The fourth annual Creative Convergence Silicon Valley—C2SV—kicked off Thursday with lively discussions about the future of downtown San Jose, $35 computers and a bunch of great musical performances.

The day started with a talk about how so-called “cultural districts” are born and how they might be maintained without succumbing to the crushing forces of gentrification. Four speakers—Teo Castellanos, Moy Eng, Dr. Ayodele Nzinga and Steven H. Oliver—and moderator Jessica Cusick, looked at examples of cultural districts from around the country.

In nearly every example, artists came into an economically disadvantaged and underserved neighborhood in search of cheap rent. The artists then created a vibrant scene in that neighborhood, drawing wealthier residents and property developers, leading to a spike in rents and the exile of the artists, as well as the poor families originally living in the neighborhood.

Teo Castellano talked about the Wynwood neighborhood, which went from a poor Puerto Rican community to become one of the most trendy corners of Miami. In the process, developers got rich, while many of the artists who helped revitalized the neighborhood got pushed out along with low-income Puerto Rican families.

Right to Wynwood from Right to Wynwood on Vimeo.

The same thing is happening now in West Oakland, according to Dr. Nzinga—a longtime resident of the Lower Bottoms neighborhood there. “West Oakland is not being gentrified,” Nzinga says. “It has been gentrified.”

The speakers then turned their attention to ways that this pattern might be avoided in the future. The implications were clear: as luxury apartments go up all over San Jose, and the city’s downtown becomes ever more saturated with craft cocktail bars and tony restaurants, what will that mean for the local artists who seem to finally be making inroads in a city that has been devoid of art and culture for so long?

“San Jose has the most extraordinary opportunity to be the 21st century city, as far as culture,” Eng said. Only time will tell.

Watch C2SV founder and Metro Silicon Valley’s editor in chief, Dan Pulcrano, delivering his opening remarks:

San Jose-based artist Daniel Lazo, the winner of this year’s C2SV T-Shirt Design Competition says he was inspired by the local technology festival’s goal of uniting music and tech.

“My inspiration for the shirt design came from how I see music and technology intertwining and joining in unity,” Lazo says.

Lazo has designed logos and posters for a number of local organizations and causes—including promotional materials for a hurricane relief fundraiser, organized by the Filipino and Vietnamese clubs at Piedmont Hills High School; a T-shirt logo for the Filipino Youth Coalition; and a logo used by a candidate running for secretary of Akbayan, a Filipino-American organization at San Jose State University.

Much of Lazo’s work has the sleek, so-called “flat” aesthetic commonly seen in much of today’s professionally produced graphic design.

Lazo’s C2SV T-shirt design (top) was chosen from among many entrants precisely because of it’s clean lines and modern look.

“The design captures how music can be infinitely transmitted,” Lazo explains of the piece. As a San Jose native, the artist says he wanted to find a way to represent Silicon Valley’s creative and technological nature in a singular and cohesive whole. “The music moves into the mic. The mic transfers the waves into speakers. The speakers burst out music onto the city, which feeds back to the mic. Everything is connected.”

To check out more of Lazo’s graphic design, click here. To view his freehand illustrations, check out his Instagram.

Though they may not enjoy the same level of recognition as some of their name-brand peers, production duo Christian Rich certainly have some serious behind-the-boards bona fides.

Beginning with their first major production credit on Lil’ Kim’s 2003 album, La Bella Mafia, these two brothers—born in Chicago and raised in Nigeria—have lent their chops to a string of well-known hip-hop artists, including Drake, Childish Gambino, Earl Sweatshirt and Vince Staples.

Now based in Los Angeles, the duo, which are slated to perform at the Continental Bar, Lounge and Patio during C2SV, cite Pharrell Williams and his N.E.R.D. cohort, Shae Haley, as mentors. According to Christian Rich, Pharrell’s patience and perseverance in the music industry was an inspiration.

“At the time when we were working close together—back between 2009 and 2011—I remember he would say, ‘I’m not going to change up my style; I’m going to let the people come to me, I’m going to do what want to do,’” Taiwo says, recalling a conversation with Williams. “That’s something that we think about on a daily basis—just being focused, consistent and do what do.”

Christian Rich’s latest album, FW14, plays like an intergalactic journey—jumping hyperspace from ethereal acid jazz to aggressive trap to neo-soul, dancefloor-ready jams.

“We could’ve easily done a hip-hop album, but it could be very limiting,” Taiwo says. “And we’ve already done that to some capacity, so we really just wanted to branch out and try to bring more ears to our music. The idea was to make an album that lent itself more to the electronic space.”

In this goal, Christian Rich have succeeded. The Vince Staples-featuring “High” lurches with chopped and screwed vocals, thudding subsonic bass and dissonant, robotic, stutter-step horn squelches—at once recalling the industrial ambiance of Actress and the heavy electrohouse of Datsik.

FW14 is sensual, endearing and nuanced—packed with samples and sounds weird enough to intrigue but not so weird that it sends listeners running from the dance floor. Instead, it offers a peek into an infectious amalgamation of hip-hop, R&B and electronica.

The album’s list of recognizable up-and-comers definitely helps widen this record’s appeal. In addition to Vince Staples, FW14 also features emcees Goldlink and Bia—two young heavy-hitters bending the limitations of rap and electronica—as well as singers JMSN, Brooklyn’s Denitia and Sene, Jack Davey and Sinead Hartnett.

It’s a roster that Taiwo says the brothers scouted on SoundCloud. “I think the one thing that SoundCloud has done for us is really open our palette to new collaborators,” Taiwo says. “It’s just as easy to go on Twitter and talk to someone, but SoundCloud makes it so much easier to be able to hear the music first-hand and really latch onto their style.”

Christian Rich are performing at The Continental Bar, Lounge and Patio as part of C2SV on Oct. 8 at 10:30pm.

There are many parallels to be drawn between the return of the SoFA Street Fair this Sunday and the so-called “reunion” of Insolence, who along with Salmon and Maids of Honor will provide direct support to the festival’s headliner, Fishbone. But whatever you do, don’t call it a comeback.

Sure, it’s true that Insolence went on hiatus more than three years ago, but the band never technically broke up, according to Mark Herman, one of Insolence’s two vocalists.

“We just took a little break,” Herman says, explaining that some of the band started families, while others moved outside of the band’s home base of San Jose. “It just got to the point where life happened for some of us. We had never stopped—from 1996 to 2010, we were just grinding, grinding, grinding, and chasing that dream.”

By many measures Insolence have achieved that “dream.” The group has toured the world with its high energy mix of rap, metal, reggae and punk—sharing huge stages with some of the biggest bands of the aughts, including Rancid, Incubus, System of a Down, Jane’s Addiction and Papa Roach. They’ve been signed to independent and major labels, and many of the group’s members have gone on to form other successful acts.

Along with Insolence’s success came many trials and tribulations. During its heyday, the band kept up a grueling touring schedule and was under constant pressure from their record labels—Maverick and especially Warner Bros.—to write material that mainstream radio would play, which was a particular problem for a band like Insolence.

“We’ve always been all over the place,” Herman admits, explaining that the band never had any interest in playing one kind of music. “We were just in a band to have fun.”

According to Willis Rosenthal, the group’s other vocalist, at the time record labels started courting Insolence, their sound was very new. It was the mid-’90s, and rap-rock bands like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park were only just starting to get traction.

The way Rosenthal tells it, Insolence wasn’t even trying to ride the rap-rock wave. Their hybrid sound was more the result of everyone in the group trying to insert their own influences into each song.

Unfortunately for Insolence, while the aggressive sounds of nu-metal and rapcore initially took the U.S. by storm, by the turn of the millennium, critics and fans began turning on the music that had only a few years earlier been so popular. And they weren’t just listening to other stuff. Bands that combined guitars and emcees were suddenly punch lines.

It was tough time, Rosenthal says, recalling those years. “We thought we were on to something,” he says. “It turned into something that we weren’t really into.”

Insolence’s label started pushing them to sing more, encouraging them to pivot away from rapping, Herman remembers. “But you can’t fake the funk.” Insolence refused to fold itself into any of the prepackaged, marketable options that their labels presented to them. They just kept doing what they wanted to do.

The strong independent streak that runs through the band not only led to Insolence ignoring their record label’s wishes. It also resulted in the formation of side projects. Drunken Starfighter was formed by Rosenthal and Insolence’s DJ, Itchy, back in 2001. And The Whiskey Avengers were formed by Insolence’s bass player, Clint Westwood, and drummer, Kevin Higuchi, in 2006.

Those more intimately familiar with Insolence’s hiatus may know that the increasing attention and energy that Westwood and Higuchi were pouring into the Avengers took its toll—leading to some bruised egos and infighting.

“It’s time to let bygones be bygones,” Herman says, adding that he is just looking forward to getting back on stage, without any of the old pressures that used to weigh on his mind. “I’m super excited, man. There’s no greater feeling than playing music. I just want to get up on stage and have that camaraderie with my friends.”

Herman says he is also pumped that the group’s first show in over three years will be at the “reupholstered” SoFA Street Fair, which is returning after more than a 10-year absence, thanks in large part to longtime San Jose promoter Fil Maresca, as well as South Bay veteran booking agents Gary Avila and Jimmy Arceneaux. He sees it as a sign that San Jose’s local music scene is on its way back.

A new Insolence album is in the works, which Rosenthal describes as a mix between the early rapcore stuff that put Insolence on the map and newer electronic and synth-based sounds. “It’s going to be awesome,” Rosenthal says. After years dealing with record execs, grueling tours and internal drama, Insolence is ready to just chill out and play.

Insolence play the main stage at the “reupholstered” SoFA Street Fair in San Jose on Sept. 14 at 5:30pm. More info.

A year and a half ago, veteran Bay Area musician Carlos Elizalde nearly called it quits. For more than two decades the lead singer of Ruckatan had been playing in local bands—including The Yardies, Mirage, Bautista, Cantera and La Ventana—but he had hit a roadblock that seemed insurmountable.

Elizalde’s cousin was bowing out to go in a different musical direction and Ruckatan was without a guitarist. The prospect of finding a suitable replacement—someone who would be able to seamlessly integrate and contribute to the group’s complex, highly structured style—was daunting. After all, it had taken more than eight years to find the members he was currently playing with.

Ruckatan had become “a melting pot that fused really well together,” Elizalde says of his band’s sound—an eclectic mix of Latin, reggae, pop, rock, soul and world music. “We didn’t dumb it down. If anything, what we did was take it to a level where not only the people that are into jazz and Latin can identify, but regular folks can get [into a] hook from a song.”

Thankfully Carlos Hernandez, a fan of Ruckatan for the better part of a decade, stepped in, declaring he’d wanted to play with the group for years. With an ear for their sound, Hernandez clicked, and will be rocking out with his bandmates this Saturday at Chacho’s as part of the C2SV Latin Music Showcase.

It would have been a shame if Ruckatan had disbanded. Though this lineup has only technically been together for five years, Ruckatan has been an entire lifetime in the making.

Take the group’s moniker, for starters. The word “Ruckatan” comes from a line in a limerick that Elizalde’s father used to sing to him as a child.

Then there’s the work—as well as the providence—that went into getting all the right people together playing music as Ruckatan.

It was through Craigslist that Elizalde linked up with Blaine Hoopes, a multi-instrumentalist whom he calls “the mad professor.” But it was something almost nearer divine intervention that brought keyboardist Jose Angel Amador to the band. Elizalde happened to hear Amador playing on one of the store’s keyboards and was immediately taken with the power of his style. Elizalde urged Amador to try out for his group. “He was a perfect fit,” Elizalde says.

From there, the pieces slowly fell into place—with each member of Ruckatan’s current seven-man lineup bringing his own unique style to the table.

It’s little wonder Elizalde views the band as more than just a collection of musicians working toward a single goal. To him, Ruckatan is a “tribe.” It’s a notion that extends beyond the band to Ruckatan’s fans, who Elizalde views as possessing the same collective spirit.

Ruckatan will play C2SV’s Latin Music Showcase at Chacho’s on Sept. 13. More info.

Last week, local artist, musician and graphic designer Ben Henderson took down the plastic banner—which had hung above Cafe Stritch’s main entrance for more than a year—and replaced it with a hand-painted sign featuring the venue’s name and logo. Next week, the first of three shows booked in coordination with “boutique” production company (((folk YEAH!))) will kick off at the SoFA bar and restaurant. And in September, Cafe Stritch will host the two-night C2SV Local Music Showcase, featuring a handful of San Jose indie bands, including Darto, Dinners and No Maps.

Those three events may seem unconnected, but to Maxwell Borkenhagen, artistic director of Cafe Stritch, they are all indicators of something much larger: a resurgent live music scene in downtown San Jose.

As far as Borkenhagen is concerned, it’s impossible for any city to have a thriving arts scene without great live music. And as artistic director of Cafe Stritch, Borkenhagen says he feels it is “his responsibility” to try his damnedest to resurrect the “glory days” of the ’80s and ’90s, when bands like Sublime, Nirvana and Green Day played at legendary venues, such as The Cactus Club, Ajax Lounge and F/X.

“The music thing is key to me,” Borkenhagen explains. “Music is my life, it’s my passion.”

He doesn’t want to live in a place without it. Nor does he want to move to find it. He is fiercely loyal to his hometown. “I’m from San Jose, I live in San Jose, I want to live in San Jose,” he says. “We’ve got huge potential. We just need to show a lot of the people that live in the suburbs surrounding San Jose that it’s worth going downtown.”

Since Borkenhagen’s family rebranded the space formerly known as Eulipia, he has been working tirelessly to book shows that not only bring patrons through the door, but which also carry a certain level of cultural cachet. “I want to show the world that San Jose doesn’t suck,” Borkenhagen says—straight faced, without the slightest hint of irony. The idea is to get people stoked about going out to see live music in San Jose again.

That means bringing in national, critically acclaimed acts, such as Built to Spill—who played a blistering “secret” show at Stritch last April—as well as working with the taste-making  (((folkYEAH!))) Presents production company, which has booked three highly anticipated shows at Borkenhagen’s SoFA restaurant and bar this month, featuring Sonny and the Sunsets (Aug. 13), The Fresh and Onlys (Aug. 19), and The Entrance Band (Aug. 25).

It also means championing local talent, which is why Borkenhagen, is working in coordination with C2SV (Creative Convergence Silicon Valley) to present two nights of local indie and punk, Sept. 12-13) at Cafe Stritch.

The C2SV Local Music Showcase will feature Darto, Dinners and Plume on Friday, Sept. 12.

No Maps, Breathing Patterns and Li Xi will play on Saturday, Sept. 13.

Each night of the showcase will provide a peek into the diverse array of young indie bands coming out of the South Bay—proving that in a region better known for cover bands and DJs spinning Top 40, there are still plenty of musicians pushing themselves to create new and interesting tunes. There’s the artfully fractured noise- and post-rock of Darto and Breathing Patterns, the chugging, fuzzy indie of Dinners and No Maps, the bouncing, poppy, garage-punk of Plume. Li Xi—the only non-San Jose band in the bunch—crafts reverb-soaked, psychedelic beats of Li Xi.

Borkenhagen is very excited about the upcoming (((folk YEAH))) shows. “I’ve been a huge fan of Folk Yeah for a long time,” he says of the production company. “The bands that Folk Yeah works with are my dream bands that I’d love to book and work with and play in San Jose.”

He’s also pumped on the great local talent he’s been able to book at Stritch since it opened last March, as well as the support he’s felt in the community for live rock & roll shows. “There’s a lot of like minded peope in San Jose right now that realize that if you don’t like where the culture is at, you’ve got to build something,” he says, adding that he is keeping his fingers crossed that the trend continues. “I don’t know why so much is happening now, but it definitely feels like we’re on the rise again.”

Years from Now, people will be likely be talking about that “one time Iggy and the Stooges played St. James Park in San Jose” for a couple thousand music fans. For those of us that were there for it—year zero for C2SV Music Festival—it’ll be a badge of honor for years to come.

As memorable as Iggy and the Stooges were, the band’s performance was only one piece of the four-day music and technology festival, where an impressive lineup of well known and local acts graced stages at 12 venues and mingled on the streets throughout downtown San Jose.

Some Highlights:

• Without a doubt, the highlight of the festival was Iggy and The Stooges. Iggy Pop isn’t just the godfather of punk rock, he’s a true rock ’n’ roll weirdo. In the 60s when Jim Morrison was considered the most controversial figure, Iggy was cutting himself up, puking on stage and exposing himself—this was all to a largely unappreciative crowd.

At 66, hopping around on the stage like a maniac, times have changed. People adore him, and rightfully so. The Stooges ripped through several of their classics: “Raw Power,” “Gimme Danger,” “Search and Destroy” and “1970.” The songs were still fresh, and Iggy was still a wild, crazy freak, though a more friendly version that in the 70s. He periodically asked the lights to be turned on so he could “get a look at everyone” and jokingly referred to himself at one point as “a drug pioneer.” Highlights were powerful performances of “I want to be your dog” and “The Passenger.”

At the close of their set, the Stooges were joined by several fully painted naked models before closing with a “dirty nasty number that requires no brain whatsoever,” according to Pop, which turned out to be “Louie Louie”—possibly the most covered song of all time. The Stooges played the song raw, sleazy and just as bare bones punk rock as possible.

• Decked out in shiny silver space suits, Bay Area favorites the Phenomenauts closed the first night of C2SV with a rowdy Café Stritch performance that included an impromptu jam with the in-house piano that normally serves jazz bands.

• Local electro-pop stars the Limousines played an early set at the Agenda, starting with some of their heavier material and peaking with a full-on dance party with singer Eric Victorino jumping into the crowd at one point. The sound system was so loud it earplugs almost proved ineffective, but most in the crowd didn’t seem to mind.

• The Lemonheads play an intimate set at Café Stritch with Mad Men star Jessica Paré (“Bisou Bisou”) in the crowd. Most of the audience sang along to every song from lead singer Evan Dando in the smallest venue you’re likely to see him perform.

• Off! played for a full house at the Blank Club, running through blistering punk songs in the vein of Black Flag—a group singer Keith Morris once fronted, along with the Circle Jerks. A surprise moment arrived between Morris rants between songs when he teared up and paused for a few beats while introducing the song eulogizing his friend Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the Gun Club singer/guitarist who died in 1996.

• San Francisco black metal group Deafheaven played the San Jose Rock Shop. The singer, who has the aura of a serial killer was maybe a bit over the top, but he’s so committed to the part, and because the music is so intense, it all somehow works.

• Pagoda Lounge was especially funky on Saturday with the Coup and Dam-Funk channeling different points along the funk spectrum. The Coup started with a live band serving an updated take on Sly and the Family Stone-era funk with front man Boots Riley serving a heavy dose of politics easily disguised as party rhymes for those not following his lyrics. San Francisco punk legend and former Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra danced in the crowd earning a shout out from the band at the end of the set before Boots joined him to visit and take a few photos. (MC)

• Dam-Funk brought a DJ set with his original tracks, 80s boogie, electro and disco funk. He kept the party going and danced with the crowd for a few songs even after the house lights came on for last call. Toward the end of his set, he debuted new songs from his joint album with Snoop Dogg, set for release in January on San Jose native Peanut Butter Wolf’s Stones Throw Records label. (MC)

• Anya and the Get Down had to get down without their guitarist on the closing night of C2SV. The ever-busy Matt Gonzolez unfortunately didn’t show until after Anya’s set was over, causing the band to have to cut it short, but producer/keyboardist/sonic generator Marcus Daniels (aka snack|BOT) held down, especially on new single “One Less,” a fantastic new song Anya closed with about growing up—not growing up, as the case may be. As always, her soaring voice provided the best vocals to be found in the South Bay. (SP)

• Stumblebunny, a relatively obscure power-pop band from the 70s played an early set at Café Stritch. They played a bunch of now-seemingly mellow rock n roll songs while cracking jokes between songs about being added to the C2SV bill so they could tell old dinosaur rock ’n’ roll stories. One of them being that bass player Peter Jordan before Stumblebunny was the bass player for the legendary NewYork Dolls, after first being their roadie.

• Closing out the festival was a performance by up-and-coming Detroit rapper Black Milk, backed by a live drummer, a six-string bass player, keyboardist and DJ. The band played thick bouncy funk grooves with a jazzy, hip-hop edge, while Black Milk spit some clever word play on top of the beats. Even by the end of the fourth night on C2SV, a marathon of live music never before seen in San Jose, the audience still had a blast, dancing along until late in the night.

What did you like most about C2SV? Leave a comment with your personal favorites in our comments section.

Matt Crawford and Steve Palopoli contributed to this report.

The anthem of punk rock is based on the Bunny Hop. To prove it, Iggy and the Stooges guitarist James Williamson deconstructed “Search and Destroy” during a talk Saturday at the C2SV tech and music conference, breaking down chord by chord the 1973 hit off their album “Raw Power” while the audience whipped out their smart phones to document the quick lesson in music theory.

The quirky little demo prefaced the Stooges’ show later that night in St. James Park, where fans packed the lawn to rock out to the godfathers of punk, reunited for four years after a three-decade hiatus. Williamson, who in 1970 joined the band fronted by the drug-addled wild-child Iggy Pop, gave up the rock ‘n roll life for 30 years to pursue a Silicon Valley engineering career instead.

Today, the 63-year-old looks more like your typical semiconductor-age valley exec than the glammed-out rocker of yore. Instead of leather pants, thigh-high boots and neon eyeshadow, his usual contemporary stage get-up consists of straight-cut jeans and a plain black tee, though the music he plays remains just as aggressive.

Williamson’s is one of the coolest biographies you’ll encounter–a remarkable study in contrasts, said Metro publisher and C2SV founder Dan Pulcrano in introducing him before the interview.

“Here’s someone who pretty much transformed rock ‘n roll in the ’70s, then decided to become an engineer, leading a quiet life in Saratoga, never talking about it,” said Pulcrano. “It’s one of the most amazing stories I’ve seen as a journalist 30 years here in the Silicon Valley.”

Jack Boulware, author of punk history compendium “Gimme Something Better” moderated the afternoon talk with Williamson, opening up the session by projecting a black-and-white photo of the 14-year-old guitarist standing shirtless, behind him a house, a clothesline and, in the distance beyond a field, leaning utility poles. His hair is long–shoulder-length like a goddamn hippy’s, as folks used to tell him.

“I was just reacting to the times more than anything else,” Williamson recounted. “That was kind of the time when, you know, Bob Dylan was around and you had the Beatles just starting to break in the U.S. So it was, you know, it was cool to have long hair. But it was also very troublesome for me in Michgan as a kid … because they weren’t having any of it.”

That hair brought him a lot of grief. Got him kicked off the football team. Then out of school. Refusing to chop it off meant skipping class, which racked up a truancy charge.

“I asked what any good Bob Dylan fan would ask: What would Bob Dylan do?” he said. “So I basically told them to pound sand, and, of course, that made me a truant.”

A judge sent him to juvy for a few months, where he learned about real delinquents and finally got that close-cropped ‘do the powers-that-be demanded.

The Williamson family moved from Texas to Oklahoma to Michgan, ending up in Detroit during the Motown heyday. A few years after picking up the guitar, Williamson joined his first band at the age of 15, banging out covers of British Invasion bands like the Rolling Stones. He was 20 when he met Iggy Pop–then just Jim Osterberg–at a frat party in Ann Arbor.

Those early days were marked by hedonistic excess and commercial failure. Williamson followed Iggy on the road, more focused on performing new songs than giving fans a chance to learn the old ones. Their shows were unpredictable, the audience rarely knew the words enough to sing along, to latch on to a standout hit. That big break lasted about six months. Williamson came down with hepatitis, Iggy with some addictions.

Literally sick and tired, Williamson moved back to Detroit to crash on his sister’s couch. Then one day, out of the blue, Iggy called him up, asking him to accompany the band on a trip to London. He’d just been picked up by CBS, which wanted to jet the bumpkins from Detroit right into the glittery glam-rock world of 70’s London to record “Raw Power,” which is now considered a classic power punk album–everybody in rock ‘n roll knows that record.

Williamson’s abrupt transition from late-night rock ‘n roll vampire to the world of engineering came years later in the music studio. Producing disco albums he wasn’t really into, he was more fascinated by the electronics he got to work with. So he decided, sort of on a whim, after encountering a dad showing his son how to boot up an MSI 8080 in an electronics store, to trade his musical gig for engineering class at Cal Poly, Pomona.

“I got struck by the whole excitement of the personal computer,” he said. “I hadn’t seen anything like that. Rock ‘n roll isn’t so exciting to me anymore, but this shit really is.”

In 1982, he moved to the South Bay for a job at AMD building applications using its chips.

“I reinforced this rule learned back in the stooges … unless you are one, always get a good frontman,” he said. “Certainly Iggy fits that bill and [AMD CEO] Jerry Sandersthat bill. He was a very bigger-than-life guy and the people who worked at AMD were very, very loyal to him for many different reasons.”

Sony later hired him as an executive in charge of interoperability standards for consumer electronics. Barely did he mention his punk-rock past. Co-workers had no clue that the corporate-clean-cut guy they worked with once wrote things like “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell.”

“I was done with music and I was having a good time doing what I was doing, so I was pretty fat, dumb and happy,” he said.

Then, in 2009, a series of events brought the band back together and, at least for now, closed the book on Williamson’s engineering career. In many ways, the band’s better than is used to be, Williamson feels.

“In the ’70s, we were terrible entertainers,” he said. “Not only had our albums not sold, but we had ADD. We didn’t want to play the same songs all the time, so we’d play new songs. So nobody ever knew what they were hearing. It was always like the first time. The shows were still interesting, but people didn’t know what to expect.”

These days he sees crowds hundreds of thousands strong, 20-somethings in the front row, singing along verbatim.

“It’s wild,” he remarked. “Who would have thought it?”

“HEL-LLLLO?” says Evan Dando, his unmistakable husky voice filling my receiver. Then he calls to someone in the same room: “Am I talking into the right side of this thing?” On the other side of the line, I cannot for the life of me figure out what he’s talking about. The phone? Does a phone have sides that can be considered debatable? Or maybe a different Apple product of some type that he’s using as a phone? Seems more plausible. Whatever it is, the longtime leader of the Lemonheads, performing Sept. 27 at C2SV Music Festival in San Jose, is struggling with technology today. An earlier number I called didn’t even ring, it just went dead after I dialed it. Turns out it broke on him, and he hadn’t realized it.

But now he’s on the line, and just a couple of minutes into our conversation, I’m reminded why Dando is the most fun interview in rock ’n’ roll, besides maybe Lou Reed. At one point, the noise in the background suggests he is definitely playing ping-pong while he talks to me. The first time I interviewed him, back in the ’90s, he asked if we could stop the interview for a couple of minutes because the new Beck video had just come on, and since I hadn’t seen it, he gave me a play-by-play call throughout.

It’s more than that, though. Dando manages to seem both scattered and thoughtful at the same time. He often responds to questions with a warm, drawn-out “yeah,” the kind that makes you feel like you just said the most insightful thing ever about his music. Since I’ve listened to his music for a long time, I have a lot of ideas to bounce off him, and sometimes it seems like he’s flipped it around and is interviewing me.

For instance, I’ve long felt that his records after 1990’s Lovey—1992’s It’s A Shame About Ray, 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads and 1996’s Car Button Cloth—form a trilogy of work that in retrospect is remarkably cohesive both in its sonic landscape and its themes.

“Yeah. They definitely are,” Dando says. “They’re the three Atlantic records after we sort of broke a little bit. Lovey is not really a part of it. It’s definitely a trilogy.”

For one thing, those are the records that defined his ability to write epically melodic pop songs that hide a dark lyrical core. It’s perhaps best exemplified in “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You” from Car Button Cloth, which matched a nursery-rhyme melody with lyrics like “Khmer Rouge, genocide quoi/Your place or Mein Kampf, now I’m giving the dog a bone.” Not necessarily what the world was expecting from the man who had broken out with covers of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” and Robyn St. Clare’s “Into Your Arms.”

“It’s deceptively bright sounding,” Dando admits of “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You.” But really that dark/light contrast shouldn’t have been a surprise. It grew out of the band’s early, punkier years, and as Dando’s songwriting matured, it found its way into fan favorites from “It’s A Shame About Ray” to “Rudderless” to “Hospital”—the latter a recollection of his own time in rehab, recovering from crack cocaine addiction in the mid-’90s, that nonetheless glows with the repeated lines “Green, green leaves/Falling from the trees.”

“I always liked that sour-sweet, the combination of the happy, jaunty sounding stuff with some messed-up lyrics. It comes naturally,” says Dando, making it clear why the band’s name is so apt.

Dando is full of the same contradictions himself; he’s proud of records like Come On Feel, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, but he also regrets falling for the music industry’s desire to market his looks more than his music.

“They managed to screw up the record cover. They changed it,” he says. “We had this nice cover, but they wanted to see my eyes and stuff. I totally knuckled under on it, too. I did. I did a lot of stuff like that back then, because I was sort of naïve and young, and I just wanted to be in a band, and it was working out well. But that record’s really good, I like it.”

Rumors have been flying about the record he’s working on now, but most of them are either false or yet to be decided. Ryan Adams is not involved, though Dando says they do want to work together at some point, and original Lemonhead Ben Deily—who co-founded the band with Dando in 1989, while they were in high school together in Boston—may or may not be, either. (He and Deily would like to do something to commemorate the British re-release of their first albums Hate Your Friends, Creator and Lick.) But the album is coming, regardless, Dando says.

“I know my next record’s gonna be really great, so I want to spend some extra time on it,” he says. “It really, really has to come out by spring, so I’ve gotta finish it this winter.”

San Francisco’s Deafheaven, performing Friday at C2SV Music Festival, has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention this year for their groundbreaking sophomore album Sunbather, an impressive mix of extreme black metal, screamo and post-rock.

With near constant metal riffs, vocal screaming and post-rock arpeggios, the album never sounds cluttered, and somehow, gradually and unnoticed, they shift into something gentle and spacious, and then back again into another complex aggressive section.

Before Sunbather pulled this formula off so fluidly, the band has been combining with these competing elements since they started in 2010, just trying to play all the music they loved and somehow make it work.

“I’ve been listening to aggressive music for as long as I can remember—over a decade now,” says lead vocalist George “We sort of had an idea of what we were trying to accomplish musically, but I think we just went in it a little blind, curious just to see how it would come out. Other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot of thought put into it.”

Sunbather wasn’t just a feat of extreme musical complexity, but an emotionally one too, particularly for a metal or hardcore album, where traditionally artists make every song as angry as possible, or wallow in doom for twelve tracks. On Sunbather, within each song—some ten minutes, others just a couple minutes long—Deafheaven express a whole range of emotions.

“There were a lot of records coming out in 2011 and 2012 that really wanted to be dark and brooding,” Clarke says. “I felt like those weren’t an accurate depiction of the human emotional experience. We wanted something that went through emotional movements. We wanted something that really represented the idea of self—one that is not sad all the time, or angry, or happy, but rather a mixture of all those things all the time.”

Deafheaven started as a two-piece, with Kerry McCoy on guitar and Clarke on vocals. They recorded a series of demos together at Atomic Gardens in East Palo Alto with no real point to them, just a way to kill boredom. Though after listening back to what they’d created, they decided to send them off to be reviewed.

“I was looking at certain blogs and I was like, ‘These bands are getting attention. I don’t think we sound too far from this stuff. Maybe people will listen to our demos,’” Clarke says.

Not only did they get positive press, but independent record label Deathwish, Inc read the reviews and contacted the band to see if they’d work with them.

By the time Deafheaven were ready to record their first album, Roads to Judah, Clarke and McKoy had found three more members. While stylistically it is similar to Sunbather, it at times sounds more ambitious than groundbreaking.

“Roads to Judah after a while felt really elementary, but I like the direction we were going in,” George says. “I just thought that the riffing and stuff like that sort of was a little simplistic. Even the production is really thin compared to Sunbather. It sort of lacks a heavy base.”

Over the years that followed, other band members came and went. By the time they were ready to record again, Clarke and McKoy didn’t really have a band, so they went back to being the two-piece and wrote Sunbather together. With just the two of them, they spent long, meticulous hours tooling each section of every song in a way that just wasn’t possible on Roads to Judah.

“It was very thought out—much more than in a jam type situation,” Clarke says. “We were really trying to overcompensate for the fact that we didn’t have five people. Everything had to have lots of details, riffs had to be as fluid as possible. We had to make sure all our transitions worked. It was very piece-by-piece,” Clarke says.

They recorded the album with drummer Daniel Tracy. The result is something that doesn’t sound like completely new territory musically, but it shows a new level of complexity and maturity within metal music, and pushes the boundaries as far as what the standards for aggressive music should be.

“I think the hardest part about songwriting is fluidity, making sure that something is seamless, especially when you are attempting to combine assorted genres,” Clarke says. “I think we did a good job in melding styles together just like one big piece. I remember feeling personally accomplished by the record because we put a lot of time into it.”