Tim Yohannan
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Tim Yohannan, born August 15, 1945, died April 3, 1998 in San Francisco, California of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, was the founder of Maximum Rock and Roll (MRR), a radio show and zine documenting the punk scene 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. He was a hardened ideologue with a strong puritanical streak but—luckily—also a sense of humor; he also had an extremely practical side that was results focused, and so his projects arguably avoided the problems of some collective endeavors which get bogged down in debate. Instead, Yohannan would simply declare what he percived as "right", and move forward. Yohannan was also a 1960s counterculture-era leftist, which was often at odds with the tendencies of many punk scenes. Still, this ideological element created many rifts in the punk scene.
[edit] Quotes
"Records are not just records any more. They come with lyric sheets & there's all sorts of information in them, political stuff, addresses, iconoclastic representations of existing society." —Tim Yohannan, 1984
"What's important about punk rock is its independence of government & of corporations & its network that exist outside of that. That is, what is political...not the words, not the music as much as the independence..." —Tim Yohannan
