Neil Freiman

See podcast description for full disclaimers.

Yeah, it's further evidence that you can just do things.

You can go to over 10,000 shows over 40 years and record them for your own edification and leave the world with one of the most important musical archives in history because this hobbyist project turned into an absolutely historical behemoth with over 10,000 recordings.

And he is known, Jacobs is known, around Chicago.

So he's taken on this mythic status.

There was a documentary about him in 2023.

WBEZ, the public radio station there, did a story about

about him in 2019.

So he is known around Chicago as the taper guy.

And I think more people will know him now that this is being helped on by other volunteers and being digitized because he has all these cassette tapes.

For everyone to listen, there needs to be a huge project around digitizing them.

So the Internet Archive, which is this nonprofit that preserves sort of digital artifacts, has helped him with this huge push to digitize them.

And so we're all going to be richer for it.

My first thought when I read this, honestly, was maybe it's just the business news aspect.

I was like, so what do artists think?

Like, is this bootlegging?

Yeah, are they going after him?

What do they think?

And he said that most of them are just very happy to have their early concerts preserved.

He just said that two of the bands requested that he take it down.