Dave Stimson, Co-Founder of Touch & Go, Has Died

Dave Stimson, who co-founded the Touch & Go fanzine and later the record label that became a pillar of independent punk and hardcore, died Wednesday. The news was shared by the label’s Corey Rusk, who recalled the days when Stimson and Tesco Vee were “cool older brothers” to his band, the Necros.

Stimson and Vee, both elementary school teachers in Lansing, Michigan, launched the Touch & Go zine in 1979. With an irreverent mix of humor and raw review writing, they captured a scene that was still underground. Their coverage of the Teen Idles’ debut single gave early momentum to Dischord Records, and by 1981, enthusiasm for the Necros drove them to start Touch & Go Rekords solely to release the band’s four-song EP. Rusk quickly took over sales and distribution, and when Vee relocated to Washington, DC, in 1982, Rusk and Lisa Pfahler assumed control of the label, steering it for decades.

Vee’s tribute sketched Stimson as a minimalist counterweight — “he could convey as much with a dry, condensed sentence as Tesco could in a full page,” Rusk wrote. Vee remembered him as “my partner in musical mischief,” adding that Stimson often joked they started the magazine simply because they were bored. It was that unvarnished, instinct-driven approach that made Touch & Go feel essential, never calculated.

The zine ran through 1983 and was collected in a 2010 book that features writing from Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Byron Coley, and others. Stimson’s brief bylines sit among those voices, a reminder that the most lasting institutions sometimes begin with two friends, a photocopier, and an ear for something louder than the mainstream.