By John Orr
August 2002
Click on the images to see larger and more complete photographs.

Back in the day, most of the people who went there just called it ''10101.''

Blues harp great Gary Smith likes to remember it as ''The Blues Hotel and Home for Wayward Girls.''

For several remarkable years in the early 1970s, it was where blues musicians went to drink, sleep, eat, party -- and most of all play music, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

''We didn't really have any neighbors as such,'' remembers pianist Sid Morris, who was one of the ''proprietors'' of the Blues Hotel. ''Next to it was an abandoned little real-estate office, then a Bob's Big Boy. On the other side, an elderly couple, very nice, they never complained. So, we could make music any time.''

And they did, starting with Smith, who'd taken over the little two-bedroom rental at 10101 Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road from his family.

10101 links Chris Cain Patrick Ford's Blue Rock'it Records Robben Ford Andy Just Charlie Musselwhite Michael Osborn Gary Smith interview Gary Smith at Mountain Top Productions 10101 folks: If you have a web site or email address you would like listed here, please send a note to johnorr@triviana.com.

It was Ground Zero of what was once a great blues scene in the South Bay, and in some way or another influenced hundreds of musicians and thousands of fans, most of whom never even knew 10101 existed.

Smith, Morris, James Cotton, Luther Tucker, Mike Bloomfield, Charlie Musselwhite, Alberto Gianquinto, Patrick, Robben and Mark Ford, Michael Osborn, Kenny Baker, Andy Just, Sammy Varela, Paul Durkett, Ron Thompson, Billy Johnson, Mike ''Junior'' Watson, Danny Hull, Clifford Coulter and many others stayed or hung out there, and played music.

Most of those people went on to tour the world on their own, or back musicans ranging from Miles Davis to John Lee Hooker to Joni Mitchell. Some of them -- notably Smith and Robben Ford -- have influenced thousands of other musicians.

The Blues Hotel started with Smith. ''I put an ad in Rolling Stone in the musicians free classifieds,'' Smith remembers, 'Harmonica player wants to get the hell out of Sunnyvale.'''

Patrick Ford -- who'd been in a surf band in Ukiah until he'd heard ''The Paul Butterfield Blues Band'' album and changed his tunes -- answered the ad, and by 1970 the Charles Ford Band (named for the brothers' father) began, with Robben on guitar, Osborn on rhythm guitar, Lou Bottini on bass, Pat Ford on drums and Smith on mouth harp.

''Back then, we just jammed constantly,'' says Osborn. ''Played a song for an hour. Gary was King of Cupertino.''

That band played all over the Bay Area -- the Bodega in Cupertino, the Cellar at De Anza College, Keystone Korner in San Francisco -- and began a following that was to include Chris Cain, who was so deeply impressed by Robben's playing that he actually went back to school to learn more music theory; he's gone on to become one of the greatest blues performers ever. The 10101 group became a pool of musicians who formed band after band and continue playing and helping out on each other's gigs and albums to this day.

''Gary was the center of that group,'' says Robben Ford. ''The mandala. He was great. Very funny. And turned Patrick and me on to a lot of music we'd never heard -- Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf. We hadn't really heard those people. At that point all we'd known was the Paul Butterfield Band.''

The Butterfield band had begun in Chicago, where its members, including Butterfield, guitarists Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop and keyboards player Mark Naftalin, had learned directly from the musicians who had brought the music up from the South.

By the '70s, Bloomfield, Bishop and Naftalin were all spending a lot of time in the Bay Area. The Ford brothers would sometimes play at jam sessions with Bishop as host at Keystone Korner in San Francisco. Bloomfield and Smith became close friends, and Naftalin recently performed on a Ford brothers tribute album to Butterfield.

And some of the older roots guys -- who had influenced the Butterfield band -- became friends, mentors, and sometimes bosses, to some of the 10101 guys.

Mark Ford remembers, especially, a night in San Francisco. ''We were doing a slow blues. Robben was taking his solo, and all of a sudden everyone starts clapping.'' Muddy Waters had just walked on the stage. ''He says something nice about 'these young white boys really play the blues ... they got everything but one thing' -- and everybody yells, 'What's that?' and he says, 'Me!' And then he sang 'I'm going just around the corner to my baby's house.' That was supreme.''

And John Lee Hooker, who was to take, among others from 10101, Osborn and Baker to stages around the world, ''Was one of our godfathers,'' says Smith.

Morris remembers a time when a 10101 band, the House Rockers, were ripped off of all their gear except his piano. Hooker fronted a gig for them to raise money to replace the instruments, and all Hooker asked to be paid was ''car fare and a bucket of chicken.''

''I started playing blues in (Fremont) high school (in Sunnyvale) with Gary,'' remembers Morris. ''It was the '60s, a real cultural explosion. I ended up getting drafted by the Army, went to Vietnam. Came back in 1972, when Gary was getting established. My experiences of 10101 -- wild times, drugs, alcohol, women all flowed pretty freely -- but one thing that we -- I hope this doesn't sound too farfetched, but we tried to pursue a kind of Bohemian lifestyle, seriously pursuing blues music. That house was kind of an icon. We were determined that we were going to be blues purists.''

''I was working at Safeway right across the street (from 10101),'' remembers Durkett. ''My friend was at the end of the line. I said, 'Hey George, I bought harmonicas. Gary was there. I think it was fate.

''Through Gary, I was right in there, a little bit behind everybody else, lucky enough to be around those guys.''

Durkett learned from Smith, then went on to have his own career as a blues musician, going on to teach other harmonica players. He mostly plays la musica norteņa these days, pointing out that the blues ''nightclub scene is just abyssmal right now.''

Mark Ford -- the youngest of the brothers -- joined the party after dropping out of high school. ''I used to sleep on a little three-foot couch on the porch, hanging off one end. I was like 16, 17 years old.''

Mark Ford took Smith's place as harp player in the Ford band when Smith moved on to other gigs, but the two of them were great friends. ''We hit it off right away,'' Ford recalls. ''He taught me so much about the great old players -- I sat back, amazed at the wealth of blues knowledge he had.''

''I learned what was real blues there,'' says Sam Varela, who joined the Smith band when he was 17. ''The real Muddy stuff, instead of just the Paul Butterfield stuff. I didn't have a good understanding of who the old guys were until I started learning from Smith and those guys.''

Just remembers starting to visit 10101 when he was in his late teens, in 1973 or '74. ''I saw Robben, he blew my mind. This kid my age, Mark Ford, on harp, and I'd never ever heard it played like that. And through them they hooked me up with Gary Smith. Said, "We'll meet over at this this house on Highway 9 (Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road).

''Alberto, Sid, they would rehearse there. Charlie Musselwhite would pull up in his little van with a bottle of wine.''

''I did spend a lot of time around there during my drinking career,'' says Musselwhite. ''It was always great to see Gary, whoever was living there. It was a fun time to go play records, talk about harmonicas. It was fun, real loose.

''I don't really remember playing,'' Musselwhite says. ''I remember playing a lot of records and talking about music.

''I was drinking heavily in those days, and not remembering much. Going about a daily life, blacking out.

''It's been 15 years since I had a drink. Life is just getting better and better.''

''I became really tight with Paul Durkett,'' Just says. ''He actually spent the most time hipping me up to, as he used to say, "the correct way to play harp.'''

Because there was more than straight blues happening at 10101, especially thanks to be-bop guitarist Johnson and Robben Ford, who, as Osborn recalls, ''Were playing Coltrane on guitar.'' And Mark Ford, who was taking harmonica into places none of the 10101 guys had been before, becoming at the time, according to Durkett, the best harp player in the world.

The house closed up as the Blues Hotel in the late '70s and was razed. But the players kept making music, including in Silicon Valley, which was a happenin' place for the blues in the 1980s and early '90s. There were three JJ's for a while, and several other clubs in Redwood City, Palo Alto, Cupertino and Sunnyvale where blues music could be heard fairly regularly.

The tech boom somehow changed all that. Now only one JJ's is left as a blues club in Silicon Valley, with a few other places here and there where blues can be heard occasionally. And the Silicon Valley audiences just aren't into the music. They're too busy talking about their jobs, or lack thereof, to focus on the tunes.

''San Jose is a cultural vacuum,'' says Morris. ''In Santa Cruz, the local scene is lively, vibrant. San Francisco or Oakland can be great places to go, with communities of blues people. But there is a lack of cultural depth in San Jose.''

Only a few of the 10101 grads continue to make their living at the blues; most have day jobs. ''I always likened the music industry to a pyramid,'' says Morris. ''It's awfully narrow at the top of that pyramid.'' Morris is a construction superintendent. Smith works in landscaping. Varela is a pipe fitter. Osborn works at a college in Oregon. Mark Ford is a paramedic. Cain, Pat and Robben Ford, Watson and a few others actually make their livings as musicians, near enough to the top of the pyramids to feed themselves and their families.

The house at 10101 was razed sometime in the late '70s. The name of the street has changed from Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road to De Anza Boulevard. There is a concrete ramp there now that leads to underground parking.

''People were walking past it and would just burst into tears,'' says Gary Smith, ''Because of the blues just seeping out of the ground there. So the EPA had to come in and tear out the dirt, and lay down a concrete slab.''