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?”

James Williamson resembles any number of retired semiconductor-era Silicon Valley execs, the ones that drive late model SUVs, talk with an easy Midwestern drawl and have a mop of white hair mussed over the tops of their ears. Then he starts with the stories.

Like the night he was introduced to his wife, who at the time was working on Helen Reddy’s management team at Warner Brothers and was brought backstage to meet him at the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard.

“My hair was sticking straight up in five different colors. Iggy falls out of a closet. We had to go on stage and Iggy didn’t want to take time to use the bathroom. So while we were walking down the ramp to the stage, Iggy whips it and whizzes the entire way down the walkway,” says Williamson, who performs with Iggy And The Stooges on Sept. 28 at C2SV Music Festival.

“My wife, she’s seen it all,” he says. Still, it wasn’t much of a first impression. “It took her seven years to go out with me.“

The Williamsons moved to Cupertino in 1982 when James was hired by AMD to design products using its microprocessors. He barely lifted a guitar for 30 years.

“We’d go to work parties here in the valley, and the girls and the boys would sit on opposite sides of the room, just like in high school,” he says. “We had just come up from Hollywood, where, at parties, people were on the floor, laying on top of one another. My wife and I would just look at each other. I mean, where am I?”

His co-workers at AMD, and later at the Sony buildings on Zanker Road and N. First Street, knew nothing about his rock & roll days. “It never came up,” he says simply.

“The more time that passed, the less relevant it seemed to me. I had completely lost the rock dream. I was not into it. I was done. I was out of music.” He and and his former collaborator Iggy Pop didn’t talk except for the occasional business conversation.

“Things were very bad between us,” Williamson says.

The memorabilia remained stashed in the closet. “The only things I had out were a couple of guitars that sat in their cases, leaning up against the wall.”

“My son was a huge fan of Nirvana, so I’d tell him, “You know, I kind of pioneered that.’

“‘Oh sure, Dad,’” he’d say.

Williamson’s son later wrote a piece in college about the unplayed guitars. He called it “The Coffins in the Corner.”

Williamson took up the instrument after seeing Elvis on television. He describes himself as a “wild boy” living in Oklahoma and Texas with a “strict military stepdad,” and “there was tension around the house.”

The family moved during Motown music’s heydey to Detroit, where he’d see Stevie Wonder and other acts up close at the State Fair. He started his first band at 15 and played covers of British Invasion bands like the Rolling Stones and Them (“Gloria”) but soon began writing his own material. “It was easier for me to make up my own stuff than learn their stuff,” he says. He experimented with power chords and “chords within chords” because he said they were harder to copy.

His high school sent him home when his hair got too long and he was soon hauled before a judge on a truancy charge. He was incarcerated for three months after refusing to cut his hair.

He met Jim Osterberg, the future Iggy Pop, at a fraternity party in Ann Arbor and joined the Stooges in 1970, following Osterberg to New York, London and Los Angeles for a series of commercial failures before deciding to become an electrical engineer.

Williamson remembers arriving in London in 1972, “ground zero of the glam movement,” to record with David Bowie. “Here were these two bumpkins from Detroit … a couple of Midwestern guys amidst all these dandies in frilly cuffed shirts,” he remembers.

Hard rocking rebels amidst the androgeny, the Stooges played their only London performance at the Royal Gardens Hotel. Williamson remembers future Clash member Mick Jones and future Sex Pistol John Lydon in the audience.

“It wasn’t anything they’d seen before. They’d never seen a singer come out and confront the audience. It made a huge impression. It shocked many people,” Williamson said.

He had developed a rapid chord style he said was based on the sound of machine guns during the Vietnam War.

“We should probably wear some makeup, I told Ig, Of course, none of us knew anything about makeup. We found a clown box of makeup. I was in white face. Iggy painted his lips black. It was very extreme. Two years later everybody started looking like that.”

“Management wouldn’t let us play again. They were afraid we were going to get arrested.”

The Stooges imploded and left the secret sauce recipe in the British Isles. Williamson’s jagged chordsmithing, along with other innovations like stage-diving, spiked hair and eye liner, pretty much wrote the playbook for the punk rock explosion and its various offshoots: goth, modern rock, speed metal, alt rock.

“We weren’t trying to be anything. We were just trying to be wild.”

Williamson was anything but wild during his days in Santa Clara Valley. As real estate values grew, he moved his family to the white shoe suburb of Saratoga. After 15 years at AMD, he joined Sony as vice president of technical standards, a job he says involved formal meetings with competitors on industry standards such as Blu-ray.

After the 2008 financial implosion, Sony began to look for ways to trim costs. “It becomes obvious,” Williamson says. “First they try to get rid of the guys past 50 years. They offer voluntary retirement packages. They make it very attractive.”

He was 59 at the time. “I don’t think my boss had any clue I was going to take it. I was leaning towards it. They always give a deadline. Then I get this call, and Ronnie’s dead,” WIlliamson recalls, referring to longtime Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, who died in 2009.

Osterberg called again after Asheton’s funeral. “We broached the subject of whether I would want to come back and play guitar. I hadn’t played guitar in 30 years. I don’t even know if I can play or not.”
The past four years have pretty much dispensed with any of those reservations, and the consensus is that one of rock’s great guitarists, both live and in the studio, was quietly ensconced amidst the cubicles on N. First Street for three decades.

Williamson refers to his return as “closure.”

“It’s kind of a cool way for an old guy to do some victory laps at the end of the game,” he says with a wry smile.

Disclosure: Executive Editor Dan Pulcrano is the promoter of The Stooges’ St. James Park performance.

Guitarist James Williamson will deliver the keynote music address at the C2SV Technology Conference and Music Festival in Silicon Valley at noon on September 28 before he performs with Iggy and The Stooges at St. James Park later that evening.

Williamson’s story is one of the more remarkable ones in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. As member of Iggy and The Stooges in the 1970s, Williamson created punk rock’s signature guitar sound, then settled into a quiet career as a Silicon Valley engineering manager. After 30 years, he took an early retirement buyout offer as Sony’s Vice President of Technology Standards and rejoined the band.

Completing a world tour that’s taken The Stooges from Australia to Europe, the legendary band will play its final show of its triumphant sweep on Williamson’s home turf in Silicon Valley. Williamson is an ideal icon for a conference and festival celebrating “Creative Convergence,” the fusion of information technology and the creative arts. In February, he’ll be inducted into the  Engineering Hall of Fame at California Polytechnic University. “To my knowledge, I am the only holder of a Rock n Roll HOF and an Engineering HOF,” Williamson says.

At the keynote, Williamson will talk about his journey from juvenile delinquent and rock pioneer to mild mannered corporate executive, in which one of rock’s great guitarists was embedded, undetected, in a big consumer electronics company. The keynote will take place in the newly-opened wing of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center on the last day of the C2SV tech conference.

Born in Texas and raised in Oklahoma and Detroit, Williamson first played music with Iggy Pop while in high school and joined The Stooges in 1970, but the band was a short-lived trainwreck of drug-fueled excess and commercial failure.

In 1972 David Bowie invited Pop to record in London. Williamson joined him there, co-wrote all of the songs with Iggy, and played all of the guitar parts for The Stooges’ classic 1973 album, “Raw Power.” Kurt Cobain called it his favorite album of all time, and Cee Lo Green ranks it among his favorites as well.

Williamson’s jagged, loud, raunchy Detroit guitar sound inspired the punk rock movement that transformed rock music and continues to influence guitarists to this day. “He has the technical ability of Jimmy Page without being as studious, and the swagger of Keith Richards without being sloppy,” says Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr.

Photo courtesy of James Williamson.

“The first time I heard him play,” Iggy Pop told Britain’s The Guardian in an interview, “which was in a basement in Ann Arbor, he did something that later became known as punk or speed metal—a great number of chords, almost all at once—but which at that time came from no known musical vocabulary.”

As the band disintegrated in the mid- and late-1970s, Williamson left the music world and earned an electrical engineering degree from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

He worked for silicon chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) from 1982 to 1997, then spent more than a decade as Sony’s Vice President of Technical Standards. He raised a family in Saratoga and didn’t talk to his colleagues and neighbors about his platform shoe days.

Photo courtesy of James Williamson.

Unlike many Silicon Valley managers who get the early retirement letter when they reach their 60s, Williamson didn’t have to open a frozen yogurt franchise. He accepted Sony’s buyout in 2009 and rejoined the Stooges after a three-decade break.

Williamson warmed up for his return to the stage with the Careless Hearts, a San Jose band, at the Blank Club in 2009. He’s been touring the world with Iggy and The Stooges for four years now.

Williamson’s keynote will be open to badge holders of the C2SV Technology Conference and VIP ticket holders for the Iggy and the Stooges concert later that day in St. James Park.

The concert ticket is sold in combination with a wristband that enables concertgoers to experience three days of music at more than 12 venues in Downtown San Jose.

The Creative Convergence Silicon Valley technology conference will feature three days of speakers, including many notable Silicon Valley CEOs, entrepreneurs, technologists, authors and academics.

More info on tickets.

Dan Pulcrano is the founder and organizer of the Creative Convergence Silicon Valley (C2SV) Technology Conference and Music Festival. Follow him at @Pulcrano.

A lot has happened to Derek See in the last year. It’s been about that long that since The Bang, the girl-group band he started with his partner Angeline King, broke up.

“There was a lot of turmoil,” he says, in the line-up at the time, with different members pushing for different directions. He and King wanted to eventually re-start the band, but they didn’t want to rush it.

“We took a little bit of time off,” says See. “We thought a lot about how we were going to approach it when we regrouped.”

And indeed, The Bang 2.0, which headlines at the Blank Club Saturday, is quite a bit different than its predecessor. Now, instead of three girl singers up front, there are two—King and new addition Rachel Mae Havens—but the whole band sings, as well. Richard Gutierrez has joined on drums, with Jafar Green holding down the basslines.

Perhaps the biggest change musically, however, is the addition of a co-lead guitarist in Alison Green (of the all-girl Kinks tribute band the Minks). It’s a surprising change, since See’s guitar is synonymous with the sound of the Band, but he says he couldn’t be happier.

“It allows me to play more how I want to. Trying to play horn parts and keyboard parts, it was exhausting,” See admits.