"I didn't know him well, but I knew him well enough for him to recognize me.
Paul Pena began playing in Bay Area clubs, opening shows at the Great American Music Hall and the Keystone in Berkeley for Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders. If they too opened for storage, I never saw it, but they were perfect perches for this new nocturnal life, where I could suck beers between feverish wild dances. The ones at the Keystone were scaled to adult size. They were just big enough so that a boy playing out of sight of his parents could climb in and pretend to be a vampire in his coffin. Those held blankets, toys, books, and whatever else would have been useless or in the way upstairs. They reminded me of the storage bins that circled the floor in the basement of the house where my two brothers and I were raised in Brooklyn. They were made of plain boards, three high and one deep. The long walls to the left and right of the stage had benches that were about 30 inches high and ran the length of the floor. For the cheap shows that wouldn't draw very well, the tables were cleared to form a large dance floor. If a good band was forcing a high ticket price, there were usually tables set in front of the stage. Heat and sweat, fun and energy were what it was about. It didn't matter, because the sound was not what the place was about. Someone from the club must have thought differently, because one night strange sound baffles (or maybe deflectors?) suddenly showed up on the walls to both sides of the stage, apparently in some effort to improve the sound. As long as a stack of amps could rock the room, my friends and I were happy. The acoustics there could have been anything from perfect to horrible. The Keystone served mostly as a home for local bands on the way up (or often going nowhere), but also sometimes featured bigger acts on the way down, or enjoying brief revivals after having already hit bottom once. Nonetheless it was still astonishing that the Dead could headline Madison Square Garden, and a few weeks later Garcia would play this bar where he had to walk through the crowd to get to the stage. It was actually on the East Coast where the Dead became really huge, and Garcia became larger than life. Thus the band-including Garcia-had to walk through the audience to get to the stage. There was no backstage per se, as the stage was on the opposite end from the bar and the back room. It can be viewed on the inside cover of the Jerry Garcia/Merl Saunders Live At Keystone album. Backstage, such as it was, was a big room behind the bar. There was a little balcony for the soundboard and a few tables (members of the Dead would sometimes watch the Garcia Band from the soundboard). The club had a conventional setup, a rectangular room with the stage at the far end, opposite from the bar. The first Garcia/Saunders show at Keystone Berkeley was soon after that, on March 8, 1972. The first Keystone Berkeley show I have been able to find was March 2, 1972, with the Sons Of Champlin. In March, 1972, the New Monk changed it's name to Keystone Berkeley, to distinguish it from Keystone Korner in San Francisco. Garcia played Keystone Korner 20 times in 1971, so clearly it was the preferred venue, but Herrera's takeover of The New Monk put it on Garcia's radar. It's my belief that Herrera had been booking the New Monk already for some months. At the end of August, Keystone owner Freddie Herrera officially announced that he would be buying the New Monk. Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders played there on June 4 and 5, 1971, and then again on June 26 and June 27. In the middle of 1971, however, The New Monk started booking higher profile club bands. Here, the headlights of the oncoming traffic, before making a forced left turn onto University, would light the front of the club and the crowd milling outside waiting to get in, magically marking it as the place to be after dark a down-to-earth Berkeley equivalent of klieg lights sweeping the sky to draw attention. Shattuck ran due north from Oakland, heading straight for the Keystone, which lay not along its side, but directly in its path at the top of the T. University ran due east from the bay and the Berkeley marina, about 2 miles away.
It stood at the intersection where University and Shattuck Avenues formed a "T".
It became the place where more important living was done and more memories were formed than any other place in the Bay Area.
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