The Independent

Before it was a rock club it was a jazz club, and that is the better story. In 1967 Herman Warren bought a coffee shop called Emanon at 628 Divisadero and turned it into the Half Note. Miles Davis played it. So did Thelonious Monk. George Duke and Al Jarreau worked in the house band.

What followed reads like a core sample of San Francisco music: the VIS Club in the early eighties, then the Kennel Club, where Nirvana opened for Tad in February 1990 and where Noise Pop held its first festival in 1993 at five dollars a ticket. Michael O'Connor ran the Justice League here from 1997, with murals by Barry McGee on the walls.

The Independent opened in February 2004 under Another Planet Entertainment - founded the year before by Gregg Perloff and Sherry Wasserman, both out of the Bill Graham organisation. The first band was I Am Spoonbender, booked as part of Noise Pop, which brought the festival back to the room where it started.

It holds 500 standing. The room is a plain box on purpose: good sound, clean sightlines, close enough to catch a performer's eye. The back patio is shaped like a half note.