BG-25 · Wes Wilson
San Francisco
Sopwith Camel
13th Floor Elevators (billed, did not play) / Country Joe & the Fish
The poster is one of Wes Wilson's early masterpieces for Bill Graham, and at its center is a face everyone in the room would have known: Grace Slick, photographed by Herb Greene, ringed by Wilson's tightening, hand-drawn letters. It advertised a weekend at the Fillmore Auditorium — Friday August 26 and Saturday August 27, 1966 — headlined by the 13th Floor Elevators, the acid-rock band out of Austin, Texas, with the…
Read the full story →Also on August 27
FD-23 — Avalon Ballroom
Saturday, August 27, 1966 closed Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band with the Charlatans at the Avalon, on Mouse and Kelley's FD-23. The weekend's real story is what was happening four blocks away, and this chronicle tells it on the same date: Bill Graham's BG-25 at the Fillmore advertised the 13th …
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BG-79 — Fillmore Auditorium
Sunday, August 27, 1967 closed the BG-79 run at the Fillmore Auditorium: the Butterfield Blues Band, Cream and the Southside Sound System, with the Headlights on lights. The billing order matters and is easy to get backwards. For every night of this run Butterfield was billed above them — Cream wer…
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FD-77 — Avalon Ballroom
Sunday, August 27, 1967 closed the FD-77 run at the Avalon: Big Brother & the Holding Company with Bo Diddley, Bukka White and the Salvation Army Banned, on Robert Fried's "War and Peace" sheet. Read the card from the bottom up and it spans four decades of American music. Bukka White had recorded f…
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BG-134 — Fillmore West
Tuesday, August 27, 1968 opened the front half of Lee Conklin's BG-134 at the Fillmore West: Steppenwolf, the Staple Singers and Santana. The poster is the reason this week is remembered. Conklin's design is a dense pen-and-ink tangle of interlocking bodies that resolves, if you let your eye settle…
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BG-189 — Fillmore West
Ten Years After with Terry Reid and the Bar-Kays at the Fillmore West, on the front half of David Singer's BG-189. The Bar-Kays are the name that stops you. The original band had been Otis Redding's backing group and were killed with him in the Wisconsin plane crash of December 1967 — only two memb…
Read about this poster →Were You There?
Do you have memories of this show, or an original BG-25 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.