Dave Stimson obit

Touch & Go Co-Founder Dave Stimson Has Died

 He was not on the list.

Dave Stimson, co-founder of the pioneering '80s hardcore punk zine and record label Touch & Go, has died. Stimson reportedly passed away Wednesday. Touch & Go's Corey Rusk posted the news to the label's Instagram account today along with a tribute to Stimson:

Today is a sad day. Touch and Go co-founder Dave Stimson has passed away. I spent last night reminiscing and telling DS stories with Tesco. Bittersweet. Back in the Touch and Go Fanzine days, Tesco was the master of verbose storytelling. Although Dave was his linguistically minimalist counterpart, Dave could convey as much with a dry, condensed sentence as Tesco could in a full page. He was funny in a very different manner from Tesco. Together, they were like cool older brothers to us guys in the Necros (who were still in high school when we met Dave and Tesco). They put us on the cover of their fanzine, started a label (which I quickly joined them in running) to put out our records, and got us opening slots at Lansing’s Club DooBee with Black Flag and DOA at the start of 1981. Legends… both of them.

Stimson and the Meatmen's Tesco Vee launched the Touch & Go zine together in 1979. Stimson and Vee, elementary school teachers in Lansing, Michigan, published button-pushing humor and reviews of records by punk bands. As related in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, their review of the debut Teen Idles single helped build a buzz around Dischord Records that helped the label to continue as a going concern.

In 1981, Stimson and Vee heard the teenage Toledo punk band the Necros and liked them so much that they started Touch & Go Rekords to put out the group's four-song EP. Rusk, from the Necros, got enthusiastically involved with Touch & Go, handling the label's sales and distribution work. When Vee moved to Washington, DC in late 1982, Rusk and his future wife Lisa Pfahler ended up running the label.

Vee and Stimson continued publishing the zine through 1983. They published its entire run in book form in 2010. In addition to Stimson and Vee's writing, it features words from Rusk, Steve Miller, Henry Rollins, Keith Morris, Peter Davis, Henry Owings, Byron Coley, John Brannon, and Ian MacKaye.

Vee also paid tribute to Stimson in a post on Wednesday:

Got the bad news today that my partner in musical mischief has passed away. Dave Stimson and I started the magazine in 1979 because as I always said “it was a necessary calling to extoll the new music and scream it from the rooftops”. Dave always just quipped “nah we were just bored. “ Dave was my literary partner in crime for 19 of the 23 issues of the magazine. We went to countless shows together. Started the record label together. And had a blast documenting all this great music bubbling up around us. Truth be told he was the original Meatman … He was living with his folks and he would get in the car on the way to the show and belch up mom’s dinner and I would have to guess. “Pot Roast ?” “Yup”. I’ll never forget the day he called me up because he had got the new Black Flag Nervous breakdown 45 in the mail and told me I had to come over and hear this motherfucker. That time his box of rare 45s was stolen out of his VW Bug outside of Irving Plaza and he walked up to the guy selling them on the street “hey those are mine !” Dave wasn’t exactly a keep in touch kind of guy but we reconnected when the book came on in 2010 and I had seen him sparingly since then… But that doesn’t make this any easier. RIP to a great guy who could rip a band a new asshole with the best of them. Love ya DS.