DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're going to remember the influential rock critic Dave Marsh, who died a week ago. He was 76. He could be a tough critic, who didn't mince words. But he was also known for his enthusiasm and for giving voice to the emotional connection many fans had to music. Marsh dropped out of Wayne State University in Detroit to help launch the rock magazine Creem before winding up at Rolling Stone. He became an early champion of Bruce Springsteen and wrote the Rolling Stones' first cover story about him in 1978. Marsh went on to write three biographies of Springsteen and became a close friend.
The first book, "Born To Run," was published in 1979 and became a bestseller. Upon learning of Marsh's death, Springsteen wrote on social media, he was soulful, intelligent, heartfelt, opinionated, bruising and often fantastically argumentative. He deeply believed in what I was trying to accomplish. And his lifetime of support meant the world to me. Marsh also wrote books about the Who, Elvis, Michael Jackson and Sly and the Family Stone.
In his book "The Heart Of Rock & Soul," he rated what he considered the 1,001 greatest singles ever made. His No. 1 choice, Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine." Marsh also wrote a book about the Kingsmen's 1963 hit "Louie Louie." He won a Grammy in 1993 for best album notes for his work on Aretha Franklin's "Queen Of Soul: The Atlantic Recordings." And as a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee, Marsh blocked the band Kiss from entering the hall, though they eventually were inducted.
In his monthly newsletter, Rock & Roll Confidential, later titled Rock & Rap Confidential, Marsh examined the political, social and economic implications of popular music. He helped create the E Street Radio channel on SiriusXM and was host of Kick Out the Jams for SiriusXM for 19 years. We're going to listen to Terry's 1987 interview with Dave Marsh, just after he published "Glory Days," the second volume of his biography of Bruce Springsteen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
TERRY GROSS: Dave Marsh, welcome to FRESH AIR.
DAVE MARSH: Nice to be here.
GROSS: You seem to see Springsteen not only as a great performer, but as almost a savior of rock music. What do you think rock music needs to be saved from?
MARSH: Well, you know, one of the things I try to do in this new book is - "Glory Days" is back off a little bit from the idea of the messianic part of savior. And just to get into the idea that what we're all trying to do is bail ourselves out of the deepest crises of our lives. Rock 'n' roll gets trapped in a bunch of trash, in being a vehicle just for selling beer or something. What I think Bruce tried to do was prevent himself, save himself from the anguish of having his best ideas and thoughts converted into songs that were then converted into beer commercials. And what I think rock 'n' roll needs is more of that kind of conversion. And for myself, I guess the fear has always been, what would you do without it? And what are you going to do with it?
GROSS: With what? With rock music?
MARSH: It's a double-edged sword. Because, to me, it was, like, my culture. It was the culture...
GROSS: Well, let me quote something that you...
MARSH: Sure. Go ahead.
GROSS: I'm going to quote something that you say in your first book. You wrote, rock saved my life. It also broke my heart.
MARSH: Well, it seemed like a pure thing to me. And I guess I was naive, but it did seem like a pure thing to me. It seemed like there were these singers that got in the studio, they sang these songs and they spoke from the bottom of their heart. And I'm thinking about songs like - I guess the great example for right now, because it was a hit again last year, is that Ben E. King song, "Stand By Me."
GROSS: Yeah.
MARSH: You know, when the night is dark and, you know - and just that whole idea of, like, when you're most alone, something that will come and stand by your side and not let you down. For Bruce, it was a song like Roy Orbison's "Only The Lonely (Know The Way I Feel Tonight)." And I think Bruce Springsteen is a person who writes those songs. But at a certain point, rock 'n; roll did break my heart because it became clear that it was a business. And it was a business in the most kind of cynical way.
Now, like I said, that's my fault, as much as it's its fault. And I guess the best way to protect yourself and save yourself from that is to grow up and adopt a more mature attitude about it. But until "Born In The U.S.A.," I really don't think that any pop star had done a very complete job of that. John Lennon tried and came close. Elvis failed miserably. And Elvis was everybody's icon. You know, Mick Jagger just got old and cynical. Bob Dylan kind of walked a neat path and then got lost on it.
Bruce Springsteen made it to the highest heights that I think any serious rock performer has made, and, at the very moment of his greatest success, reached down and touched a community that he was supposed to be completely isolated from. And one of the great things when we were doing - the last interview we did for the book was in January. One of the great things was he explained all this to me, not in terms of what he was able to do for other people, but what that connection had done to rescue him from the fate of isolation that somebody like Elvis had had to experience.
GROSS: Yeah, he's very aware of the traps that megastars fall into. And you make a lot of comparisons between him and Elvis. And fame more or less killed Elvis Presley.
MARSH: I think it did, you know, not only because, I mean, there are people who make an argument, and they may have some legitimacy, that Elvis' overmedication was a result of him being quite sick. But if that was the case, then somebody wasn't communicating very well with somebody else about what his physical condition was. So one way or the other, the isolation, the being placed on a pedestal, is what made him no longer alive at 43. And that's an - I don't know if people who aren't big rock 'n' roll fans really would understand what a tragedy that is, what it means for a sharecropper's son from Tupelo, Mississippi, to have reached into so many lives.
And maybe somebody who's not rock fan doesn't believe. Well, I know that from the cut of my hair to the mere fact that I can stand in front of a microphone and speak, I owe Elvis Presley. I owed him. And I know that Bruce Springsteen feels that. And I know that there are enormous numbers of people who feel that, and that somehow behind all that, there was a bigger idea blossoming than just the pink Cadillac that he sang about.
GROSS: Even though Springsteen has been aware of, you know, the price of fame, didn't hype and publicity almost kill his career in the beginning? I remember...
MARSH: Twice.
GROSS: Yeah, in 1975, there were the simultaneous covers of Time and Newsweek.
MARSH: Even before that. In 1972, when he made his first record - and he'd been discovered by John Hammond, who discovered everybody from Bessie Smith to Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman. And John Hammond had discovered Bob Dylan. And so they promoted Springsteen as the new Dylan. Now, there have been 50 people, I bet you, hyped as the new Dylan since the old Dylan became successful. I should say, the real Dylan became successful.
GROSS: (Laughter).
MARSH: Bruce Springsteen is the only person whose career survived it. And then in 1975, he made the album "Born To Run." And that is a classic rock 'n' roll riff. It's a classic rock 'n' roll song from the lyric, the music, the whole business. On the other hand, that doesn't necessarily mean that it was going to be a mega-selling record. It was not trendy, necessarily, in any way. And when that hype didn't work, a lot of people figured he was finished again.
And one of the things that my first book, "Born To Run," was about was, how does someone solve this problem? And why didn't he fade away and disappear? Which an answer that's steeped more in the qualitative than the quantitative. In fact, his next album sold measurably less than "Born To Run" had, "Darkness On The Edge Of Town." And the album after that, it's called "The River," sold only a little more than "Born To Run." But what was really going on then was that Bruce had forced the marketing mechanisms of his record company to pull back because he was afraid of another bout of this overexposure, which probably would've killed him. And it wound up with him being the most idolized rock star, with a big concert audience and not so much awareness outside of the narrow world of the rock concert cult.
DAVIES: Dave Marsh spoke to Terry Gross in 1987. We'll hear a portion of his 1993 interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. We're listening to portions of our interviews with rock critic Dave Marsh. He died a week ago at the age of 76. In 1993, Marsh wrote a book about the song he said tells the story of rock 'n' roll. That song is "Louie Louie."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOUIE LOUIE")
THE KINGSMEN: (Singing) Louie, Louie, oh, no. Said, we gotta go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, Louie, Louie, oh, baby. Said we gotta go. A fine little girl, she waitin' for me. Me catch a ship across the sea. Sail that ship, ah, all alone. Me never think...
DAVIES: That's considered rock's most recorded song, covered by everyone from punk bands to Otis Redding to high school marching bands. "Louie Louie" was written in 1955 by a Black rhythm and blue singer and songwriter named Richard Berry, who recorded it in '56. Seven years later, a Portland, Oregon, band, the Kingsmen, recorded their version of it with garbled lyrics. It became a hit. In 1993, Dave Marsh told Terry how, for years, much of America came to believe that the lyrics in the song were obscene.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
MARSH: A bunch of fraternity boys decided in 1963, when the Kingsmen, this high school band from Portland, Oregon, had decided to record the record, which was a sensation - that song was a sensation in the Pacific Northwest. And when their record came out, some - for unknown reasons to anybody, I guess some college kids, as a fraternity prank, told the governor of Indiana that the song had dirty words, and a rumor, like, an urban legend went around high schools and junior highs all across America that if you played the 45 of the Kingsmen at 33 1/3 RPM, you would hear dirty words about sex.
And so the governor of Indiana immediately banned it in the state of Indiana. And, I mean, he says he didn't, but he did. He called the broadcasters association and told them that if it was dirty, they should get it off the air, and if they couldn't prove it, they should think twice. So not being able to prove it, they got rid of it. And then the FBI got their hooks into it, and they kept their hooks into it until the middle of 1966, when they started going after the Beatles or something. I don't...
GROSS: What...
MARSH: I don't know why they gave up.
GROSS: What would the song have been violating if the lyrics were dirty?
MARSH: Oh, several laws, primarily a law called the interstate transportation of obscene materials law. The FBI, when they talked to Richard Berry in 1965, told him he was going to jail. Flat out. They said, Richard, you're going to go to jail. And Richard said, for what? And they said, well, you wrote a dirty song. He said, no, here's the sheet music. And the sheet music contains a story, which, in fact, is what Richard sang and what the Kingsmen sang and what everybody pretty much sings, which is a story of a Jamaican sailor sitting at a bar, pouring his heart out to a bartender named Louie, saying, Louie, Louie, me got to go back to Jamaica to see this fine little girl who's waiting for me. And that's it. But (laughter) the FBI could not be persuaded of this, at least for the first 2 1/2 years. They finally concluded that it was unintelligible at any speed.
GROSS: Let's run through some of the versions of "Louie Louie" and do a little capsule history. Why don't we start with Richard Berry's recording recorded in 1956?
MARSH: Seven.
GROSS: '57.
MARSH: In 1957. As a matter of fact, you're playing that from the Rhino anthology, right?
GROSS: Yeah.
MARSH: Now, that is not the original version, but it's so close to the original version that you practically need a meter to tell it. And Max Feirtag (ph), who's the guy who owns the original version, had refused - was mad at Richard and refused to license it to Rhino. So, Richard Foos at Rhino simply took Richard and some other singers in and did an exact duplicate of the record. And it was so close that Feirtag called up and said, I'm going to sue you. I told you you couldn't use that.
GROSS: So these are all, like, dummy singers. These people are not Richard Berry?
MARSH: Well, Richard Berry is Richard Berry, but the other people who are with him are not the people who were on the original record, nor was the record cut in 1957. It was cut about 1980 or '81.
GROSS: What's the lyric that he used?
MARSH: He used the standard, a fine little girl, she's waiting for me. I catch a ship across the sea. I sail that ship all alone. I never think I make it home. Louie Louie, me got to go. That's Richard's version. That's what everybody sings pretty much.
GROSS: OK, let's hear the Richard Berry recording of "Louie Louie."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOUIE LOUIE")
RICHARD BERRY: (Vocalizing).
(Singing) Louie, Louie, me gotta go. Louie, Louie, me gotta go. Fine little girl, she wait for me. Me catch the ship for cross the sea. I sail the ship all alone. I never think I make it home. Louie, Louie, well, me gotta go. Louie, Louie, me gotta go.
GROSS: That sounds kind of doo-wop.
MARSH: Yeah.
GROSS: Yeah. So moving along here after he records it, nothing happens, right? It's played on some West Coast stations.
MARSH: There's a guy up in Seattle named Ron Holden, who had a big record with "I Love You So" (ph), who picks it up - and this dance that's around, the Chalypso - he uses it in battles of the bands, 'cause the kids would get up and dance the Chalypso, and he would win the battle of the bands if he played "Louie Louie."
And so from him, all these - there was an amazing rock scene in Seattle at the time. And one of the neat things about doing the book is I sort of got to do the background for everybody's Nirvana and Pearl Jam book to come later. But the bands called the Wailers, the Frantics, the Sonics, all these wildcat bands that were up there - kind of the dinosaurs of grunge, I think of them as - they all did "Louie Louie." "Louie Louie" became the anthem of the Pacific Northwest.
And they played this place called the Haunted Castle (ph), which was this - which, actually, Jimi Hendrix's song, 'cause Jimi was from Seattle, "Spanish Castle Magic" is about what went on in that place. And mainly what went on in that place was versions of "Louie Louie," taken to the Nth degree of just craziness. And that was where the song got speeded (ph) up.
GROSS: There have been dozens and dozens of cover recordings of these, some of them just incredibly ludicrous. Why in the world would Pete Fountain do a middle-of-the-road cover of "Louie Louie"? I mean, what was his producer thinking? Why bother?
MARSH: Well, first of all, you got to remember, "Louie Louie" was one of the 10 or 12 biggest records of 1963. And in 1963 and '64, if you were making a middle-of-the-road record, they gave you a checklist. Here were the big records last year. Do them. And "Louie Louie" would work as an instrumental. "Louie Louie," in terms of just being three chords of music, is OK. You know, you can play it on clarinet. You know, why someone decided Julie London had to sing it, now, that's an interesting question, you know.
And then after that, it became a standard. It became part of the rock and roll repertoire. And so Tina Turner sort of needed a version to put into her club show. And so she did this wonderful version in which she makes Louie a guy and says to him, basically, you think you're getting me without a yacht. Forget about your little ship. You sail all alone. I want a yacht or get out of here, which is probably my favorite lyrical change that anybody ever made in a straight version of this song, anyway.
DAVIES: Terry spoke with Dave Marsh in 1993. He died a week ago at the age of 76. If you want to hear an extended version of this interview and other conversations with him, visit the FRESH AIR archive. Let's listen to the recording Dave Marsh considered the No. 1 rock single of all time.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE")
MARVIN GAYE: (Singing) Ooh, I bet you're wondering how I knew 'bout your plans to make me blue with some other guy you knew before. Between the two of us guys, you know I love you more. It took me by surprise, I must say, when I found out yesterday. Don't you know that I heard it through the grapevine? Not much longer would you be mine. Oh, I heard it through the grapevine. Oh, I'm just about to lose my mind. Honey, honey, well...
DAVIES: Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film "Dreams In Nightmares." This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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