The obituaries for Steve Morse, the longtime rock critic for the Boston Globe who died last week at the age of 76, were full of famous names. Artists he saw perform, like Janis Joplin at her final concert, and ones he interviewed, like Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. In the early 80s Morse caught the second Boston show of a young Irish band called U2 at a tiny club; In 2005, when he took a buyout as a Globe staffer, Bono (in town for a concert at a much, much, much larger venue) swung by his retirement party at JJ Foley’s, Morse’s local watering hole.

I met him a few years after that, through a buddy who was also part of the Boston music writing world. Morse wasn’t on staff at the Globe any more but continued freelancing and hitting up the local clubs, particularly in the Cambridge area — he estimated he went to at least 250 shows a year, and he’d frequently bounce between multiple venues on the same night. I don’t know what show it was or where — Toad? The Plough and Stars? The Lizard Lounge? The Abbey Lounge? PA’s Lounge? — but I know he was immediately friendly to some schmuck he’d never met before. He was friendly to everyone at a show, not glad-handing but honestly happy to see folks and to see the local bands that were holding down residencies or shooting for the stars. 

The phrase “pillar of the community” is a cliche; it fit Morse not only due to his six-and-a-half foot frame but because of how he supported Boston acts on the ground and in print (and supported fellow journalists writing about them). “She has risen to the top of her craft here and it’s a thrill to see how all those local, pay-your-dues gigs around Boston have given these songs an added authenticity,” Morse wrote in a rave review of the first album from Sarah Borges, and the second part of that sentence quietly puts him at all of those local gigs too, tracking an artist upping her game. “You brightened every room, and a show wasn’t a show until we saw you there,” singer Andrea Gillis wrote in a tribute on Facebook. Gillis also alludes to how Morse could keep the night going after the shows, in her own Facebook post Borges recalls Morse “coming to our rescue with a six pack at the end of a party.” I have memories — vague ones — of a couple of us hotboxing in Morse’s car before hitting up last call after a mind-blowing show by the Willard Grant Conspiracy, last call itself is even blurrier. I never saw Bono at JJ Foleys but I did wind up drinking Buttery Nipples there at 2 a.m. with the head of an MBTA station, who Morse was somehow also buddies with, and that was its own great time facilitated by a guy who was always looking to find great times in music and keep them going.

While that exuberance in the music community was a huge part of Morse’s life, it wasn’t the only part. His son Nick is an accomplished abstract artist who is largely nonverbal, and Morse would talk about him and his work with pride and joy and love that went beyond his praise for the bands on his beat. And he didn’t let up when it came to the “critic” part of his job. That early U2 review praises Bono’s stage presence but says the band overall “blows both hot and cold” (and it spares a few words of appreciation for the intensity of local openers La Peste). The Globe’s obituary returns to Bono at Morse’s retirement party, declaring that “one thing we liked about Steve was he wasn’t afraid to kick us in the arse.” “And that was a sign of respect because I didn’t review every concert favorably,” Morse recalled in a prior interview. The obituary notes Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir paying similar respect to an honest review and quotes Morse in an interview with the Media Narrative podcast: “You know, the Dead were famous for off nights, and I would write it. I don’t get a paycheck from the band. I get a paycheck from The Boston Globe.”

I was thinking about this as yet another music criticism tempest in a teapot played out last week. This time it was the singer Halsey reacting to a negative review in Pitchfork with passive-aggressive posting but the playbook is the same every time, an artist gets mad at a critic’s criticism and their fans act like saying art sucks is a personal attack on the artist and by extension themselves. It’s a childish reaction that has no room for the mix of love and work and yes, harshness that makes criticism valuable and makes support mean something more than obeisance. It doesn’t have space for how a critic can tell Bono he had an off night and then spend their next night at a club with more band members than audience members to hear something that could be great, and be ready to tell everyone who wasn’t there about it. How a critic can be a presence that builds a community.

The last show I saw Morse at was earlier this year. Bono wasn’t there but a bunch of local bands and artists were, it was a fundraiser for a beloved local bartender needing help with medical bills. Borges and Gillis played, along with other roots and rock vets that I’d first seen with Morse in the audience, including singer Dennis Brennan. Brennan once organized a CD compilation of this crowd — also for charity — back in 2003, and Morse wrote it up in a feature for the Globe. “I can’t think of anything better than to document the scene I see every week,” Brennan told Morse, one documentarian to another. Morse shared what he heard and shared himself. It is hard to believe I won’t run into him again at a show, the volume of his welcoming bellow loud enough to be heard above the noise coming from the stage and the warmth behind it becoming part of the atmosphere. The non-famous names that Morse supported every night are still making music in Boston but the absence of his voice is going to be hard to hear.