Hot summer weekends all but demand a drive to the beach, but Sundays offer a good reason to stick around: a solid schedule of day parties. Whether it’s live music or DJ, here’s a sampling of ways to wile away the summer days.

The Social Brunch Series @ Sp2
Sp2’s outdoor set-up—a massive patio with wood, brick and succulents—stands on its own. Every Sunday guests can do brunch or drinks on the patio and catch live music.  “The Social” features a rotating lineup of bands like Nesta, Hot Pockets, and No Water After Midnight playing R&B, funk, jazz and reggae.

Last Call @ Motif Lounge
With no music boundaries and no dress code, Last Call at the Motif Lounge is all up to what the DJ picks. A standing party for the last five years, Last Call has hosted guest DJs from the Bay Area and beyond. Rotating DJs Eni, Aj Orbit, Two Tons, and Eternal keep the party going Sundays, 4:30-9:30pm, playing just anything on the bpm gamut: trap, hip-hop, house, drum & bass. It’s the kind of party for anyone who loves to get down on the dance floor or who doesn’t mind a few sonic surprises.

Sunday Sessions @ Myth Taverna & Lounge
Every first and third Sunday on the newly renovated patio at Myth Taverna & Lounge, Sunday Sessions brings together fans of R&B, hip-hop and soul. Talents such as the legendary DJ Jazzy Jeff have come to rock the crowd, assisted by a rotating lineup of DJs: Goldenchyld, Wen Davis, Cutso, Remedy and Rated R. Sunday Sessions runs 2-10pm, but has been known to reach maximum capacity by 5pm, so an early arrival is suggested.

Detox Sundays @ The Fairmont Hotel
In its seventh season, Detox Sundays at the Fairmont Hotel will kick off June 22 with L.A. and Las Vegas DJs David Garcia, JJ Flores, and Fabian. Patrons enjoy the rooftop pool, with access to both a full bar and poolside bottle service, with house beats rocking from midday to sunset.

It looks like Lil Scrappy will make it to San Jose, after all. After cancelling his June 14 show at the Agenda to go to rehab for weed addiction, he’ll be back in action July 13 at the Motif.

Lil Scrappy claims he checked himself into rehab to get help for his addiction, though rehab also kept him out of jail when he failed a court-ordered drug test and refused to take a second test.

According to TMZ, Scrappy checked out of rehab on June 29th, after being “weed-free” for 30 days. His lawyer, Mawuli Mel Davis told the site, “Scrappy was able to kick his nasty habit … Scrappy has had time to reflect, read, and write. He is now drug and alcohol free.” TMZ also reported that Scrappy left rehab inspired by his newfound sobriety to also mentor troubled teens.

San Jose will be one of the first cities host the weed-free Lil Scrappy for a performance. The Atlanta rapper is known mostly for his association with Lil Jon in the mid-2000s and the Southern crunk sound. He was featured prominently on several Lil Jon’s records and released hs 2006 debut album, Bred 2 Die Born 2 Live on the producer’s BME Recordings label. The album yielded Lil Scrappy’s biggest hit to date, “Money in the Bank.”

The album’s proper follow up, Tha Gru$le, wasn’t released until 2012 but between the two albums Lil Scrappy released several independent albums, mixtapes, and stand-alone singles, like another cash-themed jam, “Addicted to Money.”

Reality show fans also know Lil Scrappy from the show Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta, and his rocky relationship with ex-girlfriend Erica Dixon.

Lil Scrappy is due out for another album soon. It’ll be interested to hear what he writes now with a brain clean of that sticky ichy ichy stuff that so many rappers like to puff. Presumably, money will still be a popular theme.

To say that opening a nightclub is risky business is an understatement—eight out of 10 new clubs fail within the first year, according to Nightclub and Bar magazine. What does it take to beat those seemingly insurmountable odds? Trends, concept, funding, business plan, luck—a hundred factors both practical and abstract. But like the proverb that asserts that it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a crack staff with the right experience, skill set and chemistry to make any nightclub successful. It’s a team effort every single night—from the touch-and-go early days to (everyone hopes) long-term success.

When the new Santa Clara club Axis opened at the beginning of last month in its 14,000-square foot space with three dance floors, just such a team had already been working for months. Axis was meant to be something new and different in the South Bay, and the team behind it had to be able to pull it off.

“That was the key to hiring people. We wanted a tight-knit family environment on the staff, where there was a lot of trust,” says Axis manager Linda Dodge.

But what exactly do they do? Most patrons never see the tiny details behind the scenes that are handled every night and can make or break a nightclub, but the Axis staff took some time out to tell us about them.

Peter Bui, Bartender

Peter Bui had never seen anything quite like the hiring process for Axis bartenders. “It was a different approach. I was competing against like 30 people,” he says. “They really wanted the best.”

He’d heard about the new club from one of the owners, who suggested he apply. The process was rigorous, but he feels its emphasis on work ethic, time-management skills and honesty paid off. “It worked, because now we have a great team,” he says.

That team had a couple of months to set up a system before Axis opened, but they’ve been continuing to tweak in the weeks since then, taking patrons’ feedback into careful consideration.

Some of the issues they’ve had to fix are the kind of thing most people would never even think about, like the shot glass problem. Initially, the club was using 2-ounce shot glasses, but Bui noticed they were getting lots of complaints about the size of the shots. The issue was purely psychological—the standard 1-ounce shot looked puny inside the larger glasses. “It’s just the perception,” says Bui. “‘If I’m paying for a shot, I want the glass to be full.'”

Bui talked to his manager about it, the club switched to 1-ounce glasses, and the complaints from customers that they weren’t getting a “full” shot stopped instantly.

Bui says he’s never seen a staff as tight-knit as this one. The trust level extends to their tip system—they are split between the bartenders in all three rooms. That allows Bui to go from room to room, without the other bartenders feeling like he’s trying to cut in on their tips.

“It lets me say ‘If you need help, I’m there for you,'” says Bui.

Linda Dodge, Manager

The manager of Axis couldn’t tell you what the biggest challenge was trying to get the club ready to open. “It was all a challenge, I thought,” says Linda Dodge about trying to prepare for that target date. But perhaps the most nerve-wracking decision of all was deciding what that date should be.

“There are so many little things that you couldn’t possibly figure out what they all are. You just have to jump in with both feet,” she says. “We were all prepared for the worst, and hoping for the best.” The date they finally set was May 4, roughly two months after she started officially working for Axis in March. Hopes won out over fears: “The opening weekend was as smooth as could be.”

When people ask her what exactly the manager of a club does, her short answer is “everything.” “When something needs to be done, I jump in. When we run out of stuff at 2 o’clock in the morning, I’m down at the store,” she says. “I’m on call 24/7.”

So, for instance, it was her job to fine tune the staff training when one of the first hiccups turned out to be that bottle service and other transactions done with portable registers were simply taking too long. “I think we underestimated how important it was,” she admits. “You don’t want people waiting.”

DJ Sy-ence, Resident DJ

There’s no way DJ Sy-ence could have known that the debut of the Electronic Music Dance (EDM) festival I Love This City was going to be moved from San Francisco to Shoreline in May. But when it was, not even a month after the club opened, it gave a big visibility boost to what Axis set out to do musically—and even sent some electro fans their way.

“That night I was playing jungle and some drum ‘n’ bass, and I got a lot of compliments,” says Sy-ence. “One guy told me, ‘There’s no place in the South Bay playing this.'”

That, of course, was sort of the point. Axis launched with the idea of giving clubgoers who’d normally feel like they have to drive to the city to find DJs spinning an emerging genre like EDM a place to go in the South Bay. Sy-ence, a DJ for 15 years, has enjoyed a lot of freedom to experiment with finding the right sounds for the club. “They’ve given me the green light to do what I want to do,” he says. “So far we’ve gotten nothing but compliments on the mix of music.”

The entertainment menu is expected to grow very soon at Axis, with plans to bring in live music this summer. “We’re trying to get ourselves apart from just being looked at as a nightclub,” says Sy-ence. “We want to be a performance venue.”

Melissa Wells, Bottle Service/Cocktail Waitress

Melissa Wells most recently worked at Motif in San Jose. Having had a lot of experience with bottle service, she knew the demands were different than cocktail waitressing.

“It’s a lot more pressure,” she says. “You have a lot more people at one table, and you’re constantly at their table. You want to make them feel their time there is worth it.”

Once again, it’s the details that matter. One thing she noticed is that the club uses glass cups with their bottle service, whereas some other places she’d worked at used plastic, or worse. “C’mon,” she says. “If you get bottle service, you’re not going to want a paper cup.

Colby Reade, Executive Chef

“Street food without the wheels.” That’s the concept that executive chef Colby Reade has brought to The Eatery at Axis, the new club’s restaurant. As a prime mover in the food truck and pop-up food movements in San Francisco, and as an event chef for a catering company (in addition to working as an executive chef for Wolfgang Puck), Reade already knew plenty about people who need to get their food quickly and without a lot of fuss. Though he initially thought the business lunch crowd was completely different than the nightclub crowd later on, he came to realize that was the connection, and began his design of the menu from there.

“They want really good quality food in a relatively short amount of time. I’m kind of unique in that I look at the venue and what it needs, instead of saying ‘I’m going to put this kind of restaurant here, no matter what,'” says Reade. “I love the space. It’s big and it’s got a lot of unique features. And to me the feeling was that it’s time for something new, something more relevant in the neighborhood.”

With that in mind, he started with a small number of items to build around. At The Eatery, they cure their own meats, and make their own pork belly, in addition to baking their own bread. One of the first breakout hits on the menu has been the baby banh mi sliders. “Everyone’s been ‘wow,'” he says. “That’s really popular.”

Axis Nightclub
2909 Lakeside Dr.
Santa Clara

San Jose’s nightlife has a high tolerance for bad taste—eurotrash masquerading as pop, cheesy nightclubs with aspirations beyond their zip code, and most importantly: lacking a single decent place to listen to electronic music. For those of us who’ve lost interest in making the + 100 mile roundtrip trek to San Francisco, we’ve been confined to the living rooms of close friends or huddled by the speakers at a house party, exchanging playlists, URLs, and idle complaints.

It’s where I used to find San Jose DJ Chris “Demi Child” Rios. Not content to bitch and moan, Rios has become proactive in the last year. Soft-spoken and unassuming, he’s been quietly networking with a string of like-minded DJs and club owners to find a place where both the inveterate clubgoer and electronic geek can find common ground. And with the broadly titled Bass Club, his newest monthly held at Motif, he believes he’s done it.

We spoke about the rise of brostep (read: Skrillex), why the EDM acronym sucks, and kidnapping groupies.

What’s your take on San Jose’s scene?

As a citizen, I love the nightlife—it’s alive! As a DJ, it brings me down at times. It’s a big city and yet everybody knows what you do, how you do, and who you do. Which is a great benefit for entertainers, promoters and DJs but it stays contained. San Jose is great and has talent but no one really listens or gives anyone a chance due to various cliques and clichés.

It’s hard to get an “in” unless you’re in bed with a t-shirt company, taco truck, or radio station. I kinda hit on those points for our night. The music has changed little since I moved back. But it’s still a friendly place overall.

What are you guys playing?

A lot of bass, percussion heavy house, techno, b-more, indie disco, moombahton and an emphasis on San Jose stuff. You’ll hear a lot from Justin Weisberg’s label Filthy WHAT?!, and lots of Bay Area-produced music. No David Guetta.

Shots fired. Best party you’ve been to?

It’s a tossup between Lights Down Low and the Rickshaw Stop with Jeffrey Paradise and Richie Panic – the glory days, I guess. Those parties are what my friends are trying to mimic.

EDM (electronic dance music) is a terrible acronym, wouldn’t you agree?

I was barely aware of it until last year. I think it’s from the younger crowd. It’s funny cause I didn’t quite get it until I realized that’s what we used to call IDM—”indie dance music”—in early 2000 [sighs]. It’s what the younger generation called it, and it has a stigma. I know what you mean though—it sucks. People who say that usually listen to Skrillex.

Can you explain his popularity? Let’s talk ‘brostep.’

[laughs] There’s this guy in Santa Cruz who plays it, very wompy and grindy, it’s electronic grunge for head-bobbers. Dubstep isn’t really my thing. I’m into UK love step. That stuff is saucy, like Roni Size and Goldie.

I once read that Wu Tang’s Raekwon refuses to listen to rap music on the weekends—something about needing to clear his mind. With that incredibly bogus segue, what do you listen to that’s under 120 BPM?

So true. To keep my pallet fresh, everything I listen to in my car is either a part of my set or way off in left field. I usually listen to a lot of older punk and indie. Right now I’m into some Southeast Asian go-go music I found at Streetlight.

A lot of stuff from people out here too, like Albert Preset. I can go on for days about Joy Division then go to talking about some bootleg of The Supremes found at a garage sale.

Somewhat apropos of that, I’ve always wished I could’ve seen New Order at The Hacienda in Manchester. If you could back to any scene in the world, where would you go?

Berlin in the early 90s. I’m so inspired by that scene. It’s the groundwork for what we have going on over [in the States], especially [considering how] Detroit evolved.

After the wall came down, my dad was in charge of detaining that area for the army. There were all these abandoned and condemned buildings, and people claimed [them] and set up little clubs along the border of the wall. [The army] had no responsibility whatsoever – only to investigate and make sure nothing crazy was going on beyond each wall. I’ve looked at these pictures and seen [something] that almost resembled Manchester.

And finally, why do girls dig DJs? Aren’t you guys basically glorified members of the waitstaff? (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)

Oh man, at times I wish. But it’s a “who you know” type of thing. DJs seem to know a lot of people and girls figure if you want to have a good time, follow that guy. I’ve found that it’s mostly the wrong girl that winds up going for the DJ. I can’t really engage with someone like that.

It can get annoying. I remember one time when I worked with Insomniac on the Electronic Daisy Carnival in Tulare. Hyperreal sent out twenty of us to cover the event but we [had] to hijack a golf cart and pickup some girls to fill the backstage for “atmosphere.” No one knew [that] the main DJ wasn’t “into girls.” After we brought the girls, the agent had us get rid of half of them because they all tried to get on stage and make out with him in the middle of the set.

SJ Bass Club is the second Friday of every month @ Motif, 389 S. 1st Street. DJ Wool headlines the next event on Friday, March 9th. More info.

The two MCs behind Calicove are talking about the aftermath of their last party. It was just last week, in fact, after they played a show.

“We took the party back to our studio in Santa Clara, and we continued to party through the night,” says Douglas “DJ” Williams Jr., who goes by the stage name Amazin. “I’ll tell you this much: I did not wake up until 8 o’clock the next night. PM. No AM stuff. PM. I woke up, and I was like, “OK, I’m going to try.’ But then I was like ‘I can’t move.'”

His partner in the group, Travis Lindsley, a.k.a. Authentic, isn’t even phased by the recovery time. He’s more impressed that Williams pulled it together enough to tidy up the place afterwards.

“Did you clean up?” asks Lindsley.

“I did. You saw that?”

Lindsley shakes his head. “You’re a beast.”

“Party,” says Williams authoritatively. “Then clean.”

These are two guys who know the rules of partying. In Calicove, they’ve mixed rap with big rock power chords on songs like “Party Animal” and “Life of a Rock Star” from their debut mixtape 808s and Rock ‘n’ Roll. Not to mention this year’s catchy anthem “I Wanna Party,” on which they use the p-word dozens of times, rivaling even the longtime record holder for party references, Andrew W.K.’s “Party Hard.”

All of which makes them a natural for Motif’s New Year’s Eve bash; they’ll headline a party that also features five DJs, go-go dancers, champagne and more. Because it’s not just a shtick. They write what they know.

“We party pretty hard,” boasts Williams. And they may be getting a rep for NYE in particular. Last year, they led the bender at Mosaic, the club at the San Jose Sheraton. “The show was downstairs, but they’d booked up the whole hotel. They wanted to do it Vegas style, so everybody who was at the party had a room. After the show, it was crazy. You’d go up into different rooms and hang out and …”

“And do God knows what,” finishes Lindsley. “The party was everywhere.”

Finishing each other’s thoughts comes easy to the Calicove duo, who play live with a full rock outfit but do the songwriting themselves and work with a team of producers on beats. They started the band in 2009, but they met four years earlier, working at a shoe store in Newark’s NewPark Mall. Williams grew up in San Jose; Lindsley is from Hayward. They became friends, and each knew the other did music, but back then they never even talked about working together. Then they lost touch, but reconnected completely by chance in, of all places, Las Vegas.

The latest party series to hit San Jose, SJ Bass Club makes its debut December 16 at Motif. Featuring all things bass, organizers hope to bring fresh sounds in electronic music and new subgenres like UK garage, ghetto house, tropical, moombahton and more.

The party is inspired by San Francisco’s “Lights Down Low,” a series known for hosting new electronic acts like James Blake, Jacques Green, Classixx, and Brenmar, so it’s no surprise to see that party’s founder, Sleazemore, topping the bill. SJ Bass Club founder and resident DJ, Av Alaguena, says the party was founded mainly because she and other organizers awanted to bring that same “Lights Down Low” vibe to the South Bay.

“We all just wanted the same thing basically,” she says. “We have a ton of mutual friends that we know would drive to San Francisco for shows. We’ve been pushing the concept of electronic music to the forefront of clubs in San Jose, and its been well received in the past year, or so.”

The lineup for the first SJ Bass Club Party:

Sleazmore – San Francisco
(Lights Down Low)

Justin Weisberg -San Jose
(Filthy What, SJBC)

AV- San Jose
(Hella Proper, SJBC)

Joaquin Bartra of SOSOSOON – San Francisco
(Locos Only, SJBC)

Demichild – San Jose
(Wasteland, Cultdetour, SJBC)

Door open at 9:30pm. Admission is free until 11pm, $5 after. More info.