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San Jose Rocks — Celebrating the Soul of Silicon Valley
San Jose Rocks is the nonprofit dedicated to collecting, curating, and celebrating Silicon Valley's rich and often overlooked musical legacy — connecting fans, innovators, and educators across generations and genres, and inspiring the future of sound.
Most people know Silicon Valley as the birthplace of Apple, Google, Adobe, NVIDIA, Netflix, HP, and Atari. But here's what they don't know: the same region that rewired the world with technology also shaped the sound of modern music. The world's first commercial radio broadcast happened in downtown San José in 1909. Ray Dolby — whose noise reduction technology transformed recording studios worldwide — studied at San José State. IBM invented the hard disk drive in San José in 1956, forever changing how music is stored. Apple's iPod and iTunes rewrote the economics of the entire music industry. NVIDIA is now pioneering AI-generated audio. Adobe made music visual. The technologies that capture, share, and play music all started here.
And the artists? Grateful Dead performed for the first time under that name at a Ken Kesey Acid Test on December 4, 1965, in San Jose. The Doobie Brothers, Los Tigres del Norte, and Smash Mouth call San Jose home. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Pentatonix, Rancid, and the Kingston Trio all have strong ties to Silicon Valley.
Through original profiles, oral histories, multimedia narratives, and a GPS-triggered Heritage Trail launching via the San Jose Rocks mobile app, we're building a living archive — dynamic and searchable by artist, genre, innovation, location, and era — spanning 1909 to the present.
Episodes
Wednesday Mar 10, 2021
Wednesday Mar 10, 2021
Hear the behind the scenes story, told by Connie LoBue, of how San Jose concert promoter Paul Catalana raised the money, just to have the conversation with the U.S. Tour's advance team, to bring the Beatles to the Cow Palace in Daly City, CA on their first stop on 1964 U.S. Tour.
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