The Janky

"Music should be free or as cheap as possible," said Ben Garrett, Kirksville resident and part-time Truman student. This philosophy is behind Kirksville's newest concert venue, The Janky.

The Janky is a white house on West Jefferson Street whose eight inhabitants use it to host free concerts.

On a typical night, concertgoers enter through the back door leading into a living room filled with music, dancing and a mass of people.

"From the worn-out carpet and furniture, to the crammed mass of gyrating bodies that is the concert room, to the kind of anti-establishment defiance that embodies the attitude of the inhabitants as well as defines the music," freshman Ben Wesselschmidt said of his first impressions of The Janky when he attended a concert during Truman Week.

It is a scaled-down version of the now-defunct Aquadome, which closed early last year after three years of offering alternative community activities including concerts, studio space, weekly collective dinners and workshops.

"We were having a lack of funds and attendance, unfortunately," said Garrett, who is a member of Critical Massacre, a local hardcore-punk group that often plays at The Janky.

Garrett said he thinks the Aquadome may have been too big a project.

"The Aquadome was, maybe, a little more than we could really handle, but we still wanted to offer an alternative to campus-related concerts and the bar scene," Garrett said.

Though many of the same people who were involved with the Aquadome now run The Janky, some think the venue has a new feel.

"There is a different atmosphere at The Janky than there was at the Aquadome because the Aquadome was a community place set in a storefront, and The Janky is somebody's house," sophomore Emily Randall said.

Having shows at a home does not allow for as much room as a community place.

"Though everyone is welcome at The Janky, it doesn't have quite that same community feeling that the Aquadome had," Randall said. "There was a bigger area for shows at the Aquadome, though that's not to say that The Janky's space hasn't been fun for the shows so far this year."

Randall said the new spot has its benefits.

"It is a slightly shorter walk from campus, and it is warmer than the Aquadome - slightly," Randall said.

The Janky hosted four concerts last year featuring a variety of bands ranging from punk local The Pussy Posse, to St. Louis favorite So Many Dynamos, to Tennessee punk-americana band The Pine Hill Haints.

"We try to promote do-it-yourself bands who don't like to play in bars a lot of the time," Garrett said.

Bands that play at The Janky are often friends of the residents as well as groups contacted through Campus Music Collective, a group many of The Janky residents are involved in.

All shows at The Janky are free, but organizers welcome contributions to help out-of-town bands pay for gas. The venue, however, is not a money-making venture.

"We don't use the money to pay our rent or anything," The Janky resident Julia Davis said.

Davis said the residents of The Janky split the work and money involved in running the venue, each member contributing what he or she can. These shared resources also led to the naming of the house.

"The house was named by our friend Matt, who would only allow [a resident of The Janky] to borrow his car if we would let him name our house," Davis said. "He chose the word 'janky,' which is a ghetto word meaning broken or in disrepair and implies that it's somehow lacking."

All shows feature a small table covered with literature on a wide range of issues such as politics, prison abolition and feminism. These pamphlets are distributed through Black Unicorn Press, a collective-run publisher that releases writings from authors, many of them local, on social issues.

This literature reflects the socially aware atmosphere of The Janky.

"The people here don't all believe the same things, but everyone is socially conscious," Garret said. "And no one's exactly a conservative."

The Janky currently has no shows scheduled but plans to have some this year, said Davis. As always they will be free and open to all.