP Photo/Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Department)

A few years, after abandoning the Al Jackson project, I got a call from the celebrated music producer and gun fanatic Phil Spector, who was then under investigation for the murder of Lana Clarkson, a struggling actress who moonlighted at the House of Blues, where Spector picked her up one night and drove back with her in a limousine to his castle-like compound in the LA suburb of Alhambra.

There was an icy, menacing quality to Spector’s voice. I asked how he’d gotten my number. “Dave Marsh gave it to me. He said you might be able to help me out. The cops have got it all fucking wrong. I didn’t kill that woman. She offed herself, man.” I’m not easily spooked, but I found his whole rap unnerving. After Spector hung up, I rang Marsh.

JSC: “What the fuck, Dave?”

Marsh: “What the fuck what?”

JSC: “You told Phil Spector to call me?”

Marsh: “Sure.”

JSC: “You said I’d tell his story?”

Marsh: “No. I said you’d investigate his story. You’re a journalist, aren’t you? You write about police abuse all the time, don’t you?”
He was right. I didn’t know how trustworthy Phil Spector was (not very, I suspected), but I knew no one should trust the LAPD. So, I talked to Spector a few more times. He told me his unlikely version of what happened that night, which was that Clarkson was drunk and depressed and while she was handling one of Spector’s guns (he owned dozens), she shot herself in the mouth. It was a case, Spector claimed, of “accidental suicide.” But under the rules set out by Spector’s legal team, I couldn’t quote Spector. It was clear that he wanted me to write what he told me as if it were a scenario I’d verified. Well, that wasn’t going to happen.

Still, I looked into Clarkson’s life. I read the police and coroner reports and, years later, the defense assessment from OJ Simpson’s hired forensic gun, Dr. Henry Lee. I checked the backgrounds of the lead LAPD detectives in the case.  Spector’s version of events didn’t hold up to scrutiny. But I felt better about myself for running it down. Dave was right. I should have welcomed the call, not been prematurely creeped out by it.

Around this time, I started writing about death penalty cases and discovered that Dave had gotten there. He was a fierce opponent of state-sanctioned killing. He knew death penalty lawyers and prisoner support groups. He knew members of Congress who opposed the death penalty and clergy who ministered to death row inmates. He knew how to arrange death row visits and gave keen advice on how to talk with inmates and their families. Since then, I’ve covered nearly 25 death penalty cases, and I’ve quoted what he said to me very early on: “It doesn’t take any moral spine to oppose the execution of an innocent person. The real test is opposing the execution of people you know are guilty. I don’t want the state killing someone in my name and you shouldn’t either.”

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Marsh and Daniel Wolff at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival 2017. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)

Dave endured the cruelest of fates, being locked in a functioning body as his awesome mind faded, dissipating day by day from a degenerative brain disease that for the last few years of his life left him unable to read, write and ultimately communicate or think. Dave Marsh had vanished long before his body finally gave out.

Marsh left us with questions that maybe only he was positioned to get the answers to, since he always contended that the closer a writer got to his subject, the deeper the obligation the writer had to hold them accountable. And few writers were closer to Bruce Springsteen than Dave Marsh.  Shortly after Springsteen’s 9/11 album The Rising came out, Dave called to ask me if I thought the song “Empty Sky” might have been a reference to Edward Said’s book.

I had to tell Dave that he’d gotten the title wrong. Edward’s terrific book on the daily lives of Palestinians under Israeli occupation was called After the Last Sky. He was disappointed, a potential essay spoiled. I had the sense that Dave wanted to see something in Springsteen that was, inexplicably for him, absent. He wanted Springsteen, the musician he’d invested so much of journalistic energy in trying to understand and portray on the page, to feel the same compassion for Palestinians that he did. But he was searching for things that weren’t there. Even today, Springsteen has said nothing about Gaza, nothing about a genocide unfolding before his eyes. I would have enjoyed debating Dave about that. It would have pitted Dave’s loyalty to Springsteen against his deep sensitivity for human suffering and his hatred of mass killing, especially when done with US financial support and US-supplied weapons.

And once we’d thrashed that out, we could have fought about Bruce’s adoption of dynamic ticket pricing for his concerts, a greedy strategy for the troubadour of working-class America that pushed ticket prices well beyond the reach of most of his lifelong fans, leaving the audiences at his live performances packed with private equity types, who were likely making deals on their cellphones to loot companies and fire workers while Bruce played the “Ghost of Tom Joad.”

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Dave Marsh was the first friend to call the morning after Alexander Cockburn died. He said he knew how hard it was going to be to keep CounterPunch going in the wake of Alex’s death and the kind of burden that was suddenly going to fall on my shoulders to do all of the story recruitment and editing for both the print newsletter and the website. He warned I’d be tempted to stop writing and just edit and fundraise, but in reality I needed to pick up the pace and write for two. (Not the fucking advice I wanted to hear. I was already putting in 65 to 70 hours a week.)

“You’re not Cockburn,” he said. “But then he wasn’t you.” He’d been through tumultuous transitions at CREEM, Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. He pledged to write more frequently, help with the editing and send money. He did all three. “Focus on the writing and the editing,” he urged. “The money will come and if it doesn’t, then fuck them. They don’t know what they’ll be losing.”

The money came in trickles and freshets. Even a few substantial checks from notable musicians landed in the Post Office at the General Store in Petrolia, perhaps at Dave’s prodding. Our stable of writers grew as well. There developed what I called the Marsh Circle (AKA, the Flintstones): Lee Ballinger, Susan Martinez, Bill Glahn, Kevin Alexander Gray, Phyllis Pollack, Daniel Wolff, Steve Perry, Harry Browne, Michael Donnelly, John Sinclair. We survived. Turned the corner and hit the gas.

Then a few months after Alex died, our daughter was diagnosed with a rare lymphoma. And Dave Marsh was one of my own first calls. His daughter Kristen had died of cancer, a mercilessly aggressive sarcoma. For two years, Dave went through every brutal step of the illness and treatment with her. He devoted himself to understanding the disease, its origins and treatments; its costs, financial and emotional. Dave wrote a short guidebook to cancer. In some of his clearest prose, he demystified a disease that so many people were still too scared to talk about.

No one expects their kid to get cancer. No one expects them to face the possibility of death before 30. But Dave’s book advised us how to ask the right questions of doctors and nurses. It gave us ideas for how to deal with the incessant demands of hospital administrators and insurance companies. Dave’s book was a tremendous comfort at a perilous moment in our lives. It gave us this sense that we could get through this and we did.  I’ve shared it with many others facing similar diagnoses in the years since.

But Dave helped even more. He didn’t just email his book, send good wishes and vanish into the ether as many would have and, in fact, some friends did. He either phoned or emailed every day through the 30 days of radiation therapy and the weeks of follow-up treatments. He was there to talk through the nausea and lack of sleep, the tedium and anxiety,  the economic and work pressures, the fear that even when being beaten into remission it might come back. Dave was there to help us stay grounded and keep us from spiraling into paranoia and despair. We weren’t special. Dave made a similar effort with countless others. (See Holly Gleason’s terrifically tender, funny and intensely moving account in her essay “Dave Marsh Calling.”)

Marsh knew all of this because he forced himself to learn the hard facts. Most people’s initial reaction to a potentially fatal diagnosis in a loved one is to turn away from the diagnosis and the future it portends. That was certainly mine. But Dave understood that cancer was just a disease. Cancer isn’t just pain and fear and anguish. Cancer’s also a business. It’s a business often as ruthless as the disease itself that can and often does bankrupt families regardless of the success of the treatment. It’s why he fought so hard to make health care a basic human right, at least as sacrosanct in the American conscience as owning a gun, and to strip the profit motive out of treating people with life-threatening illnesses. That’s the kind of fighter (or even just hand to hold on to) that you want by your side when you find yourself under punches.

In the end, Dave Marsh’s assessment of Warren Zevon could well be said about Marsh’s own writing and way of living: “Smart enough to teach, quick enough to learn, dedicated enough to hold both ends together.”

You kicked the fuck out of the jams, Dave.