9*
TOP ROW
Vol. 1 Issue no. 1 January, 1976. Cover: Lou Reed Illustration & Design by John Holmstrom. Vol. 1 Issue no. 2 March, 1976. Cover: ‘The Two Faces of Patti Smith’ photo by Guillemette Barbet; Art/Layout by John Holmstrom. Vol. 1 Issue no. 3 April, 1976. Cover: Joey Ramone Illustration & Design by John Holmstrom. MIDDLE ROW
Vol. 1 Issue no. 4 July, 1976. Cover: The incredible Iggy Pop Illustration & Design by John Holmstrom. Vol. 1 Issue no. 5 August, 1976. Cover: The Monkees; pictured Micky Dolenz chases Jane Illustration & Design by John Holmstrom. Vol. 1 Issue no. 6 August, 1976. Cover: The Legend of Nick Detroit; pictured Debbie Harry, Judy LaPilusa & Richard Hell Illustration & Design by John Holmstrom. LAST ROW
Vol. 1 Issue no. 7 February, 1977. Cover: Rock ’n’ Roll Patti Illustration & Design by Steve Taylor. Vol. 1 Issue no. 8 March, 1977. Cover: The Sex Pistols; Illustration & Design by Steve Taylor. Vol. 1 Issue no. 9 1977 Disappeared (Theory: Rainbow Coalition headed by a young Jesse Jackson begins drive to eradicate Punk. Suspect espionage with printer involving the CIA.)
Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition. For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event— a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and on the Lower East Side.
The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jan. 14–30, 2015 At Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 8
PUNK’S PREMIER BY STEVEN HELLER The twentieth century was littered with small magazines created as soapboxes for misfits and mavericks who foisted radical and looney ideas on fellow travelers. Every generation has its own outlet used to vent or challenge. Some of these magazines reflect the times, some define them. Punk did both. It is tempting to compare John Homstrom and Legs McNeil’s leap into periodical publishing with the Futurist, Dadaist, and Surrealist art provocateurs who wrote dissonant poetry, composed asymmetric layouts, and pasted together expressive collages, which they published in crudely produced publications. But the first issue of Punk was not the 1976 version at all. Where the avant gardists waged a culture war through their publications, Punk was a fanzine cum comicbook that initially mirrored the timely passions of its creators, and then leeched out into the youth culture as its clarion. Holmstrom, a comics artist and former student of Mad magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman at The School of Visual Arts, was finding his way through the alternative culture just as the 60s underground newspapers were sliding towards irrelevance and cliché. Instead, the music emanating from Hilly Kristal’s CBGB/OMFUG, captured his interest and gave him a calling. What Rolling Stone in its early years was to hippy culture, Punk would be to this new rock and roll movement. But unlike the Stone, which covered the bands and scenes, Punk was an essential part of it ethos – from the coinage of title “Punk,” which became a vernacular brand name like Kleenex, Xerox or Fridgedare, to its role as a platform and voice of Punk.
The first issue with Holmstrom’s splash panel logo, overly cross-hatched gothic Frankenstein illo of Lou Reed on the cover, and the entirely handlettered interior texts, established a unique visual character that eshewed the stereotypical anti-design, ransom note typography of the British Punk zines. Although Holmstrom proudly referred the first issue as “crummy-looking,” Punk did not sacrifice legibility for style, and used “a lot of straight lines in layouts” to make the lettering “look orderly,” he added. Punk’s greatest innovation was combining comicbook aesthetics with journalistic language, which comes brilliantly together in the layout for McNeil’s satiric interview with the renown comics heroine Nancy’s puggish boy-toy, Sluggo. Punk took the post-hippy D.I.Y. conceit that ran from the totally artless Sniffin Glue (produced with Magic Marker–scrawled lettering, photocopied, and stapled together) to raw but professional-looking tabloids like Slash and The Rocker. The big lie about D.I.Y. and the zines that fall into the “Anybody can do it!” school of art and design was that they were created by artists and designers with vision. Holmstrom’s design may have been as stiff as the brittle white newsprint on which it was printed, yet it was filled with the visual energy of CBGB’s sticker, flyer and grafitti-ladden bathroom walls and ceiling – and the history of comics too. Incidentally, that same heavy paper, insures that Issue 1 is preserved for all to see forty years later.
From left to right Ged Dunn Jr., Rexanne Williams, Tom Katz
G. E. (GED) DUNN, JR., RIP 1954-2015 BY JOHN HOLMSTROM This HOWL! Happening gallery exhibition, which commemorates the 40th Anniversary of the publication of PUNK Magazine #1 (and the start of the Punk Movement), is dedicated to the memory of Ged Dunn, Jr., PUNK Magazine’s founding publisher. I always cringe a bit when I see some noob claim that “Legs” McNeil and John Holmstrom co-founded PUNK Magazine,” because it’s not exactly true. The truth is: I started PUNK Magazine with Ged Dunn. Eddie (“Legs”) was there for everything of course, but aside from a few things where he was involved, I spent most of the time starting PUNK Magazine with Ged, and Eddie “Legs” was rarely even involved. This is how it happened: I ran into Eddie McNeil when I visited our hometown of Cheshire, Connecticut in the summer of 1975. He said our mutual friend Ged Dunn, Jr. was running a house painting business from a small apartment in the center of town and also funding an independent film Eddie was directing, The Unthinkables and he wanted me to appear in it. It sounded too good to be true: Working for Ged meant I had no living expenses for the summer, could make a bit of cash to pay my rent for my Brooklyn place, and have even more fun appearing in a movie. I had nothing better to do, so I agreed to everything: house painting for minimum wage, appearing in Eddie’s crazy film, and sleeping on Ged’s floor. I was impressed by Ged’s ability to run a business, and Eddie’s ability to organize his film. Ged understood how to run a small business (expenses low, revenues high), while Eddie was able to scrabble together a lot of resources on a low budget. Filming for The Unthinkables
became big news in Connecticut, thanks to Ged’s family connection with Bill Higgins, the managing editor of The New Haven Register: It became front-page news! It seemed obvious that we had good teamwork, and that we all had abilities and resources to form a great team. Over that Summer of 1975, I schooled both of them about “punk rock,” especially Go Girl Crazy” LP by The Dictators, that we played a lot that summer. I also told Eddie and Ged that there was another band called the Ramones, who I saw at the 1975 CBGB Summer Festival, who were even better: They were going to be like the new Beatles!!! And CBGB was going to be the launchpad for a new music revolution, like San Francisco in the late 1960s and Liverpool in the early 1960s. We had to jump on this soon, I said, or we would miss the mark. Labor Day: Ged went back to Kentucky’s Transylvania University and Eddie went back to work for Total Impact (a hippie film commune on East 14th Street and Second Avenue). I started selling artwork to Screw magazine and Scholastic, Inc. (where I began working with the amazing R. L. Stine, the best editor ever had, for the next 10 years) and continued to work for the immortal Will Eisner as an apprentice. Ged got bored, and worried that Eddie and I were getting our careers together before he could join us after his graduation in a few years… He was correct. If he hadn’t started working with us at that time, I doubt we’d ever get together. For instance, I was offered a high-paying job working for a newspaper comic strip in January 1976. I often kick myself that I didn’t accept it, and instead
Photo taken in front of the PUNK office on 10th Avenue From left to right John Holmstrom, Legs McNeil, Ged Dunn, Jr.
decided to devote everything to PUNK Magazine, but that was because I believed that Ged, “Legs” and I were going to create the new Rolling Stone magazine. Hey, we all make mistakes… Ged always said: “Decades define themselves in the middle!” The 1970s were getting old, already. We were desperate to define the decade, since it had been a rerun of the 1960s until then. The Master Plan, once Ged, “Legs” and I began to work together was: 1. Eddie (“Legs”) McNeil and Ged would start a film company because Eddie had connections for producing and marketing “technical/educational” films. After all, he had won awards for an anti-smoking spot a few years before (ironic, since he has smoked an average of three packs a day ever since). 2. Ged and I were going to start a magazine. I had a printer lined up, and a lawyer. We were all “one for all and all for one” in the beginning, so I helped Eddie with his films (producing title screens for The Unthinkables), while he supported my idea for a magazine (apearing in a photo shoot, finding a camera crew for the CBGB shoot with the Ramones and Lou Reed, and writing the Sluggo interview). Ged had $5,000 in startup cash for both projects, which seemed like a small fortune to us in 1975. (In 2015, that would be around $22,000.) We had modest goals, so that would be a good start. Ged was convinced that his family would allow him to access his trust funds ($10,000, another $45,000 in 2015 funds). Ged also figured that through other family connections he could raise much more! Here is where it all began to go wrong: Ged’s family was totally opposed to his involvement with PUNK. They blocked his access to his trust funds and tried to talk him out of working at the magazine. They had a good point, I hate to admit. The magazine didn’t generate newsstand sales until 1979 and rarely enjoyed advertising revenues, but part of that was due to Ged’s inability to sell advertisements. If he had hired a good ad rep, PUNK would have become much more successful. Instead, his first ad rep hire was Jesse, a weirdo
who was so bizarro and fucked up that the businesses he visited called us up to complain about how obnoxious he was, how they would never, ever place advertisements with us, and to never call them again. I was so pissed off once I heard this that I visited this asshole’s home and threatened to beat the crap out of him! After I was served with a warrant for aggravated harassment I never bothered him again, but it was the beginning of tensions between Ged and I. Ged definitely had family connections. In November 1975, he brought me to a high-level publishing event at an uptown penthouse, where we were privy to discussions about publishing and the magazine business. Ged brought up our idea to start a magazine based on punk rock and youth culture to the “group leader,” whom quickly shot it down by asking us about our “business plan” and a “demographic study.” “What’s a ‘demographic study,’” Ged asked? The room exploded in laughter. The moderator skewered us for the rest of the event for our ignorance about big-time publishing, which only made both of us more determined to make PUNK Magazine happen. Fuck traditional publishing! Hugh Hefner started Playboy with $500 and an idea, Rolling Stone had been started on a small budget, and ZAP Comix started with next to nothing. Way back in the 20th century you could start a publishing empire with a few dollars and a dream. Youth culture didn’t depend on shit like “demographic studies.” Tomorrow belonged to us! Just “DO IT!” So we did it. Ged was impressed that I had access to both a printer (Perez Printing, who had produced a very professional second edition of my comic book, DomeLand) and a lawyer, Solomon Glushak (who I met during a murder trial involving a former roommate the year before). Hey, who doesn’t want a lawyer named “Solomon”?
PUNK MAGAZINE: THE WIT & WISDOM OF IDIOT SAVANTS BY CARLO McCORMICK Every generation seemingly needs its own medium, each moment or movement dependent on and demanding of some specific form of address to convey its great truth and better fictions. In the hangover wake of that epic Sixties youth quake— which had after all left behind its own media legacy in the semblance of freeform FM radio stations, all those free alternative newspaper weeklies that came to proliferate in most cities, and the radical personal polemics of underground comics—Punk would adopt and adapt these nascent strategies into its own subcultural vox populi of abject publications and birth the still kicking bastard of Zine culture. Buried underneath layers of righteous rage, cultural delinquency, personal abnegation, nihilist cynicism and sometimes even a willful stupidity, the fanzines that emerged around Punk’s music and lifestyle were often pure genius. If you buy into Punk as an aggressive kind of folk art, an attitude and style reproducible throughout time according to the urgencies of youth, then PUNK Magazine might well be a grand-parental precursor, that ugly evil ancestor, to a long and ongoing lineage of idiosyncratic self-produced missives from the contested and shifting frontlines of our agonistic zeitgeist. If we accept Punk as a historical event fixed in time however, not a style of music and dress to be recycled in that ongoing pastiche by which various modes of dissent enter into the conformities of fashion, then we need to understand what makes its eponymous publication so impossibly different. Let’s not fudge history with false equivalences, that bizarre angry love letter to the City of Haters on the Hudson, disturbing as a stalker’s stare, unleashed like a Molotov cocktail at the
tall ships that would soon be parking their anachronistic asses in that patriotic bicentennial year of 1976, was an SOS message in a bottle from a sinking island that could only be written then and only be poorly imitated forever after. Yes, PUNK Magazine was hugely influential on many, myself included, but it was a pathology all its own, endemic to an early registration of a broader cultural collapse like how the first shudder of an incipient death rattle might be confused with the spasms of a more sensual joy. Punk itself was never so much a paradigm of the best but a lowly example of the very worst. Neither the music nor the magazine meant to make things better, they merely pointed out that if they could do what they were doing so could any of us. The invitation it offered was the tacit promise that if we actually gave a shit we could likely do way better. It was a gauntlet thrown not to imitate but to surpass, and as powerful as that message was its real magic was that no matter how much better we all may have done these things they would never be nearly as good as that first awful time through. Impolitic and impolite as the music it championed, PUNK Magazine unleashed a chorus of deviant sounds and visuals, snarls and rants, bellicose, belligerent, and snide, and always the cacophony of things falling—heroes, hopes, standards or any semblance of dignity as if the whole society of politesse was nothing but a set up for the great slapstick joke of a cream-pie or banana peel. PUNK Magazine paved the way and it really made tracks, but first and foremost all that followed was the grim gravity of society on the skids.
What PUNK Magazine and its immediate successors—Sniffin Glue came out of England about a half year later, followed soon after in succession by Cleveland’s Cle, Search & Destroy out of San Francisco and then Slash and No Mag both from Los Angeles—were all addressing in their own wildly different ways was a chasm of indifference by which the artists that spoke to them fell upon totally deaf ears as far as the rest of the world was concerned. Yes the mainstream ignored it, even reviled it, and for many fans adopting the soundtrack and fashion of Punk might be reason enough for an ass-kicking in most parts, but for all its advocacy there was never a sense in these publications of trying to recruit and convert more fans. No, this was an underground that, however briefly, apparently showed little aspirations for broader success, and as the media by which it would be disseminated and decoded, the printed form was itself an opposition to all the hype and flash by which the loathsome record industry foisted its bogus pop product on the perpetually tasteless and tacky consumer public. Simply put PUNK Magazine couldn’t give a fuck what you thought of it, and as if to prove the point they put the biggest, most pretentious unmitigated asshole ever on the cover, Lou Reed, just so he could insult the magazine, its readers and the movement that would adopt this down and dirty jailhouse terms for sodomized victims as its raison d’etre. It’s hard in retrospect to recall or even imagine how outré the PUNK Magazine aesthetic actually was at the time. The year it launched began with Bay City Rollers having the number one song in the country and ended with Rod Stewart at that top spot, including such hits as “Afternoon Delight” by the Starlight Vocal Band, Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs,” and “Disco Duck” by the aptly named Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots along the way. In the end we won those culture wars, and in the endless nostalgia of our post-modern malaise we’re far more likely to hear the Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, The Sex Pistols, and Iggy Pop (all of whom were featured in its pages) when you go to the mall than any of the putrid pabulum that passed for entertainment in those years. If ratification had ever been an abiding aspiration for PUNK’s founding voices—John Holmstrom, Legs
McNeil and Mary Harron—we might say that they were a great success. But if we accept the uncomfortable fact that Punk never meant to make the world a better place, and in fact considered such nonsense as the real problem with those damn hippies they derided, we can allow them the noble mantle of failure they so richly deserve. Music, style and all the myriad signifiers of novelty by which youth culture chugs along will always continue to change, but let’s face it, the world still sucks. With a degree of adversarial dissent baked into the first generation of Punk zines, as well as a highly specific field of advocacy that promoted a narrow band of expressions to an equally selective audience, their terms of success were always dubious at best—evidenced by the short life span of most, two to three years, their demise typically coinciding with the ascension of the bands they covered to wider audiences. What distinguishes PUNK Magazine however was its almost pathological disregard for what Punk might actually mean. At the time this seemed natural, because really if you thought about it Blondie had no more in common with the Ramones, than Wayne County with the Dictators, or Talking Heads with Television, so as progenitors of this construct of convenience, Punk felt at reckless liberty to propose most anything as part of their purview. This eclecticism, driven entirely by the vagaries of their idiosyncratic taste rather than those usual editorial mandates of what should be covered or what readers might want, reminds us now how flexible, fluid and almost hypothetical this notion of genre was from the very start. Considering how with every passing decade of subsequent zines parsing out their petty squabbles of what was true punk, or punk enough, those early issues of PUNK are a lesson in the vitality of ideas and sensibilities before they become orthodoxies. Beyond the obvious greats that PUNK did so much to support in its day, there is a wider field of irreverence and absurdity that belongs there like the cartoon violence in the Three Stooges or Tom & Jerry. These guys made the gratuitous seem essential, and by whatever dint of insanity or idiocy they made the impossible work just enough to make some unlikely sense. With any clear history of what punk was, and what it wasn’t, it’s quite impossible to fathom
how the likes of Ted Nugent, Blue Oyster Cult, Alice Cooper, The Monkeys, AC/DC or the Bay City Rollers could ever have made their pages. But they did, albeit not always in the most flattering ways. But this is integral to the sensibility of PUNK that set it so far apart from the rest. PUNK wasn’t a magazine in the traditional sense; it was a fucking comic book. Everything was predicated on the kinds of radical exaggeration you get in a bizarro strip, the insane distortions of some Tex Avery or Chuck Jones cartoon brought to caricature extreme. Heavy Metal pomp or Pop music inanity might just as well fit with such a jaundiced worldview, and when articles featured the genius of comic art greats like R. Crumb and Harvey Kurtzman, you knew for sure that far from the typical wanker pretensions of most rock critics these cats were more beholden to the frenzied satire of Mad magazine. And when they interviewed B-list comic characters like Sluggo, or Boris and Natasha, or queried the likes of God and Satan, we could all realize that no one, neither our heroes nor villians, really had that much more to say on the matter than the rest of us. And that was PUNK.
PUNK #1 ANNIVERSARY BY JAMES WOLCOTT Most publications take a while to find their way...taking wobbly baby steps, falling down, getting up again...searching for their editorial voice until finally everything shakes into place. (If not, they’re kaput.) But a lucky few light a firecracker with the first strike of a match and declare their identity with issue one. Published in January of 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial, PUNK Magazine emerged from the cradle fully grown. Or was it a crypt? The cover, a classic, featured a caricature by PUNK co-founder John Holmstrom of renegade rocker Lou Reed as Frankenstein’s monster, his hair bolted to his scalp, his eyes an enlarged pair of black dots suitable for an emissary of the undead. Inside was an interview with Lou. Not really a pre-arranged interview, more like an impromptu pestering. And not presented in a typical Rolling Stone-ish layout as a papal audience with some pop deity (DYLAN SPEAKS), but as a ramshackle pastiche of comic-strip panels, fumetti (blurry low-light photographs of Lou sprouting cartoon balloons from his mouth, little toxic clouds of abuse), and blocks of hand-inked dialogue that read like an absurdist play.
chatty, but you needed a can opener to pry a lot out of Dee Dee and Johnny, depending on their moods, and I say that fondly. the Ramones’ manager, the legendary Danny Fields, mentioned that Lou Reed was hanging around at the back of the bar and Holmstrom, like a tabloid scoop reporter of yore, pounced on the opportunity. The interview began rockily, not only because of Lou’s customized irascibility, but because of the candles Legs had set on the table to avoid flash photography, their flickering flames irking Lou even more than his nightly norm. When Holmstrom asked Lou which comic books he liked, a question he clearly hadn’t been lobbed before, he cited EC Comics and Mad magazine, and inspiration sprouted in Holmstrom’s imagination like a Christmas tree. “I was already visualizing how I could draw the comic-strip interview with him, aware that I’d landed the story of my life.” Holmstrom knew that he had scored a big “get” and the cover he drew became as emblematic of the CBGB era as the Ramones’ presidential seal t-shirt. “We could have disappeared after PUNK #1 and people would still be talking about it today.”
It was all a fluke, this non-meeting of the minds. Holmstrom—one of the co-founders of PUNK, along with Gedd Dunn, Jr. and Eddie “Legs” McNeil, who graduated from punk mascot to oral historian (with Gillian McCain) of the indispensable Please Kill Me—recounts in a hardcover anthology of punk’s greatest hits published in 2012 that the PUNK squad was on hand to interview the Ramones after their set at CBGB. Hopes high, the PUNK crew soon found that the black-leather charm school dropouts were not gushing fountains of opinions and personal info. Joey could be
How did PUNK stick its landing? The debut issue not only declared its identity, but ed its personality. A smart-alecky, slapstick, bratty younger brother/sassy sister personality that had none of the pontifical airs or the rock critic establishment or the snarling, spitting, scurvy attitudes of the British punk press. The product of talents (including photographer Robert Bayley, who shot the first Ramones album cover, journalist Mary Harron, who went on to become the director of American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol), PUNK was a boisterous mongrel, a klutzy collage,
inspired by comic-artist greats such as Will Eisner (The Spirit) and Harvey Kurtzman (Mad magazine, Humbug, Playboy’s “Little Annie Fanny”), whom Holmstrom knew from his student days at the School of Visual Arts, not to mention Wally Wood, Steve Ditko, and Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead), Andy Warhol and his anyonecan-be-a-star Factory; Jerry Lewis, Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello comedies; schlock horror movies, detective thrillers, and everything else in the discount bin; and feeding off of Sensurround cruddiness of a city in economic rubble but creative ferment (not just in punk but dance, jazz, underground movies shot mostly on the druggy wastes of the Lower East Side, street fashion, storefront art galleries, the disco world—one big abrasive, barraging, struggling hustle). The full-length fumetti features PUNK would assemble in later issues—”The Legend of Nick Detroit,” “Mutant Monster Beach Party,” with an all-star cast of downtown droogies—now look like college yearbooks of a class that was always on its best misbehavior. PUNK magazine didn’t survive the bitter end of the Seventies (the deaths of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen helped toll the end of punk), but, here we are, forty years later, wishing it a happy birthday. We should all have such afterlives.
ROBERTA BAYLEY Roberta Bayley is one of the most notable of the photographers who chronicled the punk rock music movement from the mid ‘70s up until the early 1980s. Roberta was born in Pasadena, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended San Francisco State University for three years before dropping out in 1971. Bayley briefly lived in London, England and eventually settled in New York City. Roberta worked as a door person at the legendary punk club CBGB’s and subsequently befriended and photographed a lot of key punk music celebrities, among them: Iggy Pop,
Blondie, Richard Hell, Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, Joe Strummer, The Ramones (she took the picture of them which appears as the cover photo on their classic debut album), Nick Lowe, The Damned, The Clash, The Dead Boys, and The New York Dolls. Moreover, Bayley was the chief photographer for PUNK Magazine. Her photographs have been exhibited in such major cities as New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Austin, Paris, Portland, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, and Pittsburgh. Roberta Bayley still lives and works in New York City.
Photo taken by Roberta Bayley at Arturo’s loft right before Edith Massey’s debut at CBGB From left to right: Arturo Vega, John Holmstrom, Edith Massey, Joey Ramone, Legs McNeil
BRUCE CARLETON Bruce Carlton was born at 11:54 p.m. on February 24, 1955. It was Malam Jum’at Kliwon, a time of great spiritual uneasiness according to the Javanese calendar, though this was not a factor that was given much consideration at the KU Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas. I was soon ferried across the frontier into Missouri—Raytown in particular—where I then grew up. Later I did some time in college, first Grinnell in Iowa, then Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I couldn’t see where it was helping me a lot, so I bid farewell to academia. I stayed in NYC, though, and after a while landed gigs at PUNK Magazine (1977), and later SCREW (1980), as art director at both places, the main difference being that at PUNK I got into clubs free, whereas at SCREW I actually was paid a salary. There was also some freelance cartooning and illustration thrown in on the side, and my friend Alex Blair published a compilation of my notebook work called Fun Is Sick. But by now (early 80s), fed up with NYC, I made plans to go as far away as possible, which happened to be along the meridian that ran through Southeast Asia.
I settled down in Jakarta (teaching English of course), where I lived for eight years. During this time I self-published a thin volume of my drawings done there called Kamadhatu. Then some friends and I thought starting our own English school in Vietnam, which was just starting to open up in the early 90s, would be a good idea. We did well for a while, but inherent flaws were lurking in the wings, and the business was ultimately not viable (i.e. it tanked). By then I had met, wooed and become maritally united with my now soon-to-be ex-wife. We decided to move to the States. One year of INS paperwork later, we found ourselves back in the KC area, living with Mom in Prairie Village on the Kansas side of the border. We needed health insurance and a steady income, so I got a job at a local printery making decals out of sow’s ears. A dozen plus years passed that way, and I now find myself back on my own in high desert of Southern California—29 Palms to be precise. And there you have it.
JOHN HOLMSTROM In 1975 John Holmstrom founded PUNK Magazine, which launched the punk movement and was instrumental in the success of many bands such as Blondie, the Ramones, and the Dead Boys. Its hand-lettered graphics inspired many crudely-designed fanzines and helped create the short-lived “punk art” that inspired the East Village art scene a few years later. In 1981, Holmstrom started Comical Funnies with Peter Bagge (of Hate! comix), and in 1982 published Stop! Magazine with J. D. King which published work by Ken Weiner, Bruce Carleton, and many others. John Holmstrom has drawn and designed many posters, t-shirt designs, record, book and CD covers for the Ramones, The Dandy Warhols, the Rolling Stones, 50 Kaitenz and Murphy’s Law, magazines such as Bananas, High Times, Heavy Metal, and Video Games and films such as ‘DOA’, ‘A Right of Passage’ and ‘CBGB’. His archives were recently acquired by Yale University’s Beinecke Library. His work is on display at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio and in the permanent archives of the Museum of Modern Art.
ROBERT ROMAGNOLI Robert Romagnoli has been writing and drawing ever since he was a little kid. While attending New York’s School of Visual Arts in the early 70s, he befriended John Holmstrom in a cartooning class. John soon invited Robert to submit a cartoon for the debut issue of PUNK magazine. Robert continued to create cartoons and humor for every issue of PUNK, as well as for the Village Voice and many other publications. Robert has also performed live comedy, such as his one-man puppet show Hooray for Hollywood. In his alternate life as a so-called “serious” designer, he created all the large outdoor banners for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, animation for the Spectacolor sign in Times Square, sculpture for Red Grooms’ Ruckus Manhattan, a multitude of maps, books and magazine illustrations, and interactive website graphics. He is also a lecturer and tour guide. Robert is currently at work on a novel entitled Myre. He lives in a toy-filled loft in Little Italy with his wife Patrice and their interesting cat, Pip
ROSE LASAGNE Rose Lasagne attended the School of Visual Arts from 1972-1977, along with John Holmstrom, Robert Romagnoli, and many other PUNK Magazine contributors. She received a BFA degree in 1977. She worked with PUNK Magazine founder Holmstrom and Legs McNeil on “The Joe Show,” a multimedia “Cartoon Concert” that was performed from 1973-1981. She also produced a sculpture of Patti Smith that was used as an illustration for PUNK Magazine #2 and a Sex Pistols sculpture that was used as a cover image for PUNK #14. Several other of Rose’s 3-D art pieces were used for paperback book covers.
Photo taken at the PUNK Magazine 1977 office Christmas party. From left to right: Elin Wailder, Legs McNeil, Roberta Bayley, John Holmstrom (seated), Hal Drellich, Steve Taylor
STEVE TAYLOR Currently in New Orleans Louisiana, In Miami Florida: First job out of high school is graphic design and copywriting for a T-shirt company. Writes and draws illustrations for underground newspapers. Takes college courses in Radio & TV Production. New York: Lives in Hell’s Kitchen and freelances as a graphic artist. Joins PUNK Magazine as a contributing editor doing graphics, comic strips, illustrations and hand-lettering. Comes to New Orleans in 1980; city chosen purely by chance. Works in commercial art for local and national companies as a freelancer. Designs graphics for the record industry the entertainment industry, and the food industry. Begins to exhibit paintings in the mid 80s and is encouraged by sales and commissions. Pursues painting, continues to exhibit work.
KEN WEINER Now Ken Avidor (formerly Ken Weiner) lives with his wife Roberta in a loft above the Union Depot train station in Lowertown, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Ken is a cartoonist, illustrator and avid sketcher. Ken and Roberta travel by bus, train and bike and celebrate the people and places they see in sketches. Occasionally, Ken sketches hearings and trials in court for local media. Follow @avidor on Twitter.
HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker Board of Advisors Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio Anthony Cardillo Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Howl Artist/Videographer: Darian Brenner
© 2015 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 8 PUNK Magazine 40th Anniversary Jan. 14–30, 2016 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project
Vol.1 Issue no. 10 Summer, 1977 Cover: Blondie; pictured Debbie Harry onstage! ; Illustration & Design by Bobby London. Vol.1 Issue no. 11 October/November 1977 Cover: The Dictators ; pictured Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators ! ; photograph by Roberta Bayley Illustration & Design by John Holmstrom.
ISBN: 978-0-9961917-7-7 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, with prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Essay © 2016 © 2016 © 2016 © 2016
Steven Heller Carlo McCormick John Holmstrom James Wollcott
Curator: John Holmstrom Creative Director: Bobby Zou Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NYC, 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294
The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman
Vol.1 Issue no. 12, January, 1978 Cover: Robert Gordon ; pictured Robert Gordon is Red Hot! Illustration & Design by John Holmstrom. Vol.1 Issue no.13, 1978 DISAPPEARED* Vol.1 Issue no.14 May/June 1978 Cover: The Sex Pistols pictured; pictured Johnny Rotten & Sid Vicious puppets: Live and in Concert; Puppets by Rosanne Lasagna picture by Roberta Bayley Illustration & Design by John Holmstrom. Vol.1 Issue no.15 July/August 1978 Cover: Mutant Monster Beach Party pictured The movie poster from Mutant Monster Beach Party photo by Roberta Bayley Illustration by Bruce Carleton & Design by John Holmstrom. Vol.1 Issue no.16 March/April 1979 Cover: Disco Maniac pictured Disco Sucks! photo by Roberta Bayley Illustration by John Holmstrom, Bruce Carleton & Ken Weiner based on an original cartoon jam session by Ken Weiner, Bruce Carleton and John Holmstrom. Vol.1 Issue no.17 May/June 1979 Cover: The Clash pictured the Clash in a clash. Illustration and design by Bruce Carleton.
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