Largest punk archive to find new home at MTSU's Center for Popular Music

Summary

By Stacey Tadlock MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Popular Music, housed within the College of Media and Entertainment, is about to become the epicenter for punk archiving and exploration. The world’s largest collection of punk records — the iconic Maximum Rocknroll, or MRR, archive — is relocating from the Bay Area in California to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The archive includes an estimated 60,000 vinyl records, photos, zines and documents spanning decades of punk rock’s global evolution. Weighing in at around eight tons, the collection is a defining piece of music history — and it will now be part of the Center for Popular Music’s research legacy inside the College of Media and Entertainment Building. The world’s largest collection of punk records — the iconic Maximum Rocknroll archive — is being packed up to be relocated from its current location in California to its new home at Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Popular Music located inside the College of Media and Entertainment. (Photo: maximumrocknroll.com) Founded in 1985, the Center for Popular Music is one of the world’s oldest and largest research centers devoted to the study of American folk and popular music. It already houses more than one million items of music memorabilia. With the Maximum Rocknroll archive on the way, Center for Popular Music Director Greg Reish said the new addition “includes a ton of stuff that’s quite rare, if not utterly unique.” “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,” Reish told California media outlet SFGate.com. Dr. Greg Reish Logan Dalton The MRR archive, once headquartered in San Francisco, California, helped shape the punk underground worldwide. For decades, the magazine was considered the definitive voice of the movement. Its archive reflects the breadth of punk’s social and political reach, with items from over 100 countries an...