Gimme Something Better (29 page)

Sheriff Mike Hennessey:
It had very small print and was very hard to read. But it was a great way to find out about other groups. I remember as a result of
Maximum RocknRoll
, going to see DOA, who I ended up really liking.

Klaus Flouride:
Their magazine was so obsessive-compulsive, as much type as you can fit in a small place.

Jeff Bale:
A lot of people didn’t like us because they thought we were too opinionated. They didn’t like our politics. We didn’t like their bands. We had a lot of power in the punk scene. If we liked something, it became hugely popular. If we gave a band a bad review, that band might have gotten popular anyway, but we really hurt them a lot. It wasn’t like we were trying to hurt people, but we were expressing our honest opinions.

Tim Tonooka:
Tim Yohannan was a nice guy, with good intentions. He was deeply concerned that kids might think incorrect thoughts unless they were provided with carefully selected correct information. The idea of someone setting themselves up to be a self-appointed authority that needs to do other people’s thinking for them—because left to their own devices, those other people might come to the wrong conclusions? The underlying mentality is elitist and condescending.

Jeff Bale:
Me and Tim lived in a house in Rockridge in North Oakland. We had lots of visiting bands staying there, so we might’ve left a bedroom open so people could crash there. A house full of albums, and in my case, books, and that’s pretty much it. A stereo. The magazine was made in the house.

John Marr:
At one point they almost filled the entire three-flat building. Two roommates upstairs, two roommates downstairs, and then two big rooms to use for the magazine. It was like a little bustling economy.

Jeff Bale:
A ton of people have been shitworkers over the years. That was Tim’s idea. He didn’t want to call them slaves, they were basically people who volunteered. And so the term “shitworker” just seemed like a funny punk way of expressing that. Tim and I were volunteers, too.

John Marr:
I did it for three years. I don’t know if this is a secret or not, but shitworkers got paid. If you were showing up every week, Tim would give you 20 bucks a month to cover your car-fare and stuff.

Jeff Bale:
The other cool thing is we’d turn bands on to other bands. Like DOA’d be stayin’ at our house and we’d turn them on to the Pagans, this punk band in Cleveland they’d never heard of. We had listening parties and we were playing records all the time.

Kamala Parks:
A girl I went to high school with said, “Oh, do you want to go do some work on
Maximum RocknRoll
?” And I said,

When I lived with my father our phone number ended in 7588. One day I figured out it translated to “SLUT.” I would tell people, “525-SLUT, that’s my phone number.” Someone was writing up my scene report one day and they said, “What’s Kamala’s phone number?” Tim said, “Oh, it’s 525-SLUT.” So it got printed, and I got some really weird phone calls that month from perverts.

At a certain point, I stopped going to as many shows in the Bay Area because my mother had moved to Sacramento. Tim was like, “Well, you can’t be the scene reporter if you’re not at the shows.” And he basically fired me, as much as one can be fired. So there was a certain unilateral decision-making that was going on under this coat of “Aren’t we this collective, great thing.” Tim was in charge, essentially, and what he said went. I understand in another respect, because coordinating people to work for free is not an easy thing to do, and you have to be tough.

Tom Flynn:
There was a real struggle with trying to run it as a communal magazine. But overall, he was a dictator. I wish he had just admitted that.

Kamala Parks:
I felt like there was more of a purpose to it. But it had its flaws. Why do people keep coming away with this bitterness about their volunteerism? Because Tim modeled
Maximum RocknRoll
and all these other enterprises on his incredibly cushy position of being able to earn a full-time wage while working very few hours. For most of us that’s not possible, to work at a part-time job, and live.

Jeff Bale:
We started sponsoring gigs at the Mab. We had DOA. 7 Seconds would come down from Reno.

John Marr:
Dead Kennedys played one of the shows. A bunch of Midwestern hardcore bands played. We were very adamant about these being all-ages shows. It started at six and was over by ten.

Jeff Bale:
We really felt like we were bringing people together, and catalyzing and stimulating an international punk scene which had previously been pretty separated, in many respects. We exposed unknown bands and unknown scenes and unknown magazines. If there’s any justice in the world, 90 percent of the world’s punk rockers would be thanking
Maximum RocknRoll
for all the shit we did for them.

Dave Dictor:
Tim was a very passionate person. He had so much energy to get the scene going. A lot of things we take for granted. Not to say that punk wouldn’t have succeeded without him, but the magazine just became this focus. It set up all these networks, and became this intelligent voice, to crystallize the punk anger and frustration—and “Why are these young people doing all this crazy stuff?”

Jello Biafra:
From the beginning, all the record reviews had addresses in ’em. I would frantically write off to anybody whose record I’d never seen, to see if I could get it off ’em. It was especially exciting when we got something from a foreign country. People started finding out they could get a review in an American zine if they sent their records to
MRR
. And it worked beautifully. We keep in touch with many of those contacts to this day.

Jeff Bale:
Somebody would write from Brazil and say, “Here’s the scene going on,” and we would publish it. So everybody would know about Brazil.

Jello Biafra:
Scene reports started coming in from countries only Dead Kennedys had visited, like Finland and later Italy and Holland. Those were the first places where people actually got the American hardcore thing.

Jeff Bale:
By virtue of even publishing these things, we created this whole synergistic network of exchange. We expanded the punk rock scene in the Bay Area and all over the fucking world by a factor that I would say is incalculable.

Jello Biafra:
These scene reports would be peppered with that country’s politics. You could learn how strong the squatters’ movement was, and how successful it was on the European continent. Another report would come in from Italy where the local city government actually shut down a squat using tanks! Sometimes you would also get reflections by people from Europe who had visited the U.S., and came home and detailed how shocked they were at the homeless population in “rich America.”

John Marr:
Tim completely dominated the magazine, especially in the early years. He was the one who worked the hardest. It was very much his political vision. He had worked on this magazine in the ’60s called
All You Can Eat
.

Jeff Bale:
Tim was a communist, that’s just a fact. Like all communists, he was a great organizer. He was really into Maoism. He became a Maoist in ’71, and always sort of retained that. Tim was a very smart guy, very intelligent, but he kind of stopped reading about politics in a serious way by the early ’70s. He had what I would call fixed political ideas.

John Marr:
Tim was a ferocious competitor. Every Wednesday night for years, Tim played Risk. I think there may have even been an NPR or alt-weekly piece on the Risk game. It was this real big thing. If the Sex Pistols had played on a Wednesday night, they probably would have said, “No, sorry, we gotta play Risk.”

Martin Sprouse:
The Risk game wasn’t some youth revolutionary, political party type of thing at all. People have the wrong impression. That guy had his politics, but he was way too anti-authoritarian to be part of anything.

Larry Livermore:
He was shorter and louder-mouthed than I expected. When he found out I lived in Ann Arbor, the main thing he was interested in was if I had this extremely rare record called “Just Like an Aborigine” by the Up, who were the third band of the MC-5/Stooges trio that worked with the White Panther Tribe. And I thought, “Geez, he’s just a dorky record collector.”

Fat Mike:
Tim Yohannan was always kind of weird. I went to Sizzler twice in my life, in San Francisco. Both times I went, he was there.

Aaron Cometbus:
Tim had annoying qualities, but they were not the ones that everyone assumed from their ideas about
MRR
. Tim didn’t read, as far as I could tell. He didn’t eat vegetables. And I never once saw him at a demonstration.

John Marr:
MRR
made pretty good money. There was a waiting list for ads. Tim thought it was important to keep the advertising rate somewhat low. Tim was not in it for the money. But Tim benefited from it by being the publisher. You had the home office. The magazine eventually owned a car. But it wasn’t like using money from a 1/16 ad from this little western Massachusetts hardcore band to fund his summer vacation to Barbados.

Sheriff Mike Hennessey:
I’d run into him at Giants games. He was a Giants fan, and I can recall being out there with my daughter, who was nine or ten at the time, and seeing Tim Yohannan. I said, “Samantha, I want to introduce you to a real punk rocker right here.”

Frank Portman:
I was totally shocked to hear he actually agreed with my contention that hardcore was not as good as non-hardcore. Because he championed it. His reason was political. He had this clearly delusional but sincere idea that since that was what was happening, you could use it to bring the youth into this force, to gather the threads of the old counterculture and eventually overthrow the government.

Ian MacKaye:
When I first met him, I didn’t get the sense that he’s an all-ages show kind of guy, but I think what Tim started to recognize is that the punk energy that he really had an affection for, felt connected to, was something that was ultimately what the kids were up to.

Noah Landis:
He was really excited about young people doing new things in music. The way the East Bay punk rock scene started to grow—he was more thrilled than anyone to see that kind of stuff, and he jumped right in the middle of it. He spoke truth to power. He was the first person I met who was all about finding and making and taking advantage of the pathways of communicating the right shit.

Rachel DMR:
Tim didn’t like us. I remember him being a little softer toward us as he got older. But he never said hello. We didn’t fit into his mold, the activist punk movement—the vegetarians, the peace punks, the people that were thoughtful about what they were doing.

Toni DMR:
Rachel and I didn’t buy into that whole intellectual fucking crap. We’d spent our whole childhood surrounded by the upper echelons of academia. We didn’t watch TV. We were well read. So fucking what?

Carol DMR:
I spent the night at the
Maximum
house with this band, Vicious Circle. When Tim found me in the house that morning he flipped out: “There’s no girls here!” We didn’t do anything.

We went to
Maximum RocknRoll
shows and they went to our shows. Ruth was always cool, Jeff Bale was rad. But Tim, our whole presence must have bothered him. The women that he always dated were modelesque, mousy girls. They were always really younger than him.

Ruth Schwartz:
He was an old fart. He’d end up trying to date 20-year-old women and we’d be like, “Tim, how are you going to meet women your own age?” And he’d be like, “I don’t know! I’m only around 20-year-old women! I don’t know what to do.” I just used to feel sorry for him.

Dave Dictor:
Couple times Tim helped us out, with thousands of dollars. We got arrested in Canada. They charged us with “weapons dangerous to public safety.” Which meant we had a crowbar in our car. They were trying to say that we were thuggy youth going around with shaven hair, with pipes and clubs in a van, creating menace. It was a two-year sentence. They had charges on my bass player and my guitar player. The bail was $2,000 each.

I left the police station in shock, like, “How am I gonna get $4,000?” Went to the house I was staying at, the promoter and the people that were hosting us, and started making calls. To raise $4,000, you find out who your friends are very quickly, in 1982, when you’re in a punk band in Canada and half your guys are in jail.

I called my mom, she sent me $1,000. And I got some money from Ruth Schwartz, from Mordam Records. But I had nowhere else to go. So I called Tim Yohannan. He sent me $2,000. And he wasn’t rich at the time.
Maximum RocknRoll
grew into whatever, but at the time it was a lot of money. We ended up paying it off. We nickel-and-dimed half the money back, and then he let it slide ’cause the magazine started taking off. That was very, very cool.

Chicken John:
I got Tim Yohannan to send me $300. It was during the first Circuss Redickuless tour. I just called him from the road and I was like, “Tim! I’m dying out here. Got any money? I am totally fucked.” He sent it to the club in Atlanta. It was like a FedEx pack with 300 one-dollar bills in it. Not even in a bundle, just stuffed into this FedEx pack.

 

 

Martin Sprouse: I grew up in San Diego. Pat Weakland, Jason Traeger and myself started our own fanzine called
Leading Edge
. I was writing scene reports for
MRR
.

I came up here for the very first time to visit in ’84. I was 18 at the time. We stayed at the
Maximum
house. Jeff Bale and this woman Erica lived there. Jeff was drinking Coke and listening to Twisted Sister. He was trying to say they were punk. Painful!