By Aylin Aarhus
University of Maryland Libraries invited archivist John Davis to discuss his new book documenting the history of the Washington, D.C., punk scene Thursday at McKeldin Library.
Davis is the curator of the Special Collections in Performing Arts, or SCPA, at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. His book, “Keep Your Ear to the Ground,” records the history of the capital’s punk scene from the mid-‘70s to the present using fanzines—small, fan-run publications where punks could share information about upcoming events and opinions on punk music and culture.
“When you have a subculture … that is not really talked about or represented in an accurate way, or even in any way, in mainstream media sources, that was why fanzines were developed, was as a way to share news and meet other people and make friends,” Davis said.
The book is based on materials from the University Archives’ “D.C. punk collection,” which Davis curates.
Davis is a native of the ‘90s Washington punk scene, even making his own fanzines in high school. Before pursuing a career in archival work, Davis played drums professionally for the band Q and Not U.
The discussion was part of UMD Libraries’ “Speaking of Books” series, which invites authors from the UMD community to share their recently published books.
The book’s title is a line from the song “Swann Street” by the punk band Three, which was active in Washington from the mid to late ‘80s.
“That stood out to me as what fanzine creators do,” Davis said. “The idea of keeping your ear to the ground is to hear the sound of something distant and something approaching, something impending. And that is, to me, what fanzine creators often did … they were able to kind of define what was on the way.”
Shubh Agnihotri, a sophomore electrical engineering student, has been going to hardcore punk shows since 2022 and plays guitar in the punk band “Slag Dump.”
Agnihotri said he thought Davis’s work was important to recording punk history and culture.
“There’s a lot of information that would get lost because it’s only disseminated by word of mouth,” Agnihotri said. “So documenting zines, which in and of themselves are already documentations of the scene, helps preserve the history.”
Stephen Henry, head of the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, helped arrange the discussion.
He called Davis’s collection of fanzines and ephemera from the capital’s punk scene “a breath of fresh air” for SCPA.
“It’s a different medium,” Henry said. “It’s not a glossy magazine or a published book, right? … We try to encourage that, because I think that’s what a library should do. We want to represent multiple voices.”
“We have students coming in and using these new collections and asking about them, and we get press calls from The Washington Post,” Henry continued. “So to me, it tells me we’re on the right track, because there’s something that people are responding to meaningfully.”
Featured Image: Attendees of the “Keep Your Ear to the Ground” book discussion look at a presentation featuring the book’s cover on Nov. 20, 2025. By Anika Stikeleather.