Reported by MONICA ENG | Photos by KATHERINE NAGASAWA

Edited by JESSICA PUPOVAC

September 29, 2019

Rae DeRose met her husband, Rob, in 2003 at a party in a Lincoln Park bar.

“As we sat and talked, we realized we liked a lot of the same bands,” she says, “and had even been to a lot of the same shows.”

Most of these shows were at North Side clubs like Metro, Schubas, The Empty Bottle and the erstwhile Lounge Ax and Double Door, where they recalled consistently seeing this one guy with long, wavy hair, chunky headphones and big tape recorder.

“There was this ‘taping guy’ who was at all of the shows we went to,” Rae recalls. “And we thought it was pretty cool that he was recording this special moment in Chicago music history.”

Rae and Rob DeRose at a 2016 Wilco show in Millennium Park, a year before Rob passed away. When the couple first met in 2003, they bonded over their mutual love for indie rock music and recollections of a local guy who taped many of the shows they attended. (Courtesy Rae DeRose)

Rae and Rob eventually got married and went to many more shows together before Rob passed away two years ago. But unbeknownst to his wife, Rob had sent in a question to Curious City asking:

Whatever happened to the “Taping Guy” who used to hang out and record at clubs like the Double Door, Metro and Lounge Ax in the ’90s?

We decided to take on this story because, it turns out, the “Taping Guy” is a familiar figure to pretty much everyone we talked to from Chicago’s indie music scene at the time.

His name is Aadam Jacobs. And we learned that, over more than three decades, he has recorded, stored and catalogued about 10,000 live Chicago concerts on cassettes, CDs, and memory cards. His collection includes the early work of Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, Jeff Tweedy, New Order, Stereolab, Flaming Lips, Yo La Tengo and much more.

Aadam Jacobs (left) spent three decades recording audio of an estimated 10,000 live music shows in Chicago. Here, he’s seen with Feel Good All Over Records manager John Henderson, and Young Marble Giants guitarist Stuart Moxham. (Courtesy Aadam Jacobs)

“What Aadam has is really, really priceless,” says Susan Miller Tweedy, a veteran of the Chicago music scene who used to co-own Lounge Ax. “He’s a living archive.”

We met up with Jacobs at his home on the Northwest Side and got a peek into this archive. He talked about the period in local music history he captured, but also the obsession that drove him to amass his collection — and the toll it took on different parts of his life.