When the club boom shook San Jose in the early 2000s, new venues opened downtown, but live music fell by the wayside, with DJs the focus at the new clubs. David Nevin, 32, who opened the music repair and rock & roll venue The Rock Shop five years ago, wants to help bring live music back with a new SoFA District venue in a space that has a long history hosting live music.

Come Nov. 27, the musical entrepreneur will debut his latest project, a new rock club called Back Bar. The 130-person venue will occupy the back portion of what used to be the Cactus Club, which left a void in the local rock scene when it shuttered its doors more than a decade ago. The new club will be a separate venture from the Rock Shop, which will continue to host all-ages shows periodically. The Back Bar will hold 21+ shows.

“We’re really excited to start bringing back live music to San Jose,” says Back Bar manager Nick Schuneman. “We’re doing everything from rock, punk, metal, new wave, ’80s nights, you name it.”

The South Market Street club will open its doors Sunday through Friday every week and retain a resident DJ, though the focus will always be on live entertainment, says Schuneman, who plays bass for the Forgotten. He’s thinking of pulling together a comedy night, too.

“There’s something about live music that really pumps people up—it seems to inspire people having fun,” he says. “That’s what this is about.”

Downtown business leaders and the city have been especially supportive of encouraging live entertainment in downtown in recent years, Schuneman says, and the SoFA District was particularly appealing with its cluster of other venues and arts spaces.

“That’s a big reason why we’re excited to move into this area,” Schuneman says. “You’re seeing a lot more incentive to create live entertainment.”

Eventually, Nevin and Schuneman would like to see multiple live shows at various venues on any given night in San Jose. It’s already getting there, with consistent shows at the Blank Club, Caravan, Johnny V’s and now Café Stritch and Blackbird Tavern.

“We’re excited to add something to the mix,” Nevin says. “The more, the merrier. The overall goal is to kind of reflect the community that we know—the music culture that’s been here—and give them another outlet to go hang out and hear some awesome music. In a city this size, there should be somewhere to go every night.”

The Thanksgiving-eve grand opening art and music show will double as a homecoming for the self-described “comedic goon-core shit punk degenerates” Trashkannon. Like most of the shows planned for Back Bar, it’s free to get in.

PinUp Productions, a local music booking company, announced that Cupertino church and music venue The Refuge will no longer play host to live music.

The Refuge is a church hall that is a part of the Good Sam Church in Cupertino. PinUp Productions set up a variety of local music shows there for more than four years, from their Battle of the Bands to punk and metal shows. Some shows at The Refuge attracted up to 400 people. The church hall, however, was in close proximity to homes and businesses and neighbors frequently complained about loitering and noise late at night.

Last week Good Sam Church was informed by a sheriff that they would no longer be able to host non-ministry events, according to PinUp Productions. A meeting was scheduled between surrounding business, residents, Good Sam staff and the PinUp Productions staff to discuss the problems. Good Sam, however, was informed that they would not be able to host any further music events before said meeting took place.

PinUp still plans to book shows in the South Bay and plans to expand into the East Bay.

San Pedro Square Market and hosts an all-ages show for SVSX with Careless Hearts, Doctor Nurse, and Dirty Pillows.

Careless Hearts
9pm San Pedro Square Market
Careless Hearts began as pure San Jose alt-country. After building up a following in the South Bay and elsewhere since 2005, their career took an unexpected left turn in 2009 when they found themselves backing Iggy & the Stooges guitarist James Williamson at the Blank Club, Williamson’s first performance in 35 years and a warm-up for his return to touring with Iggy Pop. (The Blank Club performance was released as the 2010 album James Williamson and the Careless Hearts.) The event was a turning point in the Careless Hearts’ career; afterward, they released a three-song EP that found their finely crafted roots thunderstruck with Iggy’s (and Williamson’s) fiery “rawk” influence. It remains to be seen what direction the Careless Hearts take next, but with the band’s proven talent and new adventurousness, their next record is sure to be a welcome surprise no matter what.

Doctor Nurse
8pm San Pedro Square Market
Doctor Nurse’s approach to songwriting is similar to that of indie-rock legends Guided by Voices. Both groups pluck the best elements of psychedelic rock, prog-rock, lo-fi indie and power-pop and blend them into an amalgam of gorgeous, offbeat, well written rock & roll.

The similarities stop there; while Guided by Voices churns out partially complete lo-fi gems as quickly as the ideas pop in their heads, Doctor Nurse works slowly and methodically. The band, for instance, spent years working on Calm Seas, Phantom Lights. The album is not only full of intelligent, grandiose psychedelic indie-folk, clearly written by educated music lovers, its production is masterfully nuanced with glistening layers of keyboards, guitars, percussion and vocal harmonies. It is the kind of album worth listening to on headphones to pick out every subtle detail with each listen—or live in concert, where the waves of sound and vibrations overtake you.

Dirty Pillows
7pm, San Pedro Square Market
Formed in 2008 by guitarist/vocalist Alejandro Villanueva (who goes by his nickname “Millhows”) and drummer Jeff Evans, Dirty Pillows plays music that celebrates the pair’s shared influences—Modern Lovers, the Damned, Talking Heads—but also captures the raw, rushing sound of the earliest days of punk.

The South Bay duo’s visibility has been patchy at times, but they’re making a big push right now. Their recent song “Love Happening” sounds like something the Brian Jonestown Massacre might have released. As Evans describes it, “That song is the one that everybody has their own interpretation for.”

Evans and Millhows manage to create psychedelic, pop and garage tones with only two band members. Jeff is not afraid to hit his drum kit, and somehow Millhows makes sense of the army of loop machines and effects in front of him. “I sort of seem to channel this very post-punk, choppy, very angular guitar spirit,” Millhows says of his guitar playing.

Yeshua & the Hightones and Maxx Cabello Jr. are join forces with Mezcal for a night of great music and great food for Silicon Valley Sound eXperience.

Maxx Cabello Jr. & the Breakdown
10pm, Mezcal
San Jose local Maxx Cabello Jr. is known for his guitar chops, his soulful voice and mixing it up with a wide range of styles. He plays everything from slow soul jams, blazing electric blues and Latin rock. In the case of his video, “My Love,” he digs into old-school romantic soul, a throwback to the days before the style was dominated by drum machines and synthesizers.

A quick Google search reveals footage of Cabello playing accomplished eight-minute blues guitar solos (with touches of Duane Allman-esque slide work on “Heartbreaker”), but the simplicity of “My Love” makes it a good place to start for people new to his music. Like the video, the song is smooth and sweet—just a straightforward love song.

The video holds special significance because it helped Cabello land an opening spot at San Jose’s Jazz Summer Fest this year after submitting it to festival organizers in a contest where people voted for the song they liked best. “My Love” won by a landslide.

Yeshua & the Hightones
10pm, Mezcal
Yeshua Orozco’s dreads are sort of like his playoff beard—he’s been growing them for as long as he’s been in a band, and they seem to be bringing him luck. His seven-piece San Jose reggae group, Yeshua and the Hightones, quickly made a mark on the scene and has been getting the kind of rock gigs that are often off-limits to musical proponents of Jah. Maybe it’s something about the blues and Latin grooves they bring to the island sound. Maybe it’s the talent of the musicians he surrounds himself with, who are clearly versed in musical traditions from the world—and able to cut loose on a mean guitar solo, as well. Or hey, maybe it’s the hair.

Straying from it’s usual beat-orientate lineup, The Pagoda Lounge at The Fairmont Hotel presents a full rock-centered lineup for SVSX featuring Will Sprout (Mumlers), Fierce Creatures and Mike Huguenor (Shinobu) followed by an after-party DJ set by B.Lewis.

Will Sprott
11:30pm, Pagoda Lounge, Fairmont
South Bay fans may wonder where Will Sprott of the Mumlers has been. The singer/songwriter known for sparking the South Bay’s wave of freak-rock a few years ago hasn’t been nearly as ubiquitous here since he moved to the East Bay. But he’s been perhaps busier than ever. It’s been a couple of years now since the Mumlers’ second album, Don’t Throw Me Away. If the folky debut was surprising and offbeat enough to get Sprott national media attention, the follow-up surpassed it in every way with its grittier, Stax-on-acid soul.

Sprott, however, felt that in many ways he didn’t get to capitalize on the album’s strengths live, because it was just too hard to get the big Mumlers lineup on tour. In 2011, he decided to do some dates as a solo act.

He’s also been working on his follow-up to Don’t Throw Me Away, though he doesn’t yet know if it’ll be released under the Mumlers moniker, his own name or something else entirely. The upcoming album promises to be something unexpected. It’s not a revisiting of his sound on the last record—in fact, there are no horns at all. Instead, Sprott is focusing on bizarre new uses for vocal harmonies.

Fierce Creatures
10:30pm, Pagoda Lounge, Fairmont
Being a seven-piece indie-rock band gives Fierce Creatures the maneuverability to play exactly the kind of music they imagine. It also gives them plenty of room to layer in as many sounds and harmonies as they need to create gorgeous, dynamic-enriched arrangements.

They combine guitars, keyboards, drums, percussion and even some less-standard instruments like an occasional mandolin, harmonica and some bells—a tactic that creates a wall of sound larger than any one instrument. They work together to create new soundscapes, intense moods and crescendos, rather than focusing on any one member and showing off their chops.
Fierce Creatures tinker with musical styles indiscriminately, tactfully hodgepodging bits of pop, folk, soul, classic rock and experimental sounds into their songs to create something that is all their own. They dig for the most basic thread of childlike musical expression and re-interpret the standard rock & roll conventions to give new life to pleasantly familiar simple songs.

Mike Huguenor
9:30pm, Pagoda Lounge, Fairmont
“Agues,” the first song off Mike Huguenor’s solo album, Bardamu, is a solid, quirky alt-rock jam that rests nicely between the musical extremes of his various bands. There is Shinobu, his on-again-off-again neurotic jangle-pop quartet. Then there’s Hard Girls, the sophisticated, post-punk power trio. And of course there’s the Classics of Love, his old-school punk-rock group that’s fronted by none other than Jesse Michaels, the former lead singer of Operation Ivy.

Somehow, Huguenor also found time to record this solo EP and even shot a music video for “Agues,” which features him as every member of the band and every person in the audience. His solo material isn’t as overtly offbeat as Shinobu, or as complex as Hard Girls, or even as fierce as the Classics of Love. But what it does have is a newfound level of maturity that marries all of these elements and delivers them in an understated, clever way.

B. Lewis
12:30am, Pagoda Lounge, Fairmont
Producer and beatmaker B. Lewis is one of many local musicians influenced by Peanut Butter Wolf. Born and raised in San Jose, B. Lewis quickly came to appreciate Wolf’s legacy as a trailblazer once he started making music in 2009. “He definitely led the way, in the right way,” says Lewis.

Only 23 now, Lewis ironically didn’t discover labels like Stones Throw and Brainfeeder until he went away to Expression College in the East Bay. After college, Lewis moved back to San Jose. This spring, he finished the Egg Black EP, with singer Miles Bonny. What might surprise those who are only familiar with Lewis’ more experimental beats is the sleek and smooth sound of the songs’ soulful R&B.

Lewis’ newest release, A Lion’s Aperture, came out in late July, and delivers further proof of his willingness to push boundaries in a late-night groove. “Priority Number One” kicks off with spacey pinging sounds that evolve into an otherworldy wash of sound and vocal abstractions. “World Frozen Over” spins off in a swirl of sonic scat, anchored by strong keyboards.