Rock snobs, rejoice! Wolfgang's Vault, the Ft. Knox of classic concerts

If you call yourself a music fan and you've not taken a pilgrimage over to Wolfgang's Vault, then make a move, stat, hippie! The sprawling website is a veritable treasure trove of classic rock concerts, many from the archive of the late, great San Francisco-based concert impresario Bill Graham (real name: Wolfgang Grajonca). It's the Ft. Knox of live music.

Graham began recording rock shows at his Winterland, Fillmore West and Filmore East show palaces and stored the tapes in the basement of his Bill Graham Presents offices. These 2,500 hours formed the basis of the Vault's collection, but the archives of the "King Biscuit Flower Hour" radio show, the Dawson Sound collection, the Ash Grove (a L.A. 60s folk club, now known as the Improv) archive, the Newport Jazz archives and tapes from the Record Plant have been added in recent years. Meticulous restoration work is done on the well-preserved, but aging, material by an army of recording engineers who will even resort to slow baking the tapes for several days so they can be played just one time and captured digitally.

From the acid rock of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix on to the punkier sounds of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and beyond ('80s New Wave groups like Culture Club, Duran Duran and ABC are represented too), much of the 3,500 concerts on Wolfgang's Vault stream free for members (it costs nothing to sign up, but you do have to register to listen) and the audio quality is top-notch. Additionally Wolgang's Vault boasts a streaming radio station and an online store with what is probably the single best source of rock and roll memorabilia on the Internet. New concerts are added weekly. There's even a Wolfgang's Vault iPhone app for listening concerts on the go, which was named the best app of 2009 by Macworld.

www.wolfgangsvault.com

-- Richard Metzger

Image credit: Wes Wilson/Herb Greene, courtesy Wolfgang's Vault