BC073 - Five Mixes: My Nominees for the National Recording Registry, 1974-2001
Frankie Knuckles, Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin—this is history, folks
For years, I have had a low-level but persistent obsession with the National Recording Registry (NRR). Established in 2000, and first selected in 2002 by the Library of Congress, the NRR aims to collect sound recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically important” to the history and life of the United States. The NRR’s aims are vast—any sound recording of any type can be nominated, as long as you can make the case for inclusion.
In its first four years, the NRR added fifty titles per year; it’s been twenty-five per year since 2006. For the 2024 roll, that includes comedy records (Lily Tomlin’s This Is a Recording, 1971), a military cylinder (“Clarinet Marmalade” by Lt. James Reese Europe’s 369th U.S. Infantry Band, 1919), and modern classical (Kronos Quartet’s Piece of Africa, 1992), in addition to rock, pop, country, jazz, hip-hop, and Latin classics.
This year there are eleven albums, one complete discography (the Wisconsin Folksong Collection: 900-odd titles, recorded by two women, Sidney Robinson and Helene Stratman-Thomas, for the Library of Congress between 1937 and 1946), and thirteen singles, one cited for both sides (“Catch a Falling Star” b/w ”Magic Moments” by Perry Como, 1957), one a B-side whose legend has outstripped the A (Doug E. Fresh & the Get Fresh Crew’s “La-Di-Da-Di,” once merely the attention-grabbing flip of the hit side, “The Show,” 1985). This brings the Registry’s total item number up to 650; here’s a complete list.
David Browne, who has also been fascinated for years by the NRR, has a wonderful feature up at Rolling Stone in which he discusses the new picks with the Library of Congress’s head, Dr. Carla Hayden. I love how not-snobbish she comes across in the piece; she sounds like she's having a blast (and should be): “[ABBA was] a cultural phenomenon. The movie, ‘Dancing Queen,’ all of that. You can sing along. It’s a karaoke thing. Talk about crossover!”
This probably won’t surprise anyone, but I have long fantasized about writing historical guides to the titles in the NRR. I’m the proud owner of two volumes of America's Film Legacy by Daniel Eagan, which does the same with the titles in the National Film Registry. (Vol. 1 is everything inducted through 2008, Vol. 2 covers 2009-10 entries.) I have long considered doing something similar with the NRR—a side Substack, say. We’ll see.
But reading David’s feature—not to mention a seeming groundswell of attention to the form (see below)—made me realize that if anything deserves to be in the NRR, and isn’t, it’s DJ mixes. Since I’ve always promised myself to make nominations for the Registry and hadn’t until now, why not make my ballot public? These are all groundbreaking and historically important sets, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.
The caveat throughout, of course, is that in all cases, you could just as easily nominate these five artists (not a fallback word, folks—deliberately chosen) for their recordings, and you’d be right to. Tom Moulton’s Philadelphia Classics (1977) and the Soul Jazz “A Tom Moulton Mix” (2006); a couple dozen Frankie Knuckles tracks and releases (the one-stop is House Masters, a 2015 double CD that does him right); Levan’s collected remixes for West End Records; any number of Mills releases, with Underground Resistance and solo; Sheet One and “Spastik” from Hawtin, for starters. I’ll be thrilled when and if those make their way in. But these mixes are every bit as important and deserving.
So, then, what follows is my actual ballot—what I wrote to the National Recording Registry folks. This is the Nomination page, which will take you to a more direct portal; you can also email it in, as I did. You get to nominate five recordings total. I’ll include my ballot language as pull quotes; any addenda will follow in normal type. Not everything has addenda. I’ve written about some of these extensively, so some of the nomination language may seem familiar.
You can hear all five sets on this SoundCloud playlist.
Tom Moulton, reel-to-reel mixes for the Sandpiper, Fire Island, New York (1971-74)
Crafted by hand on reel-to-reel every quarter for the gay nightspot the Sandpiper, in Fire Island, where Tom Moulton had gone and realized that, if he did some edits, he could extend the dance floor groove rather than watch it change course with every new record. It took 80 hours of work to craft his first tape, but he became an expert, as the handful of sets on Mixcloud and SoundCloud attest. Moulton went on to become a tape-editing guru for many disco artists, and beyond; his work with B.T. Express and MFSB, in particular, radically opened up the possibilities for disco production.
Tom Moulton, Summer Mix Tape 2 (July 27, 1974)
As I hope the above makes clear, my aim here isn’t to spotlight this specific set—but it’s my favorite of the handful of Moulton reel-to-reels I’ve heard, all on Mixcloud or SoundCloud. (Here’s Summer Mix Tape 1, and the Labor Day set, both also from 1974.) But the collection is what matters to me here. (I can already hear people suggesting the Pine Walk Tapes, and I won’t object, though I’ve tried a couple and they haven’t really caught on for me. Suggestions welcome.) The NRR has enshrined a number of other collections: in addition to Wisconsin Folksong Collection from the 2024 class, the inductees include the Benjamin Ives Gilman Collection Recorded at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago (inducted 2014); the Chippewa/Ojibwe Cylinder Collection of Frances Densmore, recorded 1907 to 1910 (2003); and a set of New Orleans oral-history interview recordings from WWOZ, recorded 1973 to 1990 (2002). There is no question: Moulton’s collected Sandpiper reel-to-reel mixes are of equal historical importance of those sets, and of anything in the NRR, full stop.
Frankie Knuckles, Live at the Warehouse, Chicago (1979)
Part of the mammoth and crucial SoundCloud holdings of Manny'z Tapez, this is the earliest known and verified DJ mix by Frankie Knuckles we yet know of, and not only does it stand in as a representative snapshot of the very earliest house music, it's a scorching example of disco at its most vibrant. Much of Knuckles' work as a producer and remixer merits inclusion in the Registry on its own merits, but he was a master DJ above all, massively influencing Chicago's DJs and then the world's. House music is named for Knuckles' Chicago club the Warehouse, and when he died in 2013, President Obama commemorated him publicly. This set is an inclusion worthy of Frankie's enormous legacy.
Larry Levan, Live at the Paradise Garage (Strut 2CD, rec. 1979/rel. 2000)
As did his lifelong best friend Frankie Knuckles, Larry Levan was a pathbreaking DJ who defined the sound of his city at night, dancing. Larry was a lifelong New Yorker who refused to refute disco, but kept his floors hopping with the newest sounds--some of them from his own remixes (Taana Gardner's "Heartbeat" is the masterpiece) and original productions (NYC Peech Boys' "Don't Make Me Wait"). But his gift for creating drama from carefully chosen and juxtapositions--not to mention his wily but slam-bang turntable technique--is still mesmerizing. This set, 90 minutes recorded on reel-to-reel on a good night, and issued officially on CD twenty-one years later, captures Levan at a peak moment that still sounds amazingly fresh.
ADDENDUM: I wrote about this at the time for City Pages. Keith Harris, bless him, cut it from a thousand words to six hundred and then asked if it was OK, as if he hadn’t done it already; I said no, and then he gently showed me in “Well, what if?” fashion. Needless to say, it was embarrassing how right he was. I referred therein to a “punk-rock violent” transition here, and while I may have exaggerated slightly, I wasn’t wrong, either. Along with the below—and a colleague’s expert opening up of its moment-to-moment action—it makes me think part of what makes a great DJ is the stuff that doesn’t quite line up but works; what makes a great DJ is having the will to impose on others’ work, thereby enhancing it.
Jeff Mills, Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo (React CD, rec. October 28, 1995/rel. May 20, 1996)
The only DJ mix CD yet to receive a perfect 10 from Pitchfork, for good reason: It is an artistic statement from techno's greatest auteur, a Detroit legend whose work with Underground Resistance and on his own, among others, set the path for much of techno in the 1990s and beyond. Before he was a producer, though, Mills was legendary for his turntable technique, and on this set, recorded at a Japanese nightclub with microphones set up to capture the crowd noise that flavors it, Mills tears into his selections, unleashing backspins and layering tracks with ferocious gusto. It was also the first official appearance of an untitled track that Mills had been playing for over a year; it would be issued on its own as "The Bells" shortly after this CD appeared. Ask any techno aficionado for the greatest DJ mix ever and they will invariably name this one.
You bet part of the impetus for this post is Gabriel Szatan’s Sunday Review from early February. I’m tickled that he counters me on my persistent comparison to the first Ramones album, and he may well be right about the set resembling Raw Power more than it does Ramones, though he’s making nearly the same point as I am, albeit more geared to technique, which is certainly fair. For me, Ramones still tracks because (a) its sense of headrush was/is so screechingly headlong and unrelenting, whereas the Stooges had way more rhythmic give than Johnny-Joey-Dee Dee-Tommy; and (b) that was the literal thing that popped into mind when I heard it the first time, when it was playing at Let It Be Records in downtown Minneapolis. I’m not the only person I know who heard it that first time and was shocked that it was on a CD. Most live tapes didn’t even sound like that, and only live tapes sounded like this up to that point. And most of those didn’t have near that level of rude energy, never mind that kind of outlandish technique.
Another point worth noting—Mills did a lot of backspins, it’s true, but the long flourish before “Strings of Life” was, to my ear anyway, as much a tribute to Derrick May’s particular use of the backspin as it was a cover-up. Szatan points up the tempo shift when “Strings” come in, whereas I hadn’t registered it as a tempo shift so much as a dramatic jump-cut a la the artiste he’s playing.
Richie Hawtin, DE9: Closer to the Edit (M_nus CD, rel. September 11, 2001)
Few dance-music DJs or producers have been as tech-forward as Richie Hawtin, who grew up in Windsor, Ontario—right on the border of Detroit—the son of an engineer who avidly pursued the futuristic in both gear and records. Many of Hawtin’s records were purpose-made for DJs ready to cut them into new shapes, himself foremost. His 2001 mix CD, DE9: Closer to the Edit, was both a virtuosic display of the editing technology that let him play looped snippets of multiple tracks atop one another, creating something new out of them, and a preview of the sound of digital DJing to come. It was also a bravura display of the beguiling “minimal” techno sound coming to the fore in the early 2000s.