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On July 8, 1989, a young 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.<\/p>\n
After a blast of guitar feedback, 20-year-old Kurt Cobain<\/a> politely announced to the crowd at the small club called Dreamerz: \u201cHello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.\u201d With that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the riff-heavy first song, \u201cSchool.\u201d<\/p>\n Jacobs surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band in raw, fiery form more than two years before Nirvana’s global breakthrough with the album \u201cNevermind.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 devoted volunteers in the U.S. and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and uploading them one by one. <\/p>\n The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection<\/a> is an internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the scene blossomed and became mainstream. The collection features early-in-their-career performances from alternative and experimental artists like R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Bj\u00f6rk. <\/p>\n There’s also a smattering of hip-hop, including a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Devotees of Phish were thrilled to discover that a previously uncirculated 1990 show by the jam band is included. And there are hundreds of sets by smaller artists who are unlikely to be known to even fans with the most obscure tastes. <\/p>\n All of it is slowly becoming available for streaming and free download at the nonprofit online repository Internet Archive, including that nascent Nirvana show recording, with the audio from Jacobs’ cassette recorder cleaned up.<\/p>\n By the time Jacobs snuck his tape recorder into that Nirvana gig, he had been recording concerts for five years already. As a teen discovering music, Jacobs began taping songs off the radio. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd I eventually met a fellow who said, \u2018You can just take a tape recorder into a show with you, just sneak it in, record the show.\u2019 And I thought, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s cool.\u2019 So I got started,\u201d Jacobs, now 59, recalled. <\/p>\n He doesn’t remember offhand what that first concert was in 1984, but he taped it with a tiny Dictaphone-type device that he borrowed from his grandmother. A short time later, he bought the Sony Walkman-style tape recorder. When that broke, he briefly used his home console cassette machine stuffed in a backpack that a generous soundman let him plug in. <\/p>\n \u201cI was using, at times, pretty lackluster equipment, simply because I had no money to buy anything better,\u201d he said. Later, he moved on to digital audio tape, or DAT, and, as technology progressed, to solid-state digital recorders. <\/p>\n Jacobs doesn’t consider 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 concerts a week anyway, why not document them? In the early years, he contended with contentious club owners who tried to prevent him from taping. But they eventually relented as he became a fixture in the music scene, and many began letting the \u201ctaper guy\u201d in for free. <\/p>\n Author Bob Mehr, who wrote about Jacobs in 2004<\/a> for the Chicago Reader, calls him one of the city’s cultural institutions. <\/p>\n \u201cHe’s a character. I think you have to be, to do what he does,\u201d Mehr said. \u201cBut I think he proved over time that his intentions were really pure.”<\/p>\n