In early November 1985, an Evanston teenager named Aadam Jacobs took the CTA’s Red Line to see a concert by the Chicago punk rock band Naked Raygun at a movie theater in Uptown. Jacobs brought a Yamaha cassette deck, which he used to record the show with microphones he hung from the theater’s balcony. He’d begun taping concerts he attended the year before, and Jacobs would continue taping shows regularly until the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly in Chicago, amassing an immense archive.
That 1985 Naked Raygun show has become a limited-edition vinyl album, released Oct. 16, along with a selection of Jacobs’ recordings of performances by Eleventh Dream Day, another Chicago band at the vanguard of the city’s 1980s indie rock scene. “This Place Used to Be a Strip Joint (Live)” and “By the Time They Got to Lounge Ax (Live)” are the first two physical records sourced from Jacobs’ tapes and follow the same music being made available on major streaming platforms in mid-September.
Eleventh Dream Day will celebrate their record’s release with a concert at the Hideout on Oct. 21. For their part, Naked Raygun will release another live record on Nov. 6, a document of the band’s 2006 reunion concert at Riot Fest. Jacobs and Karl Marquardt, his partner in their fledgling label, Laughing Bee Music, are planning future releases, and a squad of volunteers has been putting Jacobs’ recordings online at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library.
Now 59, Jacobs has been obsessed with music since he first began listening to Top 40 radio as a preteen before gravitating to rock stations, then college radio. He’d already been taping concerts off the radio when an acquaintance told him he could record concerts in person. “I started going to the punk rock shows that I was going to already and bringing a little tape recorder along,” he recalls.
In 1993, he quit a record store job to have more time for taping, supporting himself with part-time work that over the years ranged from helping in his mother’s furniture store to delivering the Chicago Reader. “I wanted to live my life the way I wanted to,” Jacobs says. Lately, he’s supported himself by selling records from collections he’s inherited or purchased.
“I realized that I was never going to be able to live through these experiences again, that for everybody there this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, it’s only going to be in your memories from now on, and I thought to myself, I want more than that, I want to be able to relive what I’m experiencing,” he says.
Over time, his methods became more sophisticated, and Jacobs would set up microphones next to the venue’s soundboard or plug directly into it to record on cassettes, and later digital audio tapes and memory cards. Jacobs says that at his peak in the 1990s, he was attending about 250 shows a year. He got into many of them free, admitted by club owners who indulged his passion.
The recordings available on the Internet Archive are astonishing not only for their volume — 3,510 sets and counting — but also for Jacobs’ seemingly preternatural knack for catching many now iconic acts on their way to greatness. He recorded everyone from mostly forgotten Chicago bands to the first local performances by Nirvana and Pavement and 1984 shows by The Cure and Hüsker Dü.
He reduced his attendance at concerts in 2004 when he took to videotaping improv performances at the iO Theater most weeknights. His interest in both activities had begun to wane by the time COVID-19 shut down live events, and he only recorded occasionally after they resumed. He’s also been constrained by fibromyalgia, a condition Jacobs only recently began disclosing publicly.
Jacobs had begun exploring the possibility of donating his recordings to a museum or university when an Internet Archive representative contacted him. Last October, Brian Emerick, a volunteer with the Internet Archive, began driving from his house in Des Plaines to Jacobs’ home, gathering up as many tapes as he could fit in his Mazda, and bringing them back to his basement workroom. There, he used 17 tape players he’d bought second-hand, most in need of repairs, to transfer the recordings in large batches to digital recorders.
“I’d set up 17 tapes, hit play and walk away, do something else,” says Emerick, who works from home as a database administrator for a law firm. A night owl, he often managed the transfers between his wife’s bedtime at 10 p.m. and his at 1 a.m.
“I took it upon myself to go gung-ho,” says Emerick, a taper himself whose musical tastes run toward smart, quirky songwriters and bands (Mike Doughty, Camper Van Beethoven). “I feel like I owe it to the city and the music to keep this stuff preserved.”
Once the tapes were transferred, he sent the digital files to a project manager at the Internet Archive, who’s been dispersing them to about 10 other volunteers worldwide. They clean up the sound quality if needed, title them and return them to be put online. Emerick has now transferred all of Jacobs’ nearly 10,000 recordings, encompassing what Emerick estimates are 12,000 concert sets.
The Internet Archive removes recordings from the site when musicians ask, but hasn’t sought advance permission to share the music online. “For the most part, all the bands have been loving it, or haven’t noticed it,” Emerick says.
Over the years, some bands have released a few of Jacobs’ recordings on their own, including at least three Sonic Youth concerts. The Replacements incorporated Jacobs’ recording into their release of a live album from their 1986 show at Cabaret Metro (as Metro was known then).
More Top Picks Best Photo Printers
To release the Naked Raygun and Eleventh Dream Day records, Jacobs formed Laughing Bee Music with Karl Marquardt, a retired New York attorney he befriended in the 1980s when Marquardt was a Northwestern University student and a DJ at the school’s radio station, WNUR. Both men stress that the label is a labor of love, not financially motivated.
“This isn’t what you do to make money. This is what you do to have fun,” Jacobs says.
They’ve developed a lengthy list of other records they want to release and began contacting bands to see if they’re interested. “In the next year we’ll have five or even more coming out, and we’d love to put out five to seven every year,” Marquardt says.
The choice of Eleventh Dream Day and Naked Raygun for the first two albums reflects Jacobs’ near-lifetime association with the bands and his fervent enthusiasm for their music. “It’s great to be working with these bands who I’ve known forever, and I care so much about, and be part of their legacy,” he says.
Eleventh Dream Day formed in 1983, and as guitarist and singer Rick Rizzo recalls, Jacobs was at the band’s very first shows, tape recorder in hand. He subsequently recorded nearly all of their Chicago performances up to the Old Town School of Folk Music’s Square Roots Festival in 2023, the last concert by anyone that Jacobs has recorded.
For the streaming and vinyl record release, Jacobs gave Rizzo 40 to 50 cassettes documenting those performances. From them, Rizzo chose 16 songs from early 1990s shows at Lounge Ax, the storied Lincoln Park club that was central to Chicago’s indie rock scene until its closing in early 2000.
“I thought we hit our stride in the early ‘90s. It always felt good to be onstage at Lounge Ax,” Rizzo recollects. “When the stage sound felt good, the band played well, and I could hear it in the recordings, the energy.”
Indeed, on “By the Time They Got to Lounge Ax,” Eleventh Dream Day plays with ferocious intensity. From the first (“Baghdad’s Last Ride”) to the last (“Orange Moon”), the songs showcase their gripping mix of Rizzo’s churning guitar and yearning melodies, Janet Bean’s expressive drumming and keening harmonies, Doug McCombs’ probing bass lines and searing guitar leads by the late Matthew “Wink” O’Bannon and substitute member Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo.
Unfortunately, that time period proved to be Eleventh Dream Day’s commercial peak. They lost their record deal with a major label in 1994 and in the decades since largely have focused on other endeavors. But they still produce new records at about five-year intervals and regroup to play at least one local show annually. Rizzo says a new band project is in the early stages.
By the time Jacobs recorded Naked Raygun, they already were making a big impact on Chicago’s music scene. A performance at the Cubby Bear a few years earlier famously was the first rock show David Grohl saw, and set him on his path toward superstardom with Nirvana and the Foo Fighters.
“We were trying to change the world with the music, get people to think like we did. I think we pulled it off,” says Naked Raygun singer Jeff Pezzati.
The two Naked Raygun live records each find the band at turning points. The concert heard on “This Place Used to Be a Strip Joint (Live)” showcases the band’s blueprint: buzzsaw guitars, drum fusillades, the surging bass lines of Pierre Kezdy (making his debut with the band) and Pezzati’s shouted chants and sing-along choruses. “Live at Riot Fest” captures the band’s reunion after 14 years apart, the start of an ongoing second act, and finds the band closer to melodic alternative rock on songs like “Treason” and “Walk in Cold.”
Pezzati has been contending with Parkinson’s disease for nearly 25 years, and Naked Raygun’s late-night show at Metro as part of last year’s Riot Fest was their only concert since 2019. Two years later, the band released “Over the Overlords,” their first record of new music in 31 years and last with Kezdy, who died of cancer in 2020.
Still, Pezzati reports that he’s written songs that eventually will be included on a new Naked Raygun record, along with the re-release of singles for the short-lived Riot Fest label. “Songs keep coming into my head,” he says, “and I have to get them out of the way and put them down in some form so the next one can come in and take its place.”
Kevin McKeough is a freelance writer.