Aadam Jacobs “secretly recorded over 10,000 local concerts since 1989. Now, they are cleaned up and ready to listen to for free online.”
“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.
After a blast of guitar feedback, 22-year-old Kurt Cobain politely announced to the crowd at the small club called Dreamerz: ‘Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.’ With that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the riff-heavy first song, ‘School.’
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 Nevermind.
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.”
Jacobs was a bit older and a lot cooler than me, but I was hoping we’d been at more of the same shows, given my proximity and love of Chicago. Seems like we saw a lot of the same bands (Belle & Sebastian, Pavement, Liz Phair, etc.), just at different times.
But Jacobs was at Pitchfork back in 2007 when All Tomorrow’s Parties hosted Sonic Youth doing Daydream in its entirety. Awesome to revisit that magical day, even if he didn’t record the Slint or GZA sets.
Gotta dig thru my ticket stubs, see what else I can look for.