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 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...
Read More