Gimme Something Better (31 page)

Jello Biafra:
Going after people, from very early on, in the magazine, and calling people on sexism, racism, and homophobia triggered one hell of a backlash. From the East Coast to the Midwest. When the magazine had barely gotten off the ground.

Jeff Bale:
It came from Tim. We weren’t gonna cover any homophobic bands, we weren’t gonna cover any right-wing bands, we weren’t gonna give publicity to any bands that we wouldn’t review, like skinhead records, or Skrewdriver.

Tom Flynn:
Maximum RocknRoll
assumed everyone was racist and homophobic. Irony or sarcasm was totally lost. People assumed that everyone else was a moron.

Jeff Bale:
There was obviously some relationship between local emanations of the punk scene and the general milieu in the Bay Area. We were at KPFA, the most PC fuckin’ station in the whole world. In retrospect,
Maximum RocknRoll
reflected all too perfectly the sectarian, intolerant left-wing milieu of the Bay Area. To complain that homophobia is bad—I mean, gee whiz, is there anybody in the Bay Area, except for a few fringe elements, who doesn’t agree with that? If you really wanna be a badass fuckin’ revolutionary, go down to Alabama and start peddling these views. Don’t just sit in your comfortable little Bay Area house drinking your cappuccino and getting all morally righteous.

Jello Biafra:
Who was the lucky band that got to go on tour when everyone was crying, “Commie faggot, you’re trying to indoctrinate us!”? Dead Kennedys. And me in particular. I was the one who did most of the interviews. I was starting to get asked all over the country, “Isn’t Tim Yohannan a communist? Isn’t this just a front for some kind of communist cult or something?” As if everybody’s fragile eggshell minds would suddenly become little Tim zombies if we dared to read his magazine or liked the same bands that he did.

Larry Crane:
God bless Tim Yohannan’s heart, he was one of the sweetest, nicest guys, but he started this thing that became really fuckin’ rigid. Punk rock, man. Jesus Christ, anybody could do it. Just get up there, it’s all attitude over rules. All of a sudden it became the same kinda rules that made dinosaur rock gross. Less interesting than Foreigner.

Bucky Sinister:
The thing that really got to Tim was that I pointed out to him that he’d been running book reviews of corporate books, books that came out on Warner’s press. He wouldn’t review records out by Warner, because they were corporate. But he’d review the books because they were about the Sex Pistols, or whatever. He never forgave me for that.

Scott Kelly:
I remember having my opinion of Agnostic Front completely shaped by
Maximum RocknRoll
. We went to New York and became friends with Agnostic Front and hung out. As we were taking the ferry to New York, Roger [Miret] was like, “Every time I see the Statue of Liberty all I could think about is my father and how much it meant to him to come to this country. And that’s why we fly that flag. Because I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing if I was still in Cuba.”

As we got to talking more, he was like, “So, you know your buddy Tim Yohannan? What’s that guy like?” And I’m like, “He’s pretty intense but he’s actually a really good guy.” And he’s like, “Well . . .”

Roger got in some trouble for some shit, went to prison, I believe it was a drug thing. But the reason that he ended up going for as long as he did was because the district attorney brought out
Maximum RocknRoll
and said, “Look, this guy’s the leader of a Nazi skinhead movement in America.”

I remember going, “Man, that’s some irresponsible, fucked-up shit that happened to him.” Agnostic Front’s not Nazi. Roger’s Cuban.

Jello Biafra:
The first place I ever saw the term “grunge” was in
MRR
’s record review section. Long before it got glued onto the Seattle bands by the industry.

Ian MacKaye:
Another thing to credit to Tim—the term “emo.”

Jello Biafra:
I don’t know whether that was Tim or Martin Sprouse who first came up with “emo.” Originally they slapped it on Embrace, Ian MacKaye’s almost forgotten transitional band. Embrace were really important. The lyrics were personal like Minor Threat, but starting to take on worldly concerns like Fugazi. Plus it was very emotional. Supposedly he even cried onstage.

Ian MacKaye:
This is the genesis of that term. In 1985 Rites of Spring and Embrace were playing in D.C. People were talking about metal-core, and a lot of jokes about all the different cores that were out there. Brian Baker, who was the bass player in Minor Threat, coined the phrase “emocore,” which was emotional hardcore. It was an insult, it was pejorative. So he used that term in an interview with Dag Nasty in
Thrasher
magazine. Somehow Tim picked up on it. And he just fuckin’ went to town with it.

He would write these reviews and call us “emocore,” “emo,” whatever. I was of course infuriated. Since when is punk not emotional? It’d be like saying, “chai tea.” It’s a redundancy. Chai means “tea,” so chai tea is “tea tea.” Tim really hammered that term in, as an insult. He beat it into common usage. And like every other thing, like the word “punk,” eventually people started using it.

Dave Dictor:
Tim could be very dogmatic in what should go on, and what shouldn’t happen. I had arguments with him. He even sometimes sandbagged me.

Frank Portman:
There was a transcript in
MRR
, an interview with MDC.

Larry Livermore:
They denounced Dave for selling out the scene because his band had flown from one gig to another, instead of driving in a van. And so they got Dave for an hour-long debate with Tim.

Dave Dictor:
We made $8,000 in ten gigs in a tour in 1986. And Tim started saying, “Bands like MDC are selling out their roots.” He didn’t relate to what it was like to be in my shoes, being in a band, trying to feed five or six people, keep my people out of jail. Arrested at the border, held at the border. Two, three, four times.

Tim, what are you writing? You don’t know what it’s like to get an engine for your van. And I realize you work 70 hours a week, and you’re a slave to your zine. Well, I’m a slave to being a punk. I’m on the road, I’m living at other people’s houses. When I get home I’m right at the food stamp line.

“Everyone should work at least 20 hours a week.” But there weren’t 20-hour-a-week jobs, when you’re going away on tour for three months and you’ll be back in three months.

Tim could see there was going to be a day where there was going to be Green Days playing Woodstock, and Blink 182s, showing off their 15-car garages, grinning like idiots, with a funny mohawk. He was laying the groundwork for that.

But at the time, $8,000 for ten gigs from D.C. to San Francisco? By the time you get home, there’s $2,000. There’s $400 apiece to pay my month’s rent. And I’ve gotten someone pregnant, and having to deal with these other realities.

“I hear what you’re saying, Dave, I still disagree.” Later on, I said to him, “You’ve always picked on us. You picked on DOA and 7 Seconds. But Dead Kennedys are making more on one tour than we make in three years, and you don’t mention them. What’s going on?” He was silent about it for a year or two or three, and then, instead of getting more understanding of what it takes to be in a band, started picking on Dead Kennedys.

Jeff Bale:
Tim was not a person who believed in freedom of speech. I was. Elements in the punk scene were being excluded. So I started giving them a voice in my column. At a certain point Tim just said, “That’s it, I’m not tolerating that kind of stuff, and you can’t do that if you want to write for the magazine.” So I said, “Fuck you. I’m not writing for any magazine that’s gonna try to censor what I say.” That was the end of that, pretty much.

Larry Livermore:
It was a big dispute within the magazine, where Tim fired Jeff Bale. A number of people said, this is advertising itself as a magazine for the community—that means there should be a variety of community viewpoints.

Jeff Bale:
When I got out to Berkeley initially, I thought, “Oh, this is so liberating,” because finally I’m somewhere where being anti-establishment in a certain way is not considered heresy. But it took me a few years to realize that actually the Bay Area is no better than anywhere else in terms of tolerance. In fact it’s worse. It’s like fucking Stepford people. It’s mind-numbing, and even worse than that, it’s censorious.

Matt Wobensmith:
Jeff Bale is very reactionary in some ways. Benzodiazepines were created for people like Jeff Bale. Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, get some, man. He’s so angry.

Ruth Schwartz:
Jeff is one of the most massively opinionated people I know. It wasn’t just a column. I mean, maybe in Jeff’s eyes it was just a column, but the column was just the last straw. So it became The Thing.

Larry Livermore:
That argument came down to a mass meeting of pretty much everybody involved in the magazine, over 50 people. This was whether this was a community magazine or Tim’s magazine. And the vote came down in favor of Tim’s magazine.

Jeff Bale:
I blame myself for not seeing that it was going to go in that direction. And even to some extent contributing to that process. Oh, I blame Tim much more, but I blame myself for allowing myself to go along with it for so long. I wasn’t very clever. I got caught up in the spirit.

I would still go over to the
Maximum
house, and Tim and I would sit there and listen to records, and we’d go out to gigs and drink and have a good time. But as far as the magazine, no.

Ruth Schwartz:
I was Tim’s business partner, I owned
Maximum RocknRoll
for eight years. So I did the books, I did all the tax returns. And I worked for two years for Rough Trade as their buyer. We had a big stormy protest in there and walked off the job, so I decided to start a new distribution company.

Biafra had just lost his shirt down in L.A. A distribution company cut him off, and didn’t return any of his product. They called me one day and said, “We’ve located our stock in a warehouse, and how quickly could you sell these for us?” It was like—
boom!
Tim loaned me a thousand dollars to get a UPS account and rent a space, and get a phone line put in. He told me I had a year to pay it back. When the year came up, I wrote him a check. But he said, “No, no, it’s okay.”

Jello Biafra:
Alternative Tentacles and
MRR
were the original two clients of Mordam distribution. When Ruth started it, with Tim involved, I knew this was the way to go. Rather than holding my nose and signing everything to Enigma and quitting Dead Kennedys because I didn’t wanna be on Enigma. This was a great option. So we grew together for many years that way.

Tom Flynn:
They had big arguments. All the labels would get together in these official meetings. They had to have their policy about selling to major labels, selling to distributors that are owned by major labels. Some wanted to sell as many records as they could.

Steve Tupper:
I think it got dark when Tim began trying to give orders. He demanded that everybody agree to stop making CDs to make a statement against how the industry was going.

Jello Biafra:
Then Tim came out with, every Mordam label should pull all their stock out of every chain store because all chains are politically incorrect. Except for Tower, because he liked them. Because they stocked punk singles early on. The room was silent.

I thought, “Wait a minute—are people actually gonna knuckle under and agree to this just because Tim is ordering us around like a general? Fuck that!” So I spoke up, “Look, not everybody is as spoiled and elite that they can live in a big city where there’s choices. Or a college town where there’s a cool independent store. I know what it’s like to come from a cultural desert where you really have to hunt for something cool that will change your life. And I want my stuff in those stores, just because it may be the first time people blunder into anything that will hip them to how evil those stores could be. Somebody has to be the gateway drug, and it should be us.”

Ruth Schwartz:
Blacklist Mailorder was another
Maximum
offshoot. It was a retail outlet, in the back of the Mordam warehouse. Nobody was doing real mail order, and doing it well. Nobody could get the records that we were reviewing in the magazine. And so we wanted to become that source, simply as a service. We were buying records from all over the world and mail-ordering them.

Basically Blacklist broke even. We sold things as cheap as we could. It was the eight-to-midnight crew in there every night, it was insane. I agreed to do it as a not-for-profit. Running something like that with volunteers—oh my god. It’s very hard to build motivation. After awhile, people who gave a crap moved on.

Danny Norwood:
I was involved in helping start Epicenter. They had the record store going and Blacklist Mailorder was in the back.

A. C. Thompson:
Epicenter was in a huge second-floor walk-up on Valencia Street and 16th Street. There was a back room where all the records were kept, because punks would just steal them. Then there was a bunch of couches, a pool table, bulletin boards for people to post their various things, and an area for bands to play. There was a zine library. For awhile there was a switchboard. If you came to town and you needed to get connected with some kind of service, whether you needed housing, a ride, or an STD test, we had this list of references for people.

Ruth Schwartz:
Epicenter was a record shop, but Tim was trying to make it into a community center.

A. C. Thompson:
Epicenter was never really about being a business. It was about having a place for people in that scene to hang out. There were so many smart, crazy people there all the time.

Floyd:
After Blacklist Mailorder folded, Epicenter was never able to find a suitable tenant.