Maximumrocknroll, the legendary Bay Area punk zine, started off as a Berkeley public radio show in 1977, and its late founder Tim Yohannan turned it into a newsprint zine in 1982. Early in the zine's run, Yohannon set out an impossible task for the publication: It would review every independent punk record that came out. Even as MRR grew into an institution, it couldn't maintain that mission. But MRR always upheld its banner as an underground torch-carrier. Its regularly updated Book Your Own Fuckin' Life reference tome helped establish a pre-internet DIY touring circuit, and its attacks against the music business drew battle lines in the '90s culture wars. (There's a lot of MRR talk in our most recent Alternative Number Ones column, on Green Day's "Longview.") Along the way MRR amassed a vast, obsessively cataloged collection of punk records. Now, that collection, along with another important one, is moving to Nashville.
Maximumrocknroll still exists online, but it ended print publication in 2019 -- a real end-of-an-era moment. Now, SFGate has published a long feature on MRR's archive of records, which has found a new home at Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Popular Music, a research center in the Nashville suburb of Murfreesboro that was founded in 1985. The physical MRR headquarters in the Bay Area have shut down, so its vast record collection, which has been stored in an East Oakland basement for the last six years, needed a new home. Center director Greg Reish says, "We want people to realize that in one fell swoop, the Center for Popular Music is going to be the new epicenter of punk-related research." In its own account of the decision, MRR calls the move "bittersweet" but expresses hope that the Center will keep its mission alive.
Before MRR agreed to move its collection to Murfreesboro, the Center For Popular Music already had a full collection of the zine's decades-long print run -- which means the the nearly complete print run that the magazine already had will find a new home at the Oakland Public Library's History Center. The Center For Popular Music has the capability to store and preserve the full MRR collection, which the magazine itself calls "the greatest punk record collection the world has ever known." Greg Reish says that the Center will make it a priority to build a searchable internet database of the MRR collection. (I hope they put all the old Rev. Norb columns online, too.) Read the full SFGate feature here.
By sheer coincidence, another important punk collection is coming to Nashville around the same time. As Blabbermouth reports, Henry Rollins announced in a VersoFest panel last month that he's got his own vast collection of the "punk rock things" that he's been amassing since the '70s, including flyers, posters, and records. He wants to make that collection available to the public. In 2022, Rollins spent $2.7 million on a Nashville commercial space previously occupied by an HVAC company. Rollins says that he's poured his life savings into this, his next "major project." NOFX frontman Fat Mike already opened his own punk museum in Las Vegas recently, but the Rollins Nashville version seems like it'll have a different sensibility.
