Janis Joplin Down

Discovering the rock 'n' roll history of Indiana Beach

Today's newspaper and jconline feature an interesting project about the rock 'n' roll history of Indiana Beach.

Arts and entertainment reporter Tim Brouk spent countless hours researching the bands who performed at the Monticello amusement park's ballroom during the 1960s. Records are spotty, to say the least. Even more striking was the lack of surviving memorabilia from performances by well-known acts who played at the small venue on their way to the big time.

No concert poster announcing The Who's show. No ticket stubs marking the Jefferson Airplane performance. No Janis Joplin autographs scrawled on an Indiana Beach flyer.

Brouk did track down photographs from an Aug. 12, 1966, concert by the Yardbirds. Even so, for Brouk the search at times probably felt like trying to find a guitar pick in a haystack.

As Brouk's story says, the physical evidence has largely vanished, but the memories of concert-goers survive.

Here is some additional information about Brouk's interesting investigation:

Question: You did a pretty extensive search for records of these 1960s concerts. Can you outline what research you did?

Answer: It all started with a post by Rick Knapp a few years ago on the messageboard of the LafayetteMusic League.org

He put links to his Yardbirds pictures that were posted on LedZeppelin.com

Other people mentioned The Who playing there as well.

It wasn't until this year that I discovered how consistent Indiana Beach booked stellar acts from 1940 to 1970. Just about anyone you can think of played there besides the mega acts -- Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly. Most of my leads came from people who went to shows, and then I sifted through Monticello Herald Journal articles and years of Indiana Beach newsletters, which were found in a large binder at the White County Historical Museum. Some of these dates could be verified online.

Q: What was going through your mind when you visited the ballroom and DJ booth?

A: Anyone knowing that The Who or Jefferson Airplane played in the ballroom can still picture them inside the space today. The room, like other parts of Indiana Beach, harken back to yesteryear. The furniture and equipment in there today screams '70s, '80s and '90s. But it doesn't take much imagination to see Janis Joplin wailing on that stage.

When entering the DJ booth, I felt like an archaeologist finally gaining access to an ancient Egyptian tomb. The Indiana Beach workers said that hardly anyone goes in there. Luckily one young man had a key. I was hoping to find some rolled-up posters or some old tickets. Maybe a dusty old photo album. No, there was a lot of dust as well as a bunch of old LPs and CDs that were used for teen dances decades ago. The tomb was empty.

Janis Joplin, feminism and sex | Firstpost

Nandini Ramachandran is a books-writer, lawyer, and editor who graduated from National Law School in 2009. She reads for a living, runs the blog chaosbogey, and writes a weekly books column for mylaw.net. She has been published in online venues like OpenDemocracy, Global Comment, and Popmatters, as well as print magazines and newspapers. One day she hopes to grow up and become a hippie.

The self-styled ‘sexual revolution’ had its inevitable drawbacks. It created a culture which ignored consequences, as the AIDS epidemic and the failing family in later decades were to prove. A friend and I were commiserating about the fate of Delhi’s slutwalk when she pointed me to this excellent conversation between three British feminists (including the erstwhile Belle Du Jour — the internet’s most famous whore). They talk about the politics of appearance, and what it means to live within the cyber world’s ‘intensely sexualised’ environs. ‘Sexual liberation’, having solved one set of crises, fashioned a new series of fissures. No one grasped this better than Janis Joplin, who lived and died by the mores of her time.

Joplin’s metamorphosis from the ugly duckling of Port Arthur to the peacock of Haight Ashbury meant, among other things, that a woman who wasn’t conventionally pretty, who had acne and an intermittent weight problem and hair that stuck out, who could not only invent her own beauty (just as she invented her wonderful sleazofreak costumes) out of sheer energy, soul, sweetness, arrogance, and a sense of humour, but have that beauty appreciated. Not that Janis merely took advantage of changes in our notions of attractiveness: she herself changed them… and there was a direct line from her to those apocryphal burned bras and all that followed….

…. Watching men groove on Janis I began to appreciate the resentment of many black people towards whites who are blues freaks. Janis sang out her pain as a woman, and men dug it. Yet it was men who had caused this pain, and if they stopped causing it, they would not have her to dig. In a way their adulation was the cruelest insult of all… To sing the blues is a way of transcending pain by confronting it with dignity, but Janis wanted nothing less than to scream it out of existence.

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