Chicago Tape Guy v Niluccio on noise

The story of the "Chicago Tape Guy" Aadam Jacobs has apparently been knocking around for a few years, though I only came across it the other day via an Associated Press article. 

Aadam Jacobs takes a break from taping (pic: Nam Y. Huh / AP)

It's the story of how Jacobs recorded thousands of gigs in Chicago venues between 1984 and (I think) 2019. Thirty-five years of taking various recording devices into shows in Chicago, sometimes surreptitiously but mostly very openly, and building an impressive archive of recordings. He apparently now has more than 10,000 tapes (and files), some of the tapes comprising three separate gigs. According to Wikipedia, Jacobs may have as many as 30,000 concert recordings. The bootleg collection to end all bootleg collections. Back in 1984, a school friend apparently casually suggested he could "sneak" a recording device into the shows he was already attending, he gave it a go with his grandmother's cassette-dictaphone and ... he never looked back. Aha, I can relate! Yep, because I too have been doing these "sneaky" recordings at gigs for years and years. Not since 1984, admittedly, but for a pretty long stretch - in my case since 2000. Like Jacobs, I also recorded my first gig with a cheapo cassette-dictaphone (not my grandmother's). It was at a Schneider TM gig on 5 November 2000, with me thinking, "er, what'll it sound like if I use this at the gig tonight?". Even without my nerdy dictaphone taping endeavour, it was already a slightly strange gig: a low-key free show on a Sunday night at the Great Eastern Hotel next to Liverpool Street Station. Why was there a gig there, of all places? With its posh bathrooms and fancy lifts up to a big concert room? And why was it free, and why was there apparently never anything else going on there? 

Choose your fighter: some of the devices in the Niluccio on noise armoury

Anyway, coming back to the Chicago Tape Guy, I don't - at all - claim to be in the same league as him. Evidently, he became a Chicago phenomenon. Known to all the venue managers, often let in free, and even, sometimes, hooking up his recording devices to sound desks, Jacobs was a "character" on the live scene. Among the various devices he took in with him was a full-size home stereo cassette deck which he carried around in a backpack. And he was apparently pretty conspicuous with his headphones and his self-involved efforts to get the sound levels right. It's a world away from my half-hearted gig-recording exploits. Far too self-conscious to risk being labelled the "London Tape Guy", I've simply used various hand-held minidisc or digital recorders as discretely as possible, while also going months without recording anything at all. The big question with all of this - for people like Jacobs as well as more humble bootlegger types like me - is: what's it all for? For Jacobs it seems to have been a way of producing a permanent record of the gigs he attended, something akin to a souvenir (I notice in some of the articles on Jacobs that he also appears to have bulging folders of concert ticket stubs and other paraphernalia). My motivation was probably a bit more about having the music, in some cases later taking a few bits and pieces from these recordings and threading them into some of my interminable podcasts. Whatever. With Jacobs, who appears to have stopped his gig recording altogether (seemingly so as not to damage the relationship with his partner), the focus these days is on the ongoing archival effort to digitise this enormous collection, a major project being handled by the Internet Archive (see this article for an explanation of how this "mad undertaking" is being done). To date there appear to be 2,427 of his gigs online, out of which I've listened to precisely ... one: A Certain Ratio at the Bismarck Theatre on 6 August 1985. If I'm honest, I was slightly disappointed by the sound quality of this recording. To me it sounds quite echo-y and far-away, but hey, you should hear some of my recordings  - super-loud crowd chatter, immense distortion from the PA, horrible scraping and rustling as I accidently bash the mic. Thirty-five years of gig recording is no mean feat, and I must admit I'm always impressed by projects with this kind of outsized commitment. And yes, I'm also a little envious of the Chicago Tape Guy (why oh why did I leave my own efforts so late?). Then again, if he's stopped taping and I'm still doing it then it's only another nine years and then I'll have been at it for 35 years. Yes, then AP will have to send a reporter to interview me (or not). Anyway, a thought occurs to me: on my one visit to Chicago, back in April 2018 (it was constantly freezing-cold in the city I recall), I went to a gig at The Empty Bottle, a longstanding Chicago venue which Jacobs also went to numerous times. Was he, I wonder, there on Monday 2 April, down the front taping Absolutely Not and No Men? I don't think I remember anyone at the gig looking like a "tape guy". Great! That means I may have the only recording of the show! Oh no, did I actually record any of those shows I went to in Chicago? Er, perhaps not. I don't think I bothered to pack the Zoom recorder for the US trip. Damn, the Chicago Tape Guy wins again ... 

PS: I think what's not really considered in the various articles on Aadam Jacobs is the inherent tension between the apparently obsessive desire to tape, tape, tape, and the "use value" of the end-result recordings. In other words, was Jacobs actually listening back to these recordings on any kind of regular basis while he was in the midst of this epic taping effort? With this level of primary recording, I would have thought that play-backs would have been limited and eventually more or less unmanageable. Even with my own less extensive recording history I've definitely felt a sort of internal "pressure" to listen back to the stuff I've recorded, at least occasionally. To not do this would seem to be an admission that the whole process is more a kind of ritualistic behaviour than something related to er, actually enjoying the music. So yeah, I do try to occasionally dip into my live recordings, in my case all now stored on that not-exactly-very-fashionable format, minidisc. Despite what I said earlier about the dubious quality of some of these recordings, at their best they can actually sound really good, especially the non-rock stuff, the music that doesn't blast out at you at 200 watts per channel. A case in point is this recording of the Brandon Allen Trio (from 8 July 2007 at the now-closed Black Gardenia club in Soho to be precise). For some obscure reason I've ended up with a CD copy of the minidisc in question, and here it is, in all its CDR glory. For the last several days I've been spinning this pretty regularly. It's top sax-led bebop action, with the saxophone somehow booming out of the mix in the most fantastic way. Yeah man, all hail the bootleg recording. Murky but wonderful sounds recorded by a tape guy - or tape woman - who went to gigs for the sheer pleasure of turning on their machine, pointing their puny mic toward the musicians and pressing "REC". 

The Brandon Allen Trio bursting out of the mix

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