The MRR Archives Find a New Home
Maximum Rocknroll is heartbroken/excited to announce that we are donating our archives — paper files, photos, notes, zines, books, ephemera, and yes, the greatest punk record collection the world has ever known — to the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. This might seem random, but it’s the culmination of a long and thoughtful process intended to ensure that the legacy of MRR, Tim Yohannan, and all of the contributing bands, shitworkers, labels, collectors, and punks of all stripes is preserved, curated, referenced, and appreciated for many years to come.
MTSU’s Center for Popular Music, established in 1985, aims to “promote research in American vernacular music, and to foster an understanding and appreciation of America’s diverse musical culture.” As part of this broad vernacular, we’ll occupy shelf space along with the Anderson Memorial Presbyterian Church square dance collection and the archives of Black country pioneer DeFord Bailey, AKA the Harmonica Wizard. Basically, the Center specializes in people’s music that’s untrained, hyperlocal, stripped down, and raw. It was critical to us that the MRR collection remain a living archive — and the MTSU curators have promised to make it accessible to the public as well as scholars. We don’t have an exact date for the move yet, but anticipate it will happen in June.
This move is bittersweet. The famously green-taped record collection — snaking verdantly for 70 feet or so around Maximum Rocknroll headquarters — served as the background and inspiration for our shitwork for all the years we published in a physical space. It’s special not only for its vastness and variety, but also its international scope — there are punks all over the world; in Malaysia, in Paraguay, in Russia. They poured their hearts into their songs, and they sent them to our house. We pulled them out in sticky little stacks (from the duct tape residue) by many themes and categories — by artist, by city, by year, by incomprehensibility of band name, by weirdness of sleeve art, by trigger of beautiful memory, at random. They provided a soundtrack to breakfast for those of us who lived there and fodder for our eponymous radio show*. Pilgrims from all over the punk world have visited MRR HQ to spin b-sides and admire Tim Yo’s legendary handmade sleeves.
So you can imagine the sad strangeness back in 2019 when when we packed up and moved the collection out of the space and into storage. Since then we’ve been in limbo, which never feels great. After an initially scattershot search for a new local home — alas, no local institutions had the capacity to keep a fragile, temperature-sensitive collection of this size — we explored concentrically outward from the Bay Area until we found MTSU. We’ll still have a Bay Area presence, thankfully — the Oakland Public Library stepped up, and one run of the printed magazine has been donated to their Oakland History Center. And soon another full run of MRR magazines will be available at the California State Library in Sacramento.
This hasn’t been the sexiest chapter in shitworker history, and we want to thank everyone who helped. We want especially to remember our late friend and fellow shitworker Pete Avery, who along with his partner, Jesska Hughes, graciously stored and maintained this gigantic collection in their basement for six years(!!!). Huge thanks to Gregory Reish and Rachel Morris at MTSU for opening their doors. Thanks also to Michelle Casto at the DC punk archive for her advice, as well as genius problem solver Ian MacKaye. Both had important insights and ideas about our collection.
Loosely quoting from the final print edition of MRR: It’s not time for an eulogy, it’s time to demonstrate the life eternal that is worldwide DIY punk, from MRR’s inception until the end of time, punk will never die.
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*Have a listen to the last radio show that was recorded at the compound… It’s a good one!
Read more about the archive and our move to Tennessee HERE.
