On a humid July night in 1989, a young music fan named Aadam Jacobs slipped a compact Sony cassette recorder into his pocket and walked into a small Chicago club called Dreamerz. He was there to see an up-and-coming band from Washington play their debut show in the city.
After a sharp blast of guitar feedback, a lanky 20-year-old stepped to the microphone. “Hello, we’re Nirvana,” Kurt Cobain announced politely. “We’re from Seattle.” Then the band, still a quartet at the time, launched into “School,” a riff-heavy song that would later become a cult favourite, reports AP from Chicago.
Jacobs pressed record. Hidden in the shadows, he documented the fledgling band in raw, fiery form, more than two years before Nirvana’s seismic breakthrough with Nevermind.
That grainy cassette tape, recorded surreptitiously by a fan who simply wanted to remember the show, would eventually find its way into one of the most extraordinary live music archives ever assembled.
Jacobs, now 59, didn’t start out as an archivist. He started as a teenager taping songs off the radio. Then, in 1984, a friend gave him some advice: “You can just take a tape recorder into a show, sneak it in, record the whole thing.” Jacobs borrowed his grandmother’s tiny Dictaphone and never looked back.
Over four decades, he would record more than 10,000 concerts. He moved from cassettes to digital audio tape to solid-state recorders. He became a fixture in Chicago’s music scene, contending with hostile club owners who eventually relented and let the “taper guy” in for free.
The resulting collection is a treasure trove. Now being systematically catalogued, digitised, and uploaded by a team of devoted volunteers, the Aadam Jacobs Collection is finding a permanent home at the Internet Archive, the nonprofit online repository. There, it is slowly becoming available for free streaming and download.
The collection features early-career performances from alternative giants: R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, and Björk. There is even a 1988 concert by hip-hop pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Devotees of the jam band Phish were thrilled to discover a previously uncirculated 1990 show. And there are hundreds of sets by smaller artists so obscure that even fans with the most esoteric tastes would not know them.
All of it, including that Nirvana recording with its audio cleaned up, is slowly seeing the light of day.
The man behind it all does not consider himself obsessive. “I’m just a music fan,” he insists. Author Bob Mehr, who profiled Jacobs for the Chicago Reader, calls him one of Chicago’s cultural institutions. “He’s a character,” Mehr says. “But he proved over time that his intentions were really pure.”
For years, Jacobs kept his tapes in boxes. That changed after a local filmmaker made a documentary about him in 2023. A volunteer from the Internet Archive reached out and suggested the collection be preserved. “Before all the tapes started disintegrating, I finally said yes,” Jacobs recalls.
Enter Brian Emerick. Once a month, Emerick drives from the Chicago suburbs to Jacobs’ house, picking up 10 or 20 boxes. Each box contains 50 to 100 cassette tapes. Emerick’s job is to transfer—in real time—the analog recordings to digital files. He has a room devoted entirely to a wall of outdated cassette and DAT decks.
“So many of the machines I find are broken,” Emerick says. “I learned how to fix them. Currently, I have 10 working cassette decks, and I run them all simultaneously.” Since late 2024, he has digitised at least 5,500 shows. He believes it will take another few years to finish.
The digital files are then claimed by a dozen volunteer sound engineers across the U.S., U.K., and Germany. They add metadata, clean up the audio, and solve the hardest puzzle: figuring out song titles. Sometimes Jacobs kept notes. More often, volunteers spend days consulting each other and even reaching out to artists to ensure accuracy.
Volunteer Neil deMause in Brooklyn says he is constantly impressed by the audio quality, especially given Jacobs used “weird RadioShack mics.” “He’s got it so dialled in that some of these recordings from crappy little cassette tapes sound incredible,” deMause says.
Occasionally, Emerick unearths a gem. He points to a 1984 James Brown concert as a standout—the Godfather of Soul captured by a fan with a hidden recorder.
As for copyright, Jacobs says the vast majority of artists are pleased to have their work preserved. He will remove recordings if asked, but only one or two musicians have ever requested that. “It’s easier to say I’m sorry than to ask for permission,” he says with a smile. Copyright attorney David Nimmer notes that while artists technically own their live recordings, lawsuits are unlikely since neither Jacobs nor the archive is profiting.
One band, The Replacements, was so happy with Jacobs’ tape of a 1986 show that they mixed it with a soundboard recording and released it in 2023 as a live album.
Jacobs stopped recording a few years ago due to worsening health. But he still enjoys live music online, much of it recorded by a new generation of fans with cellphones.
“Since everybody’s got a cellphone, anybody can record a concert,” he says.
Still, there is something irreplaceable about his collection. These aren’t pristine soundboard recordings. They are memories—smuggled past bouncers in the pockets of a kid who just wanted to hold onto the night. And now, decades later, the rest of the world can finally listen.
