Nirvana, Pixies and The Smiths sit in a 10,000-concert Chicago tape archive

Nirvana played a Chicago room called Dreamerz on 8 July 1989, two years before Nevermind, opening for a local band named Precious Wax Drippings. Aadam Jacobs was standing there with a tape running. That recording is one of roughly 10,000 concerts he captured around the city across 36 years, and the whole collection is now being uploaded to the Internet Archive for anyone to hear free.

About 2,200 of those sets were taped at Lounge Ax, the small rock room on Lincoln Avenue that opened in 1987 and was run for most of its life by Julia Adams and Sue Miller. Jacobs recorded his first show there on 5 July 1989, a Duncan Imperials gig, and more than a decade later he recorded the club's last night, played by The Coctails. Lounge Ax shut for good on 15 January 2000, after a farewell week that brought in Wilco, Eleventh Dream Day and Shellac.

The archive reaches well past one venue. Pixies turn up from Metro on 10 August 1989, Husker Du from West End on 16 June 1984, and The Smiths from the Aragon Ballroom on 7 June 1985, which was the opening night of their first American tour. There are early Liz Phair sets too, from the years when almost nobody was turning up. Phair has stayed close to her own back catalogue since, and this year put two unreleased songs on a limited seven-inch.

Jacobs made his first recording in 1984, aged 17, at a show by the British free improvisation group AMM. Once the habit took hold he was out most nights of the week. Through much of the 1990s he logged between 200 and 250 concerts a year, and he kept a written diary on every one of them.

He told Rolling Stone en Espanol that he usually asked the bands and the rooms for permission first, and often handed them copies afterwards. A handful were taped more discreetly, he admits, but he says the microphones were in plain sight for the overwhelming majority and everybody knew what he was doing. Neither he nor the Internet Archive takes any money from what is now filed as the Aadam Jacobs Collection.

Brian Emerick, who is running the digitisation, has done the counting. Eleventh Dream Day is the band Jacobs taped most often, at 166 shows. Counting solo performers as well, Robbie Fulks leads with 282. Dag Juhlin of Poi Dog Pondering and The Mekons also come in high. Emerick has been on the job since late 2024 with a team of around 15 volunteers, working through the tapes and the diaries that go with them.

Emerick's view of the recordings themselves is that Jacobs worked out microphone placement as he went and got remarkably good sound out of rooms he was learning on the job. Jacobs, asked for favourites, points to his many tapes of the Dutch band The Ex, and to a Wedding Present show at Lounge Ax on 9 March 1991.

He kept recording several nights a week until early 2020, when the pandemic closed venues everywhere. He used that time to sort the collection alphabetically and catalogue it properly, and found afterwards that the urge to keep taping had simply gone. Health problems followed. He caught a few isolated shows once concerts came back, and he has not made a recording in about three years.

Most of the material has been digitised, but the full run is a long way from being online. Emerick puts the upload rate at roughly 200 concerts a month with something like 8,000 still to go, which at 2,400 a year leaves close to three more years of work. Pixies, meanwhile, are still touring on their own terms and have booked an April 2027 date in Buenos Aires.

Jacobs says the point was never to miss anything that mattered the first time a band came through town. He has reached the stage where he would rather sit with what he already has, which is a fair position for a man who wrote down every gig he ever went to. The indie and alternative bands who passed through those rooms mostly have no other document of those nights at all.