Where to Start With the 10,000 Concert Archive Everyone’s Talking About
A Chicago taper spent 40 years documenting live music. These are the 10 shows to hear first.
There’s a new archive online that, if you care about music even a little bit, you’re going to lose hours to. Chicago legend Aadam Jacobs spent the better part of four decades bringing a tape recorder to shows and walked away with over 10,000 live recordings, everything from early R.E.M. and The Replacements to bands that never made it out of their local scene. That 10,000 number is absurd. At one show a day, it would take 27 and a half years to hit that.
As of this writing, 2,477 of those shows are up on the Internet Archive (there’s also an iTunes-style player if you don’t have an aversion to vibecoded sites). Archivist Brian Emerick says more are coming soon, including a 1984 James Brown set and 1989 Pixies performance; this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The collection spans from 1984 to 2019 all around Chicago. Some of the mid-80s tapes are rough, but the majority of these sound great. Sometimes it’s straight soundboard, sometimes room mics, someti…
