Tim Yohannan
Tim Yohannan, born August 15, 1945, died April 3, 1998 in San Francisco, California of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, was the founder of Maximum Rocknroll (MRR), a radio show and zine documenting the punk subculture around the world. As the zine became popular and profitable, Yohannan donated those profits to zines and collectives, even as he continued blue-collar work in the Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California, Berkeley.
Also known as Tim Yo, he is remembered for popularizing "Punk Rock Infrastructure", essentially an informal ideal of necessary worldwide community among punks. He gathered a number of like-minded partisans for the burgeoning punk genre and established a number of collectives in the DIY spirit, such as 924 Gilman Street, Blacklist Mailorder, and the Epicenter Zone community center.
Yohannan helped to mold the early 1980s American punk scene and tied in various international punk scenes as well, documenting them in MRR Scene Reports. Yohannan was always mindful of the central conflict between punk rock's essentially ungovernable force and the apparent need for punk rock infrastructure. This conflict could be considered a sort of dualistic driving force which ensured his project's success.
As a self-appointed herdsman of the punks, Yohannan had a reputation as being notoriously difficult.[citation needed] He was a hardened ideologue with a strong puritanical streak but also a sense of humor; he also had an extremely practical side that was results focused, and so his projects[vague] arguably avoided the problems of some collective endeavors which get bogged down in debate. Instead, Yohannan would simply declare what he perceived as "right", and move forward.
Yohannan was also a 1960s counterculture-era leftist. Still, this ideological element created many rifts in the punk scene. His divisive personality was described in the NOFX song "I'm Telling Tim" in which if Tim found out you were doing things not in accordance to Tim's beliefs, you would get "ostracized like Lawrence" (Livermore). [1]
The band MDC recorded a tribute to Yohannan titled "Timmy Yo" on their 2004 studio album Magnus Dominus Corpus.
[edit] External links
- Maximumrocknroll official site
- the 924 Gilman Street Project
- Slingshot obituary: A Salute to Tim Yohannon
- Salon obituary: The Day Punk Died
- Online Memorial: Memorial guestbook setup on the day Tim died
