Vale, Dave Marsh, who has died at 74. One of the founding writers of Creem, my teenage bible, he’s probably best known for getting people to realise the power of Bruce Springsteen but he was also fierce advocate for Patti Smith, which was no small thing in the cock-rock 70s before punk arrived. I took him seriously enough that I checked out Springsteen though at first I bristled at his original verison of ‘Spirits in the Night’ which I knew by Manfred Man (hey, I was a kid). Then I heard ‘Rosalita’ and bought The Wild. The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, and then I went back and bought Greetings from Asbury Park, and when Born to Run came out I was there at the start and then I saw him in concert and as a roommate much later said, realised, ‘He’s a troubadour!’ If you haven’t seen him live, fuck off. He is a troubadour and there is as much story telling and (yeah) myth-making as music, but it’s an absolutely compelling show.

When people ask writers what are you influences, I’m usually nonplussed–I’d be the last to know. I generally say something about Beowulf because the book literally changed my life. But when I really get down to what made me think I could write, made me crazy to write, it was the rock magazines, the music I obsessed over and the writers who shared that obsession. Marsh was important, and I always read him, but you know my looney self was much more attached to Lester Bangs and Hunter S. Thompson (so much so that I once wrote the last night of Christopher Marlowe’s life in the style of HST and there’s something I’m sort of working on now that…well, it will come or it won’t). I didn’t always agree with them. I wished they’d write about women more — other than Patti and sometimes Joan Jett and not in ways that creeped me out. The women that scared them but they still found attractive made it into their pages. Women writers: there were some but they tended to get the less interesting bands or I remember a particular cringey profile of Keith Moon, my obsession, that even had me muttering that she must have just slept with him, which seemed to always be the price of woman writing on rock-n-roll and it distressed me.

I think that’s why later I was drawn to the writing of Mark Fisher because it captured some of that same verve albeit with a decidedly English mordant bleakness but with the same enthusiasm for music as something more than entertainment. As an art, sure but also as philosophy as much as books, the perfect blend of sound and meaning, noise and articulation that could only be so powerful because of the bass and drums and because we dig repetition, the three Rs. And as much as Bach’s compulsive iterations the three minute pop song could endless innovate on simplicity to create magnificence.

And in performance: the ritual that makes us want to live. That is always magic. Okay, maybe not always — as William Goldman wrote, ‘Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t’ — but when it works, it renews us. It gives us the power to try again, to find the magic. That’s why we need magic. That’s why we need music. And art, and dance, and theatre, and conversation, and writing that lights embers in the blood.

Thanks, Dave.