Fresh off a plane from New York City, Matt Fazzi of the locally bred Happy Body Slow Brain, says it’s good to be home for the holidays. Though he now lives in Queens, NYC, Fazzi grew up in San Jose and says he is looking forward to spending time with his friends and family, and perhaps even playing a little music hometown.

“It’s the place where pretty much every band I’ve ever played in has practiced—with the exception of Taking Back Sunday,” the multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter says of his childhood home in the city’s Evergreen neighborhood, which, he adds, produced more than its fair share of raucous rock & roll. “Thank god for my neighbors.”

Indeed. For well over a decade, it would seem that the Fazzi household has been the epicenter of some of the best music to come out of San Jose.

As a freshman in high school Fazzi was recruited to replace an outgoing guitarist in the Jaded Monkeys, a local band that played regularly around town. From there, he co-founded the successful pop-punk outfit Tragedy Andy, which took Fazzi on statewide and national tours before he was even 20 years old. By the time Tragedy Andy had disbanded, he was already working hard on Facing New York—a challenging, progressive alternative band, which landed him a spot opening up for Taking Back Sunday and took him as far as Japan.

When Fred Mascherino, vocalist, guitarist and main songwriter for Taking Back Sunday, left the group, Fazzi was tapped as his replacement—giving him the “keys to the kingdom.”

Moving from the proggy Facing New York to the pop-oriented Taking Back Sunday was a bit of an adjustment for Fazzi. But he took it in stride, working to make compact tunes with catchy melodies.

Fazzi, who was never made a full member of Taking Back Sunday, was dismissed from the band in 2010 after the album he contributed to, New Again, failed to sell like previous albums. He didn’t waste any time getting Happy Body Slow Brain up and running.

“I’m in a much happier place,” Fazzi told Metro in 2010, just five months after leaving TBS, and all signs point to him still being pleased with the hand fate has dealt him.

“I’ve been fortunate,” Fazzi says of his career trajectory. “One band has always led to the next.”

In addition to his cat-like ability to land on his feet, it only makes sense that he’d be happier in HBSB. He certainly has more job security. He’s the boss, after all.

“It’s my little baby to do what I want with,” Fazzi says of the project, which he initially began in 2007, while still in Facing New York.

In the four years Fazzi has been pursuing HBSB full-time, he has released an LP, Dreams of Water, and an EP, Sleepy, and an eight-track live album, Live.

Fazzi has described HBSB’s sound as “GrooveRock,” and it’s as apt a label as any. Combining the chops he developed while playing “really selfish music” in Facing New York, with the stripped-down, poppy songwriting he learned in Taking Back Sunday, he crafts tunes that feel both sprawling and compact—ornate and fully embellished, yet to-the-point and groove-heavy.

“I’m trying to find that middle ground,” Fazzi says—”taking some of that musicality of a band like Facing New York, but trying to absorb some of the pop sensibility of Taking Back Sunday.”

This Saturday, Fazzi brings his genre-straddling project to The Blank Club. He’ll be joined by long-running San Jose post-rock quartet and the excellent amalgam of local indie veterans, Dinners—making the show a fitting send-off to the club which will close its doors for good at the end of January.

“It’s cool for me, in a way, to come full circle,” Fazzi says, noting that Syrus Fotovat of Amonie has been a fan and friend since the Tragedy Andy days. “We go way back to my old roots and my very beginnings.”

Fazzi adds that Amonie is only one of many great bands he has either seen play in San Jose—at places like the now-defunct Cactus Club—or to come out of San Jose.

“I’ve been lucky to witness a lot of great musicians,” he says. “They make me proud to be from San Jose and rep San Jose.”

Happy Body Slow Brain play The Blank Club on Jan. 3. More info.

Last week, as soon as I saw Corey O’Brien standing on the southeast corner of First and San Salvador—right outside the former F/X The Club—I knew what was happening. Through the open doors workers could be seen cleaning up some old debris and hosing things off. It was clear. After nearly 12 years of operating The Blank Club with his partners, O’Brien was about to begin a brand new live-music adventure with some new investors inside the old F/X building, which had been the Pussycat Theatre before, and The Usual, the Spy and Angels in the years following F/X’s closure.

It is with a tinge of sadness, that I report The Blank Club will close for good on Jan. 31, 2015. The name will be retired and O’Brien’s new, yet-to-be-named club will open by the beginning of March. It was not a sudden decision. While the Blank has been the only venue of its kind in San Jose for years, everyone knows it simply isn’t big enough. While it’s miraculously managed to host many legendary shows over the years, there was no real backstage, no real place to load-in and the stage itself was way too small for national touring bands. Looking back over the last 12 years, I was very lucky to see Lemmy Kilmister, the Damned, GBH and the Buzzcocks on that stage.

After awhile though, with production costs going through the roof, and with more and more national touring bands expressing grief over the less-than-ample conditions, O’Brien says he finally came to a decision. The era of the Blank Club was not going to last much longer. It must eventually come to an end and he needed to move forward on his own to find a more suitable venue. The old F/X building has been empty for seven years, and while it will be expensive, O’Brien says it will be worth it.

I had to get the skinny in person, so I showed up at The Blank Club on the afternoon of Dec. 4, during non-operating hours, to ask O’Brien what was going on. He said the place simply wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

“We don’t have what we need here,” O’Brien told me. “The stage is too small, there’s nowhere to stage gear, the green room is back behind the bar, upstairs. If we want to do major touring bands, we needed a bigger room. San Jose needs a real, mid-sized club. We don’t have one here.”

Opening a new live music venue in the SoFA District—in the same building where alternative music fans saw countless bands 24 years ago—will add a much-needed component to the street. The area is already making a serious comeback and opening the F/X building again is going to work wonders for music-based nightlife.

The former F/X is the only building still empty at the intersection of South First and East San Salvador—an area once referred to by San Jose nightlife junkies as “The Four Corners.” Original F/X owner Fil Maresca said a new rock club in that space will be transformative: “To see that marquee lit up again is going to make a serious difference in the neighborhood.”

When 400 South First Street was called F/X, from 1989-1995, it regularly jammed that building with numerous national touring acts. No Doubt, Helmet, the Melvins, Jesus Lizard and countless other bands gigged there, back when they were nobodies. This unfolded in-between huge dance nights, themed events and all sorts of performance-based revelry. It’s an amazing space for all sorts of events in addition to live bands, which is why O’Brien is looking forward to opening its doors in 2015. Especially since he was one of the original regulars who drank at F/X when it first opened 25 years ago. He even DJed there.

But even though he now has over a decade of memories at 44 S. Almaden Ave., O’Brien reiterated that he is not relocating the Blank Club to another venue. The new club will be just that: a new club.

“The Blank Club is here, at this location,” declared O’Brien, as we continued to stand there during non-operating hours. “To do something else, it isn’t the Blank Club. The Blank Club’s here. It’s going to be different over there, so it needs a different name.”

Ever since he was a boy, Dustin Brown has understood that music is his calling. And though he struggled with formal lessons in his youth, it is clear that he has found his voice as the frontman of Portland-based electro-pop outfit NTNT.

Brown’s brainchild, NTNT is a genre-splicing amalgam of force and bubblegum, which Brown has described “sunshine thump.” The trio will bring their maturing sound to The Blank Club tonight, Dec. 3.

“When I was 9 or 10, I picked up the guitar … and just messed around with it,” Brown says recalling his earliest memories of composing. “I started making music and—it’s kind of a young age—but that’s when I knew I wanted to make music and that was all I wanted to do.”

NTNT has not been Brown’s only project—nor is guitar the only instrument he plays. In fact, he began experimenting with what would ultimately become NTNT while still playing drums for another band.

“I started writing music in secret, sort of, and recording it on my workstation,” Brown says. “Then I put it up on the Internet and it got a bunch of blog stuff and that’s when I decided I wanted to go with this project.”

Since then, Brown says, “there’s been a circulating group of people playing with me.” But now, the band is solidifying around Chad Van Dyke on guitar and John Boyd on drums.

“They’re able to put their personalities into it and make it feel genuine without invading on the music or the songwriting itself,” Brown says.

NTNT’s first album, a 12-song effort entitled I’ll Find You In The Colors was released in 2012. It is characterized by ethereal melodies that undulate and intersect over bouncy beats. Brown’s vocals surf over the eclectic tunes with a shapeshifting presence, channeling the energy of an unbuttoned lounge singer, a tightly-trousered indie rocker, a mantra-leading DJ, or a full-throated ’80s frontman at various points throughout the album.

“Spinning on Fire” features Brown swaggering over a buzzy synth, reggae-paced alien guitars and massive, emphatic snares. It is an infectious dance anthem that commands the foot to tap and the head to nod.

NTNT’s most recent effort is a five-song EP released earlier this year. Titled And Then The Moon, the EP works like a conceptual pop opera—guiding the listener along Brown’s personal journey from a religious upbringing, through a phase he describes as “alcohol-fueled nihilism,” on to him finding a center and orienting his personal moral compass on his own terms.

The EP is the combined result of nearly 50 semi-completed songs that Brown workshopped without the help of traditional instruments.

“You know how you get a song from the radio stuck in your head and you’re just humming along to it?” he asks. “I’ll do that and then I realize, ‘Oh! That’s not actually a song, that’s just something I’m imagining.’”

Brown first demoed the songs he was hearing in his head by beatboxing, whistling, and singing snippets of lyrics into his iPhone before ever picking up a guitar or sitting down at a drumset.

“I realize I’m making something and then go finish that,” he says.

Brown says his current ambitions don’t revolve around selling albums—rather, the singer hopes to build a following, and perhaps catch the ear of a television commercial producer along the way.

“Bands on our level aren’t really selling albums as much as they are selling singles or EPs,” he says. “It seems like people digest music in more of a playlist form. You’re gonna make your money from licensing and ticket sales. So it’s just like: ‘Please, have our music, share it with your friends, and if you like it come out and see a show.’”

And people are coming to the shows. NTNT is beginning to turn the corner toward consistent work, but the band is still in the sticky middle ground between being three dudes who play music together and becoming an established voice within the online cacophony of modern music.

“It feels like right before you get a blowjob and you know you’re about to,” Brown jokes. “It can be discouraging at times, but we’ve accomplished these little things and now we have to accomplish these bigger things, so the problem solving continues.”

 NTNT are playing The Blank Club on Dec. 3 at 8pm. More info.

The Hormones, a Bay Area-based all-female Ramones tribute band, headlined The Blank Club this weekend. The benefit concert was held to raise funds for local Roller Derby teams. Metro photographer Greg Ramar was on the scene to catch the action. Check out the photos below:

San Francisco’s campy glam-poppers, Scissors For Lefty, may have been under the radar for the past six years but to say the group took a “break” isn’t entirely accurate. Since the band’s last EP, 2008’s Consumption Junction, they’ve been collecting lessons learned in the biz, making room for some life off the road and getting deeper and perhaps darker than they have ever before.

“We’re going into some territory that is not standard for Scissors For Lefty,” the group’s lead singer Bryan Garza says of his band’s recently released full-length, Bangs & Lashes. “We used to sing more about San Francisco and love gone wrong. This is more focused on the complexity of why love goes wrong and/or what’s going right and how to hold onto it and celebrate it.”

“Bangs & Lashes,” the playfully artsy video for the new album’s title track, certainly carries a less-than-savory peeping-tom vibe. Garza says the song itself is a reinvention of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”—this time from the obsessive vantage point of the stolen man.

“Dolly Parton was singing, ‘Please don’t take my man,’” Garza explains, “and this is his perspective of, ‘No please, please take me.’”

If Bangs & Lashes reminds you of the back rooms of your favorite nightclubs where the soundtrack is primarily ’80s-era British- and goth-pop, Garza says that probably has something to do with his band’s regular Thursday night dance dates out in San Francisco, where the group gravitated toward the back-room DJs spinning gloomier beats.

But perhaps what really sets Bangs & Lashes apart from previous Scissors efforts is the balance it strikes between polished studio wizardry and raw, energetic musicianship.  Garza says that is simply a product of experience. The band self-produced and recorded their debut LP, Bruno on their own time; after they were signed to Rough Trade they recorded 2007’s Underhanded Romance in what Garza described as a “whirlwind” two-month sprint; this time around, they once again took their time, but were able to incorporate the sophisticated production techniques they’d picked up on the previous album.

SCISSORS FOR LEFTY – BANGS & LASHES – Director’s Cut from GLASSCOFFIN on Vimeo.

The finished product is an album that is clean, but not sterile—emotive but not sloppy. Garza describes it comparing it to “a slick, one-mic recording.”

“To me, that’s the ultimate way of doing it,” he says—to make it feel real and not cut-and-paste.”

After many years spent touring with the likes of Smashing Pumpkins, Blonde Redhead and Panic! At The Disco, Garza says a break was necessary—and not just to find time to record Bangs & Lashes, but to avoid “singing about the rigors of the road and these trivial things that everyday people aren’t going to connect with. We wanted to make sure it was more about our life experiences instead of just some kind of touring life.”

Some of these life experiences include the deaths of loved ones, including Garza’s aunt who committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Things like that were not easy to work into a pop album before and this album gave us a chance to really go there,” Garza said. “That meant a lot.”

In addition to delving into deeper more difficult lyrical material and self-producing Bangs, the band also made some other significant changes in the makeup and operations of the band.

Due to the economic downturn and the continued contraction of an already shunken music industry, Garza says Scissors For Lefty had to reassess some of its longstanding strategies of touring and distributing the band’s recordings. Scissors For Lefty stopped searching for a label or record deal, and now use social media and online streaming services to promote and distribute their music.

“We realized you have to do everything yourself,” Garza says. “If you make something awesome, it will find a way to shine.”

While the local scene was in flux, so too was the Scissors lineup. Ever since 2006, Scissors For Lefty was the “marriage” of the Garza and Krimmel families. On the Garza side, there was Bryan, his brother Steve, and their uncle Robby. On the Krimmel side, there were the brothers Peter and James. In the midst of recording Bangs & Lashes, Steve left the band, but was quickly replaced by Garza’s younger cousin, Eric. And Garza says he wouldn’t have it any other way—especially when it comes to performing.

“Shows are just a really great time for us to love each other,” he said. “We had a lot of eye contact at the last show and were just like, ‘Hey man! You’re my cousin! Look at us do this! And there’s your mom and my other 15 cousins out there in the audience watching us.’ It’s very fun.”

Scissors For Lefty play the Blank Club on Nov. 15. More info.

Many bands plug away for years, playing house parties, clubs and smaller halls before they ever reach a stage inside an arena, assuming they even reach such a stage at all. But the South Bay-bred indie-blues-rock group Fritz Montana were fortunate enough to play at Oracle Arena in Oakland—on their fourth show.

This isn’t to say the members of Fritz Montana haven’t earned their success. The group went up against a slew of great local bands in Live 105’s local band contest before pulling in the most votes and nabbing the coveted opening slot for the radio station’s annual Not So Silent Night concert last December.

“It was beyond a dream,” says Fritz Montana bassist Kevin Logan, who recalls how the gravity of the accomplishment didn’t totally sink in until the group showed up at Oracle the day of the show. “The second we stepped into that arena, we started seeing all the techs, the roadies, the sound guy—it was really overwhelming.”

Since last year’s NSSN, Aaron Axelsen, Live 105’s music director, has continued to play Fritz Montana’s tunes on his weekly local and new music show, Soundcheck. When the group recorded some new tracks earlier this year, he put those into regular rotation on his program as well.

The group’s infectious mix of heavy, blues-tinged alt-rock and high-energy pop—a la The Arctic Monkeys and The Black Keys—has been earning the band a following, at home and around the country. According to Logan, the NSSN gig served as a springboard to bigger local shows and a seven-show run at this year’s South By Southwest.

For a band that is hardly 2 years old, Fritz Montana are certainly making big waves. That doesn’t come as a surprise to San Jose promoter Barbara Wahli, who caught the group’s very first show at San Jose State University.

“I loved the songs and knew they would resonate well with a large audience,” says Wahli, now Fritz Montana’s manager. “They have so much potential and everyone I contact responds positively to their music. My gut tells me big things will happen for the band.”

So far, Wahli’s predictions appear to be on point. Fritz Montana saw a large turnout at the July 26 release party for their new EP, Scaredy Cat, held at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco. And in addition to regular spins from Axelsen, they’ve garnered some positive press. The music blog, Infectious Magazine put Fritz Montana on its “best unsigned bands to watch in 2013,” while another music blog, Lucy Out Loud, featured the band on one of its new music compilations.

“Every show I feel like, we build up a little more momentum,” Logan says. “When we started we did not have a game plan. The experience of playing in front of several thousand people, that got us hungry for bigger shows.”

Fritz Montana play The Blank Club on Oct. 24 at 8pm. More info.

When a band calling itself Day Maker played at last month’s So Long San Jose Skate event, band members didn’t announce who they were, or that it was their first show together in seven years—or that their real name was Strata. In fact, they’d told just a small handful of friends that they were doing the show. Once their gear was set up, they simply began playing. Everything on stage felt natural, like no time had passed.

“I think a few people in the crowd knew who we were and a few didn’t—which is exciting for us to play for people that never heard of us before. I think they liked it; nothing was thrown at us,” says Ryan Hernandez, Strata’s guitarist. The band kept their reunion on the down-low that day, playing under a pseudonym.

The show may have been a send-off for once-great local music venue (and roller rink) San Jose Skate, but it marked the rebirth of Strata, a band that had broken up under a cloud.

So Long San Jose Skate saw several other local bands reunite—at least for one night—but Strata had bigger plans. This was a warm-up for their return, which officially begins this Saturday at the Blank Club. They’re already writing new material.

“You do that, ‘we’re back’ in that sort of monster truck commercial sort of promotion, making a big deal out of it—if it’s a big deal to people, that’s awesome—to us, we’re really happy about it, but it feels like the beginning of something. It doesn’t feel like a one-time event. We’re already in pick-up-where-we-left-off mode,” lead singer Eric Victorino says.

During Strata’s seven-year run they self-released two EPs, got signed to indie giants Wind-up Records, which released two of their LPs, and they toured constantly. Victorino quit the band in early 2008 due to a combination of tour exhaustion, growing debt with their label and increasing tension between the members, but everyone was feeling the pressure.

“Strata’s departure was inevitable. It felt like it was hanging on by a thread towards the end,” Hernandez says. “We reconciled it over a burrito.”

After the breakup, drummer Adrian Robinson and Hernandez formed Beta State. Victorino says he planned on quitting live music altogether, but when a casual recording project he’d been working on with Bay Area producer Giovanni Giusti—a guy he barely knew at the time—suddenly started getting radio airplay for their song “Very Busy People,” Victorino got a second chance at a career in music. That side project was called the Limousines.

Whereas Strata’s music touched on more emotional, personal issues, the Limousines were everything that Strata wasn’t. They played sarcastic, witty synth-pop tunes.

The Limos’ second album, the serious and highly personal Hush, was a major departure from the band’s fun nature, which Victorino now thinks wasn’t the best move. In a way, he was trying to wedge a Strata album into the confines of the Limousines.

“In the end, I think Hush is a better album, but it doesn’t have a lot of the quirks that made Get Sharp so popular,” Victorino says. “When I have this honest and heartfelt, deep dark thing to sing about, it can be a Strata song. When I have something funny to say, it’s going to be a Limos song. It feels like for once in my life I can compartmentalize everything.”

The plan is to keep both bands active, with neither band having priority over the other.

The major factor that led to Strata getting back together was the rekindling of the friendship between Victorino, Hernandez and bassist Hrag Chanchanian. Playing music was a natural extension of that.

“Underneath all of this Strata business are close friendships, and maintaining that became my priority. With or without the band, we’re stuck with each other. Something creepily calming about that, but I’d say it played a big hand in our reconciliation,” Chanchanian says.

The trio invited Robinson to drum with them, but he declined. They enlisted Andy Bailey—a Strata fan as early as 2000, when the band was just starting—to be their new drummer.

The reconciliation has helped the bandmates remember all the good music they made and the good times they shared during their seven years, rather than just the stress and the darkness where things ended before.

“I hadn’t even said the word Strata in, like, six years. I would always say, ‘my old band,’ but I’d never say the name,” Victorino says. “This girl actually commented on my page, ‘does this mean we’re allowed to say Strata again?’ cause I really felt like before, if you said that word to me, you were going to get a lashing.”

Strata performs at the Blank Club on June 28. More info.

Some bands’ sounds are fueled by past loves and worldly turmoil, others by pizza and beer. Joan and the Rivers are an experimental three-piece rock band from San Jose—and a trio of kindred spirits.

They all seem to finish each others’ sentences; they’ve all worked hourly jobs together; two of three live together. When I met the band members for an interview over dinner all three ordered French dips.

“Until it stops being fun, we will always play music together … my girlfriend fucking hates it,” bassist Mike Hickel says.

Joan and the Rivers’ music is freeform, and accordingly, they call themselves a jam band. They epitomize “experimental,” sonically and visually. In fact, even the band’s promotional art was created by their singer/guitarist, Eric Smith, based on his hand-drawn and Photoshop-enhanced experiments.

Pizza Foam is not simply their newest release. It’s also the disgusting glue holding together a collaboration with the band Failure Machine. Joan and the Rivers connected with the Reno-based band during shows at the Caravan. It’s been a whirlwind of road trips, shows, pizza and beers ever since.

The smitten bands spent a day recording in the midst of the aforementioned whirlwind. Each contributed two songs to the split and shared the fifth. Failure Machine will join Joan and the Rivers for their upcoming show at The Blank Club on June 14.

So what’s up with the name? The group toyed with different ideas in the beginning and stuff like Danny and The Devitos kept popping up. When Joan Rivers was suggested, it struck their funny bones and stuck.

“We started playing shows and no one got the joke,” Smith says. “Everyone was like, ‘Which one of you is Joan?'”

Like most artists, these three are dedicated perfectionists. Hickel wishes they could record every take. They have to force themselves to cease re-recording. However, the band’s work ethic is inversely proportional to the meanings behind their name and song titles.

They take turns picking titles—no emotional stake is needed. They keep lists of silly strings of nouns on their iPhones. “Jabroni” and “Picolonely” are their contributions to the recent split. The trio laughs while naming off past song titles, acknowledging each inside joke.

“We just get drunk,” Hickel says. “We spew things and write them down.”

Joan and the Rivers
June 14
The Blank Club, San Jose
$8

Skate-punk wasn’t just another hyphenate subgenre of good, old early ’80s punk rock; it was made by skaters, for skaters. In fact, San Jose’s the Faction, who formed in 1983 as part of the first wave of skate-punk, boasted one of the most famous professional skaters in the world as their bass player, Steve Caballero. Prior to the formation of the band, he had virtually no musical experience—which was why, he says, the music was attractive to him in the first place.

“It was easy to play. I never took lessons. I just kind of played and learned on my own,” Caballero says. “It was like skating, like a do-it-yourself type of thing. As we played longer and longer we got better and better at our instruments and the music got better.”

The band had an initial run of about two years—and have gotten back together on a couple occasions. This Saturday will be their first show in a decade.

Caballero had gone pro in 1980, three years before the Faction formed. Some other punk bands criticized the Faction for their success, saying that it was due to Caballero’s fame, but the truth was, they were one the hardest-working bands in San Jose. They were recording and releasing their own music, pressing their own shirts and stickers, and went on two DIY tours in the States.

An early song that gained them some popularity was the raw, rebellious anthem “Skate and Destroy.” It became a bit of a theme song amongst skate-punk rockers.

“The band was pretty underground besides the fact that it was so popular in skating,” Caballero says. “Back then we weren’t really musicians. We were just trying to make our way and just have a good time. There wasn’t any money to be made; we were just having fun.”

Though the city didn’t build skate parks until recently, San Jose has long since been a haven for skateboarders. The term “skate-punk” was coined by South Bay native MoFo, a photographer for skateboarding magazine Thrasher. He later assembled the first skate-rock compilation for Thrasher in 1983, which included several San Jose bands like Los Olvidados, Drunk Injuns, and of course, the Faction.

The Faction started out as a raw four-piece punk band, much in the vein of early hardcore bands like Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys, but in 1984, Caballero bought the Adolescents’ Blue Album and fell in love with the twin-electric guitar punk sound. He switched to second guitar. The band added Ray Stevens II from the recently defunct Los Olvidados to be their fifth member and new bassist. They ended up having a thicker sound like the Adolescents, though retained their hyper-energetic early ’80s hardcore sound, later adding some metal influences. And they didn’t lose their focus on skating and skateboarding culture.

“Really, we did get to skate a lot and rock a lot. I lived in the south side. That’s where we ended up rehearsing. We’d practice for hours, take a break and drive to Morgan Hill, and go skate, and then go back and practice. We practiced five to six days a week,” Stevens says.

The San Jose music scene at the time was particularly underground. It was a healthy, supportive scene with a lot of local punk bands, though the Faction (as well as most of the San Jose punk scene) stayed away from the bars, and played pretty much everywhere else, so kids under 21 would be able to go to their shows. In fact, the Faction’s first gig was at San Jose City College opening for Social Distortion. According to Stevens, one skate kid that was booking shows back then was Corey O’Brien, current owner of the Blank Club, and brother of the Faction’s lead singer, Gavin.

“We played art galleries and house parties, skate jams and contests at loading docks. People really got it together,” Stevens says. “Even though it took the city a while to come through with skate parks, it didn’t matter cause skaters were always making shit happen with backdoor ramps, putting out zines, putting on shows, building their own spots.”

Caballero recalls nearly 800 people showing up to a show in Palo Alto, one of the last during their initial run, before they broke up in 1985.

“I had a feeling right there that we were getting huge. Then we broke up,” Caballero says.

The band has held on to their legacy, reuniting in ’89 for a couple years and then again in 2000 for a couple more—and each time with a lot of interest from their fans, who are now in their 40s and 50s. Yet, at the same time, the band has gotten bigger since their 1985 breakup, skateboarding and punk rock have gotten more mainstream in subsequent years, so there’s a new generation attracted to the raw, aggressive, rebellious spirit of the early Faction records.

“I didn’t know I was still going to be playing when I was 50. I’m still skateboarding. To me skateboarding and music—if I do them every day, I have a really good day. I’m lucky that I have skate parks a couple blocks from my house and I can practice all the time, and that there’s creative people. It’s amazing that Corey’s still booking shows, and Steve is still a skate pro,” Stevens says.

It’s a new album and a new start for Dee Dee Penny and her brainchild the Dum Dum Girls. Though it’s fair to say that each of her three albums has been its own departure, 2010’s I Will Be introduced the band as a more than competent low-fi act that understood its roots in ‘60s girl groups and garage rock.

Sophomore album Only in Dreams separated Dum Dum Girls, performing April 9 at the Blank Club, from the pack. It was not only richer, louder and more beautiful, but more ambitious and complex. Produced in the wake of the sudden death of Penny’s mother from cancer, the album stares unflinchingly at loss, longing and the experience of watching loved ones wasting away. The album’s genius, however, is that it uses the same conventions of ’60s teenage heartbreak songs to discuss adult loss.

On the surface Too True, the band’s latest release, is the darkest and moodiest to date. An extra guitar has been added to the mix, bringing new textures to the DDG’s previous, monolithic wall of sound, and giving it a more distinctly shoegaze and even gothic sound. But that’s just the surface. At heart it’s a warm and seductive pop album, true to DDG’s roots but open to a wider range of influences. “Are You Okay,” the emotional heart of Too True, suggests that Penny is. Having weathered a difficult time, she and the Dum Dum Girls are moving ahead.

Although DDG formed in Los Angeles and now lives in New York, Penny (born Kristen Gundred) is a Bay Area native who graduated from UC Santa Cruz, where she studied literary theory, music and German.

“I felt very much at home tucked up and away on the mountain campus,” she writes in an email interview.

“Tucked away” is how Penny likes to create. The first DDG album was written and produced in her bedroom. Too True was a similarly solitary effort—at least in the writing, which she did from her apartment and from a room in L.A.’s Chateau Marmont.

While the typical DDG metier is the sound of the mid-60s filtered through ‘70s New York punk, Too True’s touchstone is the early ’80s, mostly. On the Dum Dum Girls’ website, Penny name-checks Siouxsie Sioux, the Cure, Madonna and the Paisley Underground, but also Suede and Patty Smith. I ask her to expound on her list.

“That list was kinda tongue in cheek,” she says. “I’ve found if you don’t define your terms someone else does, most often incorrectly.”

I take that as a challenge to state my own terms. To my ear, Too True evokes 1983, that banner year for music when REM’s Murmur album was defining a new indie sound and the Cocteau Twins’ Head Over Heels invented dream pop. This was a time when post-punk gloom was widespread, when the term “goth” wasn’t yet in wide currency and music critics were describing bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and Sisters of Mercy as “neo-psychedelic.”

I ask Penny if she was explicitly thinking about the ties between ’80s alternative music and ’60s rock when she was putting together the new album.

“I don’t think I’d call my music ‘goth,’” she says. “I relate much more to that earlier neo-psychedelic term. Ultimately, I’m just making pop music and choosing to color it as I see fit, however it gets me off. I serve the song.”

Perhaps that’s a little disingenuous coming from the black-haired, black-clad songwriter whose “Evil Blossom” ends with a chorus of “Why be good? Be beautiful and sad. It’s all you’ve ever had.” And perhaps that’s an unfair characterization. A quality that raises the Dum Dum Girls above a mere revival band is that they are not slavishly locked in to any genre. Penny borrows what she needs, and always serves the song, just as she says.

I’m reminded of David Bowie’s observation that it’s easiest to be sincere through artifice. (And if he didn’t say that, he should have.) So I ask Penny if having a lot of musical references to play with has allowed her to write about topics that might otherwise be too emotionally difficult. Does working within a genre give her freedom to be more personally expressive?

“I am with you theoretically but I don’t really feel like I work within the constraints of anything. The persona and melodrama are just part of the sincerity. I know I’m not inventing anything, and I know that the exchange between artist and listener is often most powerful when we touch on those common, shared experiences.”

Dum Dum Girls perform at 8pm, April 9 at the Blank Club. More info.