John Davis - Keep Your Ear to the Ground: A History of Punk Fanzines in Washington, DC

In Keep Your Ear to the Ground, University of Maryland archivist and musician John Davis documents the history of fanzines as they evolved alongside DC’s punk music scene. Read on for a Q&A with the author to learn more.

You mentioned your personal history with fanzines–what inspired you to write a book about punk fanzines in Washington, DC, and how did your experiences shape the way you approached this book?

Not long after I got into punk as a teenager in the early 1990s, I started publishing my own fanzines about the D.C. punk scene. I’d been inspired by some kids a few years ahead of me at my high school, as I was amazed by the zines they wrote, designed, and published themselves.

I decided to take an indefinite break from being a touring musician in the early 2010s and went to graduate school for a Masters in Library and Information Science. Not long after I obtained my Masters in Library and Information Science, I started working at the University of Maryland’s Special Collections in Performing Arts (SCPA) and became Curator there in 2020. This led to various scholarly articles, a book chapter, and conference presentations about the D.C. punk scene and the archives at UMD.

After presenting at the D.C. History Conference in 2017, I met Hope LeGro of Georgetown University Press. She asked if I’d ever considered writing a book on the history of D.C. punk fanzines and, indeed, I had wanted to do something like that for a few years.

What do you hope readers will glean about the history of punk fanzines from this book?

Just like punk rock showed that anyone can play music, no matter how skilled you are at singing or playing an instrument, punk fanzines demonstrated that anyone could and should make a zine to share their punk fandom. The main thing I want readers to understand is that punk rock communities are about more than the bands. Without all of the other aspects of the community, you lose the energy that binds everything together.