FD-19 · Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse
San Francisco
Oxford Circle
Bo Diddley
Sons of Adam
Dollar Bill
Friday, August 5, 1966, is the day this chronicle likes best, because on it the scene's defining rivalry played out two rooms and a few blocks apart, each with its own poster. That night the Family Dog opened a weekend at the Avalon Ballroom with Big Brother and the Holding Company — Janis Joplin's band, the Avalon's own — sharing the bill with Oxford Circle, under Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley's FD-19, the poster…
Read the full story →Also on August 5
BG-21 — Fillmore Auditorium
Love at the Fillmore Auditorium, on Wes Wilson's BG-21. Arthur Lee's band were the great Los Angeles anomaly: a racially mixed group signed to Elektra before the Doors, making music that had almost nothing to do with the San Francisco sound and rather more to do with Bacharach, flamenco guitar and …
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BG-76 — Fillmore Auditorium
Night five of Muddy Waters at the Fillmore Auditorium, with Buffalo Springfield and Richie Havens. Richie Havens, third on this bill every night of the run, is worth a note of his own. He played a Guild acoustic in open D with his thumb fretting the bass strings — a self-invented technique born of …
Read about this poster →AOR-2.80 — Fillmore West
Ornette Coleman at the Fillmore West. Coleman is the hardest booking in this entire chronicle to explain in one line. He had effectively invented free jazz with *The Shape of Jazz to Come* in 1959 and *Free Jazz* in 1961, playing a plastic alto saxophone and abandoning fixed chord changes in a way …
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BG-185 — Fillmore West
Opening night of the Butterfield Blues Band at the Fillmore West with It's a Beautiful Day and SRC — and a poster that advertises a band who did not appear. The Fillmore West listings carry the note plainly: the BG-185 sheet says Fleetwood Mac. They did not play. What the audience got instead was P…
Read about this poster →Were You There?
Do you have memories of this show, or an original FD-19 poster? On This Day in Art Rock History celebrates the people who lived through the psychedelic era. Your stories and collections matter to this archive.