In September 1984, the widely read punk zine Maximum Rocknroll published its review of Victim in Pain, the debut album by a New York City band called Agnostic Front.
“I’m approaching this band with caution,” it warned. “Unfortunately, much of the narrow-mindedness, fanatical nationalism, and violence that has destroyed the New York punk scene seems to have revolved around AGNOSTIC FRONT.”
The author of that review was the publication’s founder and editor, Tim Yohannan, a 40-something ex-Yippie who thought punk music should march in lockstep with left-wing politics. As Ray Farrell, a punk veteran who once worked at the independent record label SST (run by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn), told Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore: A Tribal History,“there was an ideological development at Maximum RockNRoll, making everything move towards a Socialist bent.”
In effect, Yohannan appointed himself as the grand inquisitor of the punk rock thought police, scouring the scene for any signs of deviation from the lefty script. “If it’s just ‘good sounding’ music you want,” he admonished readers in the March 1985 issue, “then punk is no alternative at all. For me, what makes punk different is the intelligence and commitment behind it.”
Agnostic Front quickly became one of Yohannan’s primary targets. In one 1984 column, he claimed “the N.Y. Skins apparently have embraced the British National Front’s racist and nationalist attitudes.” He rarely missed the opportunity to depict the band’s members and their friends as goose-stepping goons.
This August, Agnostic Front singer Roger Miret published a new memoir that tells his side of the story, writes Damon Root.
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