Marty Balin had a specific vision: a club built around a house band that he would assemble himself. He persuaded three investors to put up $3,000 apiece, keeping 25 percent ownership for creating and managing the venue. The house band he formed was Jefferson Airplane, and their residency at the Matrix during late 1965 and early 1966 brought them to the attention of music critic Ralph J. Gleason, who became an early champion of the group. From that 50-by-80-foot room with its 10-foot ceiling (rising to 18 feet toward the back), Jefferson Airplane launched themselves into the national consciousness. The bar served only beer and wine, the stage was a single step above the floor, and a small galley at the back prepared the pizza. It was, by any conventional standard, an inadequate venue. It was also ground zero.

The roster of performers who played the Matrix reads like a syllabus of 1960s American music: the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Doors, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, Santana, the Velvet Underground, Steve Miller Blues Band (with a young Boz Scaggs), Moby Grape, and Howlin' Wolf, among dozens of others. Steel Mill appeared with an unknown Bruce Springsteen. The Sparrow played sets that would later be released as Early Steppenwolf when the band changed its name. Hunter S. Thompson made it a regular haunt -- the club appears briefly in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Because the Matrix was created and run by musicians, other musicians gravitated to it. On off nights, famous players came just to listen and hang out, and management waived the cover charge for them.

The Matrix's most lasting contribution may have been its role as an accidental recording studio. Tapes made at the club captured the first commercial recordings of "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" by Grace Slick's pre-Airplane band, the Great Society. The earnings from those tapes funded a major remodeling: Columbia Records built a custom mixing board, a professional sound booth was installed, and the stage was repositioned. The ceiling was opened to its full 18-foot height throughout the room, transforming the intimate pizza shop into something closer to a proper venue. Recordings from the Matrix also yielded Big Brother and the Holding Company's Lost Tapes, captured in January 1967 before the band was widely known.

The Matrix closed in 1972, with a brief reopening at a new Broadway location in 1973. What followed was a procession of reinventions. Pierce Street Annex turned it into a DJ-only nightclub. In 2000, Gavin Newsom's PlumpJack Group took over and renamed it the MatrixFillmore, briefly incorporating live music before abandoning the effort. It became one of San Francisco's first ultra lounges. In 2017, the name reverted to the Matrix. In 2018, it was remodeled and renamed the White Rabbit. Through all its incarnations, the space has never quite recaptured the alchemy of its first seven years, when a room built for 120 people regularly contained the future of American rock music.