Three dangling crimson bulbs trace a straight line through the hall, directing eyes to the stage at the far end of the room, while another set of orbs cast a sanguine glow on the shiny black surface of the bar. There, two men sit, sipping bottled water and surveying their brand new venture.

Corey O’Brien leans forward in his stool, forearms on the bar, fiddling with his phone. His pale hands and face float in the darkness. His black shoes, pants, long-sleeved shirt and beanie merge with the surrounding black walls, floor and ceiling. The parts of his neck not covered by the hat are largely obscured by the long, dark locks falling out from beneath the knit cap.

In two days’ time, The Ritz will open to the public, and there is still a lot of work to be done. O’Brien’s business partner, Kyle Gilmore, pulls on his cigarette as the pair discuss the repairs they’ve made to the space, what the club means to them and what it could mean for San Jose’s nightlife scene, which after a decade or more of fits and failed starts seems finally to be making a comeback.

The success of that renaissance could well depend on what happens here, inside this dimly lit expanse at the corner of South First and East San Salvador streets. Once an adult movie theater, it was converted into a music venue in 1989 by a group headed by Fil Maresca, who also spearheaded a guerrilla rebranding of the neglected three-block stretch of a key city street.

Sure, the Market at San Pedro Square is a booming hub of nightlife, and the 100 block of South First Street has picked up steam in the two years since 55 South, Original Gravity and Paper Plane opened up. And in San Jose’s arts and culture district, known since the 1990s as the South of First Area, or SoFA—things have been improving. Singlebarrel, Back Bar SoFA, Café Stritch and The Continental have all brought something to the table. But there is still a void to be filled: a theater-style venue for touring acts.

And according to Maxwell Borkenhagen, impresario of the nearby live music venue Café Stritch, The Ritz is the answer. “It really is this keystone. It’s what we need,” Borkenhagen says. “A big rock club at the heart of the district.”

Borkenhagen’s eyes light up when discussing the new venue, which occupies 400 S. First Street—former home to many previous rock and dance clubs. To him, it promises to legitimize the SoFA district and bring the kind of mid-sized indie, punk and hip-hop acts that one would usually need to drive to San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz or Berkeley to see.

“Walking in there, it was such a breath of fresh air,” he says, referring to The Ritz’s soft open on April 8. “It’s is just as cool as any place in San Francisco or the East Bay. That place has potential.”

That promise was on full display April 12 at the Reverend Horton Heat show, which drew a large crowd—despite it being a Sunday and even though The Ritz wasn’t serving alcohol, as it had yet to secure its liquor license. (The club has since obtained it’s license and the booze is flowing—both in the club’s main bar and the front bar.) The audience whooped and hollered as The Reverend and his band tore through hits like “Psychobilly Freakout.”

Still, it remains to be seen whether the new club will draw the kinds of big names many locals hope it will, and whether the SoFA District will recapture its former glory, when bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and No Doubt performed on the block. The Reverend Horton Heat, along with Agent Orange, The Faction and Dick Dale (all of whom are slated to play The Ritz in coming months) aren’t exactly risky bets in San Jose. O’Brien regularly booked successful shows with skate punk and psychobilly bands at his former venue, The Blank Club—but rarely, at least in recent years, took risks on emerging acts and new musical styles. The jury is out on whether O’Brien and his team will book the younger bands making headlines on websites like Pitchfork and Stereogum. And even if The Ritz can get those groups, will San Jose show up?

San Jose music circuit veteran Jonny Manak of Jonny Manak and The Depressives brushes aside those worries, arguing that O’Brien will be able to book buzzed-about bands now that he has the space to guarantee enough money to both pay the band and turn a profit.

“If you build it, they will come,” Manak optimistically predicts. “Corey just built it. And we have the RockBar theater too. It’s going to show national booking agents that there are two big-ass rooms where they can send their bands to play.”

The Reverend Horton Heat played the second night of the Ritz’s opening weekend. Photo by Nick Veronin.

The Day The Music Died

Just a few years ago, this debate was moot. The South First district had a handful of theaters and galleries; destinations where visitors would come and then promptly leave. What existed of a SoFA nightlife scene was fragmented, at best.

It fell apart in the late ’90s, according Sam Ramirez, operator of the recently opened Continental Bar, Lounge and Patio on South First Street. Ramirez witnessed both the rise and the disintegration of the SoFA district first hand. He cut his teeth in the bar and club industry on the street—working first as a bouncer and then as a bartender at a series of local establishments. The way he tells it, the scene was built by locals at a grassroots level and was undone by bad operators and a change of San Jose Police Department policy.

At its height, the intersection of South First and East San Salvador streets was called “The Four Corners”—a reference to four clubs: F/X The Club, The Cactus Club, Polly Esthers and Marsugi’s. Ajax Lounge, which was in the space above Cafe Stritch, was another popular live music and DJ venue. The multi-level Dimensions theme club occupied a former furniture store building that was razed to make way for a residential highrise. After F/X closed, it reopened as The Usual, and continued as a live music venue and dance club. Ajax became the B-Hive, a hip hop establishment, and later Sofa Lounge, before fire code enforcement ended its run.

With the exception of Polly Esthers, a chain, all the venues had been started by local operators with a passion for music and nightlife, and most ran on a shoestring budget.

O’Brien says he was never fond of the nickname “Four Corners.” Nonetheless, he was a regular on the SoFA scene. “It was happening,” he says of his days hanging out at Marsugi’s and F/X, and later working at The Usual. “It was for real.”

SoFA became what it was because none of the clean-nosed developers and businesses would invest in the neighborhood. The city’s redevelopment agency poured public money north of San Carlos Street and brought in new restaurants to compete with SoFA’s cluster of white tablecloth restaurants. “This whole area was worth nothing to anybody,” O’Brien says, allowing the rock clubs to come in and build businesses without much capital.

But then—as so often happens when the bohemian class turns rundown neighborhoods around with music, art and nightlife—the establishment took notice. Hopes of selling new condos to buyers unaccustomed to fights and shootings and sidewalk vomit meant padlocking the clubs that had become increasingly rowdy as rents rose and SoFA became a regional destination. “The city came in and they wanted to do everything,” O’Brien recalls. “They wanted to clean up the street.”

A string of club owners with deeper pockets had invested. After the New York-based Polly Esthers came Cabana, then Glo, then Wet. When The Usual became Spy, Pete Escovedo’s and then Angels. The investment community had little interest in rock & roll, O’Brien says. The venues hit on a formula revolving around Top-40 DJs and expensive drinks. Trouble soon followed.

The San Jose Police Department changed its policy of requiring off-duty officers to be employed directly by the clubs to one in which a parked line of patrol cars herded exiting masses to their cars as quickly as possible when 2am rolled around.

“The result was that people who wanted to avoid police interactions stopped coming out,” Ramirez says, “while those who didn’t mind contending with, and even confronting, the police, continued to show up.” Ramirez himself left downtown and opened a club in Campbell.

Clashes between the police and club-goers rose and by the late aughts, and both Wet and Angels closed after incidents and police enforcement actions. The SoFA nightlife scene was the quietest it had been since music replaced the sex industry as the district’s dominant entertainment in the 1980s.

In recent years, Club Miami drew a loyal but highly niche Latin dance crowd on Friday and Saturday nights. And the 300 block was bracketed by Agenda and Motif on one end and Original Joe’s on the other—with nothing, save the excellent but sleepy Anno Domini art gallery in between. 

A photo of two Wet nightclub patrons. Chuckin’ them deuces. Photo by Dave Cabebe.

SoFA’s Glory Days

For those old enough to remember South First Street’s glory days, it was an especially hard blow to watch the SoFA District deteriorate.

Manak refers to the SoFA District of the early ’90s as “the Mecca of entertainment” in San Jose. He remembers heading to the intersection of South First and East San Fernando confident that he’d find something fun going on. “You didn’t have to make plans for the night,” he says. “You just went out, and if one band was shitty (at one bar or club), you just went across the street. It was fucking crazy. There were just people on all corners. There was music coming from every building.”

Eric Victorino, lead singer of Strata, The Limousines and Gestalt, has similarly fond memories of the SoFA scene. “It’s been so sad over the years to see that building just sitting there,” he says. “It was devastating to see it turn into Angels.”

The fifth show Strata played, when they were still called Downside, was at the Cactus Club. At that show, his fledgling band grabbed the attention of a Capitol Records scout—an encounter that led to the band’s first contract and kicked off Victorino’s professional music career.

According to Victorino, the cluster of music clubs functioned as a training grounds for local acts—helping them move from their garages to state and national tours. “It was fun, because there was a hierarchy set up,” he says. “You could get a show at the Cactus and play the tiny room, and you had something to aspire to. Maybe you started at the Gaslighter in Campbell, and you’d eventually work your way up to headlining the Cactus.”

As O’Brien surveys The Ritz just days before the club’s opening night, his business partner recalls touring the venue before signing a lease. “When we first came in here, [Corey] said, ‘I got beat up right here, and did this over here.’”

That fighter’s spirit and sense of belonging that O’Brien brings to the space makes him an ideal candidate to lead the revival of rock & roll in San Jose.

Corey O’Brien on the corner of S. First and E. San Salvador streets. The Ritz is behind him. Photo by Dan Pulcrano.

From The Blank Club To The Ritz

After rock & roll died in SoFA—and unwilling to accept that California’s third largest city should go without at least some kind of alternative music club—O’Brien and zine publisher Larry Trujillo seized the opportunity to buy what would become The Blank Club.

O’Brien was at the Cactus Club the night it opened and he looks back on the day that The Usual closed. “The city wiped out all the real culture,” he says of the decline of the SoFA district. 

O’Brien came formed his definition of “real culture” as a wiley skater kid who loved going to punk shows and drinking when he wasn’t cruising the streets on his board. For a time, he would regularly make the trip up to San Francisco to see his favorite bands play at Mabuhay Gardens. But he eventually tired of making that trip and decided to try promoting his own shows locally.

The first show O’Brien organized was a big one: Social Distortion at San Jose City College. “They were our favorite band at the time,” he says of Social D. “They had no albums out yet, they just had singles and were on some compilations. We asked them to play San Jose, and they told us, y’know, ‘Rent a hall! Set a date!’” he says, chortling a bit at his former naiveté. “So we found the student union at San Jose City College and did the show there. We actually made money doing the show. Tons of people showed up. It was a big deal.”

In the early 2000s, Trujillo was managing Plant 51—a restaurant that, while popular, was just barely hanging on behind the scenes. “They were struggling…and I told Larry, ‘Let me know if they wanna sell that place, cause I’ll buy it.” He said the owners would never sell, but two months later, O’Brien got the call. “We all just scraped money together.” The Blank opened in February 2003.

During its 12-year run, the club kept the local scene alive, while providing a venue for rising touring bands and every once in a while snagging a big fish—like Dwarves, The Damned, The Ataris or ISIS.

“It was the phoenix that rose from the Cactus Club and The Usual going away,” Manak says of The Blank. “Without it we wouldn’t have had any national bands in San Jose at all.”

Borkenhagen, put it another way. “If you’re into punk rock and alternative stuff, it was the closest thing to a CBGB’s we had,” he says. “It was a black room that booked rock bands.”

The Blank was not without its faults, and O’Brien is the first to acknowledge it.

“We’ve done a lot of big shows here, like huge production shows,” O’Brien says. Still, he continues, “bands would come here and just not be happy, and we could see it when they walked in. We need a bigger place; we need a room that has everything we need.”

At 8,000 square feet, The Ritz more than triples the size of The Blank. It has a capacity of 537—versus The Blank’s 188. It’s about the same size as Slim’s or The Independent in San Francisco. And as such, O’Brien says he will be gunning for the level of bands that play those venues.

In response to critics who dismiss his risk-adverse booking history, O’Brien first concedes, then goes on the offensive. 

“I agree with them!” he exclaims, saying he is well aware that The Blank Club rarely booked a band that would have been covered by the likes of Pitchfork—a website he says he reads every day.

There were lots of reasons why he didn’t book many of the bands popular in indie rock circles, he says—chief among them being cash. Bringing in bigger names costs money, and with only 188 people at a sold out show—even when he raised ticket prices above the $5-$10 range—the club would barely break even and sometimes lost money.

“X sold the place out,” O’Brien says, referring to the the time he booked the late-’70s punk icons. “It was a $30-$40 dollar ticket and we lost money.”

There were other factors that held back The Blank, too. “It was a destination,” Manak says, pointing out that for many years there was nothing in its vicinity but The Caravan Lounge and the Greyhound bus station. “You didn’t go to The Blank unless you planned ahead of time to go to The Blank.”

All of this combined with the club’s poor layout—a small stage, no backstage, no parking for bands—led to band complaints.

But “excuses suck,” O’Brien says, explaining what his plan to bring bigger and better bands into The Ritz.

“We looked at every detail when we built this club up, because it has to be perfect, so when the bands leave, they speak well of The Ritz,” he says. “That’s the only way we’re going to get people here.”

Everything from the custom-built subwoofer to the monitors and on-stage mixing board, to the two green rooms backstage—complete with a private bathroom, a shower and a washer and dryer—is aimed at wooing bands, O’Brien says.

Gilmore says that he and O’Brien are going to do their best to bring the best music— “from jazz, to hip-hop, to rock & roll to punk”—and that the only thing left is for “San Jose to show up.”

‘Stepping Up’

Upon securing the keys to what would become The Ritz and walking into the building where he worked as a bartender and drank as a patron, O’Brien was met by an olfactory assault. “It smelled,” he recalls. There were dead rat carcasses lying about the place, holes in the roof had allowed water to leak into the hall and collapse portions of the drop-down ceiling, and parts of the floor were rotted out.

In a way, the interior of what is now The Ritz could be seen as a metaphor for the entire downtown scene. In just a few months time, using connections he built over a lifetime living, working and skating in San Jose, O’Brien was able to transform the building. Similarly, in just a few short years, the local nightlife scene has been revitalized—by craft cocktail and beer bars and new restaurants. 

“I’ve been one of those people who has been super pessimistic about downtown San Jose for a long time,” Victorino says. “But then Stritch kinda made me change my mind and turn things around, and now I think The Ritz is going to solidify that.”

Manak is decidedly more enthusiastic. “I’m so fucking excited,” he says. “This is the best news I’ve heard for the scene in 10 years. This is going to light South First on fire. There are people who are 20 and 30 years old in San Jose who have never experienced this. They’re going to lose their fucking minds.”

Borkenhagen, himself in his mid-20s, is hopeful that Manak is right. “The Ritz is a beautiful blank space and a fresh start,” he says. “People have their expectations, but The Ritz is not The Blank.”

The artistic director of Cafe Stritch—the current go-to venue for the freshest sounds in local indie rock—says was once very skeptical of San Jose. In fact, he says, he “hated” the city for turning its back on the kind of music he loved. But these days, he is far more hopeful.

“My hope is that The Ritz embraces the fact that there is a lot of different programming that’s now possible that has a big audience here,” he says. “And I hope that audiences are ready to step up, just like Corey is stepping up.”

For more info on upcoming shows at The Ritz, visit the venue’s website. Jody Amable contributed to this story.

This weekend marked the final curtain call for The Blank Club. After 12 years of booze-fueled, punk rock parties and indie discos, the owner of the San Jose venue, Corey O’Brien, allowed the club’s lease to expire. O’Brien plans to open a new venue in the SoFA district in March. It will be called The Spectrum. We’re sad to see The Blank Club go, but we’re excited for what’s next. Until then, check out these photos by Greg Ramar, taken during the last two nights at the Blank, Jan. 30 and 31.

It can be hard to believe now, but two decades ago ska had a pretty big moment. It was a time before Gwen Stefani’s solo debut and Bradley Nowell’s overdose, when alternative radio stations were spinning bands like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, Goldfinger and Less Than Jake with regularity. And then there were the Voodoo Glow Skulls.

The Riverside, Calif.-based six-piece ska-core band wrote hyper-fast street-punk tunes with distorted guitar upstrokes, and punctuated with bright horns, dark lyrics and hardcore-style shouting vocals—in English and occasionally in Spanish. They even released an all-Spanish version of their Epitaph debut (1995’s Firme) well before groups like Ozomatli carved out a substantial American market for rock en Español.

The Glow Skulls never got heavy rotation, but they toured hard and packed clubs. When the ska boom busted, a lot of the bands from that era broke up, changed their sound or altered their marketing strategy, but not the Voodoo Glow Skulls. They just continued doing what they did best: playing the distinct and kinetic fusion of ska and punk they’d been playing since the late ’80s. And they haven’t stopped.

“I don’t feel like we’re part of any scene. We’ve always been floating in our own little bubble,” says Glow Skulls guitarist Eddie Casillas, whose band comes to The Blank Club this coming Monday.

Even during the ska boom, it came as a surprise to the band when they MTV would play their videos. They never saw themselves as having any commercial appeal, according to Casillas, who says getting signed to Epitaph was equally as surreal.

“We’ve never tried to be commercial, or tried to be poppy,” Casillas says. “I like pop-punk. I grew up on the stuff. There will always be some Voodoo songs that have a little bit of Descendents in them or Green Day. Ours is just a little different sound. It’s not positive. It’s not poppy, or uplifting.”

Casillas and his two brothers, Frank and Jorge, founded the band in 1988. They released four albums on Epitaph, then three more on Victory Records. Their ninth was on the smaller Smelvis Records, and they are undecided for their 10th, which they are currently in the middle of recording. They are considering self-releasing a series of EPs and seven inches like they used to do in the early days, before they released their debut, Who Is, This Is.

“It feels like we’ve come full circle. Casillas says. “We went through this whole thing where we were on a couple successful labels, had full support. Now we’re back to square one. It’s like 1993 all over again. But the thing is, the band is known now, there’s a name behind it.”

The band’s writing and recording process has changed a great deal since those early days. The last three Voodoo albums were recorded by Casillas in his ever-expanding home studio. The band now record bits and pieces at their leisure, instead of on some executive’s clock.

The group have always been DIY advocates. Even in the early years, they opened their own record store and live music venue in Riverside. That not only gave them better footing in the scene, but also provided them an extra source of income—always welcomed by professional touring musicians. Ever business savvy, the band recently started a label of their own, called California Street Music, and have released a few albums of friends’ bands so far.

The Voodoo Glow Skulls’ touring schedule isn’t as jam-packed as it was back in the ’90s, but they stay busy, doing mostly short tours. Casillas continues to find motivation and inspiration in working on making better recordings. And the band keep an eye out for better gigs and festival shows that will expand their audience, but at this point that isn’t really what keeps them playing.

“Our goals have never been financial,” Casillas says. “We want to have fun and play music. I still just want to make that one next level record. I know people think we probably already made it. But there’s always more. I still think I can top it.”

The Voodoo Glow Skulls play The Blank Club, Monday, Oct. 6. More info.

No one in The Chop Tops has a day job. It’s been that way for the Santa Cruz-based “revved-up rockabilly” outfit since sometime in 2007. But even though they’ve been doing little else besides playing and writing music for the better half of a decade, you’ll never hear Gary “Sinner” Marsh, the band’s sole founding member, describe himself—or anyone else in The Chop Tops—as “rock stars.”

Rock stars, Sinner explains, are flown around the country, or else driven in cushy charter buses, and are otherwise “pampered out of the gate.”

“‘Working musician’ is how I like to say it,” Sinner continues. “It’s a serious living. It’s not for the squeamish.”

Ever since the singer and drummer took his group pro, they haven’t let up—even as they’ve lost members and taken on new ones. The Chop Tops’ upcoming tour, which kicks off this Friday at The Blank Club, will hit 25 states in around 40 days. Sinner estimates the band will play just shy of 40 gigs when all is said and done.

That’s roughly a third of the number of shows they play on a light year, Sinner says, explaining that The Chop Tops keep up a rigorous schedule of between 150 and 200 shows a year. “If you’ve built up the momentum, why throw it away?”

Sinner’s work ethic certainly jibes well with the aesthetic he has worked to curate as the de-facto leader of the band he started 20 years ago. With their well-groomed pompadours, cuffed jeans and boots, and affinity for hot rods, The Chop Tops radiate a tough, individualist, working-class American vibe.

Which may explain why The Chop Tops and other rockabilly and psychobilly acts have consistently done well in San Jose.

The band’s guitarist, Shelby Legnon, says he isn’t sure exactly what has kept the rockabilly scene so strong in San Jose, even as other Bay Area scenes have gravitated toward other sounds.

“Growing up in San Jose, I would have never guessed there would have been a big rockabilly scene there,” Legnon says. However, he is convinced one exists. Rockabilly and psychobilly have always drawn sizeable crowds, he notes. “And it still carries over to this day.”

The newest addition to The Chop Tops, upright bassist Josh Liem, has a theory. “Maybe because San Jose has always been pretty deep rooted in the car club and car show scene,” he says, recalling stories his dad and his dad’s friends used to tell about cruising the streets of San Jose in their hot rods.

He speculates that even as the vibe in San Jose has shifted from The Valley of the Heart’s Delight to Silicon Valley, much of that Americana pastoralism and car culture—and by extension, rockabilly—has remained dear to many in the area.

Of course, it may not be so complex as all of that. After all, The Chop Tops have been playing San Jose for two decades and have built a well-deserved following.

“We’ve played The Blank Club since it was a club called Fuel 44 in the mid-’90s,” Sinner says. And considering he’s modeled his routines on rockabilly and early country giants like Hank Williams and Elvis, it’s little wonder The Chop Tops have picked up a few fans along the way.

“Their craft had to be really good,” Sinner says of his idols. “It wasn’t a huge pyro and tech show to distract you. It was all about the music.”

And, at the end of the day, it’s the music that keeps The Chop Tops grinding away at their grueling touring schedule and writing new music.

“Music has always been with me,” Sinner says. “I love it. I love playing it. We’ve been really blessed and really fortunate that our weirdo take on this roots-based music has stuck.”

 The Chop Tops play The Blank Club in San Jose on Sept. 5. More info.

Up and coming San Jose new wave band The Trims celebrated the release of their new self-titled record, playing to a sold-out crowd at The Blank Club on Friday. The local quartet ripped through a high-energy set of angular, post-punky dance-rock tunes, including their new single, “Now You’re Gone.”

Watch the video for the song below, then click through some of the best photos from the night, taken by Metro photographer Eric Belladonna.

When the Murder City Devils disbanded in 2001, the Seattle group were drawing more fans to shows, were no longer struggling to make ends meet, and were scheduled to produce another LP for their label, the storied Sub Pop Records. But none of that really mattered, according to MCD lead singer, Spencer Moody.

“If you’ve been in a van and sleeping in hotels with six people for several months and realize it’s been like three weeks since you’ve said a single word to each other, then you’re like, ‘Oh maybe we don’t get along,’” Moody recalls.

After taking several years off, the group began playing casually again in 2006. Earlier this month, MCD released their first new record in more than a decade, The White Ghost Has Blood on Its Hands Again—a looser, wilder and more furious set than anything they put out in the ’90s. And yet, while the new songs are in many ways darker and more venomous than anything the band has ever done, the members of Murder City Devils have never been happier or gotten along better.

“I think of the new record as a really angry record, but in a more healthy way,” Moody says of White Ghost, which the band will draw from when they play The Blank Club next week, Aug. 20.

On their earlier albums Murder City Devils mixed the rough-around-the-edges sensibilities of garage rock, with a hardcore punk attitude and blues-metal riffage, and Moody sang about blood, guts and macabre scenes ripped straight out of a B-horror movie. While the singer’s obsession with violence made for some explosive music, it ended up bleeding into the group’s stage show, where a hostile “us vs. the audience” vibe began to develop. To the crowd it may have seemed like it was just part of the act, but for the band it was mostly real.

“I didn’t look forward to going on stage,” Moody says.

These days, the singer “actually” enjoys playing shows and sayshe thinks the band is ready to move forward and work together in a more serious way.

The band recorded the album with no producer, no label and total control—with the aim of making a free-flowing record that wasn’t overly slick. The new album leans more into spastic, psych-garage territory.

White Ghost features plenty of the warbling organ used to great effect on songs like “Press Gang,” from 2000’s In Name and Blood, and Moody howls with as much rage as ever—channelling his inner Tom Waits on tracks like “Pale Disguise,” which sounds like a drunker version of Six Demon Bag-era Man Man. However, Moody has dropped the gory, campy lyrics in favor of just speaking his mind.

“On the previous records, I was probably trying to be smart,” he says. “That’s always a mistake. I just want to be in the moment. Actually, for the first time these last couple years, I enjoy playing shows.”

The Murder City Devils play The Blank Club on Aug. 20. More info.

The annals of popular music teem with ersatz nobility: self-proclaimed dukes, kings and princes. But no one deserves her title more than Wanda Jackson, Queen of Rockabilly.

Although she had only one US rock & roll hit—1960’s “Let’s Have a Party”—Jackson’s seminal rockabilly singles are prized by aficionados. Fans of her straight-talking, hard-rocking stage persona include Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Jack Black. Female artists as diverse as Adele, Pam Tillis and Cyndi Lauper have acknowledged her as an inspiration and a pioneer in a field that has often been unwelcoming to women.

At 76, Jackson is still on the road and making new fans. She brings her extensive catalog of rockabilly, country and gospel tunes to the Blank Club on August 15.

Although Jackson wasn’t born with a guitar in her hand, it didn’t take long for her to pick one up. “I think I got it when I was six,” the country and rockabilly singer/songwriter says of the her first six string. “But I didn’t really learn much till I was seven.”

It may have been inevitable that she start playing. Jackson’s musical roots run deep. On the phone from her home in Oklahoma City she recalls her early introduction to the country-swing dance bands of her 1940s childhood. “I used to go to the dances with mother and daddy,” Jackson says. “Almost every weekend. By the time I was six or seven, I’d heard all of the great western swing bands. … I loved the girls in the band most of all, because they’d dress all flashy in their Western outfits. And they’d yodel. In my young mind, I’d think, ‘If I’m going to be a girl singer, I got to learn to yodel.’”

Jackson never got into yodeling, but she did rise quickly in Oklahoma’s country scene. After winning a talent contest at age 15, Jackson had a radio show, a record contract and was making television appearances all before graduating from high school in 1955.

That’s the year she started touring, and, as fate would have it, was paired with a certain young man from Tupelo, whose hybrid black-hillbilly sound and provocative stage moves were starting to send shock waves across the nation.

“Elvis convinced me I needed to be singing this new kind of music,” Jackson says, recalling that she was apprehensive of the King’s advice at first. “I didn’t think I could, but he convinced me that I could.”

Like Elvis, Jackson recognized the sea change going on; she embodied it too. In stiletto heels and stage clothes sewn by her mother—tight skirts with silk fringe, sweetheart necklines, and spaghetti straps—Jackson projected a western-meets-night-club look that was both sexy and tough. Her small frame, however, dwarfed behind an acoustic guitar, exaggerated her girlishness. The disjunctions of Jackson’s image encapsulated the moment: No one knew exactly what this rock & roll was yet, but it was dangerous and unprecedented. And it belonged indisputably to teenagers.

Even with the look, the sound and the imprimatur of the King of Rock & Roll, Jackson struggled with the business end of music.

“The first time we tried [to get a record deal],” she remembers, “the executives said, ‘She sings fine, but girls just don’t sell records.’”

It would not be the last time someone laid a paternalistic mansplanation on Jackson about what “girls” could and could not do. It was discouraging.

“I couldn’t get airplay,” she says. “The whole nation was in an uproar about rock & roll music. They were giving Elvis a hard time, all the other guys too, so they sure weren’t going to accept an 18-year-old girl in a shimmery dress singing these songs—and singing them just as well as the guys.”

With resistance from DJs and no hits, Jackson was about to give up on rock when “Let’s Have a Party”—a filler song from an album recorded three years earlier—broke the Top 40.

“It was the last song on on my first album,” Jackson says. “Everything else was stone country, but we needed another song. I’d been opening my shows with it, so I thought we’ll just throw it in.’”

And yet, while Jackson’s star was rising, American rock itself was facing a steep decline. “[When the Beatles hit,] I couldn’t get a session,” she says. “I couldn’t get a record. You just had to fight to get something released.” All these years later, the frustration is still palpable in the singer’s voice, as she recounts the many obstacles she faced in her early career.

“I just couldn’t make it,” she laments. “I was losing my country fans, so I had to just”—she lets the thought trail off.

Jackson returned to country music, where she went on to have 32 hits.

She didn’t come back to rockabilly until a Scandinavian tour in 1985. A generation had grown up entirely within rock & roll and the music didn’t have the old biases: “On my first show, they kept hollering ‘Mean, Mean Man!’” (one of her rockabilly tunes from the late ’50s).

It had been so long since she’d sung the tune that she’d forgotten the lyrics. A fan brought them to her hotel the next day and Jackson started rocking again. She still fondly remembers the request today: “I was accepted. And it was great!”

Looking back on her life in music, Jackson is especially proud that her struggles have helped other female artists get the rewards so long denied her. “The artists who thrill me the most are the girls who tell me what an influence I had on them,” she says. “It showed them, hey, girls can do this kind of music.”

Asked whether she thought she paved the way for iconic female punk rocker Joan Jett—whose black hair and tough-girl style mirrored Jackson’s in many ways—Jackson replies: “Yeah, I talked to Joan not long ago. She said, ‘You definitely influenced my style.’ I thought, ‘Well, you kinda took my style and ran with it, is what you did!’”

Wanda Jackson plays the Blank Club on Aug. 15. More info.

These days, when a rock band wants distorted guitars or an overdriven vocal, they can simply kick on a stomp box or apply a digital effect to the mix. But back in 1960, when the Sonics were first developing the gritty sound that would come to be known as garage rock, there was really only one way to get that fuzzy tone—they had to crank up the volume.

“We got asked to turn down a lot,” Jerry Roslie, the group’s lead singer and keyboardist, recalls from his home in Tacoma, Wash., where the Sonics formed, and where he is currently taking a break before hitting the road again on a brief West Coast tour that will bring his band to The Blank Club on Aug. 13.

Back in the ’60s no one was used to such loud, grungy tones, he says. “So we said, ‘OK. We’ll turn it down,’ and then we didn’t.” It simply wouldn’t have felt right if they had acquiesced and heeded the protests of club owners, Roslie explains.

“It’s just the way it sounded good to us,” the singer continues, elaborating on his band’s preference for the loud and the rough. “If we played things lighter, it felt like, ‘Aw … Let’s sit down on a chair.’ It’s no fun. We liked to get up there and sweat a little bit. We don’t play any real spectacular, top-of-the-world jazz notes. It’s all feeling and all high energy.”

Indeed, the energy of the Sonics holds up. Their classic versions of garage rock staples “Louie Louie” and “Have Love Will Travel,” as well as originals, such as “Strychnine” and “The Witch,” have proven influential in the decades since. The sounds pioneered by the Sonics can be heard in the proto-punk of Iggy and The Stooges, the muddy tones of Nirvana and in contemporary garage revival acts like Thee Oh Sees.

Just as the Sonics influenced many bands that followed, they too drew on influences of their own. Roslie says his favorite two piano players were Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, and it shows.

Roslie says he was inspired by the frenetic piano playing and caterwauling vocal styles of both men. He and the Sonics only took that to its logical next step by turning the volume up to 11.

 The Sonics play The Blank Club on Wednesday, Aug. 13, at 8pm. More info.

Roots-tinged rockers Hurricane Roses found a following with the earnest, revealing songs on their 2011 debut record. A quick follow-up would have made a lot of sense for the Bay Area band, but it also would have betrayed the authenticity that their fan base appreciates.

In truth, the band members have been through a lot of changes over the last three years, and, true to form, those experiences are all reflected on the sextet’s new album, Home to Haunt You.

“The process of writing this album took two or three years, because a number of us had children, one of us got married and a number of people close to us passed on,” says bassist Ethan Sanchez. “All those experiences during this whole process really came through in the album.”

Haunt covers a broad spectrum of experiences and emotions. The country-rock title track touches on the haunting quality of death, the folk track “Our Love” explores the finer points of an enduring relationship and the swelling, bluegrass-meets-country track “The Old Days” centers on that longing for more carefree times from the past. As on their first album, singer Angi Lemucchi is highly confessional on Haunt. However, there is one song on the album that delves into personal feelings that she was hesitant to share.

“It’s not overt, but ‘Heart Grows Tired’ is about suicide or thoughts that lead to that,” she says. “Because I was so brutally honest in the first album, I feel like that’s what people wanted from me, from us.”

The band had a chance to find out what else the fans really wanted from them—and just how much—when they launched an Indiegogo campaign last year to fund the making of this album. More and more artists are turning to crowdsourcing these days to help them get albums made, but it wasn’t a slam dunk that the Roses would, could or even should go this route.

“It was terrifying putting trust in people to fund your ‘baby’ and hoping people like you enough to even care,” Lemucchi says. “But we knew we wanted to go big on this album and we couldn’t do it alone, so it seemed like the only way.”

“We were apprehensive at first,” Sanchez adds. “We weren’t sure how it would come off. We didn’t want to seem like we were needy or entitled, or begging people to give us money or expecting people to give us money. So we decided to be ourselves and say, ‘Hey, we’re looking to make another album, and if you guys want to help us get it out, if you want to be a part of this, we’re really open to your support and help.’”

The band exceeded their fundraising goal and Sanchez is still blown away by the outpouring of support.

“To know we have a group of people who want us to make music, who want to hear our music, so much that they’re willing to step forward and make an investment before even hearing the new songs, that is really breathtaking,” he says. “It’s humbling. It’s a huge blessing. We knew we wanted to put out an album, but it felt that much better to know there were people who were right there with us, and wanted to hear our music.”

Having felt the love from their fan base, Sanchez hopes this connection will continue to deepen.

“It is an amazing feeling as a musician, being able to communicate to a listener through our music,” Sanchez says. “That is as good as it gets.”

Hurricane Roses play the Blank Club on July 25. More Info.

There are moments in modern life when nature intrudes and reality is transformed. When I was living in New York, a twister skipped across my Brooklyn neighborhood. It was tiny as tornadoes go, but enough to tear off roofs, flood the streets and knock down far too many trees. In the aftermath, we all crept out to survey the devastation, no longer hard-bitten New Yorkers but talking apes gaping at the ruined streets of the Forbidden City.

The core songs of Last Night on Earth, the new album by Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and his band The Dust, were written in the wake of hurricane Sandy, in a week without electricity or water, but with mercifully little human damage in Ranaldo’s Lower Manhattan neighborhood.

“It was kind of amazing,” he says over the phone. “No matter what anyone had planned or what they had to do, there was just kind of this enforced stop to everything. It was very intense.” But for the prolific writer, the forced unplugging wasn’t without a silver lining: “We got a lot of work done that week.”

Ranaldo was speaking from Poitiers, France, on the last leg of his European tour. Next week, he and The Dust will be playing San Jose and San Francisco as they hit North America.

“I didn’t want to give the impression that this was a concept album or anything like that,” Ranaldo qualifies. “There wasn’t too much to do in the evenings, so I was just strumming chords and sort of improvising some of these songs. I must say the effect of the storm on New York definitely found its way into some of the lyrics as well.”

Disclaimers aside, the songs that make up Last Night on Earth are dreamy and evocative, redolent of that post-adrenaline euphoria, familiar to anyone who’s had a close encounter with fate, when the ordinary is suffused with significance and life seems to be unfolding outside of time.

Although he is the songwriter, Ranaldo makes it clear that the fully realized versions are collaborations, the result of months of rehearsing with The Dust—Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, Alan Licht on guitar and Tim Lüntzel on bass. Together, they produce sounds that are somewhere between droney psychedelia and shimmering jangle pop. The music builds and soars, loops and even meanders in passages that can only be called “jams”—a telltale trace of Ranaldo’s well-known affection for the Grateful Dead. Warmer and more intimate than Sonic Youth, Renaldo’s new band still has an experimental and cerebral side that twists pop clichés and gives an agreeable bite.

I ask what it’s like to be the frontman now, and Ranaldo gives a modest answer. “I have a strong confidence in the songs, and all the rest just falls into place.”

How about carrying the leads?

“[At first] it was a little weird, singing every song in the set…. But I got over that quickly. I definitely like to sing, and it’s been really fun. The singing part of it has been one of the more enjoyable aspects for me.”

As the conversation winds down, I bring up Lou Reed’s death. With CBGBs now housing an expensive men’s boutique and SoHo and the Lower East Side a playground for the ultra wealthy, a chapter in pop history seems definitively over. Am I correct in seeing Last Night on Earth as perhaps an elegy for the gritty bohemia of ’70s–’80s New York?

“Well, I don’t know…” Polite. He means, “No.”

Ranaldo’s response demonstrates the same forward drive that has characterized his 30 years in music. “That’s the way history moves. You know, you have people from any particular period carrying elements of that period forward, and hopefully synthesizing it with new stuff, and passing some of that information on. It’s kind of the natural course of events, I guess.

“[Sonic Youth] were lucky enough to be living in New York at a time of great experimentation … so we had a firsthand view of that. It feels pretty special to have been around during that time. And we’ve carried aspects of that forward with us. … It all gets passed along.”

For Lee Ranaldo, every night is the last on Earth. The past is not a subject for nostalgia or sentimentality, only a source of tools for carving something new from an unknown future. Something more to pass along.

Lee Ranaldo and The Dust perform at the Blank Club on Dec. 10. More info.