John Holmstrom has a complaint about the way people remember PUNK magazine. Call it a fanzine, and he hears an entire publishing operation being reduced to a photocopier and a stapler.
“People assume it’s some Xerox thing that sells a couple hundred copies,” he says. “But we were a magazine. We were a real magazine.” Professional printers. National distribution. Print runs reaching 25,000. Color pages that cost actual money. And a roster of young photographers and cartoonists whose work would help define the look of a musical revolution.
That work comes to Hudson Hall in “50 Years of PUNK,” opening October 17 and continuing through November 29. Curated by Holmstrom and Ki Smith, the exhibition brings together magazine covers, photographs, cartoons, and other artwork by contributors including Roberta Bayley, Chris Stein, GODLIS, R. Crumb, and Shepard Fairey.
Holmstrom’s ambitions began with dissatisfaction. Rock magazines offered photographs of stars, interviews, reviews, and articles he found dull. As a cartoonist, he wanted to scramble the format. Founded with Ged Dunn and Legs McNeil in 1975, PUNK made its debut at the beginning of 1976, combining music journalism with comics, satire, and visual mischief.
The first issue came together through an improbable evening at CBGB. After interviewing the Ramones, Holmstrom got an unexpected offer from their manager, Danny Fields: Lou Reed was there. Would he like to talk to him?
Reed became the cover subject. Inside, Holmstrom turned the interview into a mixture of photographs and drawings, with a comic strip opening the feature. Among his questions for Reed: Did he like comic books?
“I always thought there was a mixture of music and art,” Holmstrom says. Musicians drew; artists played music. Poetry belonged in the conversation. For him, the magazine’s hybrid form reflected the creative traffic around the club.
The Ramones supplied another kind of clarity. Holmstrom first saw them in August 1975 and recognized a perfected version of the raw rock he already loved: the Stooges, the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, the MC5. Their clothes made sense, too. T-shirts, jeans, sneakers. He could leave the fishnets to glam rock. “Short songs, no drum solos,” he recalls. The Ramones stripped away the stage patter and musical excess. PUNK gave that sensibility a printed form.
It also gave photographers opportunities. Bayley worked the door at CBGB before Holmstrom hired her to photograph the Ramones; one of her pictures became their debut album cover. Stein contributed photographs of Debbie Harry. Holmstrom remains proud of the range and caliber of those images.
The original magazine folded in 1979. Holmstrom continued working in comics and publishing, eventually becoming publisher and president of High Times, and revived PUNK in 2000. Over the past two decades, clothing licenses have provided another outlet for his artwork—and filled his apartment with boxes of samples.
For Hudson Hall, he wants art people can take home. The exhibition expands on the earlier Ki Smith Gallery show, with more illustration and a planned selection priced under $100. Luis Accorsi, who helped bring the exhibition to Hudson, is contributing objects, including a Dee Dee Ramone painting.
“I want people to buy art,” Holmstrom says. “I want them to put my cartoon on their wall.”
Meanwhile, his archive resides at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The institutional embrace still amuses him. Someone told him he had been canonized. “Somehow over the years, punk became respectable,” he says. “Maybe I didn’t waste my whole life after all.”
“50 Years of PUNK” runs October 17–November 29 at Hudson Hall, 327 Warren Street, Hudson. Opening reception October 17, 5–7pm.
