Music fan Aadam Jacobs concert recordings turned…

On July 8, 1989, a younger music fan named Aadam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band from Washington for their debut show in Chicago.

After a blast of guitar suggestions, 20-year-old Kurt Cobain politely announced to the group at the small membership called Dreamerz: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” With that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the riff-heavy first music, “School.”

Jacobs surreptitiously recorded the efficiency, documenting the fledgling band in uncooked, fiery type more than two years before Nirvana’s global breakthrough with the album “Nevermind.”

Aadam Jacobs stands in entrance of his document storage bookcase inside his Chicago home on March 19, 2026. AP

Jacobs went on to document more than 10,000 live shows, with more and more refined gear, over 4 a long time in Chicago and other cities.

Now a group of devoted volunteers in the US and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and importing them one by one.

The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an web treasure trove for music lovers, particularly for followers of indie and punk rock during the Eighties through the early 2000s, when the scene blossomed and grew to become mainstream.

The assortment options early-in-their-career performances from different and experimental artists like R.E.M., The treatment, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk.

There’s also a smattering of hip-hop, including a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Devotees of Phish have been thrilled to uncover that a beforehand uncirculated 1990 show by the jam band is included. And there are a whole bunch of units by smaller artists who are unlikely to be identified to even followers with the most obscure tastes.

All of it’s slowly changing into out there for streaming and free obtain at the nonprofit online repository Internet Archive, including that nascent Nirvana show recording, with the audio from Jacobs’ cassette recorder cleaned up.

The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an web treasure trove for music lovers, particularly for followers of indie and punk rock during the Eighties through the early 2000s. AP

An LP document performs on a participant inside Jacob’s home. AP

Jacbos’ first recording was in 1984

By the time Jacobs snuck his tape recorder into that Nirvana gig, he had been recording live shows for 5 years already. As a teen discovering music, Jacobs started taping songs off the radio.

“And I eventually met a fellow who said, ‘You can just take a tape recorder into a show with you, just sneak it in, record the show.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ So I got started,” Jacobs, now 59, recalled.

He doesn’t keep in mind offhand what that first concert was in 1984, but he taped it with a tiny Dictaphone-type gadget that he borrowed from his grandmother.

A short time later, he purchased the Sony Walkman-style tape recorder. When that broke, he briefly used his home console cassette machine stuffed in a backpack that a beneficiant soundman let him plug in.

“I was using, at times, pretty lackluster equipment, simply because I had no money to buy anything better,” he said. Later, he moved on to digital audio tape, or DAT, and, as technology progressed, to solid-state digital recorders.

Jacobs doesn’t think about himself obsessive or, as many call him, an archivist. He says he’s just a music fan. He figured if he was going to attend a few live shows a week anyway, why not doc them? In the early years, he contended with contentious membership house owners who tried to forestall him from taping.

But they finally relented as he grew to become a fixture in the music scene, and many started letting the “taper guy” in for free.

Author Bob Mehr, who wrote about Jacobs in 2004 for the Chicago Reader, calls him one of town’s cultural establishments.

“He’s a character. I think you have to be, to do what he does,” Mehr said. “But I think he proved over time that his intentions were really pure.”

After a local filmmaker made a documentary about Jacobs in 2023, a volunteer with the Internet Archive reached out to counsel his assortment be preserved. “Before all the tapes started not working because of time, just disintegrating, I finally said yes,” he said.

The assortment options early-in-their-career performances from different and experimental artists like R.E.M., The treatment, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk. AP

Boxes stuffed with tapes

Once a month, Brian Emerick makes the journey from the Chicago suburbs to Jacobs’ home in town to decide up 10 or 20 bins each stuffed with 50 or 100 tapes. Emerick’s job is to switch — in real time — the analog recordings to digital recordsdata that might be despatched to other volunteers who combine and grasp the exhibits for add to the archive.

Emerick has a room devoted to his setup of outdated cassette and DAT decks.

“So many of the machines I find are broken. They’re trashed. And so I learned how to fix those, get them running again,” said Emerick. “Currently, I have 10 working cassette decks, and I run those all simultaneously.”

Jacobs doesn’t think about himself obsessive or, as many call him, an archivist. He says he’s just a music fan. AP

Emerick estimates he’s digitized at least 5,500 exhibits since late 2024 and that it can take another few years to full the project.

The digital recordsdata are claimed by a dozen or so volunteer-engineers in the US, UK and Germany who present the metadata and clean up the audio.

Among them is Neil deMause in Brooklyn, who said he’s always impressed by the audio constancy of the unique tapes, particularly contemplating Jacobs was utilizing “weird RadioShack mics” and other primitive gear.

“Especially after the first couple years, he’s got it so dialed in that some of these recordings, on, like, crappy little cassette tapes from the early 90s, sound incredible,” deMause said.

Emerick pointed to a 1984 James Brown concert as a gem he found in the stacks.

The digital recordsdata are claimed by a dozen or so volunteer-engineers in the US, UK and Germany who present the metadata and clean up the audio. AP

Jacobs stopped recording a few years in the past as worsening health issues sapped his want to exit and see live shows. AP

Often, the toughest job is determining music titles.

Occasionally, Jacobs saved helpful notes, but the volunteers steadily spend days consulting each other, looking out and even reaching out to artists to make sure the setlists are precisely documented.

Jacobs said the bulk of the artists he recorded are happy to have their work preserved. As for copyright issues, he’s comfortable to take away recordings if requested, but added that only one or two musicians so far have requested that their materials be taken down.

“I think that the general consensus is, it’s easier to say I’m sorry than to ask for permission,” he said. The Internet Archive declined to remark for this story. David Nimmer, a longtime copyright attorney who also teaches at UCLA, said that under anti-bootlegging legal guidelines, the artists technically own the unique compositions and live recordings. But since neither Jacobs nor the archive are profiting from the endeavor, lawsuits appear unlikely.

The Replacements, a foundational punk-alternative band, have been so comfortable with Jacobs’ tape of a 1986 show that they blended some of it in with a soundboard recording.

They launched it in 2023 as a live album as half of a box set produced by Mehr.

Jacobs stopped recording a few years in the past as worsening health issues sapped his want to exit and see live shows. But he still enjoys experiencing live music he finds online, a lot of it recorded by a new era of followers.

“Since everybody’s got a cellphone, anybody can record a concert,” he said.

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