Concerts | Parallel Narratives

Here are a couple of artifacts from the Bay Area music scene in the 1980s. These are two of the earliest issues of the punk zine Maximum RockNRoll. The magazine was originally founded by Tim Yohannan, who also helped found the 924 Gilman Street club. Vol 1, issue 2 is from 1982. It features a scathing expose on the Bechtel corporation. Indicative of the amateurish feel of the underground press, at least some of its claims about what Bechtel was up to have been confirmed over time. Also included are early interviews with Husker Du and Dirk Dirksen. By issue 9, in 1983, MRR had begun it’s long time practice of focusing on the regional and international punk scenes. There is also a nice listing of what punk was being played on the radio in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Over 400 issues later, Maximum RockNRoll published its last in 2019.

I knew of John Sinclair from John Lennon’s song about him on Some Time in New York City and had a vague idea that he was known for being busted for pot. In fact, I still associate my earliest awareness of the term political prisoner with John Sinclair. I didn’t really know what it meant back then, but I knew it wasn’t supposed to happen here.

Then I saw this book at a local head shop. It was the 70s in a college town, teenagers hanging out in head shops was normal. The book was revelatory for me. It not only contained Sinclair’s writings, which I admit I didn’t read thoroughly at first, but it is also full of radical illustrations, pictures of MC5 concerts and posters, protests, etc.

I pulled it off the shelf today and leafed through it for the first time in decades. The first page (text pictured) pretty much encapsulates perfectly the scene that I would aspire to, for better or worse, for much of my young life, propelling me across thousands of miles to hundreds of concerts and protests and smoke-ins and gatherings and friendships. Definitely for the better.