“I’m a nobody,” Jeff Larsen says with a laugh. Most weekdays, the West San Jose resident works as a real estate agent. On weekends, he spends time with his family and friends. On occasion, he boards a commercial aircraft for some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones, where he dons a long-haired wig with bangs, a leopard-print shirt, tight jeans and a blazer and belts out “Don’t Stop Believin’” for a crowd of American and allied troops.

On days like these, Larson isn’t entirely himself. He is Perry Stevens—frontman for Journey Unauthorized, a tribute to one of the biggest bands to ever come out of the Bay Area.

Aside from playing the normal tribute band gigs—casinos, private parties and fairs (his band plays the Santa Clara County Fair on Aug. 4)—Larson has forged a relationship with a booking agent handling overseas entertainment for service members.

“We’re his favorite Journey tribute band,” Larson says. “He just works with us.”

It’s not exactly a normal gig for a tribute group, Larson says, but it is definitely exciting and the pay is pretty good. Plus, when he and his band aren’t playing in regions where they have to worry about enemy fire, they get to do some sightseeing. Six months back Journey Unauthorized played at a base in Jordan, and he and the guys took a trip to Israel.

“It’s a rush,” he says, “especially for a guy who never made it. This is icing on the cake.”

Since the earliest days of the Elvis Presley impersonator, tribute bands have found a place in the music scene as a way for audiences to hear their favorite songs from their favorite artists in a more accessible setting. Tribute bands also allow casual music fans to attend a concert and know exactly what they are getting for their ticket.

While tribute bands have long been seen as a niche in music, they’ve exploded in popularity in the last 20 years as classic rock icons have retired or passed on. Now, for many fans, venues and musicians, tribute bands have increasingly become the bread and butter in the live music business.

In the South Bay, venues both large and small regularly turn to tribute acts to draw crowds. The Ritz in downtown San Jose has two tribute shows scheduled for the second half of July alone. This Charming Band, a Smiths and Morrissey act, plays the club on Jul. 20; Temptation, which specializes in New Order, headlines the following weekend, Jul. 20.

Just last week a group called Brit Floyd played at the Mountain Winery, bringing spot-on Pink Floyd covers and a serious light show to the Saratoga open-air theater.

While Brit Floyd is based out of the UK and regularly tours the world, many tribute acts keep things local. Aside from the armed forces shows, Journey Unauthorized tends to stay on the West Coast. The same goes for The Killer Queens (Queen), Maroon Vibes (Maroon 5), Petty Theft (Tom Petty), Zeparella (Led Zeppelin) and the Sun Kings (The Beatles)—all of whom are based locally.

DIFFERENT STROKES

“I saw The Cure in 1989,” says Mark Sharp, bassist for This Charming Band as well as Bloodflowers, a tribute to The Cure. He remembers that show—and the time he saw Morrissey, in 1992—fondly. When he first began playing his own music, he was attempting to emulate groups like The Smiths and U2. “That’s what shaped me as a musician.”

He’s worked in many bands, including The Trims, that write original material, and has always enjoyed that process. But, he says, playing in a tribute band is something entirely different. “The appeal for me is trying to recapture what those shows meant to me and what those records meant to me so many years ago.”

As for Morgan Hill resident Joe Urbano, his striking resemblance to Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine led him to front Maroon Vibes.

A family man with a career in the semiconductor industry, on weekends Urban slips on nylon tattoo sleeves and runs through the Maroon 5 catalog with his band at parties and community events. They’ll be playing the Gilroy Garlic Festival at the end of July.

Urbano, who has always written and performed his own music, says playing in a tribute is a way for him to keep up with a hobby that he loves while making a little cash on the side.

“I never thought I’d be in a tribute band, honestly,” he shrugs. “But if you just love music and performing, why not?”

For Nina Noir, a big part of the appeal is the energy and appreciation she feels when she is on stage. The San Jose native fronts the Killer Queens, an all female Queen tribute.

While she’s written and continues to write original tunes, she says her own music has never taken her far. “It’s very difficult to be a female rock vocalist,” she says. “Bands typically want men”—especially in the genres that she’s always gravitated toward, namely hard rock and metal.

In the Killer Queens she doesn’t worry about those kinds of politics. “Freddie Mercury is probably the perfect front person to gender-bend,” she says. And judging by her success, she’s got a point.

The Killer Queens have a packed summer schedule that takes them up and down the West Coast, to Las Vegas and even to Miami. They’ll be playing the Santa Clara County Fair on Aug. 2 and they have a few Facebook corporate parties on in their datebook as well.

Looking back, Noir doesn’t regret going this route. “This opened a lot of doors for me,” she says.

HERO WORSHIP

Veteran hard-rock drummer Clementine first fell in love with Led Zeppelin as a youngster listening to KMET radio in Southern California, and when she began to hit the skins herself, she realized just how much influence Zeppelin drummer John Bonham had on her musical aspirations.

In 2004, Clementine was looking to better learn those Zeppelin songs and the drum parts she loved. She hooked up with guitarist Gretchen Menn, who admired Jimmy Page as much as Clementine admired Bonham, and the two formed the Bay Area’s all-female tribute band Zepparella.

“When we started it, we looked at it being a practice project,” says Clementine. “Shortly after, we started talking about, ‘Why not do it onstage?’”

For Clementine, it was and still is all about the music.

“I wanted to get better as a drummer, and why not go to the source of how I got into playing drums?” she says. “I feel like I came into this through the back way. It wasn’t that I set out to start a tribute band; it was that I wanted to learn this stuff and see what happens.”

Even 15 years into the band, Clementine notes that she’s still learning from Bonham. “We just keep going forward because it’s so musically exciting,” she says. “Led Zeppelin is maybe the only band that I could continue to play for 15 years, and a lot of that is because we take parts of the songs and develop them through improvisation onstage, and Led Zeppelin gives us that freedom because they were so improvisational in the way they presented the music. It enables us to create new parts of songs, new ways to approach songs. It’s always changing.”

In addition to the musical explorations afforded to her in Zepparella, Clementine appreciates that the band can act as a steady source of income and help her develop an audience for her other singer-songwriter projects.

“The creative process as far as being able to write something from scratch with other musicians is a beautiful thing, and I have that in the other projects I do,” she says. “I value it all. I feel like one feeds the other, what I learn from Zeppelin is what I take to my original writing, and parts of my original writing I put into the drumming with Zepparella.”

This year, Zepparella is offering fans a way to learn the songs themselves, with the newly launched Zepparella Learning Channel on YouTube, a series of videos in which the members teach the audiences their parts to a Led Zeppelin tune. So far, the series has featured “When the Levee Breaks” and “Immigrant Song.”

“It’s been a remarkable learning experience for us to teach these songs,” says Clementine. “For 15 years we’ve been learning all these little things that you learn playing this music onstage, and to be able to share that freely with people, it feels like we’re able to give a little back from what we’ve gained playing the music.”

Obviously, Led Zeppelin will never play together in concert again. And even if classic rock acts like the Rolling Stones or AC/DC are still touring, they’re not playing in venues with four walls; they’re in stadiums that often don’t offer the intimacy that a club can provide. Clementine sees Zepparella as a way for audiences to experience the classic rock of yesterday in an intimate setting. “To be able to get swallowed up by theses songs in a smaller venue is where the power is,” she says.

Zepparella continues to thrive because of the power of those Led Zeppelin songs, and Clementine says the tribute band has lasted so long because of the musicians she’s been able to share that power with. “I value the people I’ve played with in the past and now,” she says. “It’s a great experience. I wouldn’t trade it.”

CREATIVE LICENSE

Tribute bands come in many forms. Not to be confused with cover bands, which play a variety of different songs by well known pop artists, tribute acts tend stick exclusively to a single group’s repertoire. Some make an effort to approximate the look and feel of the bands to which they are paying homage. Others go all out, springing for custom costumes, special effects and even purchasing the same gear used by the bands they are aping. It’s practically like a Broadway show.

In fact, while it’s hard to pinpoint the origin of the tribute act as a distinct type of live musical entertainment, some point to Beatlemania, the Broadway musical revue, as the start of it all. Debuting in 1977 and running through 1979, the show was billed as “Not the Beatles, but an incredible simulation.”

Monroe Grisman, the guitarist and vocalist for the Marin- and San Francisco-based Petty Theft, says he’s seen some very convincing simulations in his day. “I just saw a Genesis tribute band with set designs and period-specific gear,” Grisman says. “And there’s certain value for that, like for me that was the closest thing I’ll ever get to seeing Peter Gabriel-era Genesis in 1973.”

Forgoing the costumes themselves, Petty Theft focuses on performing the music and honoring the sound, while also adding their own flourishes and taking liberties that keep the concerts fresh for fans.

“I think it’s why we’ve built up a pretty amazing following now: People like that we are not trying to be Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; rather, we always pay tribute and we always give it up to the real deal.”

And the real deal has given it up back at them, with Heartbreakers drummer Steve Ferrone meeting the band through a mutual friend and sitting in with Petty Theft three times over the years. “It’s been an amazing honor,” says Grisman.

Noir has also earned the blessing of original Queen members Roger Taylor and Brian May. Taylor gave her the OK in person, when she and her band attended the premiere of the recent Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

“They 100 percent thought it was wonderful.”

ROCK DOCTRINE

Things don’t always go so well for tribute acts.

Paul B. Ungar, Esq. is a New Jersey-based entertainment lawyer concentrating in intellectual property and contracts. He has advised Noir on how to best avoid legal blowback with her Killer Queens endeavor.

It’s not the performance of any given song or string of songs that is the issue, Ungar explains. If a tribute band is playing at a club that is on the up-and-up—that is, a venue that is in good standing with the major music licensing organizations BMI, ASCAP and SESAC—the tribute act is covered.

However, things get trickier as a tribute band gets larger, begins to market itself, creates promotional material featuring its own performances of other artists’ material and endeavors to take on the likeness of a celebrity.

The kind of satire and parody that a show like Saturday Night Live engages in is recognized as free speech and is protected. But when someone is using an artist’s likeness and performing their music in the way that tribute acts do, the waters are far murkier.

“It really comes down to how the famous band reacts,” Ungar says. “Technically, it is violating all sorts of laws.”

In the past, Ungar says, Apple Corps—The Beatles’ recording label—has gone after successful Beatles tribute acts and won. And the late Prince was known for having a serious distaste for tribute acts that sought to profit from his catalog and image. In 2008, the Purple One sued a group of Norwegian artists who had recorded an album of covers intended to honor the artist for his 50th birthday.

Still, most of the bands interviewed for this story weren’t too concerned with getting slapped with a lawsuit—even Larson, who says he has dealt with “cease and desist” letters from Journey in the past.

“They came after us in the beginning,” Larson recalls, adding that there are now so many Journey tribute bands that it’s probably hard for the band’s label and lawyers to keep up. “I’m just not on their radar anymore.”

Practically speaking, Ungar says, even though the tribute acts often “don’t have a leg to stand on,” the original bands simply allow them to do their thing. As Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich learned in the aftermath of Napster, it never looks good when a massive band goes after the little guy.

Plus, Ungar adds, “What happens in real life is that some bands are more than happy to let tribute bands  co-exist. That just increases the value of their brand.”

This Saturday, the 38th Annual San Jose Fountain Blues & Brews Festival unfolds in Plaza de Cesar Chavez, once again cementing the festival’s position as the longest running affair of its kind in the Bay Area.

The history is worth repeating. The birth of the festival takes us back to a version of San Jose that now seems like the vanishing Wild West, when the SJSU Associated Students Program Board oversaw a serious budget to book concerts on campus all year long. It also harkens back to a time when notorious rock promoter Bill Graham was still trying to prevent anything in San Jose from succeeding.

When a young Rick Bates first emigrated from Iowa to the Associated Students at SJSU, he hit up Ted Gehrke for a job. Gehrke assigned Bates to put up concert posters around town, but Gates eventually wound up with the title of contemporary arts chair, meaning he worked with Gehrke to book concerts.

In the spring of 1981, the prog rock band Ambrosia had just fired its manager and agent, so the group needed a gig. Working for the Associated Students, Bates booked them in the San Jose Civic Auditorium. The show sold out, giving the program board a pile of dough with which they organized the first Fountain Blues Festival, over the first weekend in May of that year.

These days, when students don’t get to experience a live music infrastructure of any sort, let alone getting on the phone with national booking agencies, it seems hard to fathom a San Jose in which such activity unfolded on a regular basis. In the late ’70s, for example, Bates helped book a Peter Gabriel show in the old SJSU men’s gym, located in what’s now Uchida Hall. Bill Graham called up Bates and tried to stop the show because Graham wanted exclusivity in San Francisco.

“At that time I was 20 years old, and he starts screaming at me,” Bates recalled. “I’m a snotty little kid, and I’m going, ‘Hey this is pretty cool. I must be doing something right. Bill Graham’s calling me up and yelling at me.’ I thought it was really pretty funny. We did another show with U2, and he did the same thing.”

The U2 show, with Romeo Void opening up, is now one of the most legendary stories in San Jose rock history. On the Irish band’s first US tour in 1981, Bates and Gehrke initially booked them to play a free show in the outdoor concrete amphitheater next to the Student Union. Bill Graham tried to stop the show because he wanted U2’s first Bay Area gig to be at the Old Waldorf, scheduled for the next night in San Francisco. Despite Graham’s threats, the free U2 show in San Jose went on. However, once it was booked and word began to explode, it was relocated upstairs into the old Student Union Ballroom, which is now a suite of antiseptic meeting facilities. Since the Brutalist-style Student Union structure was built on earthquake rollers, the over-capacity crowds pogo-dancing began to shake the building. Staff stood on both sides of the stage with ropes to prevent the speaker columns from falling over. At one point, Romeo Void’s tour manager got stuck in the elevator. People were scared.

According to those who attended, even with the stage verging on collapse, the young Bono was already on a path to rock stardom. He knew how to command an audience and work a room. The show was a smashing success.

Bates went on to manage several well-known blues and roots acts, including Los Lobos, who ended up opening for U2 on the Joshua Tree tour, putting Bates back in touch with Bono. At the time, Bono still remembered the harrowing SJSU gig.

When it comes to the Fountain Blues Festival, Bates speaks fondly of the original days. At the time, it just felt like a cool project for some students to work on.

“I always feel like sometimes things are just at the right place at the right time,” Bates said. “Everybody wanted to do it, and it was really successful. I never thought that it would last as long as it has.”

In 1983, deep in the suburban hinterland of Campbell, the punk rock photographer Murray Bowles attended a backyard party and shot several pictures of The Faction, San Jose’s legendary skate punk band. A software engineer by day, Bowles was just starting a decades-long side job of capturing Bay Area punk.

In San Jose, the scene was a hodgepodge of house parties, rented halls and skate ramps because no real venues existed. As the Faction played, an 11-year-old kid named Lars Frederiksen sat on the ground in front of the drum set to keep it stationary. (See photo.)

“The cinderblock wasn’t working so the kick drum kept moving and moving and moving,” Frederiksen recalled. “I remember someone tried to put a 12-pack of beer in front of it, and that obviously didn’t work. I think someone even said put the keg in front of it, but then everybody would have to come up when the band was playing to fill their beer. So somebody said, ‘Put Lars in there.’ And that’s how I ended up in there.”

The rest is history. Ten years later, Frederiksen joined the band Rancid, which then exploded into one of the most successful punk bands of all time, inspiring generations of fans around the world, even still.

But now, in what is probably the most spacetime continuum-shattering full-circle punk hoedown in local living memory, the Faction will first open up for Rancid in San Francisco on Thursday, and then they will headline on Friday with one of Frederiksen’s other bands, the Old Firm Casuals, at The Ritz in downtown San Jose. The whole shootin’ match will trigger many individuals to reflect on their own crazy journeys over the last several decades.

Over the years, Bowles’ photos from that party have almost achieved folk status. He may have captured the most punk rock Norman Rockwell moment in San Jose history.

In those days, the Faction’s bass player, Steve Caballero, was already a world-famous professional skateboarder with sponsorships, trophies, tour stories and the whole nine yards, all while not yet even 20. People around the world devoured skateboard magazines and then VHS videos of the Bones Brigade, of which Caballero was a key member. Thanks to what he and his crew were doing, it’s not an exaggeration to say San Jose was one of the skateboarding capitals of the country. Specific street tricks and maneuvers were pioneered right here in town. As the lifestyle became inseparable from punk rock, the whole scene put San Jose on the map way more than any politician has ever been able to do. It is a travesty of justice that Caballero is not in the San Jose Sports Hall of Fame.

But I digress. With the Faction, Caballero eventually switched from bass to guitar as the band became a five-piece and then soared to even more stardom before breaking up a few short years later. After sporadic reunions over the decades, they returned to semi-regular gigging about four years ago.

Bowles’ photo captures what the scene was like in those days: punks and skater kids dealing with the intrinsic boredom of suburbia. Several people in the photo are still in the area. For example, leaning on Caballero’s bass amp is Denice Vaughn, wearing a pair of pink Paradise Garage creepers, shoes Caballero bought her when he was in LA for a contest.

“I threw a fit because he wanted to get me the red and black ones,” Vaughn recalled. “And I said, ‘No, I want the pink ones, and if I can’t have those, then I want nothing.’ And he drove all the way [across LA] back to Hollywood to get me those. I totally remember that. I still have them.”

Bowles has since retired from the software industry, but still has a long photography career on which to reflect. His catalog of photos, now in the thousands, remains an integral component of Bay Area punk history, although he doesn’t scour the scene as much as he used to.

“Nowadays everybody takes pictures with their phones,” Bowles said. “It’s not as though if I didn’t take pictures, there’d be no pictures taken at all. Which is sort of the way it was for a lot of shows.”

It’s hard to blame Rory Koff for feeling a little boastful. What musician wouldn’t brim with pride upon receiving a platinum record? “I gotta brag a little,” he texts me, not long after we finish speaking on the phone. “Look what I just got.”

Attached to the message is a photo. In it, Koff stands in his living room holding his framed metallic disc. In the bottom left of the frame is another photograph: one of Koff from 20 years earlier along with his band, No Use For a Name. As of 2017, No Use For a Name has sold more than a million records—an incredible threshold for any artist, let alone a band from San Jose.

The scrappy group started in San Jose in 1988, when Koff was just a sophomore in high school. It didn’t take long for the four-piece to hit upon a then-novel sound—mixing classic rock and ’60s AM radio melodies with punchy, precise metal riffs, and refracting it all through the prism of punk. In just a few years they were signed to San Francisco label Fat Wreck Chords. Soon after that, they were known worldwide.

Palo Alto’s all-female band The Donnas began when its members were in high school in the ’90s. They went on to land a contract with Atlantic and move to Southern California. Even as music distribution has moved to Silicon Valley with the advent of iTunes, Pandora and Google Play, the lack of a feeder system and support infrastructure often mandates a trip down Interstate 5 to make it on to the Bay Area’s digital music streaming servers.

While a number of South Bay-spawned acts—like Antwon and Giraffage—have relocated to Los Angeles in recent years, with the aim of building a following and making vital industry connections, Koff credits the start of his band’s career to a show at San Jose’s now-defunct all-ages venue the Cactus Club.

“We were so excited,” he says, recalling the anticipation preceding the show. That night he and his bandmates were opening for Southern California punk group Agent Orange. At the time, Agent Orange were both influential and squarely in their prime. Knowing that this was their shot at making inroads with an active and relevant band of their genre, Koff had a bit of the pre-show jitters. Fortunately for him and the band, they made an impression:

“In just a year, or a year and a half, we recorded a demo and put out an album. Then [Agent Orange] invited us on tour. It steamrolled pretty quickly from there.”

It was that one show at the Cactus, a 16-and-up club that occupied the space now filled by Club Miami in San Jose’s SoFA District, that kick-started No Use For a Name’s platinum-selling career.

Opened in 1988, the Cactus Club was San Jose’s connection to the national music scene. Nirvana played there (check out the bootleg). Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Weezer and No Doubt all rocked the midsize venue when they were still up-and-comers.

In recent years, any number of San Jose bands could have been the next No Use For a Name, were it not for one thing: the Cactus Club shut down in 2002. And in the 15 years since, San Jose, the self-styled “Capital of Silicon Valley,” hasn’t had a single consistent venue available to its young musicians. That’s a problem for everyone.

The absence of an all ages rock, pop and hip-hop venue—like the former Cactus Club—hurts Silicon Valley’s music scene. Photo by Greg Ramar

SHOTS & LADDERS
The Ritz—San Jose’s premier full-time club venue for national rock, pop and hip-hop acts—sits just across the street from where the Cactus used to be. While the establishment has found success bringing exciting and relevant live acts to San Jose in recent years, there’s a catch. Unlike the former Cactus Club, The Ritz allows only patrons 21 years of age or older. The same goes for BackBar SoFa, which occupies the space directly behind the former Cactus.

The fact of the matter is that for venues, the money is in alcohol sales. The dependency has become more acute as the live music industry competes with new forms of digital entertainment and bands must rely on performance revenues rather than the sale of recorded media. For operators, it’s not even about making a killing at the bar: alcohol sales are often the only thing keeping the lights on. That means that any venue owner with an eye on his or her bottom line needs to sell booze. As a result, shows with cheap tickets catering to an underage crowd are rarely a good idea from a business perspective—something Dan Vado learned the hard way.

“When kids were coming to see their friends play, they weren’t buying comics,” says Vado, owner of SLG Art Boutiki—a comic book shop, cafe and live music venue located on Race Street. For the past three years, Art Boutiki has been hosting shows and events in its 150-capacity room.

When a live music establishment sells alcohol—especially spirits—it makes it significantly harder for that business to allow minors through the doors. Vado has beer and wine at Art Boutiki, but crucially he also sells pizza, snacks and comics. By offering food along with lower-ABV drinks, Vado can allow younger patrons in while giving adults a place where they can enjoy a few grown-up beverages. From a business perspective, though, he’s decided to largely steer clear of shows for the underage crowd.

“A dollar for a bottle of water was even too much for some of these people to pay,” Vado says referring to teens. “It was very difficult to justify using the time.”

The Cactus Club’s demise can be attributed in part to its failure to sell enough pizza. It was licensed to open as a pizza restaurant and its failure to comply with use permit technicalities proved a convenient way to force it out of business amidst the city’s police crackdown on clubs and the SoFA District’s gentrification.

For its entire 14-year existence, the Cactus Club had operated under a Type 47 liquor license—essentially a full-service restaurant license. This meant that the club could sell alcohol (including spirits) even with minors in the building, provided that a majority of its sales came from food. When the hammer fell on the club, food sales dipping below the 51 percent threshold were one of the nails in its coffin.

Cafe Stritch has a full bar, but it also has a full kitchen. That means it can allow anyone inside, so long as servers are diligent about carding. But Stritch focuses almost exclusively on jazz. Every once in a blue moon the venue will host a rock or hip-hop show, but even calling those rare is an overstatement.

For his part, owner Corey O’Brien doesn’t want to serve food at The Ritz, and therefore won’t be going all ages. That’s never been his thing, neither here, nor at his previous venue, the Blank Club (now LVL 44 on South Almaden near the former Greyhound station), which served up punk rock, cheap beer, stiff drinks and little else.

“We have a 48 license, so it’s 21-and-over all the time. There’s no way around it,” O’Brien says. A Type 48 license (“on sale general public premises”) is a bar license and specifically designates the club as 21 and over. There are no exceptions.

Even though he isn’t able to offer up his club for the cause, O’Brien still cares about the city’s dearth of spaces for young musicians and their fans. “We need all-ages venues here,” he says. “It’s part of the whole ladder system.”

What O’Brien calls the “ladder system” is the heart of the issue. All-ages spaces don’t just help specific musicians like Koff and No Use For a Name. They establish a network between venues, musicians and residents, putting them all on the same ladder. Dedicated musicians and their fans are a lot like smokers: most start young.

With a functioning ladder system, budding musicians can start out playing smaller rooms—all-ages spaces that tend to be easier to book than a big club. Underage fans can attend and an underage band can stay and schmooze instead of having to leave immediately after their performance, as they would in an 21-plus venue. From there they climb the ladder, with the goal of one day reaching one of the higher rungs. There they can connect with national touring acts, which in turn can connect them to the world stage.

This system isn’t just about the musicians and the fans. It’s also about training an entire generation to appreciate live music, which keeps clubs in business and gives bands a reason to make a city with a strong scene a destination on tour.

This is the system in place in just about every major city around the world. But in San Jose, it’s been cut out at the root.

Dan Vado states the problem clearly:

“It always felt like younger people weren’t going to shows because for the most part they can’t.” Simply put, there’s nowhere for them to go.

Even though Art Boutiki holds occasional shows for local bands, the venue only hosts around 10 concerts each month. It also has no connections to national booking agencies, which means that local shows are always just that: local. Besides, most shows are booked with the 30-and-over set in mind. Art Boutiki neither is, nor wants to be, the kind of place that the area’s youth need.

And though things have been going well for The Ritz, O’Brien knows its continued existence hinges on people in the South Bay both seeing and playing live music. Alcohol sales may pay the bills, but if there’s no permanent culture of live music there will be no one to buy that alcohol at clubs like The Ritz down the road.

“We need different size clubs,” says O’Brien. “We need all-ages clubs, we need 21-and-over, and we just don’t have it all here. That’s why the scene lacks here.”

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
Of course, just because there are no dedicated, above-the-board venues for young local bands doesn’t mean young local bands aren’t playing shows. They’re just being held in the types of places minors have always congregated—basements, practice spaces and (in one case) the back of a porn shop.

“Most of the shows I would go to when I was younger were at peoples’ houses,” remembers Erfan Moradi.

Moradi heads local cassette tape label Fourth Row Records, and first attended a show in San Jose at the age of 14. With nowhere else to book, the show was held at a friend’s grandmother’s house.

“There’s no formal all-ages spaces that I can think of,” Moradi says of San Jose. “We just completely lack spaces where we can put on shows safely without the worry of them getting shut down.”

Now 20 and attending UC Berkeley, Moradi says local shows aren’t just about seeing bands—they’re about community, and acceptance, and are critical for personal development.

“Having DIY spaces was really formative for me,” Moradi says. “It allowed me to find folks that were like-minded and eager to build a space that was accessible, comfortable, inclusive, accepting. All stuff that a 14-, 16-year-old who is having a hard time needs.”

“That statement is very accurate,” says Matthew Martinez.

Matthew is 17 and plays in Sunday Drive, an exciting and talented young group from San Jose. He and his bandmates are part of a generation that has never had an accessible place to play in their city, or the greater South Bay. But that hasn’t stopped them from playing anyway.

“To me, live performances are everything,” Martinez writes in an email. “Finding places to host shows can be very difficult, but as a band we’ve always had the DIY mindset. If there aren’t venues available, make one.”

For 15 years now, this is exactly what San Jose’s youth have been doing: making their own venues out of houses, DIY spots and warehouse space. Places like Trash House, House of the Dead Rat, Kitty Castle, Casa Chikimalas, Texas Toast House, Gingerbread House, Playback Studios, The Dojo, The Cuddle Space, and Arrows to Eden—the back-of-a-porn-shop venue mentioned above.

In lieu of real venues, places like these have often become the only option available for musicians in the area. But houses and DIY spots are like a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. None of these makeshift venues can openly advertise their shows or their locations. This makes them all but inaccessible to anyone not already in the know, cutting off potential fans before they even have a chance.

Spots like these are also, by necessity, transitory. People move, get priced out, and, increasingly after last year’s Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, get shut down by the police. In fact, as of the time of writing, seven of the 10 DIY venues listed with this story no longer exist. At the outset of 2018, the pool of spaces available for young musicians in San Jose is smaller than ever.

All ages shows live on in the South Bay, they’ve just been pushed underground—sometimes literally, as was the case with basement concerts at The House of the Dead Rat. Photo by Murray Bowles

PUNK GOES PUBLIC
Halfway through its second decade without a real all-ages venue, the city and surrounding region has lost a lot of momentum and will need to play catch-up if it ever hopes to build a truly self-sustaining music scene, according to Tommy Aguilar.

“We’re losing generations,” says Aguilar, a cultural producer and artist in San Jose. “How do you foster a very deep, culturally vibrant city? You gotta get the young.”

For almost a decade Aguilar worked at MACLA—Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana—a Latino-oriented arts nonprofit headquartered in the SoFA District. While there, he booked all-ages shows featuring young punk, metal and hip-hop groups.

“I never really turned anyone away,” he says, emphasizing the important role all-ages venues play for both young artists and their fans. Playing on a real stage with a real sound system in a dedicated venue gives budding musicians a chance to learn the ropes while showing their following the value of live performance. “I’m all for the romantic idea of the garage party, the house party. But you need to be on a stage, plugged in with a sound engineer. You need to learn the ways.”

These days Aguilar works solidly in the 21-and-over space with DJ collective Sonido Clash and event promoter Universal Grammar. Still, he believes something needs to be done to foster an all-ages scene—and he says nonprofits, like MACLA, will have to play a role.

A little over a decade ago, local record label owner and musician Mike Park went the nonprofit route. In fact, he went 1,200 miles down that route.

During the summer of 2005, the Asian Man Records founder and a number of musicians (including current Blink-182 guitarist Matt Skiba), bicycled the entire West Coast—from Seattle to San Diego—all to raise money for a nonprofit all-ages space in San Jose. It took a full month for the musicians to travel the distance. By the end, they had raised $80,000. Notably, none of the major tech companies in the area donated to the cause.

After completing the ride, Park and his nonprofit began looking at what they could do in San Jose with the money.

“There wasn’t much,” he says. “Even if we got a space, after paying deposits, insurance, getting the zoning, we would’ve lasted three months and all that would have been gone.”

In order to make that $80,000 work for the area’s youth, Park’s dream venue needed city involvement, which was sorely lacking, he says. Park describes his experience dealing with San Jose officials as “a lot of unanswered emails and a lot of apathy.”

Unfortunately, that apathy still seems to be the norm. When reached for comment on the historic lack of these spaces, the city’s cultural affairs director, Kerry Adams-Hapner, declined to speak on the issue, sidestepping it entirely by bluntly stating that it was not in the “purview of the office” of cultural affairs.

For his part, Aguilar would also like to see more action from City Hall. “The city has to step up,” he says. “We don’t have anybody championing music on that city level.”

That may be changing, however. Silicon Valley Creates has proposed a Japantown space for artists, a “model for supporting arts and creativity in the 21st century.” Crucially, though, current plans do not include any kind of venue space. Instead, the plan seems to double down on the city’s ill-considered decision to view artists of all stripes as “creative entrepreneurs,” rather than address the specific needs of the city’s young musicians (in this case, a place to play).

Despite the cultural affairs department’s boilerplate non-answer on the subject of all-ages spaces, San Jose clearly has a related problem on its hands: blight. In November, the City Council voted to create a pilot program to address the issue of the countless blighted buildings downtown. The program creates a registry of empty storefronts and levies fines against property owners who let them sit unnecessarily empty, in the hopes that it will push them to start renting.

While ostensibly unrelated to the city’s lack of all-ages venues, this initiative might just create some meaningful action. If this program leads to the creation of even one semi-permanent all-ages venue downtown, it could finally break the curse that has held the city for the last 15 years.

In the meantime, see you at the house show. DM a punk for the address.    

Rising above the din of boisterous, drink-fueled conversation and clinking glassware, a saxophone’s squawk snakes through the crowd. Parting the cigarette smoke haze and ambling over sticky tabletops, a wandering double bass, a splashy trap kit and a peppery piano plod on. It’s the kind of place where a private eye might have met a dame desperately in need of help, or a venue for a gang of beats to stage a poetry slam. But this is not a page out of a dimestore novel or a scene from decades past. It happens right now—every weekend and most weeknights, anyway—in downtown San Jose.

“That’s one of my favorite things about playing at Café Stritch,” says Howard Wiley, a Bay Area-based saxophonist and drummer. The SoFA restaurant, bar and live music venue reminds him of some of his favorite jazz recordings. “You hear people talking. You hear people ordering drinks. You hear people engage in the music.”

What’s more, Wiley says: “I come across younger people.”

It’s not that he’s an ageist. Wiley just gets excited when he sees fresh young faces taking an interest in jazz. And lately, jazz lovers have plenty to be excited about.

All That Jazz
Café Stritch’s fourth annual Rahsaanathon—a five-day tribute to the life and work of visionary saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, starting Aug. 3—and next week’s San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, the 27th annual installment, both serve to underscore Wiley’s enthusiasm about the state of the genre.

Brendan Rawson, executive director of San Jose Jazz, also gets excited about introducing younger audiences to jazz, which, he admits, has a way of alienating people who might otherwise be interested in the genre as a whole.

“Jazz, for a lot of folks, can be a loaded term,” he says. “It’s either that vapid, ‘smooth jazz’ sort of stuff, or it’s: ‘That’s that weird shit; why can’t they just play the right note?’ kind of thing.”

Rawson is referring to the tendency among those who are unfamiliar with jazz to lump it into one of two categories—the sterile Muzak of elevators, doctor’s office lobbies and shopping malls, or the impenetrable free jazz appreciated largely by overzealous intellectuals.

But even in its most awkward phases of growth—whether it’s corporate radio suits pushing the mind-numbing, electric sax-driven “quiet storm” format, or ivory tower academics insisting upon mashing at their ivory keys in a most discordant manner—the true spirit of jazz is always laying in wait, ready to make yet another triumphant return. And both Wiley and Rawson say they can see the jazz world in the midst of just such a revival.

Riders On The Storm
“It seems like the early ’90s are back again,” Wiley says, name-checking A Tribe Called Quest, DJ Premier and the late J. Dilla, noting their proclivity for diving deep into record store bargain bins and excavating amazing jazz samples. “I think we’re back where people are looking for and needing creative music, but also something that’s soulful and—I hate the word ‘accessible’—but something that’s relatable.”

“The hip-hop generation has come of age,” Rawson says, observing that the most recent crop of jazz players did not develop their chops in a vacuum. “They are combing the music they grew up on and the popular culture that is important to them with their jazz stylings and jazz approach.”

In Chicago, the production collective THEMpeople and emcee Chance The Rapper are drawing upon the jazzy sounds of generations past and repackaging them for their mostly young audience.

Los Angeles is home to the bass virtuoso and producer Thundercat, who recently teamed with Flying Lotus on his electronic ode to the end of life, You’re Dead. SoCal is also the headquarters of Kamasi Washington, who delivered a number of rip-roaring saxophone solos on Kendrick Lamar’s critically acclaimed To Pimp a Butterfly—an album whose liner notes read like a cheat sheet on emergent jazz talent.

Over on the East Coast, Ghostface Killah—who made a name for himself in the legendary, jazz- and kung fu flick-sampling Wu Tang Clan—recently teamed up with Toronto post-boppers BADBADNOTGOOD for the Sour Soul LP.

Perhaps the most obvious example of the jazz-hip-hop connection is The Tonight Show—that bastion of mainstream American pop culture, broadcast into millions of living rooms all across the country five nights a week. It’s easy to forget that The Roots were a forward-thinking jazz and hip-hop fusion group long before they became Jimmy Fallon’s house band.

A number of the aforementioned artists have come to San Jose in recent years to perform at the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest. Just last year, SJZ hosted two performances by Kamasi Washington—one at the historic California Theatre and one on the festival’s main stage—as well as a DJ set by Ali Shaeed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest at the Continental Bar, Lounge and Patio.

In yet another sign that younger, mainstream audiences are developing an appetite for jazz, Rawson points to the success Washington has seen since swinging through San Jose last summer. “I could never afford him now,” Rawson says with a laugh, noting that the saxophonist was well received at this year’s Coachella.

SAXY LADY: Alto saxophonist Claire Daily joins the Sonelius Smith Quartet at this year’s Rahsaanathon.

Jazz Never Left
If there is indeed a rising cohort of jazz musicians attracting younger listeners to the genre, it only makes sense, Rawson says: “Jazz is very comfortable reinventing itself. It’s sort of baked into the character of jazz. You’re always going to have artists in the genre that are experimenting and crossing over.”

Furthermore, Wiley observes, it is completely logical that the world of hip-hop would look to jazz, as Kendrick Lamar did on To Pimp A Butterfly. “There’s no way we could have any of the pop music that we like, any of the hip-hop music that we like without having jazz,” Wiley says. The way he sees it, just about every serious musician has necessarily drawn inspiration from the great jazz players and singers. “Every generation of rapper comes up talking about jazz. Every generation of soul singer talks about jazz.”

And after all, jazz’s ultimate return to cool might just be fated. After all, the “cool cats” of the jazz world are responsible for codifying the colloquial definition of “cool” in the first place.

“There’s always that resurgence,” Wiley says of the rolling jazz revival waves, perpetually lurking on the horizon. “There’s always the search for something truly nurturing and real. It’s always here, it’s always brewing.”

There was a time when jazz was the popular music of the day. Jazz provided the soundtrack to the Roaring Twenties and followed Americans into basement speakeasies.

Big band jazz gave way to funk, soul and R&B, while self-taught bluesmen of the rural south—guitarists like Leadbelly and Muddy Waters—inspired kids to pick up guitars and hack together a little something we now call rock & roll.

Patron Saint
In 1957, right around the time Elvis Presley, was launching his career with the iconic film, Jailhouse Rock, Rahsaan Roland Kirk was embarking on his own professional musical odyssey.

The blind multi-instrumentalist would eventually become known for his progressive style, boundary-pushing performances—which involved playing three specially modified saxophones simultaneously—and his cosmic philosophies that at times recall the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra.

Effortlessly hip and fully committed to his art, Kirk is the patron saint of Café Stritch. Though an honorific for a man who passed away nearly 40 years ago, it is a title that Maxwell Borkenhagen, artistic director of Café Stritch, takes quite seriously.

“For me, in general it’s about trying to redefine jazz for my generation,” Borkenhagen says.

Like Wiley and Rawson, Borkenhagen is all too familiar with the misconceptions held by so many uninitiated. “There is this tragic association among young people who really don’t know about jazz,” he says, referring to those who conflate the sprawling world of jazz with one or two self-indulgent, niche subgenres. “For me, there is a line connecting blues, jazz, rock & roll and punk. They’ve all been really rebellious forms. Rahsaan, in a way, is a perfect example of that. He wanted nothing to do with the mainstream.”

Borkenhagen grew up surrounded by jazz and the music of Kirk, whom his parents first lionized when they named their former restaurant “Eulipia”—a Kirk-coined word, taken from his song, “Theme for the Eulipions,” an ode to artists and all creative types.

And so, Café Stritch stands as an ode, not only to creativity and artistic integrity, but also to the rebellious through-line that runs from the earliest days of New Orleans brass up to the furious drumming of East Bay native Thomas Pridgen—who has performed with acts as diverse as psychedelic post-punks The Mars Volta, thrash metal revivalists Trash Talk and Wiley’s own rotating crew of Café Stritch regulars, Extra Nappy.

“Rahsaan was so true to his genuine creative impulses and he didn’t take shit from people,” Borkenhagen says, adding that jazz music depends on a particular vibe.

“I’ve observed time and time again where people might come in thinking jazz is lame or whatever, but then they experience the vibe. And that vibe—when you allow great musicians to do what they do—it’s going to make some converts. They’ll at least make the association that jazz is hip. People don’t necessarily remember that these days.”

Over the course of his career, Rahsaan Roland Kirk was not always appreciated. Nonetheless, he inspired many still-active jazz musicians. Running the gamut from a trombonist and conch shell player to a pianist and composer to a Bill-Clinton-approved saxophonist, the following artists either played with Rahsaan or deeply studied his works, making them the closest replicators of that singular man’s sound. This week they come together at Café Stritch’s annual Rahsaanathon to honor the legendary jazzman.

Steve Turre
As a 20 year-old, Turre played alongside Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Inspired by Rahsaan’s multi-instrument, medium-defying creativity, Turre took the spirit of the icon and applied it to an unconventional instrument: conch shells. Known in pop culture mostly for their ability to rally barbarians, Turre uses the conch to blow ghostly solos, his delicate notes floating out of the calcified fractals in a buzzy wail. Gathered during his travels through the Caribbean and Great Barrier Reef of Australia, he cuts the openings to hit a precise pitch. While playing, he modulates the notes by inserting his hand into their swirled openings and seamlessly switches between the limited-register shells, popping high notes out of the smaller ones and weaving bass melodies with the larger ones. More conventionally, the ponytailed savant plays the trombone and has accompanied legends like Carlos Santana and Ray Charles.

Sonelius Smith
Rahsaan attracted the attention of musical king-maker Ed Sullivan with his rendition of “My Cherie Amour,” a swaying love ballad that he rendered distinctly by switching between his three saxophones. But when Rahsaan appeared on Sullivan’s final show accompanied by pianist Smith, bassist Charles Mingus and saxophonist Archie Shepp, they broke their promise to play the meandering ballad. In the green room before their five-minute slot, Rahsaan worked himself into a lather proclaiming, “We’re gonna burn it down! We’re gonna burn the place down!”

And burn it down they did. The all-star ensemble unleashed Mingus’ spirit-quickening “Haitian Fight Song,” an already frenetic composition that got cranked up to eleven and stunned the iconic host and his studio audience who were expecting “classical jazz.”

An accomplished composer as well, he collaborated with Shamek Farrah on The World of the Children, where he slams, tickles and taps the ivory and ebony, flying through differing rhythms and melodies in an inspired display of range and prowess.

Claire Daly
Claire Daly knew by the age of 12 that she wanted to play the saxophone for the rest of her life. But making a living proved to be a trickier. She played everywhere from jazz clubs to parades to rock concerts before deciding to lay down a record of her own. Wielding her huge baritone sax, she produced Swing Low in 1999, an exceptional debut as a leader. The release garnered the attention of perhaps the most famous saxophone player at the time, President Bill Clinton, who placed the record into his eponymous Arkansas Library as a CD significant to him while he was in office. Years later, to return the favor, she played at a Democratic fundraiser. In that same year, she paid tribute to Rahsaan alongside an all-star cast of musicians including Dave Hofstra and Eli Yamin, and she enjoyed the icon’s stylings so much that she’s continued reimagining his works into the present.

More recently, in 2012 the North Coast Brewing Co. produced a record of hers in conjunction with the release of their Belgian style dark ale, Brother Thelonious, the name forming a cheeky tribute to the lauded composer-pianist Thelonious Monk and the monks that traditionally brew the high-potency ale.

James Carter
With his combination of multi-instrument prowess, atypical sounds and pure joy, James Carter gets as close as possible to replicating the singular brilliance of Rahsaan. The virtuosic Carter has mastered the gauntlet of reed instruments, from sopranino to contrabass saxophones to contrabass and bass clarinets. When he plays, he scampers up and down the sonic spectrum, biting his reed to hit scratchy, oddly hypnotizing notes, then huffing and slapping to create an almost percussive effect, before soaring to ear-piercing heights— occasionally heaving a sigh in comic contrast to his breakneck stylings. Nicknamed the “Jimi Hendrix of Jazz,” his solos are testament to the limitless potential of the human imagination.

Birthed in L.A.’s late-’70s underground music scene—back when punk rock was still in its infancy—The Dickies are one of the longest-running and most entertaining punk bands to ever take the stage.

Formed in the San Fernando Valley in in 1977, The Dickies hit upon a winning formula with songs like “Stukas over Disneyland,” and “We Aren’t The World”—all of which feature fast tempos, simple chord changes and catchy melodies paired with goofy and satirical lyrics. It is a sound that would influence SoCal pop punk bands for years to come.

As they approach the four-decade mark, the band’s founding members—guitarist Stan Lee and singer Leonard Graves Phillips—continue to draw excited crowds.

“It’s bigger than ever!” Lee says of the band’s recent stints on the road. “There are lots of kids showing up—that is the one plus to the internet blowing up the record industry. There are young people coming up that know the words, and that’s got to be through YouTube and things of that nature.”

One of the Dickies best-known tracks is the theme song to the 1988 cult horror classic, Killer Klowns From Outer Space—which was filmed in nearby Santa Cruz and Watsonville.

The campy track paired perfectly with scenes of evil clowns tossing flesh-melting pies and trapping hapless human victims in cotton candy cocoons—even though Lee says he and his bandmates knew very little about the film when writing the song.

“It was just the movie title, I went over to Leonard’s and he had that riff,” Lee says. “I brought it into (the filmmakers’) office and they said, ‘Sold!’” Another well-known Dickies song, “Banana Split,” was used in the superhero-action-dramady Kick-Ass.

As the Dickies look back on almost 40 years together, Lee points to the basic foundation of the band as reason for their legacy and longevity.

“I think it’s the songs,” he says. “They hold up, it just proves that we were right. There was lots of animosity toward us and punk rock back then. People were saying that it was terrible and we just stuck to our guns. I don’t know… You stick around long enough and you get respectability—just like hookers and old buildings.”

The Dickies
Wed, 8pm, $16-$18
The Ritz, San Jose

Ahead of his 24-date U.S.-Canada tour, Kung Fu Vampire is thinking about his hometown.

“There’s all this talent here,” the local horrorcore rapper says. “There are so many great emcees, but no one’s stepping up and saying ‘I’m gonna be that guy.’”

That guy is whoever will stay in San Jose after breaking big, in order to draw national attention to the largest city in Silicon Valley. It’s a concern many local creatives are voicing: who can rise to the top and succeed—in music, or the arts—in this increasingly tech-centric city.

If you haven’t heard of Kung Fu Vampire, you’re probably new to the South Bay. Welcome. The San Jose rapper and producer has been releasing solo records since 2001. Along the way, he’s landed prominent features on tracks by Bay Area legend E-40, horrorcore pioneer Brotha Lynch Hung and underground sensation Tech N9ne. He is currently touring behind his latest effort, Look Alive, and is scheduled to play The Catalyst in Santa Cruz this Saturday.

Over the past decade and a half, Kung Fu Vampire has often seemed to be on the verge of breaking through to the mainstream—inasmuch as horrorcore rappers can be “mainstream,” that is. With 90,000 likes on Facebook, and nearly 23,000 Twitter followers, he stands head and shoulders above most other musicians in San Jose in terms of fanbase and visibility. And, as an independent artist, he’s done it all by himself, on his own terms.

Stylistically, Kung Fu Vampire is San Jose’s one real contribution to “chopper” rap, a fast spitting style that has its origins in the Midwest. And due to his lyrical content and gloomy aesthetic, his music falls loosely into the category of horrorcore—a subgenre hip-hop that favors the cinematic imagery of horror movies and the macabre.

His latest single, “Fire,” features Ubiquitous from Ces Cru, as well as Locksmith—a pair of buzzed-about, up-and-coming rappers—who trade nimble verses with Kung Fu over an ominous beat of strings, swirling synth pads, choirs, and a female vocal hook that lands somewhere between club and trip-hop.

Although he champions a style that originated in the Midwest—and despite his ties to one of the Midwest’s most notorious exports, horrorcore kingpins, the Insane Clown Posse—those familiar with Kung Fu Vampire’s work know that he is fiercely loyal to his hometown. With his new record, Look Alive, the emcee says he aims to shout his allegiance to the South Bay from the rooftops.

“A lot of what I’ve done in the past is mysterious and withdrawn,” says Kung Fu. “I’m kinda coming clean on this album.”

True to his word, the emcee seems eager to lay most of his cards on the table. He still declines to reveal the name on his birth certificate, but he is more than willing to discuss just about everything else. He talks about his family and shares details about his numerous bodily ailments. While he used to maintain an image that might best be described as “club-goth chic”—ghoulish white face paint, red and white contacts, a shaved head and flowing cloak—Kung Fu Vampire has recently adopted a different look. In recent press photos and music videos, he sports a ball cap or beanie, wayfarer sunglasses, a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers. He is dressed similarly when we meet at a Korean barbeque joint in Japantown to chat.

“There’s always a side of me that’s been super goth, and then super cholo—super San Jose,” he says. “I was in a lowrider car club for over a decade.”

In a way, the title of Kung Fu Vampire’s latest album—Look Alive—openly draws attention to this dichotomy.

“What’s a vampire trying to do?” the emcee asks, semi-rhetorically. “He’s trying to look alive. Look Alive is a testament to where I’m at. I do have a crazy life, a crazy upbringing and how I got to this. And I’m showing people a whole other side of the music industry and how it can be done independently. I’m gonna do it for my city.”\

Kung Fu Vampire
Jul 9, 9pm, $12-$15
The Catalyst, Santa Cruz

Some relationships drag on for years, never really going anywhere, before unceremoniously sputtering out. Though it’s impossible to say exactly what the future holds for San Jose indie quartet Get Married, things are certainly looking up.

Formed just last year, the band is already taking things to the next level, inking a one-year deal with Wiretap Records. The L.A.-based label will help Get Married reissue and distribute their excellent debut EP, Four Songs.

The aptly titled four-song set showcases Get Married’s potent synthesis of classic sounds plucked from the recent—and distant—past. Recorded last January at Panda Studios in Fremont, Four Songs is fueled by a nostalgia for early rock & roll and doo-wop, as well as first-wave emo and shoegaze.

Influenced by the likes of late-’80s and early-’90s acts, such Galaxie 500 and Sunny Day Real Estate, the members of Get Married are equally enthralled with the work of Elvis Presley and The Beach Boys. In fact, frontman Jaake Margo started Get Married as an Elvis cover band, before the group started writing their own songs.

Merging a no-frills aesthetic with bright, catchy chord progressions and vocal arrangements, Get Married build songs that ride high on waves of fuzzy guitar tones, shoot the curl through a compendium of doo-wop, swing and rockabilly flourishes, and come out the other end in a glistening mist of Sun Records-style harmonies.

“Grenadine,” which follows a story of unrequited love, feels like a Grace Kelly-starring, malt-shop romance—only punctuated with revved-up guitars and snotty, punk melodies.

This summer Get Married are taking their show on the road, playing a string of dates in the Pacific Northwest before returning home to play the Art Boutiki on July 28. After that, plans are in the works for a national tour and a new EP, currently titled Into the Cosmos.

While San Jose certainly holds a special place in their hearts, looking forward, Get Married have their sights set beyond their hometown.

“We’ve been talking as a band about moving to L.A.” Margo says. “We’re all in our 20s and if we’re going to do this, then we need to be closer to the action.”

Get Married
‘Four Songs’
Various Digital Outlets

Reggaeton hit the American mainstream in 2004, with massive hits from Daddy Yankee and Ivy Queen. A mixture of Latin, hip-hop and reggae music, the new sound was a natural fit within San Jose’s downtown scene, where all three of reggaeton’s parent genres have connected well with audiences.

As a genre, reggaeton has mostly been delivered to crowds via a DJ—or a DJ and emcee; it is less frequently performed with traditional rock instrumentation. La Inedita (roughly, “The Unprecedented”), a Peruvian five-piece band play “chicha” music—a Peruvian version of cumbia that is deeply indebted to reggae, and thus, a cousin to reggaeton. If it sounds like a confusing mix on paper (Peruvian-cumbia-reggae), it’s just the opposite coming from your speakers. The music is rhythmic and infectiously danceable.

“Dancehall and reggaeton are more produced in a studio,” says Ramon Zepeda of Sonido Clash, the San Jose-based collective promoting La Inedita’s upcoming show at the Back Bar SoFa. “It’s sample-based—everybody sampling the same beat over and over again. Chicha is the Peruvian version of Cumbia music. When Cumbia got to Peru, they fused it with psych rock from the ’60s, and they started using electric instruments, guitars and drums.”

All of these elements—electric guitars and bass, live keys, drums and congas, as well as an emcee channeling the Jamaican dancehall sound—can clearly be heard in La Inedita’s music.

“It’s a diverse sound,” Ramon says. “La Inedita reflects San Jose in its diversity.”

Now on their second U.S. tour (a feat rarely accomplished by Peruvian bands) La Inedita has already made waves in America. South By Southwest organizers labelled them a must-see act at the 2015 festival in Austin, Texas. For their part, Sonido Clash jumped at the opportunity to bring the group to San Jose, where there is a growing demand for music that melds Latin American sounds with alternative, indie and electronic music.

“There’s always been Latin alternative shows in San Jose—more rock-based, more like ’80s and ’90s, that defined a generation of Latinos,” says Fernando Perez Fiesco, also of Sonido Clash. “But what we’re doing is really showcasing the contemporary music and musicians. We all grew up listening to cumbia at home. But these contemporary musicians are making a new contribution, and adding another layer on top of that.”

Both Zepeda and Fiesco hope fans will come early and ready to dance. San Jose’s own contribution to alternative Afro-cumbia music, the up-and-coming Corazon Salvaje will open the show.

La Inedita
Jul 2, 9pm, $15
BackBar SoFa, San Jose