On July 8, 1989, a young music fan named Adam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band from Washington for their first show in Chicago.
After a flurry of feedback on the guitar, he turns 20 Kurt Cobain “Hey, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle,” he politely announced to the crowd at the small club called Dreamerz. And with that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the soulful first song, “School.”
Jacobs surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band in fiery, raw form more than two years before Nirvana’s global breakthrough with “Nevermind.”
Jacobs went on to record more than 10,000 concerts, with increasingly sophisticated equipment, over four decades in Chicago and other cities. Now a group of dedicated volunteers in the United States and Europe are systematically indexing, digitizing and uploading these files one by one.
Growing Adam Jacobs Collection It is a valuable online treasure for music lovers, especially fans of indie rock and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the scene flourished and became mainstream. The group features early-career performances from alternative and experimental artists such as REM, The Cure, The Pixies, The Alternatives, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk.
There’s also a bit of hip-hop, including a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Phish fans were thrilled to discover that the jam band’s previously uncirculated 1990 demo was included. There are hundreds of collections of art by minor artists who are unlikely to be known even to fans with the most obscure tastes.
All of it is slowly becoming available for streaming and free download at the non-profit online repository Internet Archive, including a recording of Nirvana’s fledgling show, with the audio cleaned from a Jacobs cassette recorder.
By the time Jacobs brought his tape recorder into a Nirvana concert, he had been recording concerts for five years already. As a teenager discovering music, Jacobs began recording songs on the radio.
“Eventually I met a colleague who said, ‘You can take a tape recorder with you to a show, and then sneak in and record the show.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s great.’” “I started,” Jacobs, now 59, recalls.
He doesn’t remember offhand what the first concert was in 1984, but he recorded it with a small dictaphone he borrowed from his grandmother. Shortly after, he bought a Sony Walkman recorder. When that broke, he briefly used his home console cassette machine stuffed in his backpack and which a generous audio technician had allowed him to connect.
“I used, at times, very dull equipment, simply because I didn’t have the money to buy anything better,” he said. Later, he moved to digital audio tape, or DAT, and as technology advanced, to solid-state digital recorders.
Jacobs does not consider himself a geek, 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 concerts a week anyway, why not document them? In the early years, he faced controversial club owners who tried to prevent him from registering. But they eventually relented when he became a staple of the music scene, and many began letting the “Taper Man” in for free.
Author Bob Mehr, who He wrote about Jacobs in 2004 For a Chicago reader, it is called one of the city’s cultural institutions.
“He’s a character. I think you should do what he does,” Mehr said. “But I think he proved over time that his intentions were truly pure.”
After a local film director made… A documentary about Jacobs in 2023a volunteer at the Internet Archive reached out to suggest preserving his collection. “Before all the tapes became timeless and just fell apart, I finally said yes,” he said.
Brian Emerick makes a trip once a month from the Chicago suburbs to Jacobs’ home in the city to pick up 10 or 20 boxes filled with 50 or 100 tapes. Emerick’s job is to transfer analog recordings – in real time – into digital files that can be sent to other volunteers who mix and master the performances to upload to the archive. Emerick has a dedicated room for his setup of old cassette tapes and DAT decks.
“A lot of the machines I found were broken. They were destroyed. So I learned how to fix them and get them working again,” Emerick said. “Currently, I have 10 working cassette tapes, and I play them all at once.”
Emerick estimates that he has digitized at least 5,500 displays since late 2024 and that it will take a few more years to complete the project. The digital files are claimed by about a dozen volunteer engineers in the US, UK and Germany who provide metadata and clean up the audio. Among them is Neil DeMoss in Brooklyn, who said he always admired the fidelity of the sound on the original tapes, especially considering that Jacobs was using “weird Radio Shack microphones” and other primitive equipment.
“Especially after the first couple of years, it got to the point where some of these recordings, for example, the crappy little cassette tapes from the early ’90s, sounded amazing,” Demos said.
Emerick pointed to a 1984 James Brown concert as a gem he discovered in the piles.
Often, the hardest task is knowing song titles. Sometimes, Jacobs kept helpful notes, but often volunteers spent days consulting with each other, researching, and even communicating with artists to make sure the setlists were accurately documented.
Jacobs said the majority of artists he signs are happy to keep their work. As for copyright concerns, he is happy to remove recordings if requested, but added that only one or two musicians so far have requested their recordings be removed.
“I think the general consensus is that it’s easier to say I’m sorry than to ask for permission,” he said. The Internet Archive declined to comment for this story. Under anti-trafficking laws, artists technically own the original compositions and live recordings, said David Niemer, a longtime copyright lawyer who also teaches at UCLA. But since neither Jacobs nor the archives benefited from this endeavor, lawsuits seem unlikely.
The Alternatives, a founding band of alternative punk, were so pleased with Jacobs’ tape of the 1986 show that they mixed some of it with a soundboard recording. They released it in 2023 as a live album as part of a box set produced by Mehr.
Jacobs stopped recording a few years ago, as worsening health problems sapped his desire to get out and see concerts. But he still enjoys experiencing the live music he finds online, much of which has been recorded by a new generation of fans.
“Since everyone has a cell phone, anyone can record a concert,” he said.