Eight tons of punk

Facing rising San Francisco rent prices, the world’s largest collection of punk records and the anti-establishment music magazine that safeguards it must find a new home (linky).

​It was mid-March: move-out weekend at The Compound. I, along with half-a-dozen beleaguered punks twice my age, came to dismantle the storied clubhouse. Our main objective wasn’t just to clean out a work/live space filled with 30 years of counterculture, but to shepherd the magazine’s crown jewel — an eight-ton archive of punk LPs and 7”s, the largest collection of punk records in the world — to its secretive, temporary safe house at an undisclosed location in the Bay Area.

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A crate of records, waiting for review. Exacto-knives, box cutters, calculators, poster
putty, and other relics of a bygone era clutter the chairs and tables of the office.

When I arrived, I was met by a handful of long-time volunteers working quietly away, seemingly resigned to — or perhaps just worn down by — a fate that had threatened to befall them for decades. I had reached out a few months prior when I saw the farewell announcement online: “It is with heavy hearts that we are announcing the end of Maximum Rocknroll as a monthly print fanzine.” More specifically, I called a landline I’d found in an old issue. To my surprise, someone actually picked up. Since then, I’d been on the list of “shitworkers” (what MRR calls its volunteers) helping MRR ship its final issues and get their affairs in order.

When I arrived, we waited for a Uhaul to come back from its undisclosed location for another truckload of records — the first of four trips it would take this weekend. Longtime shitworkers Matt Badenhop and Julia Booz, along with unofficial Editor in Chief Paul Curran (MRR’s flat, democratic structure precludes hierarchical titles) had just finished delivering the 7”s to the secret drop-off point, and the LPs were next. I counted 268 50-pound boxes in all, not including the 7”s — about “six-to-eight tons of Punk,” Curran later told me. We passed the time waiting for the truck by categorizing the various defunct office supplies. “Man, the number of times I’ve been looking for some goddamn tape,” Curran would mutter when he returned, looking at the bucket of various adhesives before him. No one had any idea what to do with all of it.

Where did you get THAT from? Being my usual grumpy old bastid self, all the way at the bottom I found two good comments, "Does punk suck???" Like a bloody Hoover! "We'd feel safer without police." Of course you would, the Police was a ROCK band, not punk. Ordinarily I'd tell them what to do with it, but unfortunately if they shove it up their asses they'd have 15,800lbs left over. That much plastic dumped in the bay would soon find its way to the Pacific Gyre aka The Great Garbage Patch killing marine life. Dump it in a landfill and a few thousand years from now extraterrestrial archeologists will understand why uncivilized savage Earthers destroyed the planet and themselves. Burn it and the toxic soot laden smoke would speed up the process. About the only way of disposing of it properly (and it NEEDS to be disposed of to prevent more ear bleed) is to grind it up, blend it with tar, and make punkphalt out of it like they grind up glass and make glassphalt, a form of recycling I'm dead set against. That's the wasteful nonsense that replaced deposit bottles we as kids cashed in for spending money. I better stop here before this rant gets out of hand if it hasn't already............