This Saturday, the 38th Annual San Jose Fountain Blues & Brews Festival unfolds in Plaza de Cesar Chavez, once again cementing the festival’s position as the longest running affair of its kind in the Bay Area.

The history is worth repeating. The birth of the festival takes us back to a version of San Jose that now seems like the vanishing Wild West, when the SJSU Associated Students Program Board oversaw a serious budget to book concerts on campus all year long. It also harkens back to a time when notorious rock promoter Bill Graham was still trying to prevent anything in San Jose from succeeding.

When a young Rick Bates first emigrated from Iowa to the Associated Students at SJSU, he hit up Ted Gehrke for a job. Gehrke assigned Bates to put up concert posters around town, but Gates eventually wound up with the title of contemporary arts chair, meaning he worked with Gehrke to book concerts.

In the spring of 1981, the prog rock band Ambrosia had just fired its manager and agent, so the group needed a gig. Working for the Associated Students, Bates booked them in the San Jose Civic Auditorium. The show sold out, giving the program board a pile of dough with which they organized the first Fountain Blues Festival, over the first weekend in May of that year.

These days, when students don’t get to experience a live music infrastructure of any sort, let alone getting on the phone with national booking agencies, it seems hard to fathom a San Jose in which such activity unfolded on a regular basis. In the late ’70s, for example, Bates helped book a Peter Gabriel show in the old SJSU men’s gym, located in what’s now Uchida Hall. Bill Graham called up Bates and tried to stop the show because Graham wanted exclusivity in San Francisco.

“At that time I was 20 years old, and he starts screaming at me,” Bates recalled. “I’m a snotty little kid, and I’m going, ‘Hey this is pretty cool. I must be doing something right. Bill Graham’s calling me up and yelling at me.’ I thought it was really pretty funny. We did another show with U2, and he did the same thing.”

The U2 show, with Romeo Void opening up, is now one of the most legendary stories in San Jose rock history. On the Irish band’s first US tour in 1981, Bates and Gehrke initially booked them to play a free show in the outdoor concrete amphitheater next to the Student Union. Bill Graham tried to stop the show because he wanted U2’s first Bay Area gig to be at the Old Waldorf, scheduled for the next night in San Francisco. Despite Graham’s threats, the free U2 show in San Jose went on. However, once it was booked and word began to explode, it was relocated upstairs into the old Student Union Ballroom, which is now a suite of antiseptic meeting facilities. Since the Brutalist-style Student Union structure was built on earthquake rollers, the over-capacity crowds pogo-dancing began to shake the building. Staff stood on both sides of the stage with ropes to prevent the speaker columns from falling over. At one point, Romeo Void’s tour manager got stuck in the elevator. People were scared.

According to those who attended, even with the stage verging on collapse, the young Bono was already on a path to rock stardom. He knew how to command an audience and work a room. The show was a smashing success.

Bates went on to manage several well-known blues and roots acts, including Los Lobos, who ended up opening for U2 on the Joshua Tree tour, putting Bates back in touch with Bono. At the time, Bono still remembered the harrowing SJSU gig.

When it comes to the Fountain Blues Festival, Bates speaks fondly of the original days. At the time, it just felt like a cool project for some students to work on.

“I always feel like sometimes things are just at the right place at the right time,” Bates said. “Everybody wanted to do it, and it was really successful. I never thought that it would last as long as it has.”

As part of the city of San Jose’s Creative License Ambassador program, Maestra Barbara Day Turner of the San Jose Chamber Orchestra is curating a concert of original 60-second songs about San Jose, written by community members, all to be performed at City Hall on June 21. Anyone can write a song and submit it for consideration.

As part of the performances, in addition to the one-minute songs, there will be audience participation and other community crowd-sourced composition projects right there and then.

There might be some ringers, of course, which is why I’m hoping Turner resurrects the greatest song ever written about San Jose. No, I’m not talking about the Dionne Warwick abomination, the nauseating tune that even she dislikes. I am talking about a ‘70s jazz-rock masterpiece by the famous Japanese pop composer, Domei Suzuki (1920-2015), titled, “Yes, I Know the Way to San Jose.”

Suzuki first came to San Jose in 1961. In Tokyo, he was known for producing his own hits or Japanese versions of songs by Brenda Lee and Vikki Carr. After numerous visits to the Bay Area, Suzuki fell in love with San Jose and wrote the song in 1974, with English lyrics by Tom and Cathy Clark, who were living in Tokyo. The 45 RPM single features a sweeping cover photo of ’70s-era San Jose with orchards in the foreground, looking down on the valley below. Inside the single, one finds the sheet music reduction for voice and piano, as well as the lyrics. The liner notes relay Suzuki’s story in his own words:

“Leaving Japan, the first place I saw on the mainland was San Francisco,” he writes. “It was at night, and I shall never forget the beauty of the night scene from the plane that greeted me. I was met at the airport by my uncle and cousins, who took me straight to San Jose. I was to stay for two weeks with my uncle and his family, during which time we drove to San Francisco, Monterey, Pebble Beach, the mission at Carmel, and so on. The impression I received remains fresh in my mind. I became very fond of California. Before I knew it, I fell into the habit, like a migratory bird, of visiting San Jose at least once a year.”

After making several close friends in San Jose and spending much time here, Suzuki finally made good on his promise to write a tune about the city. The intro to “Yes, I Know the Way to San Jose” sounds like something straight from The Rockford Files, but then it breaks into a grooving minor-key jazz-rock arrangement replete with a horn section, electric guitar, bass, trap set and swanky English language vocals by the late Tokyo chanteuse Hatsumi Shibata. The late Japanese producer Norio Maeda arranged the orchestra and recorded the track in Tokyo.

In 1976, San Jose held several events celebrating the US Bicentennial, including a multi-day jazz fair with a residency by Quincy Jones, who conducted Suzuki’s tune, which was also chosen as the theme song for the San Jose City Bicentennial (1777-1977). Suzuki loved San Jose so much that he donated 14,000 of the records to the city’s bicentennial commission. History San Jose still has a few copies in its archives, but otherwise you’ll have to scour the antique shops on San Carlos Street or places like Needle to the Groove to even possibly track down a copy.

Upon any new listen, especially if you’re a native, it’s one of those, “why is this track not regularly performed” type of experiences. That a renowned Japanese jazz and easy listening giant could come here and reap enough rocking inspiration to write a song should inspire anyone else to write his or her own tune and submit it to maestra Turner’s project, plain and simple. She is a genius for having this idea.

Speaking of which, at presstime a dozen artists had already submitted a tune or committed to write something. Even better, San Jose’s own Jackie Gage will show up and perform her tune, “A Secret Place,” written and debuted last year at the San Jose Jazz Summerfest. It doesn’t get any more local than that.

More info at mysanjosesong.org

In 1983, deep in the suburban hinterland of Campbell, the punk rock photographer Murray Bowles attended a backyard party and shot several pictures of The Faction, San Jose’s legendary skate punk band. A software engineer by day, Bowles was just starting a decades-long side job of capturing Bay Area punk.

In San Jose, the scene was a hodgepodge of house parties, rented halls and skate ramps because no real venues existed. As the Faction played, an 11-year-old kid named Lars Frederiksen sat on the ground in front of the drum set to keep it stationary. (See photo.)

“The cinderblock wasn’t working so the kick drum kept moving and moving and moving,” Frederiksen recalled. “I remember someone tried to put a 12-pack of beer in front of it, and that obviously didn’t work. I think someone even said put the keg in front of it, but then everybody would have to come up when the band was playing to fill their beer. So somebody said, ‘Put Lars in there.’ And that’s how I ended up in there.”

The rest is history. Ten years later, Frederiksen joined the band Rancid, which then exploded into one of the most successful punk bands of all time, inspiring generations of fans around the world, even still.

But now, in what is probably the most spacetime continuum-shattering full-circle punk hoedown in local living memory, the Faction will first open up for Rancid in San Francisco on Thursday, and then they will headline on Friday with one of Frederiksen’s other bands, the Old Firm Casuals, at The Ritz in downtown San Jose. The whole shootin’ match will trigger many individuals to reflect on their own crazy journeys over the last several decades.

Over the years, Bowles’ photos from that party have almost achieved folk status. He may have captured the most punk rock Norman Rockwell moment in San Jose history.

In those days, the Faction’s bass player, Steve Caballero, was already a world-famous professional skateboarder with sponsorships, trophies, tour stories and the whole nine yards, all while not yet even 20. People around the world devoured skateboard magazines and then VHS videos of the Bones Brigade, of which Caballero was a key member. Thanks to what he and his crew were doing, it’s not an exaggeration to say San Jose was one of the skateboarding capitals of the country. Specific street tricks and maneuvers were pioneered right here in town. As the lifestyle became inseparable from punk rock, the whole scene put San Jose on the map way more than any politician has ever been able to do. It is a travesty of justice that Caballero is not in the San Jose Sports Hall of Fame.

But I digress. With the Faction, Caballero eventually switched from bass to guitar as the band became a five-piece and then soared to even more stardom before breaking up a few short years later. After sporadic reunions over the decades, they returned to semi-regular gigging about four years ago.

Bowles’ photo captures what the scene was like in those days: punks and skater kids dealing with the intrinsic boredom of suburbia. Several people in the photo are still in the area. For example, leaning on Caballero’s bass amp is Denice Vaughn, wearing a pair of pink Paradise Garage creepers, shoes Caballero bought her when he was in LA for a contest.

“I threw a fit because he wanted to get me the red and black ones,” Vaughn recalled. “And I said, ‘No, I want the pink ones, and if I can’t have those, then I want nothing.’ And he drove all the way [across LA] back to Hollywood to get me those. I totally remember that. I still have them.”

Bowles has since retired from the software industry, but still has a long photography career on which to reflect. His catalog of photos, now in the thousands, remains an integral component of Bay Area punk history, although he doesn’t scour the scene as much as he used to.

“Nowadays everybody takes pictures with their phones,” Bowles said. “It’s not as though if I didn’t take pictures, there’d be no pictures taken at all. Which is sort of the way it was for a lot of shows.”

Keith Morris, the legendary vocalist for OFF!, stands as one of the grand elders atop the punk rock family tree of Los Angeles. His new memoir, a snarling page-turner titled My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor, is culled from a lifetime of fronting multiple major acts—including Black Flag and Circle Jerks.

Brimming with stories of wild success and epic failure, the book demonstrates that Morris was never more than a few degrees of separation from almost every SoCal band worth a damn in the last 40 years. A riotous, yet humble, endeavor, My Damage rips right on by. It’s a quick read.

“It’s like listening to a Black Flag album, then listening to a Circle Jerks album, and then listening to an OFF! record,” Morris says of Damage. “It’s got that kind of pacing, which is perfect.”

To this day, both the four-bar logo of Black Flag and the skanking Circle Jerks kid with the flannel tied around his waist remain universal punk rock symbols. Morris now fronts two bands: OFF!, a punk rock supergroup of sorts, which features guitarist Dimitri Coats, bassist Steven McDonald, and drummer Mario Rubalcaba; and Flag, which features a cohort of former Black Flag players covering songs from every era of the seminal hardcore outfit’s discography. While these groups remain Morris’ most famous projects, My Damage reveals aspects of his life before, after and between the music. Readers take away a street-level, cracked-window peek into the world of L.A. hardcore from its very inception.

“Before I had taken my detour to play music, I had something else I wanted to do—and that was teach art,” Morris says, explaining that he had secured a scholarship to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. But after critiquing all the bad art created by the stoners in his high school, Morris traded insults with a teacher and his scholarship evaporated.

Pivoting away from visual art, Morris turned to music. It wasn’t long before he met guitarist Greg Ginn. The pair sowed the seeds for what would become Black Flag at a Journey concert in 1976.

From that point on, historical and hysterical connections crop up on practically every other page. On one occasion, Spinal Tap, Slayer and the Circle Jerks all opened up for The Blasters (Read: Huh?). At certain junctures Morris saw AC/DC with Bon Scott at the Whiskey and lived with Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club. He partied in Hollywood mansions and the grimiest alleys. He appeared in Repo Man for 30 seconds, and his chiropractor played bass on the first two Elvis Costello LPs. In the ’80s, Morris crossed paths with just about every L.A. musician you’d expect—punk and otherwise. Mötley Crüe, Los Lobos, Thelonious Monster and David Lee Roth all make appearances, in various conditions.

Morris got clean 28 years ago, and much of his journey to sobriety emerges throughout the book. He never gets righteous or preachy. He just takes the time to acknowledge the ways in which he treated people like shit or fucked up someone else’s party. He maintains that he’s never relapsed, even though he threw himself back into the fray of gigging just one month after leaving the machinery of a drug-addled life.

Detailed revelations also surface about Morris’ experience working for the darker side of the business—the record companies. He doesn’t paint a wholesome picture. They used and abused him more than once.

Near the end of the book, Morris reflects on Black Flag’s ascent—explaining that the band exploded out of a vastly different Hermosa Beach. Nowadays, the town is a wasteland of jock bars, foodie hipsters, mini malls and perpetual spring-break oafs. A history mural depicts Black Flag, but features Henry Rollins instead of Morris, the band’s original singer, the one who actually grew up in Hermosa.

“They’ve destroyed the place,” Morris writes. “It’s like any beach city in Florida now.”

Keith Morris Book Signing
Nov 10, 6pm, Free
Streetlight Records, San Jose

OFF!
Nov 10, 8pm, $15-$18
The Ritz, San Jose

Twenty-four years ago, Metro columnist Sammy Cohen was a drummer in the Musicians Union, and Barbara Day Turner was a harpsichordist and conductor with superb contemporary music chops. They were friends, and after running into each other at the opera one evening, they contemplated forming an official San Jose chamber orchestra to focus on new music, since the town offered nothing of the sort.

Turner wasn’t sure if Sammy was serious, and, as such, thought nothing of it—at least not until she woke up one day and found the whole proposition announced in one of Sammy’s stories, including her contact information. The pesky columnist had gone public with the idea, urging Turner to get cracking.

After receiving numerous calls in response to the column, Turner decided to move forward with the concept, making the ensemble primarily string-based. The San Jose Chamber Music Society agreed to sponsor a debut concert in the spring of 1991 at Le Petit Trianon Theatre. For that first concert, the group performed a program including Stravinsky’s Birth of Apollo to a sold-out crowd, with violinist Pat Strange as the concertmaster.

This weekend, the San Jose Chamber Orchestra begins its 25th anniversary season with Simply Strings, a strings-only program held at the same venue—Le Petit Trianon—it has performed in since 1991.

When the orchestra started, the neighborhood surrounding Le Petit Trianon—on Fifth Street, just a few steps north of where City Hall now sits—was riddled with drunks, addicts and transients. In 1991, the Trianon building still included single rooms for rent. All the rooms that are now offices were then used by transients, with the building partly operating as a boarding house of sorts. What’s more, there was only one bathroom in the whole place, so if a hundred people attended a concert in the theater, they had to share the same facilities with all the single-room tenants.

“There was a little kitchen upstairs, where people who lived there would cook,” Turner remembers. “Sometimes in the middle of a concert we would be greeted with a wafting scent of bacon. Or something else being cooked that would actually fill the hall.”

In the early years of the orchestra’s residency at Le Petit Trianon, other wacky events unfolded. One time, during a premiere of Michael Touchi’s Concerto for Harpsichord, an apparently homeless man walked into the hall and sat on the stage.

“I was in the middle of a cadenza,” Turner recalls. “He walked in the side door and went to the middle of the stage and just sat down on the edge of the stage to listen. Full orchestra, full audience. And when it was done, he applauded and he left.”

Turner spent the first few seasons building a financial foundation for the ensemble and didn’t start commissioning pieces until at least five years in. Half of the orchestra’s seasonal subscribers have been there since the beginning. And to this day, Turner still prioritizes contemporary pieces, avant-garde ideas, world music and anything off the beaten path of dead Western European composers.

After all, when one considers Bach’s time—or Mozart’s, Chopin’s or Liszt’s—the tradition was to emphasize music that had just been recently composed, not to rehash what had been already been done.

“I feel very strongly that the movement toward making a ‘museum’ of so-called Western Classical music is just kind of wrong-headed,” Turner says. “If we remember just even the basics of music history, when Mendelssohn discovered works by J.S. Bach that had been shelved after Bach died, he feared for his reputation when performing them. That’s how strong the preference was to perform newly written music.”

This Sunday’s season opener features guest violinist Stephanie Chase. The program includes the world premiere of Joel Friedman’s Movable Home as well as Suite for Lower Strings by Clarice Assad, the eldest daughter of the famous Brazilian guitarist, Sergio Assad. The official 25th anniversary performance takes place next March.

The San Jose Chamber Orchestra starts its 25th season on Oct. 11 at the Trianon Theatre, San Jose.

In a suburban Silicon Valley garage, piles of digital and analog instruments surround Robert Rich and myself. A decades-long legend in the ambient music world, Rich works out of his studio, and as we’re sitting here, Afghan rugs hang from the wall and ethnic percussion instruments seem asleep in one corner. In another corner, homemade flutes constructed from sprinkler pipe lean up against the wall. Soundboards, meditation cushions and a full-surround mastering system comprise the rest of the environment. And it is indeed an environment.

Rich is preparing for a performance at the Mexican Heritage Plaza Theater in East San Jose on Saturday, May 23rd, although he’s just now returned from a six-week US tour that included a planetarium and several theaters. For the gigs, he incorporated elements of his most recent work, Filaments, a sonic paean to cosmology, the mysteries of human existence and a work that simply asks questions about the physics of the universe.

Now that Rich is back in Silicon Valley, he seems ready to invade San Jose again. From both his perspective and mine, the Mexican Heritage Theater offers one of the best in-house sound systems and advanced assemblages of speaker configurations in the entire South Bay, yet hardly anyone in San Jose even knows about it. Rich last performed at MHP in 2012 and says he’s looking forward to this show.

“It’s a really classy theater,” he tells me. “I hate playing clubs and bars. Because they don’t work very well with my music. What works better for me are things like planetariums or nice theaters–usually theaters that are half the size of this one–but there aren’t many nicer theaters than Mexican Heritage. It’s just a really beautiful place.”

Genre fetishists categorize Rich’s music as “electronic” or “ambient,” but it often behaves like acoustic music in many respects. This is especially true in live contexts. The experience is more of a psychological soundscape designed for the concentrated listener, almost meditative at times, sort of like an immersive Rothko painting.

“I don’t go for volume,” Rich says. “I don’t like loud concerts. My music works better at a middle level. I’m going for an audiophile experience, something that’s full spectrum, dynamic, and not particularly loud. A lot of sound systems are designed just to push a lot of power and what I’m looking for is something that’s almost closer to jazz, as far as the frequency spectrum and the dynamic range.”

So expect a fair degree of improvisation, but without loud servos slaughtering the bass. Rich goes for a quality low-end and a quality high-end. He doesn’t dictate what the audience gets out of the sonic palette. Instead, his music is whatever anyone decides to make of it.

At MHP, Rich doesn’t have a planetarium to play with, but the audience should still expect lots of unique visual stimuli taking advantage of the space. To accompany the live sonic textures, Rich will supply at least two hours of processed video, plus his own laser projectors, machines he says create a slow-motion, liquid-style visual effect, sort of like light dispersed through rain as it drips down a windowpane.

“That kind of stuff for this theater is really appropriate because it has a huge stage,” he explains. “We can play around with really interesting lighting configuration as well, which is a rare treat.”

That means experimentation with scrim systems, projection mapping, see-through screens and who knows what else. Separate light and projection designers will contribute to the experience.

In 30-plus years of activity and over 30 releases, the Rich brain has crossed over into many discussions. He effortlessly shifts from aeronautical engineering verbiage to Middle Eastern tunings to Japanese noise acts like Merzbow. He delivers talks at SETI and arthouses. But in the end, his music tends to ask for something indigenous, something that returns listeners to the earth, their original environment, rather than fetishizing technology in order to disconnect from anything physical and material.

“There’s a certain geek quotient–the synthhead–they just want to show pictures of their equipment,” Rich says. “I just don’t care. As an artist, whether it’s music or whatever else that we’re doing, the [idea] is to try to reconnect what we are as a species, as an organism, as an animal, to the planet that allows us to be here.”

Robert Rich is performing at the Mexican Heritage Plaza Theater on May 23 at 7pm. More info.