Gimme Something Better (30 page)

We’d been reading the magazine since the second issue. I remember how thick it was. Seeing politics and punk, done pretty smart, and also seeing a dead guy laying in front of Bechtel in a suit, with a flag over him—I was like, “Fuckin’, that’s great!”

Aaron Cometbus:
They tried to get a ton of punks to show up outside of Bechtel for a photo shoot for the
MRR
cover. Only one did, so they took a picture of him lying down, draped him in an American flag. Pretty smart.

Ray Farrell:
The magazine and the radio show were like the entry points. For many kids, punk may still be a rite of passage for them. They get into it, they maybe have difficulties with how their parents are raising them. A lot of those basics—how you take care of yourself, how you find a way to be happy without a lot of the trappings of a capitalist society—that’s a lot of what
Maximum RocknRoll
helped kids to start to understand.

The hippie movement was certainly not successful in that. The message I remember as a kid was that it was a freeloaders’ society. Whereas punk rock was more like, there’s a working-class system in place, and you have to think about what you have to do to survive.
Maximum RocknRoll
made it more fun, because the message by itself is kind of depressing. Punk lowered the age when you start to get disgruntled with everything. It used to be, life is shit after 17 years old. Punk rock brought it down to 13.

Kurt Brecht:
We found it at a punk rock record store in Houston.
Maximum
was like our bible. It was our connection with the worldwide punk scene.

A. C. Thompson:
Everyone across the country was reading. In 2006, I wrote a book about the CIA. It’s a direct link to something I started researching in eighth grade, because I read Noam Chomsky in
Maximum RocknRoll
.

Andy Asp:
MRR
was sort of the Internet of its time for punk rock. In Humboldt we were really isolated. But I sent records to Mexico City punks. I got letters from Croatia. To be a punk in Yugoslavia or Colombia back then, writing letters was pretty ballsy.

Lenny Filth:
You could order records that you couldn’t get in your normal stores. You could see interviews from bands across the country, or across the world. It gave you an opportunity to read about what other people are thinking, someplace else in the world. Why they started playing music, and what they’re doing it for.

Adam Pfahler:
When
Maximum
got a little bit older, the columnists were starting to get into it with each other. People were always getting mad at each other up here about something. Calling bands out, calling each other out.

Ian MacKaye:
The letters section was such incendiary, squalid gossip. It was a total pissing match. The columns were maddening. I can remember being really infuriated by things.

Audra Angeli-Slawson:
You either read it or you went to your local record store and bothered the shit out of the poor guy behind the counter about every stupid little thing.

Rebecca Gwyn Wilson:
I had seen
Maximum
in Hawaii. It reminded me of Dr. Bronner’s soap and the
Oxford English Dictionary
, because you needed a magnifying glass to read it. At first I was intimidated because I thought, “Wow, these people are really smart, and socially conscientious.”

Chicken John:
At the time, the scene reports were all written very, can I say, laconic? It was just like, “This band played and then this band played. They rocked. Da da da. This band is not punk rock so therefore they are kicked off the island. And then we all danced around. Blah blah blah.” It was dumb.

I started writing New York scene reports that were like stream-of-consciousness creative writing. I’d turn in 1,500 words about driving around New York in the Letch Mobile, this ridiculous old Pontiac station wagon covered in graffiti and food. Bugs buzzing around it. Shit like guitars screwed to it. The Letch Mobile—smell it while you can.

Tim would send me these little postcards. They were so Tim Yohannan. It’s like,
Maximum RocknRoll
, the fun punk rock music magazine where everybody has colored hair and STDs! And here’s the fucking leader of the movement, right? The guy who’s in charge—his postcard is a blank gray piece of paper with a computer-printed
MRR
label on one side, and on the other side he’s written in pencil, “Hope you don’t mind editing.”

I still have every fuckin’ issue. That and my collection of soiled GG microphones. They’re in the same box.

Blag Jesus:
There was not much punk rock in Chicago. We had heard about that magazine and we followed it, and so we went out there and played our music on the radio show. There was ten other bands standing there, and they all wanted to play their music.

Fat Mike:
In ’84, I went to Italy with my dad. He went on business. I brought my
Maximum RocknRoll
. When I was in Italy, I found a guy who was in Florence, and I just walked up and knocked on his door. I got his address from the scene reports. “Hey, I’m a punk rocker from America.” His name was Stefano Bettini. So we had some beers and I taped some music, and his band was playing the next night. And I got to see a basement show in ’84 in Italy. You could do that back then.

Mike LaVella:
My band did one tour, we made it to California. We went to the
Maximum
house, and I was like, “This is it?” In my mind I guess the house was gonna be like some condemned building. We went in, and Tim interviewed us. Everybody was so nice. Ruth was like, “This is where you get a cheap burrito.” We were literally like, “What’s a burrito?” The only time I ever heard of a burrito, there was one in the
Bad News Bears
.

Jennifer Blowdryer:
Tim Yohannan was a big fan of the Blowdryers, and so when my first book came out, he approached me about writing a column. I was like, sure. No one ever gave me opportunities. Tim said something about how I was more grounded in writing than in person, and that kinda hurt my feelings a little bit. But he loved to laugh. He always had a big smile, he liked chaos.

When I would travel, the one or two nutty people in town would know me. I’d be in Chicago doing a Smutfest, and some schizophrenic would say they knew my name from
Maximum RocknRoll
. It was more global than anything else I’d ever engaged in.

Tim had a theme issue for April Fool’s Day, where the columnists all made fun of each other. I wrote a column as if I was this girl Katie O’Dowell. She got in the office and read mine before I could read hers and then wrote a super-mean one to me. I was like, “I don’t wanna be part of another sick family, and this is sick shit. I’m outta here.”

Bill Michalski:
When I lived in Baton Rouge I used to take photos at shows all the time, and I thought, “Oh, this’ll be great. I can work for
Maximum RocknRoll
.” But very shortly after moving out here, I realized how cliquish it was. And how exclusive, and what a cool-kids club it was. I really didn’t wanna have anything to do with that.

Bill Schneider:
I’d read
Maximum RocknRoll
while I was in L.A. but it seemed like it was on another world. It was kind of intimidating. It really wasn’t until I moved up here, and then all of a sudden it had a face. You were sitting there in a meeting with Tim Yohannan and all the people who had articles you’d read. And everybody was arguing about whether the toilet paper was recycled enough times. You were like, “Wow, this is cool!” It seemed real, and it felt like it was mine.

Ben Sizemore:
I was in this band Econochrist and we were from Little Rock, Arkansas. Basically we all just wanted to leave the South ’cause it sucks there. Once you figure out there’s not a wall around it, you’re free to go. California had this kind of allure, the Bay Area in particular. We saw
Maximum RocknRoll
and we loved all these bands, like Christ on Parade, MDC, Crucifix, the Dicks, the Offenders, stuff like that. We knew some of those bands from Texas, like MDC and the Dicks, had moved to San Francisco. So we were like, “We could fuckin’ just move to the Bay—those guys did it.”

Greg Valencia:
In Santa Fe, there was nothing to do. We were on our way to jail. We all broke into houses for money, did stupid, stupid shit. A couple of the other dudes that I looked up to had
Maximum RocknRoll
around. It opened up a whole new thing to me. Interviews, everyone’s trading demos, it was awesome. It had so much to offer for kids who didn’t have much. We came out here in ’91 to play three shows. It was like being in a candy store. The record stores. Punk rock girls. We never wanted to leave.

Adam Pfahler:
Jawbreaker started playing shows in Hollywood. But then we looked at
Maximum RocknRoll
, and it was fuckin’ blowing up here. So we played Gilman and I think we filled in the next night at the Covered Wagon. We met so many cool people that we admired. It made you feel like, if you’re gonna do it independent style, this is how it should be done. There was something for everyone here. You could be into taking pictures and have something to do in the music scene. Or you could be a musician, or you could be into writing your own zine like Aaron [Cometbus]. We just packed up and moved here.

Martin Sprouse:
Me and some friends from San Diego and Reno all happened to be at the
Maximum
house at the same time. We were all getting along, and Tim presented this idea. He was always scheming to do the next thing. And he said, “I want you three guys to move in here, take over the magazine. ’Cause I want to open a club.” Jason and Bessie were into it but then it fell apart. So I just moved up here. Late summer ’85. Tim had just found that house on Clipper Street.

Ben Sizemore:
I considered that place a palace. They had this really nice house in Noe Valley with this killer view. We all lived in the ghetto in Oakland, so we’d go over there and be like, “What the fuck? These guys are like yuppies. This place is so clean.” Adrienne Droogas: Before my mom would let me move into the
Maximum RocknRoll
house, she had to come out and meet Tim Yohannan. It was funny. Tim was like, “I have to meet your mom?” Cammie Toloui: I ended up moving into the house and being one of the zine workers there. There was four bedrooms, and a huge rumpus room in the basement where all the records were. The main floor had the magazine zone with the computers.

Adrienne Droogas:
Bands constantly coming and going, getting interviewed, stopping by. You were constantly walking in the door and going, “Hi, I’m Adrienne and, this room full of people from Sweden, hi, nice to meet you all. I’m gonna go in my room now.” Cammie Toloui: Tim smoked like mad and the place always had an ashtray smell. I just have these nauseating memories of getting up in the morning and the smell of the trash that was full of rotting beef and egg foo yung.

Chicken John:
His laugh was like a goose, sort of a honk. The sweat-shirts never fit him right, or he washed them in hot water. Cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The guy was a fuckin’ cartoon. You could dress up like him for Halloween.

Cammie Toloui:
He was definitely a father figure for me. There was this point where I was this wild punk rocker and fell in love with this even more wild punk rocker in the Soviet Union. We went on this long tour with his band and got married and then came back to America and I got pregnant. I called up Tim and was like, “Guess what, Tim? I’m gonna have Max’s baby!” He was sooo mad at me. Like, “Cammie, you have no money. Max is an alcoholic.” Just laying it out for me like a dad would. He pretty much didn’t want to talk to me after that.

Adrienne Droogas:
Tim worked in the mornings and would come home at noon, and do
Maximum
’til 10 or 11 o’clock at night. He’d delegate, other people would be responsible and did their thing. But weekends, Saturdays, Sundays, it was just what he did.

Matt Wobensmith:
Tim lived like a Spartan. He slept on a twin mattress in the basement. He never bought anything for himself. Martin Sprouse: It was weird. Tim always told everybody that I fired the entire staff of
Maximum
the minute I walked in the door. ’Cause it was very loose, and depended on a large group of people to put it together. They had work parties on Sundays and some people typed, some people laid out, some people did this. I had a totally different working style. I’m a very focused, workaholic person. It looked really fuckin’ sloppy to me. I was such a little anal graphics guy. And slowly the work parties disappeared. John Marr: Someone characterized Martin as the son that Tim never had. They were very, very close. Martin introduced a better aesthetic for the magazine. I started to do my own zine, so I just drifted away. But I probably would have never started my own zine if I hadn’t been a shitworker.

Martin Sprouse:
We had those discussions at
Maximum
. What is punk? Why isn’t this band getting reviewed? All the time. It’s been happening since the beginning, and it’ll go on forever. I still have that side of me. It’s really embarrassing. It makes my girlfriend crazy ’cause she just loves music. I love music, but I got this other weird side that’s like, “Nah, that’s bullshit.”

People liked
Maximum
, people hated
Maximum
. There was a revolt since issue three or four. People started hating it early on. ’Cause of the political side of it. Hate mail every single day. “You fuckin’ motherfuckers”—you know. “That wasn’t punk” or “That’s not how it was.” Some of it was valid criticism, some of it was corrections, some of it was just fucking people bitching about things.

Maximum
funded a lot of things. End of the year we’d give money away to people. A lot of the contributors or shitworkers. We gave money to different organizations. One year we picked 20 fanzines. A lot of money, to good things.

Jeff Bale:
There’s a lot of things about
Maximum RocknRoll
that were fucked up, and now especially I feel that way.