How the sounds of the South Bay helped define a generation.

My first pitch to Santa Clara Magazine was to explore today’s music scene on campus, and guess at where it’s going. My editor suggested I instead look back on where it’s been. She pointed me toward Count Five’s iconic song “Psychotic Reaction,” which led me to write a short article on its ties to the University. After hearing lead singer Kenn Ellner ’71, J.D. ’74  reminisce about his time as a student and musician in the 1960s, I had to know more about SCU’s place in the music of this era. Thankfully, I didn’t have to teleport back in time. The clues were close by, in the Santa Clara University archives.

I spent weeks digging through yearbooks, student newspapers, and various ephemera from the era. Deep in digital copies of SCU’s yearbook, The Redwood, a photo from 1966-1967 catches my eye. Familiar palm trees. It was taken outside Mayer Theatre, then called Montgomery Hall. In the foreground, students pack a grassy field, their bodies turned toward a stage. It’s too blurry to discern all of the details, but I can make out colorful bandanas, sunglasses, and a handful of guys with shirts off. The caption says, “Santa Clara’s first Spring Festival was a day of high temperatures, high spirits, and high minds.”

This wasn’t just any student band festival. The lineup included big names like jazz musicians Cal Tjader and Vince Guaraldi, as well as guitarist Jorma Kaukonen ’64 and his rock band Jefferson Airplane. In one photo, Grace Slick, lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, wears her iconic all-black velvet nun outfit, clutching the microphone. There’s not much other documentation of this late May afternoon, but something tells me that Santa Clara University’s 1967 Spring Festival should have gone down in history.

Like most other Bay Area natives, I was under the impression that the musical explosion of the late ’60s and early ’70s—often labeled psychedelic or garage rock—happened in San Francisco. I don’t know exactly how I—the child of immigrant parents from the former Soviet Union—discovered this music. But hearing snippets on the radio as a kid, I remember that it sounded so alive. In high school, I began traveling into the city from the suburbs to catch shows at the Fillmore or peruse Amoeba Records in the Haight.

When I first came to Santa Clara, I had no idea that many of the records I collected over the years emerged from the very college town I was living in. The ’60s music wasn’t just being played all over the South Bay, much of it was born here. Think about what these artists have in common: Stevie Nicks and the Fritz, Grateful Dead, Syndicate of Sound, Count Five, Creedence Clearwater, Janis Joplin, Doobie Brothers, Jefferson Airplane. They all either grew up here or developed their sound here.

That’s even though, in the 1960s, Santa Clara University was seen as a place for buttoned-up engineers and Jesuits. Yet, just blocks away, on Newhall Street, once lived the Wutzit Club, a weekend spot for teens all over the Bay Area to see live music and dance. A pioneer to many later local clubs, it was founded in 1944 by Walter E. Schmidt, S.J. to give kids under 18 their own space. This was a place of contradictions.

All of this research left me with questions: What happened to the South Bay as a hub for rock music? Why does its history seem to be scrubbed from our cultural consciousness? And what role did our University play in this story?

Baby … Boom!

At the midcentury, Santa Clara County was booming along with the rest of the country. In 1950, the county’s population was over 200,000. By 1970, it was over a million.

Post World War II, economic opportunity, the GI Bill, and other incentives encouraged people to start families, and the rise of suburbia was prepared to accommodate. San Jose, California’s third largest city once filled with fruit orchards, adapted to these trends, transforming into a suburban hub. “You go around Santa Clara and see a lot of Victorian, and then mid-century modern houses because that’s these big pockets of growth for the county,” says assistant teaching professor of history Meg Gudgeirsson. “Those people are growing houses, growing families.”

In 1960, more than a third of the American population was made up of kids under 18. Over the next decade, they were the young generation confronting an era known for hope and struggle, marked by turmoil and fight through the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.

In Gudgeirsson’s course on 1960s-1970s U.S. Protest and Activism, she begins every class by playing a song that was at the top of the billboards, characterizing this era’s music as the “language of the youth.”

“You saw The Beatles on television in 1964 and said, ‘I want to have a band too.’ ”

The kids were dictating the culture through music. They didn’t care about fitting into genres like psychedelic or labels like counterculture, they just wanted to make songs that spoke to their peers. “We now have all these suburban garages, so all these kids started playing music in these garages, and we have these garage bands. You saw The Beatles on television in 1964 and said, ‘I want to have a band too,’ ” says Mark Purdy, a former sports columnist for the San Jose Mercury News who has also devoted time to researching the region’s impact on the music of the era. He’s created an online archive San Jose Rocks and is currently co-writing a book on the subject.

Ellner’s San Jose garage band Count Five was formed in his garage before he enrolled at SCU. He remembers the beginnings of their hit song, “Psychotic Reaction.” He was learning the harmonica and played a riff so catchy during rehearsals that the rest of the band started a jam.

At the time, it wasn’t abnormal for five teenagers to be running around the South Bay streets, making music and getting paid for it. But when the single was released on the day of Ellner’s high school graduation in 1966, things got crazy. That fall, it peaked to no. 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100, which meant it was time to record an album. “There were a lot of new things going on in that song and it spoke to a generation at the time,” Ellner says. “It was the beginning of psychedelic music, and we were just a little bit ahead of it.”

What is the Wutzit Club?

If you were a teenager in the South Bay looking for something to do on a Friday night, the Wutzit was the place to be.

Later renamed the Santa Clara Youth Village, the Wutzit Club was founded in 1944 by Father Walter E. Schmidt, S.J. and a group of 20 Santa Clara teenagers in response to what city officials feared was a rise in juvenile delinquency during wartime. Schmidt was a big character on campus. The Dean of Men at SCU, he was buddies with Frank Sinatra. The University established a scholarship in his name shortly before his death in 1988.

The club “found answers for the problems of literally thousands of teen-agers in Santa Clara Valley as well as answers for thousands of adults bewildered by the incomprehensible problems of teen-agers,” according to a 1958 Loyola University lecture series brochure I found in the University Archives. It was a space to accompany teenagers in their turbulent years, through the music they seemed to love so much.

Local bands most often performed there, but the club also hosted big names like Stevie Nicks and the Fritz RMB, The Chocolate Watchband, Jimmy Nite and the Nitecaps, People!, Archie Bell & The Drells. As expected, a Jesuit-run night club had rules—“decency” was expected, alcohol was banned, and there was “no entrance to youngsters in Levi’s.” But that didn’t mean kids weren’t basking in the golden age of music. Other than a few radio stations, live performances were really the best chance kids had to dance, and bands had to gain a following.

Take San Jose band Syndicate of Sound, who got their big break by winning the Vox Battle of the Bands at the San Mateo Fairgrounds in 1965. Within a year, they recorded two songs—the second of which was their hit single “Little Girl” written by bassist Bob Gonzalez, which hit no. 8 on Billboard’s Hot 100. “Kids always know,” says Gonzalez. “You want to sell a piece of art, they know if there’s really something there that’s important.”

At last, the art was taking off. By 1964, more South Bay venues followed the path Schmidt created—The Continental Ballroom, The Offstage, Wayne Manor, to name a few—supporting the explosion of youth music. During a staff meeting, archives report Schmidt saying “that this is now a buyer’s market and we must give better service, treat the youngsters as people and not problems …”

Imagine it: a group of Jesuit priests sitting around the table discussing psychedelic rock, likely not fans themselves. But instead of being square, they were listening, indirectly nurturing a new musical sound.

“Kids always know. You want to sell a piece of art, they know if there’s really something there that’s important.”

Rock Music Rises

Santa Clara University itself transformed in the 1960s. After admitting its first 75 women to degree programs in 1961, SCU still remained a traditional institution. Most men were required to enroll in the Military Science Program (ROTC), while women were prohibited from wearing pants and being outside their dorms past 10 p.m.

But a combination of creative student minds and faculty support catalyzed the arts scene and shifted campus culture. This didn’t really surprise me. Santa Clara has always felt like a place where students don’t need to put themselves into just one box. What was more surprising is that even amongst a conservative backdrop, Santa Clara didn’t just accept change, it embraced it.

In The Redwood archives, there’s a photo from 1966 on a page titled “What Byrd Flies At Night?” It’s taken from behind the stage, capturing a guitarist looking into a sea of people, illuminated by a sphere of white strobe lights. It is Jefferson Airplane performing in the basement of Nobili Hall.

The concert was hosted by the Phoenix Club, an SCU student organization dedicated to creating more opportunities for their peers to experience art. Led by Kevin McCarthy ‘66 and faculty advisor Phillip B. Welch—then the chair of the Department of Art and Architecture and Creative Art—the Phoenix hosted film screenings, art shows, and concerts.

The University hired Welch, a visionary architect who once worked for Frank Lloyd Wright, to build the arts space. Alongside his professional ballerina wife, Diana Welch, he converted the ground floor of Nobili into a space with dance studios and classrooms, designing a projection booth that would later be used by the Phoenix Club to screen films. “Phil Welch was the flame that everything built itself around,” McCarthy says. “He said we should call it The Phoenix, something rising from the ashes.”

Former Phoenix member Marie Barry ’68 says Welch stood out from everyone else, typically dressed in grey silk suits and big glasses. When remembering her college years, Barry can hear music playing across campus from morning to night. She was particularly partial to a secret music venue on campus: Club 66. Located in the basement of McLaughlin-Walsh Hall, students who were members would drink beer and listen to bands play on a small stage. After pop soul group The 5th Dimension’s appearance in Benson Hall, the band continued the show at Club 66.

Barry says music was a balm for students who were facing grim realities, like witnessing their friends get drafted to the Vietnam War. “I think music was a panacea, a way for people to express and let go in an okay way to mend anxieties that had gripped them,” she says.

When Kaukonen returned to his alma mater in 1966 for Jefferson Airplane’s Nobili performance, the arts were flourishing at Santa Clara. A year later, the work of the Phoenix merged into newly established music, dance, theater, and film programming by the College of Arts & Sciences.

“The social consciousness was moving at light speed back then,” Kaukonen says. “Santa Clara was such an interesting place because it was very conservative in a lot of ways, but there were a lot of people there who were not very conservative at all. To be able to stimulate and welcome that kind of intellectual diversity says a lot about a school.”

Kaukonen, who still tours with his blues rock band Hot Tuna, found his roots at Santa Clara. He invented the genius fingering for “Embryonic Journey”—the Airplane’s renowned instrumental song recognized by many (even the show Friends used it in their final episode.) As a senior in 1964, he recorded The Typewriter Tape with Janis Joplin at his off-campus house, while his first wife Margarete was typing a letter—hence the name. After Kaukonen graduated, a friend introduced him to Paul Kanter, who had attended Santa Clara the year before and left to pursue music. They met as Kanter sat in front of his Santa Cruz home, playing guitar.  Kanter recruited Kaukonen as the lead guitarist of his up-and-coming band.

“Without Santa Clara, without me being in Santa Clara, none of the Airplane would’ve ever happened,” Kaukonen says. “The fact of Santa Clara’s existence and some of the people that went there had so much to do with the evolution that’s largely greater than San Francisco.”

The South Bay had perfected the recipe for musical magic: adult support, paying gigs, kids to perform, and an audience.

The Songs Spoke To The Times

As the ’60s came to a tumultuous end, the youth also grew up—dealing with adult responsibilities like starting jobs and families during a decade of recession.

Is that what happened to the explosion of music in the South Bay? Did it age with Boomers? I don’t know all the answers but it’s no shocker that what was happening around the world—the end of the Vietnam War, Nixon’s presidency, the Kent State shootings—turned kids turned away from authority. In An Oral History Archive for the City of Santa Clara, Father Schmidt from the Wutzit acknowledged this “resentment toward anything organized” as a factor for declining membership in his clubs, causing the center to shift to working with senior citizens instead.

There also weren’t any big names from the South Bay who could sustain live music venues, the way promoter Bill Graham did in San Francisco with the Fillmore and the Civic Auditorium, later named in his honor. Over the next 30 years, he was the biggest spokesperson for rock music in the Bay Area.

Bay Area rock historian and creator of the blog Rock Prosopography 101, Corry Arnold, says that “rock history was written from San Francisco, so of course it was all about San Francisco.” History is written by the victors and all that.

Filling in some of the missing pieces of this history has left me wondering whether the golden age of music in the South Bay could ever be recreated. Probably not. It was a unique melting pot of lots of kids, cultural upheaval, and a desire for change. Not to forget, support from authorities like Santa Clara Jesuits who maybe didn’t understand these kids but were willing to listen to their needs.

A song’s fate is now more at the mercy of TikTok’s algorithm than a band performing live to build a local following. However, there’s something timeless about hearing a song and instantly getting goosebumps down your arm. It’s one of those “aha!” moments, the kind I had when I first heard Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” while researching this story.

I was walking around campus, my headphones blasting the opening electric guitar riff. Seconds later, Ellner joins in on the harmonica before an upbeat melody settles. Before I know it, I’m hit with a cacophony of drums and an entirely new beat. Ten seconds in, I understand why this song lives on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll” list. It makes you want to dance.

Walking past Mayer Theatre, I think how almost six decades have passed since that sunny afternoon when the entire student body congregated on the grassy field for the Spring Festival. While I doubt there’ll ever be a campus concert with names as big as those in 1967, it must mean something that young people like me are still listening to music of this time. Music that may have never been created if not for the South Bay and, to a small extent, Santa Clara. If you don’t believe me, just listen to the songs. They speak for themselves.

Nostalgic for the magic of the 1960s? Tune into Santa Clara University’s playlist, The Sounds of the 1960s: Delivered by Santa Clara, and relive some songs that defined a generation.