For the last two years, friends of Aadam Jacobs have diligently been at work uploading his more than 10,000 concert recordings to the Internet Archive, a digital repository.
Jacobs, 59, is a Chicago institution. Beginning in the mid-1980s, he was a regular at concerts in the city, hanging out near the soundboard and taping shows. In that time, he recorded all kinds of acts, ranging from forgotten bands who were together for only a couple of months to Nirvana, before they were famous. In 1994, The Chicago Tribune wrote that Jacobs was: “A) A tireless audio documentarian. B) An eccentric but harmless mascot to the local indie rock scene. C) A freeloading pest.” (The article strongly hinted that he was, in fact, “D) All of the above.”)
After the release of a 2023 documentary on Jacobs, volunteers from the Internet Archive reached out to ask him if he would consider digitizing and uploading his collection of tapes.
The archive, known as the Aadam Jacobs Collection, now has thousands of Jacobs’s concert recordings, and a team of about 10 volunteers is working to upload more every day. The process will take years. But the early results present an extraordinary snapshot of how the Chicago music scene evolved over four decades.
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