A volunteer project is turning Chicagoan’s collection of live recordings into online archive that can play on forever

Aadam Jacobs has been thinking a lot about the late Chicago photographer Vivian Maier.

“Remember how she took a million photos and after she died, they were all found … and now she’s famous?” he said about the local nanny/prolific street photographer who never got to see her life’s work celebrated before she passed in 2009.

“My tapes aren’t going to last forever, and neither am I, and I didn’t want this collection to be discovered long after I die.”

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Jacobs is talking about his collection of 6,000 cassette and DAT tapes that — not unlike Maier’s unassuming archiving — capture a unique slice of life and culture. In his case, an epoch of live music.

Starting in 1984 and up until recently, Jacobs brought tape recorders to thousands of indie, rock and punk shows, capturing full audio sets of everyone from R.E.M. at the UIC Pavilion in 1986 to Depeche Mode at Aragon in 1985 to Nirvana (twice) in 1989, once at Metro and once at the now-defunct Club Dreamerz. And the list goes on.

“I began doing it after learning that I could sneak a tape recorder into concerts from a friend of mine. I was 17 at the time and I’d only just gone to concerts or listened to them on the radio,” he recalls. “And it snowballed. At first, it was just a teenage kid who just loved to go to shows, but then it felt like my job to capture everything that was important to me. It was an obsession.”

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Jacobs’ collection — which up until recently was largely stored in his Hermosa basement — has naturally been a point of curiosity for music fans, especially after the release of a 2023 documentary on Jacobs titled “Melomaniac,” from producers Charles Cotterman and Katlin Schneider. Word trickled into the “tapers” community and soon Jacobs had offers to help digitize the collection for posterity’s sake. With a good chunk of those files now online at Internet Archive, and accessible for free, interest has been soaring with the project in the news again.

“One of the volunteers in our group knew someone at Associated Press and got in contact with them, and they wanted to do an article,” said Brian Emerick of Des Plaines, one of the main coordinators in the project who has also been taping shows since 2002 and found out about Jacobs’ project through the online community board at Taperssection.com. Emerick is the liaison between physical to digital, meaning that once a month, he drives to Jacobs’ house to pick up about 10 to 15 boxes full of 50 to 100 tapes each, brings them home, rips them to digital files, and then sends them off to a team of about 10 fellow volunteers around the world, many of whom also found out about the project on the same forum. They then mix and master the audio, upload it to Internet Archive and add pertinent background details of the who, where and when of each show, much of it pulled from Jacobs’ copious journals.

Emerick estimates he spends about 60 hours a week on the project, when he’s not working as a database administrator for a law firm. He handles the project with incredible care, including a detailed Excel spreadsheet where he logs everything. “I have about 10,792 rows on it,” he said, breaking down the numbers. “Aadam’s given us about 6,000 tapes, and there’s somewhere in the range of about 1,500 digital files as well. I know a lot of the articles have said there’s 10,000 concerts but it’s really 10,000 sets, two sets a night, two different bands.”

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Currently, there are 2,500 shows available online with roughly 10 new ones added daily. Emerick teases upcoming entries from James Brown, George Clinton, Jane’s Addiction, Built To Spill, Broken Social Scene and “a lot of emo.”

While there is still a long way to go, there is also an endpoint. “I haven't recorded anything in about three years,” Jacobs said. “It’s not to say that I won't in the future, but I just don't have that feeling right now. It’s just not fun for me anymore, unfortunately.” Today’s landscape doesn’t help matters — now anyone can record a show with video and slap it onto YouTube, which takes the magic and rarity out of the process.

Jacobs was unique in his approach, always doing his recordings without any financial gain in mind and “99% aboveboard,” done with the blessings of artists and their teams (as opposed to bootlegs, which are done in secret for a profit). Even so, there were some challenges.

Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times

“I got in big trouble with the Metro in 1990 and wasn't allowed in there for five years,” he admits, marking a significant gap in the collection. “I missed Britpop! There’s no Oasis.”

But there are also great stories, pulled from across the globe, since Jacobs traveled to record shows all over the Midwest, New York, Tennessee, Portland, Oregon, and even as far away as England and New Zealand. “I had a lot of adventures, usually involving me getting there and getting back or finding a place to sleep or whatever,” Jacobs said, remembering a particular moment of riding the bus with Stereolab from Chicago to Minneapolis. Or the time that he was literally the only person at The Nobodies show at Fireside Bowl in 1995.

“There were a lot of bands like that, a lot of local bands too, where Aadam might’ve caught their only live recording ever,” Emerick said.

“You could say there was a fear of missing out,” added Jacobs of how they found all these acts. “For most of the ’90s I bought records on a weekly basis or CDs. And I would just go through them all, constantly in search of something new and exciting. A band would put out one 7-inch and decide to come play Chicago, and I'd show up with my equipment and they'd be like, how do you even know who we are?”

That curiosity still lives in him today. Jacobs makes a living selling records at record shows and through consignment at High Voltage in Rogers Park, estimating he has an inventory of 12,000 vinyl albums in addition to a personal collection of 15,000. And he’ll have more special titles to add soon. Jacobs is working with an unnamed label for a full-scale physical release of selections from his recorded archives. Though he can’t reveal too much yet, he said, “details will follow.” That, too, goes back to the same mission: wanting to share the wealth with fellow music fans.

“I figured I might as well allow these tapes to be heard by everyone who wants to hear them because they’ve just been sitting in my home all these years doing nobody any good,” he said. “Now I‘m able to make a lot of people happy. There have been so many who have told me, ‘I’m so glad this exists.’”