(More from Billboard via Google Books, Nov. 1981)
Archive for the ‘Dave Marsh’ Category
Because the Book Publisher, Rosie, Just Gave Me a Big Advance
Posted by s woods on July 26, 2011
Posted in Archival, Dave Marsh | Leave a Comment »
Christgau, Marsh, Rockwell Make New York Magazine’s Hot 100 List!
Posted by s woods on July 21, 2011
Back on March 26, 1979, I mean.
Posted in Archival, Dave Marsh, Xgau | Leave a Comment »
The Grad School of Rock
Posted by s woods on July 17, 2011
Excellent Christgau interview/profile by David Cohen at The New Zealand Listener.
“Greil, Dave [Marsh] and I were at one time very good friends, but Dave and I are no longer friends at all,” recalls Christgau. “We shared political assumptions and were all a part of the counter-culture, even though we all were extremely sceptical about drugs and the religious strain of hippiedom, which in fact was the dominant strain.
“But even back then we had serious political differences. And, as you know, it’s the curse of the minority-left to be sectarian. Our musical tastes were completely different, too. These days I would call Dave a cultural conservative, and Greil has become a person with, ah, extremely intense and narrow interests: he loves what he loves and ignores almost everything else.”
(Update: I thought this was a new interview… it’s not, I’ve just never seen it before.)
Posted in Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, Interviews, Xgau | Leave a Comment »
“She loved her readers”
Posted by s woods on June 15, 2011
Bit of an eyestrain, but here’s a scan of Dave Marsh’s Rolling Stone obituary for Gloria Stavers, from May 1983 (featured on a site entirely dedicated to Stavers).
Posted in Dave Marsh, Gloria Stavers, Obits, PDFs and Scans | Leave a Comment »
More on the Rolling Stone Record Guide
Posted by s woods on October 18, 2008
It might have been relevant in the previous post — the Eddy interview — to link to Randall Roberts’ lengthy analysis of The New Rolling Stone Record Guide (the second — or blue — edition) from a paper he presented at EMP a few years ago. I still need to fully re-read the thing myself, but my impression is that what he says about the guide is (somewhat? perhaps?) in contradiction to what Chuck says — but, as I said, I haven’t yet re-read it .
Anyway, I’ll put it out there for anyone interested (and would be curious to know what other people think of those early editions of the RS Guide). Here’s Roberts’s piece, The Rolling Stone Record Guide and the Creation of the Canon.
Posted in Dave Marsh | 17 Comments »
Tom Ewing on “The Test of Time”
Posted by s woods on January 27, 2008
Tom Ewing’s latest Pitchfork column, which employs an old Dave Marsh Smiths vs. Lionel Richie dichotomy as a launch pad, contains a lot to chew on, examining as it does the dubious critical fallback position of “20 years from now, people will still be listening to this [i.e., this record that I'm praising] whereas few or no one will still be listening to that [i.e., this record that someone else is praising but which you yourself don't care for].” I bet there’s not a rock critic on the planet who hasn’t written from this vantage point at some time or other, but even to call this position “dubious” is rather charitable. As Ewing points out, it’s a position that can’t really be argued with (unless, perhaps, your name is Mork).
Myself, I fear that I have too often relied on the opposite tack, which Ewing mentions only briefly:
“What strikes me is that the test of time card is played to win internal arguments as much as external ones. It’s often the justifier for something being top of a list, not fourth, or it turns up ruefully acknowledged when talking about a pleasure-perceived evanescent: I’m sure I won’t be listening to this next year but… Posterity here is a cop in the listener’s head.”
Posted in Blabbin', Dave Marsh | 5 Comments »
Former Creemster Bangs On About This, That, the Other Thing
Posted by s woods on January 24, 2008
Final installment of Bill Holdship’s Creem history/memoir/book review here, at Metro Times. A much deeper dig than the first installment into the story, the in-fighting, the book, etc.
A few disagreements along the way, the most major one being in regards to this:
“Of course, revisionism has been going on for a long time now. In 2000, music critic Simon Reynolds took potshots at Bangs (and me) on his blog, writing that he’d read Bangs’ stuff in CREEM just recently, and while a lot of it was very good, a great deal of it wasn’t all that. But Reynolds obviously couldn’t read it in full context. So that’s sort of like me saying ‘I listened to Elvis in the ’80s,’ or ‘I listened to the Sex Pistols in the ’00s, and I just don’t know what all the outrage was about.’ Take it from someone who was there reading him at the time: Lester Bangs was great, even if it’s harder these days to accept, as Greil Marcus once put it, ‘that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.’”
Posted in Creem, Dave Marsh | 15 Comments »
Marsh on the Beatles
Posted by s woods on January 13, 2008
CBC had an interesting interview with Dave Marsh recently, discussing his new book about The Beatles Second Album. Part of the Wed. Jan. 9 podcast, available here.
Posted in Dave Marsh, Interviews | Leave a Comment »
Creem NY Observer follow-up piece
Posted by s woods on December 3, 2007
The New York Observer does a follow-up piece on the Creem debacle, focusing more on Marsh’s, Whitall’s, et al. battles with the ‘zines legacy (and less on the lawsuit).
Seems to me there’s an underlying, more interesting battle going on here–a sideshow to Matheu vs. the Creem critics–that being seventies Creemsters vs. eighties Creemsters (witness Whitall’s comment: “‘John Mellencamp?’ she said with incredulity. ‘He’s in there. Come on! He’s so un-Creem. Also, Duran Duran? I mean, what?’”)
Posted in Creem, Dave Marsh | 3 Comments »
The Creem Dreem is over?
Posted by s woods on November 28, 2007
A couple weeks back, I was thrilled to receive my copy of the gigantic, gorgeously designed Creem anthology. Still haven’t read ANY of it, to be honest (that’s one thing about coffee table books that look great–they’re not especially conducive to delving in and spending time with; who wants to mess up all those lovely pages?), but a few perusals through the thing once the initial shock wore off and my excitement level dropped somewhat. For starters, as a few people mentioned in this ILM thread, the bulk of the book’s content is devoted to artist profiles, which, while certainly in the Creemspeak tradition, are probably the thing I was hoping to see the least of–certainly not as the bulk of the package. As “xhuxk” notes in that thread, it’s cool to see in there things like “Stars Cars” and “Backstage” and “Creem Dreem” reprints, but the book seems sadly lacking in record and book reviews (in fact, I don’t think there are any–I’d love to own a whole book of Creem record reviews, come to think of it). Also, the selection of writers and feature subjects just seems a little scattershot, occasionally making me wonder, “why is this here?” (Though, let’s be fair, no collection could satisfy everyone, and omissions are both understandable and fully to be expected. That’s a tribute to the mag itself, the fact that a true “best of” could never be captured in a single anthology).
Anyway, I was (and am) still happy to own the thing, and there is some great stuff in there, but how much of it I’ll actually get around to reading… not a lot, I suspect. The mags themselves are always close by. (God forbid we should have a fire, the Creem stash will be the first detour on the way out the door–after my wife of course.)
Well, the story, as it turns out, is a lot more complicated.
Posted in Creem, Dave Marsh, News | 3 Comments »
