Dave Marsh and I both came of age in the Oakland County, Michigan suburbs, northwest of Detroit — Waterford Kettering, the high school he graduated from in 1968, used to regularly play sports against West Bloomfield, the high school I graduated from exactly a decade later. The Spinal Column, the suburban weekly newspaper that gave me my first journalism job, was based in Waterford too. The music publication I eventually most enjoyed writing for, Creem magazine, was co-founded by Marsh in 1969; after initial publication in Detroit, it also spent most of its life in Oakland Country (Walled Lake then Birmingham.) Apparently after reading a heavy metal roundup I wrote for the Village Voice in 1984, Marsh recruited me to write a metal essay for The First Rock & Roll Confidential Report, the first piece I ever had published in a book. We were both proud Midwesterners, both prone to boosting Michigan music and known to be vocally suspicious of what we dismissed as effete coastal…Bohemians? Academics? Intellectuals? Artsy-fartsies? Something like that. Somebody once accused me of writing from a chip on my shoulder, back in my early years at least. I took it as a compliment, and I suspect Marsh would feel the same.
