Steven Holmsen Gardner

Like a lot of people, Steve Gardner probably wouldn’t have made it out of his teens without rock’n’roll being the soundtrack to both good times and bad. He was rabid about it from the moment he got his first radio in 1968, and when punk rock came along at the same time as he turned 21, he was hooked for life.

He got a degree in engineering and had a long career in that field, but he didn’t let that prevent him from maintaining his avid interest in rock'n'roll music. The lesson he took from punk is that you don’t have to be the best at something to try doing it; you just have to try. Failure is OK, not trying is not OK. So at nights he wrote about rock’n’roll in his own indie-rock fanzine Noise For Heroes, which saw 23 print issues in the Eighties and Nineties followed by an eight year span as a webzine and a period where Gardner was a contributing writer to The Big Takeover magazine. He played drums for San Diego band the Gamma Men in the Nineties, recording three CDs with them, and released another CD as a studio project called the Chainsaw Men. He also ran an indie record label called NKVD Records, with releases by bands from scenes in Finland, Australia, France, Sweden, and Germany. A mail-order arm of NKVD sold hard-to-find releases in America by bands from Europe and Australia for nearly twenty years. And since he retired a couple years ago, he’s been working on a four volume history of Punk and New Wave in the Seventies called Another Tuneless Racket, the first two of which are already in print.

His non-music book, Pieces Of Rope Too Short To Keep, tells a humorous story of growing up in back country Vermont during the Sixties. And he will soon publish a book called God’s Icebox telling a series of stories about Patagonia and the Antarctic.