10,000 Chicago Concert Recordings Are Being Uploaded to the Internet Archive: Nirvana, Phish, Sonic Youth, They Might Be Giants & More

Per­haps you’ve had the expe­ri­ence of mov­ing to a new city and imme­di­ate­ly being told that you’ve missed its gold­en age of live music. To an extent, this has hap­pened in more or less every peri­od of the past fifty or six­ty years. But what if the per­son regal­ing you with those sto­ries had an archive of more than 10,000 con­cert record­ings to back them up? Chicago’s Aadam Jacobs has made just such an archive, and a few years ago he and it became the sub­ject of Katlin Schnei­der’s doc­u­men­tary Melo­ma­ni­ac. Apart from their sto­ries of Jacobs’ exploits with his increas­ing­ly bulky record­ing rig, the var­i­ous rock musi­cians and club own­ers inter­viewed there­in express one con­cern above all: what will become of all his tapes in the future?

As so often, the Inter­net Archive has come to save the day. At its new­ly opened Aadam Jacobs Archive, you can now lis­ten to near­ly 2,500 of the con­cert record­ings that vol­un­teers have dig­i­tized and uploaded so far. In that more than a ter­abyte of files, you’ll find con­certs by Nir­vana, Phish, Tra­cy Chap­man, Depeche Mode, Flam­ing Lips, Stere­o­lab, Liz Phair, Son­ic Youth, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Björk, They Might Be Giants (record­ed four times in 1988 alone), and the Mekons, among many oth­ers.

If you have a cer­tain taste in rock — and espe­cial­ly if you belong to a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion — you may well, in the full­ness of time, find a Jacobs-record­ed show by your favorite band. But you’re just as like­ly to dis­cov­er a per­for­mance by the best act you’ve nev­er heard of before.

Pur­su­ing his avo­ca­tion of con­cert-record­ing with the indus­tri­ous­ness of a pro­fes­sion­al, and indeed an obses­sive one, Jacobs cap­tured mul­ti­ple shows each night at the height of his activ­i­ty. He has his par­tic­u­lar tastes, as empha­sized in Melo­ma­ni­ac, but also demon­strates remark­ably lit­tle dis­crim­i­na­tion about which bands are “cool” and which aren’t, to say noth­ing of their lev­el of com­mer­cial suc­cess. When Chica­go musi­cians first saw Jacobs’ famil­iar long-haired, heavy-back­packed fig­ure turn up at their own shows, they knew they had a chance of “mak­ing it.” Even so, as Jacobs acknowl­edges, there’s scant cor­re­la­tion between which bands blew up, which bands he likes as peo­ple, and which bands have cre­at­ed his favorite records. His tapes con­sti­tute a valu­able record of the sound of Chica­go between the eight­ies and the twen­ty-tens, and it will only grow more so, the more acces­si­ble it becomes. But as we enjoy it, we should also bear in mind the efforts of the man who cre­at­ed it, and the love of music he per­son­i­fies. Enter the archive here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jam­Base Launch­es a New Video Archive of 100,000 Stream­ing Con­certs: Phish, Wilco, the Avett Broth­ers, Grate­ful Dead & Much More

The Live Music Archive Lets You Stream/Download More Than 250,000 Con­cert Recordings–for Free

Stream a Mas­sive Archive of Grate­ful Dead Con­certs from 1965–1995

Rock Scene: Browse a Com­plete Online Archive of the Irrev­er­ent Mag­a­zine That Chron­i­cled the 1970s Rock & Punk Scene

Free Archive of Audio Inter­views with Rock, Jazz & Folk Leg­ends Now on iTunes

Nir­vana Before They Were Nir­vana: Watch Their 1988 Per­for­mance Record­ed in a Radio Shack

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.