It's around 10:00 p.m. on a recent Friday night, and local salsa collective Picoso is punching out Latin rhythms at ToST in Fremont. Sitting on a stool in the back of the club is a diminutive middle-aged woman with glasses and long, curly brown hair. Next to her, a microphone on a tall stand peeks up above everyone's heads. Occasionally she adjusts knobs on a mixer, but mostly she just quietly observes the music. It's a usual weekend night for Jayney Wallick, Seattle music's most visible and least understood historian.
As record companies increasingly restrict where their artists' music is going, it's rare and somewhat disconcerting to find someone recording an entire concert. But even at a glance, it's apparent that Wallick has permission to do what she's doing—her setup is massive, and in addition to recording the ambient house mix, she's also plugged in to the main soundboard. She's no renegade bootlegger; as she'll tell you, she's an archivist.
"I have over 1,700 recordings at the moment—and counting, of course," she says. "I don't distribute them, and I generally only have the time to revisit them when I'm making a copy of a band's music for them."
Wallick first started taping at a Cat Stevens show in Seattle in 1974. Since then, she's recorded national touring bands and small local acts, compiling a well-rounded representation of the rock scene in Seattle. Her current local favorites are Shake Some Action!, Kultur Shock, and the Whore Moans, bands she's recorded on multiple occasions. She's a fan and a supporter of local music, but she's no groupie.
"I've seen her at our shows for years, even with my old band," says David Bos, guitarist of Shake Some Action! "I never really talked to her and I kind of always wondered who she was. But now I see her and I give her a brief hello."
"It's way beyond a hobby at this point," Wallick says. "It's bordering on an obsession. But no—it's my lifework."
Loosely associated via the internet, the international taper community abides by the unwritten rule that recordings should never be sold. Tapers can be broken down into three different groups: those who record shows to listen to them again and again, those who want to share shows with people who couldn't be there, and those who believe in the preservation of live music. This last description applies to Wallick, who's not really interested in sharing, except with the future. And taping is something she's come to devote most of her free time to.
Every week she checks the concert calendar and e-mails bands to figure out who will allow her to record. Then she carts her 100 pounds of equipment to clubs all over the city, arriving early to set up and staying until the bitter end to tear down, sometimes every night of the week. She's recorded at almost every venue in town, excluding the large theaters. Any spare money from her day job, where she writes training materials, pretty much goes to buying tapes and maintaining equipment.
"I'm an amateur in the sense that I don't get paid for what I do, but I'm professional in the sense that I want to make the best recording that I can," she says. She goes to these lengths with one goal in mind—when she dies, her entire collection will be given to the British Library National Sound Archive in London.
"I was thinking about having it go to the UW," she says. "They do have a music archive of sorts, but it's very small. If you have a large collection, they can't take it all." All recordings deteriorate over time, even high-quality DAT tapes like Wallick's. There's no way to preserve a tape unless it is actively reproduced. Unfortunately, the UW doesn't preserve recordings unless a patron requests them. "Did you know that the UW has a music library that any Washington State resident can use?" Wallick asks. "Most people don't. If people don't request it, it doesn't get preserved, and if nobody knows it's there, who's going to request it?"
So barring some major improvements in Seattle's archiving facilities, off to England will go a massive collection of the city's music history. It's a somewhat sad fact, but Wallick made the choice in service of preservation, not popularity or entertainment. She believes these shows, these tapes, capture something greater than she herself can be.
"This is my legacy," she says. "This is what I'm leaving to the world. It's not something I take lightly, and it's something that I want to be around when I'm not." 
