Chicago-based music superfan Adam Jacobs has been recording concerts he’s attended since the 1980s, amassing an archive of over 10,000 tapes. Jacobs, now 59, knows that these cassettes degrade over time, so he agreed to have volunteers from the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, digitize the tapes.
So far, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted to the Internet Archive, including rare gems like Nirvana’s 1989 performance (the group didn’t break into mainstream audiences until they released the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991). Within the collection, you’ll also find previously unknown recordings by influential artists such as Sonic Youth, REM, Phish, Liz Phair, Pavement, and Neutral. Milk Hotel and many other punk groups.
For many of these recordings, Jacobs used fairly mediocre equipment, but volunteer audio engineers working with the Internet Archive made these tapes sound great.
One volunteer, Brian Emerick, drives to Jacobs’ house once a month to pick up a box of tapes, but he has to use an anachronistic cassette deck to play the tapes, which are then converted to digital files. From there, other volunteers can curate, organize, and label the recordings, and even track down song titles from forgotten punk bands.
The internet is good sometimes. And so is this 1988 recording by Tracy Chapman.
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