The kids won’t know, but recording things used to require a lot of equipment. It wasn’t a matter of just whipping out your phone, you had to have a recording device and the piece you were putting the recording onto and sometimes yet another gizmo to play the completed recording. I’ve described before my father’s intricate home VHS library of movies he recorded off the TV, and he had an equally insane and/or impressive music collection that spanned LPs to cassettes to CDs. So here’s a story after my father’s own heart: Chicagoan Aadam Jacobs has been tape recording live concerts onto cassettes since 1989. He became such a reliable presence, he earned himself the nickname “taper guy.” Now Taper Guy Aadam, along with a US-European alliance of volunteers, are digitizing his nearly 40 years-worth of concert recordings and putting them online for the world to enjoy — for free.
A music fan from Chicago is digitizing and uploading his four-decade-long collection of live concert recordings to the internet.
Aadam Jacobs, now 59, began a hobby of recording live concerts at a 1989 Nirvana concert, where he used a tape recorder to capture the performance. Jacobs met a fellow music fan who suggested that he tape the shows, and relive the performance for free via the tapes.
As someone who attended multiple gigs every week, Jacobs thought documenting them would be a worthwhile hobby. In the early years, he faced backlash from club owners who took issue with his taping. However, he soon gained a reputation as a staple of the Chicago music scene, and many allowed the “taper guy” to enter for free.
Now, after recording more than 10,000 concerts on analog tape, a group of volunteers in the U.S. and Europe are taking it upon themselves to catalogue, digitize and upload each of the tapes one by one. They are being shared to Jacobs’ eponymous Internet Archive.
Once a month, volunteer Brian Emerick picks up near 20 boxes, each stuffed with 50 to 100 tapes, for digitization. These digital files are then sent to other volunteers who mix and master the shows for upload to the archive.
The music featuring in the collection varies widely. From indie rock, punk rock, alternative music, to hip-hop, rap and experimental. Artists like Phish, Sonic Youth, R.E.M., The Cure, and Pixies make up some of the archive.
This is such a great story! (Well, once you get over the mathematical + existential shock of the reality that nearly 40 years have passed since 1989, and what that means about your own lifespan within that time frame… speaking for a friend, of course.) As I noted before, so much of this makes me think of my father. Having an international coalition of people volunteer to digitize one man’s amateur recordings? That was the stuff of my father’s dreams! The critical difference, though, is that my father recorded off the TV or collected live recordings other people had made. Aadam “Taper Guy” Jacobs has spent his life putting in the work on the ground. And it seems it’s been a life very well lived, judging by Aadam’s picture from his archive — the man looks at least a decade younger than 59! Good for him. He has the all too rare giving spirit to make his treasures available for everyone to enjoy for free. And in return, people are donating their time to make it happen. No small operation, as digitizing such a huge inventory involves cassette decks, mastering, metadata, and setlist verification. And to be clear: this is a work in progress, nowhere near a completed archive. 5,500 tapes have been digitized since the project started in 2024. I just hope the work is allowed to proceed. Meaning I really don’t want this reporting to lead to artists’ lawyers or business managers greedily taking steps to shut it down. Lawyers can be that way.
Photos via Aadam Jacobs collection on Facebook