• by Sara Guaglione , January 14, 2019

Punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll is shuttering its monthly edition after 37 years in print and roughly 400 issues.

There will be three more issues of the San Francisco-based fanzine this year.

The online version of Maximum Rocknroll and the weekly radio show will live on. MRR will begin publishing record reviews online later this year.

“Readers can look forward to more online content, updates regarding the archive project initiated in 2016, and other yet-to-be-announced MRR projects, as well as new ways for punks around the world to get involved,” according to a statement from the publisher on Facebook.

In 2016, MRR created a successful campaign to fund a project to digitize its archives.

Maximum Rocknroll is working to digitize over 50,000 records from its San Francisco headquarters, every back issue of the magazine (searchable in PDF-form and free of charge to the public) and create an online catalog of its music holdings.

A number of older publications are moving to digitize their archives.

The Saturday Evening Post announced last October it had digitized its 200-year-old archive of over 3,500 covers and a half-million magazine pages featuring work from iconic writers and cover artists like Norman Rockwell and William Faulkner. It hopes to do the same for sister publication The Country Gentleman.

Maximum Rocknroll began as a radio show in 1977. The print fanzine was created in 1982 by the founders of the show, Tim Yohannan “and the gang,” which included personalities like Jeff Bale, Ruth Schwartz and Jello Biafra.

“That first issue drew a line in the sand between the so-called punks who mimicked society’s worst attributes — the “apolitical, anti-historical and anti-intellectual,” the ignorant, racist and violent — and MRR’s principled dedication to promoting a true alternative to the doldrums of the mainstream," reads the MRR statement.

"That dedication included anti-corporate ideals, avowedly leftist politics and relentless enthusiasm for DIY punk and hardcore bands and scenes from every inhabited continent of the globe."

The magazine had “hundreds of thousands of readers,” but inevitably “the landscape of the punk underground has shifted over the years, as has the world of print media.”