UMD performing arts library exhibit displays punk history of D.C. zines

John Davis’ publication, Slanted, is in the Special Collections of the University of Maryland’s Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, among other zines. 

John Davis made his first zine in high school at the Kinkos where he worked. He cut, copied and stapled together a 20-page magazine containing a few punk album reviews, an opinion piece and an interview with Fugazi guitarist and singer Guy Picciotto. 

“I started this zine so I could spread my opinions and also to have an excuse to interview people like Guy Picciotto,” he wrote on the first page. 

Now, that publication, Slanted, is in the Special Collections of the University of Maryland’s Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. 

Slanted is just one of 370 publications in the archive’s D.C. Punk and Indie Fanzine Collection, Davis said, a nearly two year-old anthology containing hundreds of amateur magazines and pamphlets meant to detail and archive the explosion of punk music and culture in the Washington area. 

“It was something that hasn’t got a lot of attention, specifically on an academic front, and it sort of felt like it was fertile ground for something we could do that was important and that a lot of other people hadn’t done,” Davis said. 

Because punk music did not receive much coverage in mainstream music journalism, fans made their own magazines or pamphlets — zines — to detail the city’s music. The university’s collection contains both physical and digital fanzines related to or created in Washington. They detail the rise of the counter-culture in the ’70s and ’80s with hardcore bands like Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Rites of Spring, archives curator Vin Novara said. 

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Last year, Davis pitched the idea to Novara, who also had roots in the punk scene as a member of the post-hardcore band 1.6 Band. In college, Novara transferred to this university partly to get closer to Washington music, so he loved the idea of starting a collection honoring that era, he said. 

Davis and Novara used their old connections with Washington punk bands to quickly amass a large part of the collection. Davis also included his own zines, Slanted and Held Like Sound, which he made while attending this university. 

With untraditional designs and layouts, the zines capture and detail the underground music scene with album reviews, concert photos and interviews with popular bands, said archives graduate assistant Pedro Gonzalez-Fernandez, who studies musicology. Some went beyond music and featured fiction writing, poetry, art or political opinion pieces. 

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“Indie rock of today is this huge thing, this huge industry,” Davis said. “It’s fanzines like that that set the foundation for that. We were the first ones to write about those bands.” 

The collection’s earliest publication is 1977’s Vintage Violence. The first three of its issues featured drawn-on covers and a typewriter-like print, but as zines evolved their quality improved, and they began to include cover illustrations, artist profiles, creative writing and comics. 

“You start with guys drawing them with a pencil on 8-by-11s, and then you get more graphically slick ones with the start of the personal computers,” Gonzalez-Fernandez said. 

The collection also contains a zine produced in 1993 by Washington music venue the Black Cat to promote future bands and shows and zines by the university radio station WMUC, which printed a short-lived self-titled zine in 1995 and another called Closed Captioned in 1996.  

In the ’90s, zines also became an active outlet for feminist bands and social justice, Gonzalez-Fernandez said. The collection reflects that with selections like the first Bikini Kill zine, published by the band of the same name. 

“There is no prism of history to distort at all,” Davis said. “This is exactly what they thought about at that time. It’s interesting to get this unvarnished take, and it can be ugly, or it can be insightful or surprisingly fresh.” 

Sometimes they can be both of those things, Davis said. A headline in a 1988 issue of Greed reads: “Elvis: Nice Guy or Garbage Wrapped in Skin?” An article in Bikini Kill’s fanzine opens with “Tabatha says death to all f—head fanzine editors who dare to dis the Bratmobile/Bikini Kill/RGSN/Girl Day/International Pop Underground Revolution Summer 1991 Riot Grrrl Style Now even!!!” 

But they also detailed things that might have never been seen in mainstream media, Gonzales-Fernandez said, like a comic about depression and suicide in a 1987 issue of Greed. The same Bikini Kill fanzine article also discusses sexism in the punk community. 

“One thing that renders the D.C. scene a little more unique is that most people aren’t just people who just attend shows,” Novara said. “Most people do something, whether they have a band or some other creative outlet. I knew people who were punks who were involved in everything. Zines go right along with that participation.”