The club emerged from the orbit of Freddie Herrera, who had founded the Keystone Korner, a celebrated jazz venue in San Francisco's North Beach. Herrera opened the larger Keystone Berkeley and then sold the Korner to Todd Barkan, turning his attention to a different kind of music. With partner Bobby Corona, Herrera built a network of clubs that functioned as an alternative circuit to the Bill Graham empire -- venues where the booking was eclectic, the rooms were intimate, and the artists ranged from blues legends to bands nobody had heard of yet. Keystone Palo Alto, at 260 California Avenue, opened on January 20, 1977, expanding the network down the Peninsula. A third venue, The Stone, followed in 1980 when Herrera and Corona took over a space at 412 Broadway in San Francisco, presenting the same unpredictable mix of artists until 1993.

What made the Keystone Berkeley historically significant was its timing. The club bridged the transition from 1960s counterculture to 1980s alternative rock, catching the music in between at exactly the moment when it was most vital and least categorizable. Before 924 Gilman Street or the Berkeley Square opened their doors to East Bay punk, the Keystone was already hosting early punk and post-punk acts. R.E.M. played two of their first Bay Area dates here, back when they were a college radio curiosity from Athens, Georgia. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers sold out three nights in February 1977 on their debut tour. Ray Charles, B.B. King, and Blondie all performed on the same stage, a booking philosophy that treated musical genres as suggestions rather than boundaries.

The Keystone's legacy lives on in an unusually rich recorded catalog. Multiple live albums preserve what the room sounded like on its best nights. Jerry Garcia's performances alone generated a shelf of releases: Live at Keystone, Keystone Encores, Pure Jerry: Keystone Berkeley, and several volumes of the Garcia Live series. The Keystone Companions compiles the complete 1973 Fantasy Recordings made at the venue. Even Metallica's deluxe edition of Kill 'Em All includes Keystone material. These recordings capture something that studio albums cannot -- the sound of musicians playing in a room small enough to feel the audience breathing, where the distance between performer and listener was measured in feet rather than arena sections. The intimacy is audible.

The Keystone Berkeley closed in 1984, and its extended family of venues followed over the next decade. Keystone Palo Alto shut down in 1986, its building cycling through identities -- restaurant, nightclub, a place called Illusions -- before being demolished in October 2013. The Stone held on until 1993. The lineage of these clubs stretched back further than Herrera, though. Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane had opened the Matrix at 3138 Fillmore Street, a club that defined the San Francisco sound before closing in 1971. The space at 412 Broadway that became The Stone had previously hosted the New York Dolls in September 1973 and Bob Marley and the Wailers in October of that year, during a brief and unsuccessful run under different management. The Keystone network inherited that tradition of small rooms where the music mattered more than the money, and when the last of them went dark, something irreplaceable went with it.