PUNK Unfinished

Filed Under: Correct the Record

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Fifty years on, John Holmstrom plans to reprint his magazine’s back issues because he never wanted them to cost this much.

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John Holmstrom never set out to make a collectible. He wanted to make a magazine people could actually afford to read.

Fifty years later, original copies of PUNK sell online for hundreds of dollars. The magazine that once struggled to pay printers has become valuable enough to frame, archive, and auction.

“It was never my objective to create something that sells for big bucks,” he told Pot Culture Magazine. “I have always wanted to make our content available to people. I hate that these back issues are so expensive!”

His answer is print on demand. Holmstrom says he plans to make PUNK back issues available through PunkMagazine.com, where readers will also find Jillian Jonas’s CBGB audio documentary. He has books planned and wants to publish new material through the same system.

The timing could not be better. PUNK is celebrating its 50th anniversary as galleries, archives, and museum exhibitions busy themselves with turning the unruly little magazine into American history. Holmstrom is happy to see the work recognized, but he has no interest in watching it disappear behind glass.

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Before any of that existed, he was a cartoonist looking for somewhere to aim himself.

Holmstrom studied at the School of Visual Arts under Harvey Kurtzman, the cartoonist and editor whose work on MAD helped teach generations of artists that comics could be rude, intelligent, and dangerous at the same time. Kurtzman became an important influence on Holmstrom, who was already more interested in underground comics than respectable illustration.

School eventually lost its grip on him because New York had better material.

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By the summer of 1975, Holmstrom had started going to CBGB. Downtown did not yet look like the birthplace of a cultural movement. The New York Dolls had broken up, Max’s Kansas City had gone disco, and rock clubs were disappearing. Holmstrom remembered parts of the neighborhood feeling abandoned.

Then he saw the Ramones.

“When I saw the Ramones I became convinced that something was really happening here.”

Holmstrom recalled it in a video interview with Steven Hager, posted on Hager’s YouTube channel.

They fit the way Holmstrom already saw the world. The Ramones looked exaggerated without seeming manufactured, and their songs hacked away most of what rock had spent the previous decade piling on. Holmstrom did not need a critic to explain why they were funny or why they worked.

He eventually became part of their visual world.

In a January 2026 interview with Valerie Simadis, Holmstrom recalled Johnny Ramone approaching him about the inner sleeve for Rocket to Russia. Holmstrom wanted to bring other illustrators into it, but Johnny told him to draw the whole thing himself and gave him only a few days. Holmstrom produced twelve drawings, then designed the back cover after Johnny laid out what he wanted. Read the Valerie Simadis interview

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Road to Ruin came together differently. Holmstrom told Simadis that the band had originally approached cartoonist Wally Wood, whose poor health led to the job being handed to an apprentice. When that work failed to satisfy the Ramones, Holmstrom got the call. He stayed up through the night and produced the illustration that became the cover.

His relationship with the Ramones went well beyond somebody mailing him an assignment. He knew them before they became an institution and continued speaking of them as friends long after the original scene scattered.

The magazine came out of the same downtown mess.

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PUNK’s first issue appeared in January 1976, with Lou Reed on the cover. Holmstrom and the people around him mixed interviews, cartoons, photography, and jokes into something that did not resemble the music magazines already sitting on the rack. Nobody had money for elegance anyway. See PUNK Volume 1, Number 1

Ged Dunn helped finance the operation and handled much of the business side. Legs McNeil was part of the founding crew, while Holmstrom drew, edited, and shaped the magazine’s look. Five decades later, people still argue over exactly who did what, and Holmstrom has never been shy about challenging accounts he believes get the history wrong.

When Pot Culture Magazine asked what people still get wrong about the roles played by him, Dunn, and McNeil, Holmstrom did not offer a painless anniversary answer.

“That is a very long list,” he wrote. “Give me a day or two to remember all those painful memories.”

He had not sent that list by the time this version of the profile was finished. For now, the answer tells us something simpler: half a century has not drained the emotion out of those arguments.

Back then, PUNK had more immediate problems. Printers wanted money, distribution could fall apart without warning, and people sometimes slept in the office because the operation was barely hanging together. Holmstrom has never tried to pretend there was some brilliant business machine operating beneath the cartoons.

One of the people who helped keep it alive was Tom Forçade.

Forçade is usually introduced today as the founder of High Times. That description leaves out the underground press operator Holmstrom knew, a publisher who understood alternative distribution and had already spent years figuring out how to keep outlaw media moving.

Forçade also understood PUNK.

In the Hager interview, Holmstrom recalled that PUNK worked out a distribution arrangement through High Times. The company helped with printing, extended credit, and was planning a broader distribution operation.

“They were pouring money into us,” Holmstrom said.

He remembered Forçade as the person inside High Times who “had the vision to know that punk was gonna make it big,” while much of the rest of the company wanted nothing to do with the magazine.

Holmstrom’s description of Forçade today is even less complicated.

“Tom Forçade loved PUNK Magazine. He wasn’t a hippie; he was a punk rocker.”

He points toward Forçade’s instincts at High Times. Debbie Harry appeared on a cover, and Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols showed up too. Forçade called Harry “The Marilyn Monroe of Punk,” a line Holmstrom still thinks nailed her.

Then there was the axe.

Holmstrom remembers Forçade taking an axe to the High Times phone switchboard during one notorious blowup and meeting with Ged Dunn afterward.

“Forçade was such a fan of PUNK mag that he might have tried to shut down High Times,” Holmstrom told Pot Culture Magazine.

There have been easier men to work for.

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Forçade’s connection to PUNK overlapped with one of the most chaotic chapters in punk history. Holmstrom and photographer Roberta Bayley followed the Sex Pistols during their 1978 American tour, when a band already running hot landed in a country that seemed determined to see how much more abuse it could take.

Holmstrom was close enough to take notes while the tour unfolded, which separates his account from the mythology that accumulated afterward. He was reporting on a band that still existed rather than reconstructing one from memory decades later.

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M O R E F R O M P O T C U L T U R E M A G A Z I N E

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Forçade was also involved in the film project that became D.O.A.: A Rite of Passage, a story Holmstrom has continued revisiting in his own writing. Material from that period eventually became part of the John Holmstrom Papers and Punk Magazine Records at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The official finding aid describes 52.34 linear feet of material, including correspondence, writing, photographs, printed matter, audiovisual material, and artwork connected to Holmstrom and PUNK. View the Beinecke finding aid

Most of it started life in a working magazine office, not a climate-controlled archive.

Money remained the recurring problem. At one point, Holmstrom says PUNK was approaching a deal with Larry Flynt that would have brought the magazine a $50,000 advance.

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For an operation where people were sleeping in the office, that kind of money could have changed everything.

“We were going to get a 50,000 advance,” Holmstrom remembered, enough to stop “sleeping in the office and starving.”

Flynt was shot outside a courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia, on March 6, 1978. His publishing operation was thrown into chaos, and whatever future PUNK imagined with that money disappeared with it.

The magazine kept scraping along while punk changed around it. By 1978, the Sex Pistols had broken apart, and the music business had discovered that some of these bands might actually sell records, even if executives had become less enthusiastic about the word attached to them.

Holmstrom remembered Sire Records backing away from “punk” with a “don’t call it punk” campaign as the industry tried to separate commercially useful bands from a label that had become harder to sell.

He had also been around the scene long enough to know that punk did not become admirable simply because outsiders hated it. Heroin was common around the club scene, and the Heartbreakers presented a particular problem for Holmstrom because he did not want PUNK romanticizing the drug culture surrounding the band.

“I didn’t like promoting drug use,” he said.

Years later, Holmstrom would become a major editor and publisher at High Times. His earlier comment is interesting precisely because it was specific. He was talking about heroin around the Heartbreakers and his reluctance to use PUNK to glamorize it, not laying down some blanket position on every drug or every corner of counterculture.

By October 1978, PUNK was in serious trouble, and Holmstrom decided to throw a party before the lights went out.

The Punk Awards took place on Friday, October 13, 1978, at Club Hollywood in Manhattan. Holmstrom’s own account says the staff already knew the magazine was in danger and treated the night as a possible farewell.

“I was planning our funeral because I knew we were going out of business,” Holmstrom later said. He also remembered putting money from his Road to Ruin work into the event.

Using Ramones money to help finance your dying magazine’s farewell party is either terrible business or perfect editorial judgment. For PUNK, it somehow feels like both.

The original run ended in 1979, but Holmstrom kept drawing and publishing before eventually landing at High Times. He moved through senior editorial and publishing roles, including managing editor, executive editor, publisher, and president, before later working on the magazine’s early web operation.

By then, he had years of experience trying to keep publications alive outside the normal publishing world.

High Times gave him another version of that fight. Cannabis users were easy targets for caricature, growers were being arrested, and the federal Drug War had reached deeply into the culture surrounding the plant.

One of Holmstrom’s favorite memories from those years involves Tommy Chong.

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In 1989, Holmstrom said in a 2017 High Times retrospective that he got Tommy Chong to pose with a big bud, and he called it one of his proudest moments at the magazine. He connected the shoot to the climate surrounding Operation Green Merchant, the federal campaign against indoor cannabis cultivation. Federal records show the DEA developed the operation in 1988 to target covert indoor growing and the businesses supplying it.

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“I think Tommy Chong really deserves whatever accolades he gets from High Times for being such a brave person. ‘Foolish’ is the other word, of course.”

His years at High Times make up one chapter in a career that had already taken him through underground comics, CBGB, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. He also knew Tom Forçade as a working publisher before Forçade’s death in November 1978, rather than as a name later fought over in histories of the underground press.

That proximity helps explain Holmstrom’s impatience with cleaned-up stories. He has spent years objecting when later accounts rearrange credit, smooth over fights about money, or reduce messy relationships to neat captions underneath old photographs.

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Now institutions are preserving the same work that once had trouble getting through a print run.

The “50 Years of PUNK” exhibition opened at Ki Smith Gallery on November 28, 2025, billed as marking 50 years since the CBGB interviews with the Ramones and Lou Reed that fed the first issue. See the Ki Smith Gallery exhibition. The exhibition later traveled to MASS MoCA, where it is on view through January 3, 2027, and Holmstrom told Pot Culture Magazine that Hudson Hall in upstate New York is next. See 50 Years of PUNK at MASS MoCA

Holmstrom also told Pot Culture Magazine that his work is included in You Should Be Dancing: New York, 1976 and Beyond, which opened October 2 at The New York Historical and will run through April 4, 2027. The exhibition examines New York in 1976 as punk, disco, hip hop, and other cultural movements moved through the city.

He sounds pleased that people finally recognize the work without sounding interested in turning PUNK into a relic.

Original issues now command prices that would have sounded ridiculous to the people trying to keep the magazine alive in the 1970s. Scarcity turned cheap paper into valuable merchandise, which is exactly the kind of joke Holmstrom might have drawn himself.

He would rather put the pages back into circulation.

For Holmstrom, print on demand is about access. If somebody wants to read PUNK, he does not think they should have to pay a collector hundreds of dollars for the privilege.

That brings him back to what he was trying to do in 1976: make the magazine and get it into somebody’s hands.

Collectors can fight over the originals. John Holmstrom still wants readers.

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