Steve Morse left an indelible mark on music journalism—and on everyone fortunate enough to have known him. He died over the weekend, after a brief illness.
He authored and taught the Rock History course for Berklee Online, a role he poured his heart into after retiring from the Boston Globe, where he was senior rock critic for 30 years.
He was a nominating committee member for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a member of the New England Music Hall of Fame. He was also a devoted partner and a devoted father to his special needs son, Nick, whose visual art he proudly celebrated on social media posts and in conversation.
On a personal note, Steve was also a friend. Early in my own career as a music journalist, he would often reach out after reading my articles, emailing to offer words of encouragement (and occasionally, an additional detail that spoke to his deep knowledge of music). Over the years I was fortunate enough to get Steve to share some of this knowledge in the Take Note articles he wrote.
Whenever we’d meet at a party or a show, Steve would always have so many stories to share, all delivered with a sense of humor and humility, as if to say that he still couldn’t believe he had witnessed so much music history. But he was also very much a part of that history, having an impact on many of those he wrote about. Bono came to Steve’s retirement party just to raise a toast to him.
Just as the Berklee Online course was about to go live, I ran into Steve at a concert. He was so excited about the course, and I was working at a different newspaper at the time, and we agreed it would make a good story.
When we talked on the record, he was a bit more formal than the Steve I knew socially, but he was a consummate professional. We discussed his oft-publicized estimate that while he was at the Globe, he went to about 250 concerts every year for 30 years.
“I tell people that in between my marriages I went to 300 a year,” he said with a full-bodied laugh. “It’s been an ultimate challenge to synthesize all of this information from my life and keep it on an academic level and also put in personal touches and weave it together.”
Years later after I started working at Berklee Online, we began to develop a video interview series. I knew he had to be a part of it, just to try to capture a few of those stories.
In just 10 minutes we were able to get into anecdotes about him interviewing Madonna, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, David Bowie, Neil Young, Roy Orbison, Stevie Nicks, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, and more.
But if you knew Steve, you’d know that he was just as much of a giant as any of the stars he wrote about.
