In early April, a college friend – and my sometime-time personal musical sherpa – sent me a cryptic, two-line message which contained just the link to the Aadam Jacobs collection on the Internet Archive) and the postscript “You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.”
Thus began an obsession that has consumed my days (and nights) for the last five weeks. My early fascination with the archive ultimately led to the development of a custom web app for exploring the collection – and, in turn, hundreds of hours of streaming.
Much has been written about Aadam’s story that I won’t recapitulate here. Rather, I wanted to take a moment in this venue to describe what the collection has meant to me.
As it happens, neither my friend nor I are actually what you might call “live music guys.” While he and I share many similarities – and, crucially, overlapping musical tastes – with Aadam, we both prefer the refined product of a studio-produced record to that of a live performance. For my money, I’d rather listen to what the artist has enshrined as the best possible iteration of their songs rather than whatever they’re able to muster on-stage with limited or variable resources. Call it snobbery or a kind of completism, but it is nevertheless a preference borne of reverence for the artist and the art itself.
And though bootlegs have a long and respectable history – and can, at times, make for a truly novel or thrilling listening experience – they’ve never really seemed like an essential part of fandom to me. A surprise guest, a unique cover or a particularly rousing rendition of a song from a band’s catalogue during a live show might capture my interest, but it is usually fleeting.
In the Dead and Phish fan communities, “boots” represent a kind of magical panopoly, relics that must be preserved, distributed and discussed (endlessly). They are the coin of the realm in that subculture, so to speak. This cultural imperative is less established in the punk and indie world, however, where a band’s transitory or sometimes-shambolic live performances might be read as a direct assault on the preservationist ethos itself. The Sex Pistols, as just one example, didn’t even finish their American tour – or really perform any actual songs in their last set – before summarily disbanding. The punk ethic is founded on the acceptance (and embrace) of impermanence, it seems.
In other words, if you’d asked me five weeks ago, I probably would not have classified myself as a member of the target audience for this collection.
And yet, as my friend and I explored the collection and traded notes, we quickly came to the conclusion that, in fact, this was something different, richer and more worthwhile than a just a CD or playlist of live tracks. This was a story about a place – and a resident of said place, a fan, whose love of bands and the Chicago club scene compelled him to become an archivist. This was Alan Lomax for the post-punk era. These were field recordings which, in their totality, represent a project every bit as ethnographically substantive as Lomax’s efforts to preserve folk music.
Unlike Lomax’s work however, the moments captured by Jacobs feel perhaps even more relevant by virtue of their proximity to our own era. Hell, in some cases, they can even intersect with our own lived experiences. As a former Chicagoan, I’ve been thrilled to stumble into shows that I actually attended (or have spent years harboring regret for having missed). My friend, a polymath and one-time multi-instrumentalist, was delighted to find decades-old performances of his own amongst the collection. Here is a time capsule that – unbeknownst to us – contained dozens of dutifully-preserved artifacts from our own lives.
And, perhaps most excitingly, we can now revisit them, with all the perspective that comes with the passage of time. We can “rewind the tape” on an otherwise lost experience and really listen this time for the beer bottles hitting the trash can or the stray comment from the crowd or the stage. We can put ourselves in the place and imagine the mise-en-scène of the club on that night or the weather in Chicago on that particular spring day. And as the reels roll on and the band winds up for the encore, we can get lost again for a second, pondering all that has been created, lost or destroyed in the years since.
Perhaps this is all just the over-enthusiastic ramblings of a former history teacher and aging punk, but the potential for deep exploration and meaning-making proffered by Aadam’s collection feels like something precious – and demanding of some kind of urgency. Whereas most of the internet is awash in high-engagement, low-context (and otherwise disposable) distractions, Aadam’s collection is very nearly the opposite. It is not a carousel ride past something political, something comical, some kind of advertising and then your work-friend’s reposts. It is an integrated, parasocial experience in waiting, a vicarious trip into the daily life of an actual person, the places he frequented and the performances he gave his time and attention to.
I’d like to think that means quite a lot – that is, if one is only willing to take the time to listen.