For most of 1967, the basement of a warehouse at 50 Green Street, near the foot of Telegraph Hill, was a place where nothing was supposed to happen. Chinese in the morning. Portuguese. Italian. Whatever middle-of-the-road filler could be stacked into the hours nobody had bought.
Then, in February, at midnight, for forty-five dollars a week, a twenty-six-year-old from Detroit named Larry Miller sat down at the board and played what he wanted. He called it folk rock. He let whole album cuts run, folk into jazz into classical into whatever he’d found that day, and he talked when he felt like talking. No jingles. No clock. No time and temperature.
I know because I used to ride over from Berkeley to watch him do it.