Dave Marsh - Early Years

Early Years

Marsh briefly attended Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He began his career as a rock critic at Creem magazine, where he was mentored by close friend and colleague Lester Bangs.

From the early days of his career, Marsh self-identified vociferously as the product of a working-class background with the sensibility of a Blue-collar worker. His contempt for artistically ambitious bands such as The Doors or The Beach Boys is usually expressed in terms of loyalty to rock and roll as "working class music" where the performers are proudly uneducated and disdain all forms of literary and musical sophistication. Throughout his Springsteen cycle of books, Marsh suggests that the central struggle in rock and roll is between the "natural" or "original" rock and roll audience -- blue collar whites with limited education -- and the "decadent, cynical" musicians who attempt to corrupt the music by focusing on decadent "rich-kid" innovations such as melody, harmony, poetry, complexity and ambiguity.