Steve Morse Death, Obituary: renowned Boston rock critic Steve Morse, dead 10 days after posting he had just learned he had stage 4 lung cancer

Even before he began writing reviews, Steve Morse had a talent for being at the right performance at the right time to witness some of rock music’s most historic concerts.

While visiting England in 1969 he caught the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, the band’s first appearance just after the tragic death of founding member Brian Jones. The following year, not long after graduating from Brown University, Mr. Morse was in Harvard Stadium at Janis Joplin’s final concert before she died at 27.

He tried teaching high school after Brown, but later wrote that he was “far too lax to control the students.” And frankly, he added, “my love of music was too strong to ignore.”

Stellar freelance concert reviews led to him being hired in the mid-1970s as The Boston Globe’s first full-time rock critic, a position he held until 2005 while penning a de facto history of the genre one byline at a time in thousands of reviews and scores of interviews that brought readers inside the world of world-class creativity.