BY JUD COST

It looks like a scene from Stanley Kramer's 1959 post-nuclear annihilation film On The Beach, right in the heart of downtown San Jose. They've cordoned off an entire city-block of South First St. at both ends to allow Booker T. plenty of elbow-room as the headline act for the first-annual Left Coast Live festival. Sidewalks are lined with porta-johns, two cops are talking to each other and a few radio-station booths are handing out flyers you don't want. They've thought of everything but the main ingredients for a successful rock festival: Where are the music fans to fill this cavernous space? And where are the name acts to attract those warm bodies?

By the time iconic Hammond B3 electric  organist Booker T. kicks things off at the head-scratching early hour of 6:15 in the evening, the crowd has swollen to maybe 150 hardy souls. Booker T. drew twice that many just last week at the Independent, a medium-sized San Francisco night club.

Booker T. Jones and his four-man backing band sound just fine as one of a handful of recognizable names on the LCL talent roster. The famed keyboardist has slightly modified his ultra-stylish, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-worthy Booker T. & the MG's prototype machine that once featured guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Duck Dunn and drummer Alvin Jackson. The current model runs on swamp-gas, a high-test fuel that adapts well to Booker T's classic numbers "Green Onions" and "Hip Hug Her." It's especially maneuverable with new material from Jones' current release Potato Hole (Anti-) and a rare vocal excursion by Jones on Albert King's "Born Under A Bad Sign." The King staple is one of many R&B, blues and soul classics tracked by the likes of Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding at Stax/Volt Studio while Booker T. & the MGs served as house band for the Memphis label. It's a shame there aren't more folks here to enjoy Booker T.

But this has been a long-standing problem in San Jose, the Bay Area's largest city (over one million residents in a recent head count): getting butts in the seats and attracting acts that will bring people out at night. Left Coast Live may have been doomed from the start when they asked me to serve on a panel at the Gordon Biersch restaurant that tried to unravel the thorny question: "Does San Jose know its way? The history and future of rock." As Groucho Marx once said, "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member."

The panel, along with some of the 15 onlookers, floated a few possible answers to the burning question: Why does San Jose fail to attract nationally known, mid-level touring rock talent? It's either the fault of local print-media or an overly-aggressive police force, suggest the participants. San Jose Mercury News pop-music columnist Shay Quillen scoffs at the idea that press non-cooperation was in any way responsible for the paltry turnout. "We ran four stories about Left Coast Live. How much more could we do?"

As I slink away from the Booker T show like a CSI detective taking notes, I give Dan Orloff a call on the cell to inform him of the woeful turnout for the evening's headliner. "That absolutely sucks," says Orloff, busy setting up his drum kit for local cover band Black Pearl's warm-up set for South Bay legends Count Five. President of San Jose's Orloff/Williams Advertising & Publicity, Orloff is also the co-founder of San Jose Rocks, a valiant attempt to shine some limelight on local musicians in a hall of fame-style format. Over the course of two inductions, San Jose Rocks has anointed the Syndicate Of Sound, Count Five, People, Jefferson Airplane/Starship member Paul Kantner (who once attended nearby Santa Clara University), drive-time KUFX DJ/pop star Greg Kihn among others.

I decide to make a night of it with a few interesting names on a Left Coast Live talent roster loaded with "who-dat's." As I'm strolling past a parking lot where LCL has erected a secondary stage, I notice it's in the exact same spot where a giant advertising billboard once stood. It's the scene of the crime where Kris Ziakas and Mike McGinn of semi-legendary local indie-rockers Bridget (two albums on Grass Records/one of Beggars Banquet) pulled an amazing stunt in the early '90s. Dressed in painters' uniforms and wielding buckets, the pair climbed the billboard and pasted a huge ad for their band over the top of the existing advert for some auto dealership. Nobody noticed for days.

The Cactus Club, just up the street, where Nirvana once played an early club date, was torn down years ago. I cross San Salvador St. and peer in the window of what was once Marsugi's, the throbbing heartbeat of dangerous rock 'n' roll in San Jose. I recall vividly witnessing through that same window the battle-scarred derriere of Buck Naked-who appeared onstage with his Bare Bottom Boys dressed in nothing more than a strategically placed plumber's plunger. Marsugi's stage was moved from the window to the rear of the place within weeks of this scabrous event.

In the mid-'90s, KFJC college-radio DJ Big Myke Destiny and I booked a show into Marsugi's to showcase our favorite Aussie band of the era, the Celibate Rifles. We ran on-air ads for the gig for a month and were very excited when the big day finally arrived. Eight people showed up.

"Who knows if San Jose will ever see the glory days again?" says Syndicate of Sound guitarist Jim Sawyers, whose band topped the national charts and put San Jose on the map in 1966 with "Little Girl." Syndicate founding-member/bassist Bob Gonzalez, new drummer Pat Hennessy and Sawyers now play as the Sultans, a sharp R&B lounge combo, whenever Syndicate vocalist/co-founder Don Baskin can't make the scene.

The Sultans are part of LCL tonight in a satellite gig at the Smoke Tiki Lounge, a drab little joint about a block behind the Greyhound Bus Depot. The Sultans' set is dotted with gems like occasional vocalist Gloria Hennessy's heartfelt workouts on the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and Van Morrison's "Wild Night," as well as Sawyers biting down hard on Elvis' "Little Sister." Onetime co-frontman for People, Gene Mason, also joins the Sultans tonight for a solid reading of his former band's 1968 smash, "I Love You," a cover of a Zombies song.

Sipping ice water before the set, the nattily-attired Mason has a few bones to pick with Fallen Angel: The Outlaw Larry Norman, a recent tell-all David Di Sabitino documentary about Mason's former co-vocalist in People. Norman, later a guiding light in the Christian Rock movement, "did not leave People because he had dollar signs in his eyes," insists Mason. "Larry didn't give a crap about money. He gave it away."

Before I stumble down to my final destination: the "late show," a 10:00 p.m. set by the three surviving members of Count Five, I cruise by the boarded-up former home of a nitery once called The Laundry Works, tucked away in San Pedro Square. Along with San Jose State's Spartan Pub, it's where you could catch a laundry list of great young college-rock bands on their way up in the late '80s: the Endmen, Daddy In His Deep Sleep, the Raging Marys, the Frontier Wives, Dinner With The Browns, the Shock Waves and London Down. There is no plaque on the front of the building to commemorate this beehive of activity.

For a year or so back then, it looked like San Jose might awaken from its 25-year slumber and stoke the rock 'n' roll furnaces once again. If you worked hard, you might have been able to see each of these budding Laundry Works combos maybe two or three times apiece before the entire milieu vanished in a cloud of pink dust, and San Jose turned over and went back to sleep. It had been a scene that might have rivaled the better-known South Bay garage-rock heyday from the mid-'60s. That post-British Invasion era had once spawned the Syndicate of Sound, Count Five, Chocolate Watchband, Mourning Reign, the Otherside and the E-Types, all playing South Bay teen clubs like San Jose's Losers South, Sunnyvale's Bold Knight and The Continental and The Whatzit Club in Santa Clara.

And now here we are, more than 40 years later, sitting in the patio of a Santa Clara St. restaurant called A.P. Stump's on a warm spring night, waiting for the appearance of Count Five. Formed in 1965 by a bunch of Pioneer High School kids, Count Five topped the national charts in 1966 with "Psychotic Reaction." Wearing their trademark Dracula capes, they also sat for one of the coolest publicity photos ever, snapped on the front lawn of the Winchester Mystery House.

To wake up this dozy crowd, Black Pearl and its leather-lunged vocalist Jim Salata make you see the connecting link between Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner," John Cougar Mellencamp's "Small Town," Tom Petty's "Breakdown" and the Cars' "Just What I Needed."

Count Five lead vocalist Kenn Ellner, guitarist John "Mouse" Michalski and bassist Roy Chaney may have played almost as many gigs since their 2006 San Jose Rocks induction than they did in their original incarnation with songwriter/guitarist/singer John "Sean" Byrne and drummer Craig "Butch" Atkinson, both of whom have died within the past decade.

Always a razor-sharp guitarist in the Jeff Beck mode, Michalski knows exactly what to do with his spotlight lead-breaks. Chaney and Michalski form a formidable tandem on Kinks classic "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" and ratchet the pressure to the danger level when spurting out Yardbirds gems "I'm Not Talking," "Lost Woman," "Wish You Would" and "Mister You're A Better Man Than I." Kenn Ellner just about pops his cork spitting out the lyrics and blowing his harp to lost Count Five classics "Double Decker Bus" and "The Morning After."

Count Five was immortalized in Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung, a Greil Marcus-edited, 1988 compendium of the writings of gonzo journalist Lester Bangs, where the Rolling Stone/Creem magazine contributor rhapsodized about purchasing the Count Five's only LP, then fantasized about a series of follow-up recordings.

Longtime San Jose music fixture Robert Berry joins Count Five tonight for a three-song cameo, preceded by Ellner's wry description of a 13-year-old Berry, whose dad provided the band's amps, hanging out backstage at a 1965 Count Five gig opening for the Dave Clark Five at San Jose Civic Auditorium. In tribute to those moptop days, the guys nailed the DC5's "Glad All Over" and the Animals' "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place."

Ellner wraps Roy Head's "Treat Her Right" around his little finger before Count Five unfurls the anthem everyone has come to hear. "Psychotic Reaction"-written by Byrne during a psychology class at San Jose City College while the prof was droning on about psychosis and neurosis-may have a freak-out section eerily similar to the Yardbirds' version of Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man," but the melody is a pure rave-up original that earned Count Five invites to both of Dick Clark's ABC-TV daily teen spectaculars: American Bandstand and Where The Action Is.

"Psychotic Reaction" inspires an outbreak of bad dancing that threatens more death and misery than the recent swine flu pandemic, before Orloff grabs the mic to back-announce the band: "Count Five! They continue to push the rock up the mountain!"

Whether Count Five's Sisyphus-ian feat will ever engender another golden (or emerald or cardboard) age of rock in San Jose is open to debate. My mind keeps drifting back to that magical night in 1977 when the Bodega, a tiny club in nearby Campbell with terrible sightlines, presented both the Talking Heads and Eddie & The Hot Rods on the same bill. Or when I could catch great NYC acts the Ramones and the Feelies as well as fab Australian rockers the Church and the Lime Spiders or wild and demented combos like Tex & The Horseheads and The Butthole Surfers at Santa Clara's One Step Beyond. Total commute for me, about five miles.

If the local scene never again amounts to much, I'd settle for a San Jose venue where I could see current indie-rock stars Fleet Foxes, M. Ward, Cat Power, Jason Lytle and Animal Collective without having to drive 50 miles to San Francisco 75 times a year. Is that too much to ask?

What San Jose desperately wants to see expunged from its collective consciousness is the oft-repeated tale told by the late Ned Torney, founding member of the original Chocolate Watchband in 1965. When Torney and his current band the Otherside (including sometime member Skip Spence) played a Sunday afternoon audition for Bill Graham in 1966 at the Fillmore Auditorium, Graham was impressed with the young combo until he learned they were from San Jose. The band was given the thumbs-down, and as they shambled down the Fillmore's staircase, one of the members muttered, "Never tell anyone you're from San Jose."

Burt Bacharach, so the story goes, had never even been to San Jose when he penned Dionne Warwick's 1968 hit "Do You Know The Way To San Jose." Surely, the eyes-wide-open, can-do entrepreneurial spirit that created all the magic found today in Silicon Valley can come up with something, anything, to make this Groundhog Day-like, self-fulfilling bad dream end.