The music rooms as music rooms: the Seahorse, Vegetable Buddies, and Bare Hands tested

1971–PRESENT · BOUNDARY: THE COUNTY'S MUSIC ROOMS; THE HOME GROUND'S BREWERY AS A MUSIC ROOM, TESTED

The named-owner club exists — across the line: the checklist asks for the music room as a music room, and for the blues-room or named-owner-club equivalent. The county's named-owner club is South Bend's, and it is a documented institution: the Seahorse Cabaret, Gloria Frankel's club. Frankel (1940–2007) opened the city's first gay club — the date prints in its variance whole: 1971 in the standard reference, "by 1975" in the Talking Hoosier History account, 1974 in the public library's Michiana Memory telling — moved it to a larger room as Seahorse II in 1975, and built its entertainment on drag pageants and shows. Its civic record is fuller than most courtrooms': Frankel successfully challenged the ban on same-sex dancing in 1974; the club was firebombed on the morning of 26 November 1982 and reopened in ten days with the community's help; its liquor licence was granted again in February 1986 amid code-enforcement pressure; in the 1980s it hosted free HIV and AIDS testing; and it closed shortly after Frankel's death in 2007, having mentored the rooms that followed it, Jeannie's Tavern and Vickie's among them. The county's blues room stands a few streets away in the same record: Vegetable Buddies, at 129 North Michigan Street, a music-first room of the 1970s whose own history claims Canned Heat, Muddy Waters and the New Riders of the Purple Sage among its acts, and whose room a Ball State student-paper concert account of a Willie Dixon show lets us see whole — tree-stump tables, some eighty or ninety seated comfortably, six hundred at capacity, a small nearly all-white room landing top-rate talent that no other Indiana club outside Indianapolis's Vogue matched. The room was revived under new owners in the present century and stands listed as closed today. Tested against this ground, the class narrows to one room, and the room was tested fairly: Bare Hands Brewery, this ground's only brewery, does have music — Indiana on Tap's visit of 24 June 2014 found live musicians playing at a charity IPA night, and visitor reviews of 2024 note live music on some days, one complaining it was far too loud. But music at Bare Hands is incident to the beer, not the room's purpose: no blues room, no named-owner music club and no music-first room stands on Granger ground in any record reached, and the corridor rooms across the line hold the class entire.

From the Indiana Historical Society's account (Nicole Poletika, 2017), the Talking Hoosier History podcast and the St. Joseph County Public Library's Michiana Memory LGBTQ Collection (the Seahorse record, with the 1971 / by-1975 / 1974 opening variance printed whole in the text); Vegetable Buddies' own published history and the Ball State Daily News concert account via the Ball State digital repository (the Dixon show, the room's size and tables); Indiana on Tap, 24 June 2014, and 2024 visitor reviews (Bare Hands' music). Searches: Tribune entertainment listings and venue records for the CDP, November 2026.