Tim Yohannan

Tim Yohannan (August 15, 1945 – April 3, 1998), also known as Tim Yo, was the founder of Maximum Rocknroll, a radio show and fanzine documenting punk subculture. He also helped in establishing a number of DIY collectives, such as 924 Gilman Street, Blacklist Mailorder, and the Epicenter Zone record store.

Yohannan was initially a 1960s counterculture-era leftist, before shifting this ideology to the punk scene. He helped mold the early 1980s American punk scene, and tied in various international punk scenes, through documenting them in Maximum Rocknroll, a fanzine he founded in 1982. As the zine became popular and profitable, Yohannan donated those profits to zines and collectives, even as he continued blue-collar work in the Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California, Berkeley.

As a self-appointed "punks' herdsman", Yohannan had a reputation as being notoriously difficult.

Yohannan died at 53 on April 3, 1998 from complications from lymphatic cancer.

Tim Yohannan had a daughter named Sophia Price Palmira, born in San Francisco on August 21, 1984. While he acknowledged her as his biological daughter, he chose to not participate in her life.

Yohannan's divisive personality was described in the NOFX song "I'm Telling Tim" from their 1997 album So Long and Thanks for All the Shoes. NOFX would later mention missing him in their song "We Threw Gasoline On The Fire And Now We Have Stumps For Arms And No Eyebrows" from Punk-O-Rama III.

The band Green Day recorded the song "Platypus (I Hate You)" on their 1997 album Nimrod. The song does not directly mention Tim. However the band's frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, tweeted on February 17, 2011 (and deleted the tweet a few hours later), "Platypus was written for Tim Yohanon. And I pray to god I misspelled his name. Rest in shit you fucking cunt".

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