On Thursday, June 23, 1966, Bill Graham brought Them — the raw, blues-soaked band fronted by a twenty-year-old Van Morrison — to the Fillmore Auditorium in what is recorded as the group's first San Francisco appearance. The booking was unusual: a single weeknight show, slotted in because Graham's weekend was already committed to Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention and the comedian Lenny Bruce. Wes Wilson's poster says so in its own lettering — ONE NIGHT ONLY! — along with the admission price of $2.50 and a nine o'clock start.

**The sheet and the stage did not hold the same bill, and the difference is worth being exact about.** BG-12 advertises two acts and no more: Them, with "Gloria" printed under the band's name like a subtitle, and the New Tweedy Brothers, a Haight-Ashbury outfit who never went anywhere much and kept playing Bay Area rooms for years afterwards. The Fillmore's own listings for the night record a longer card — Them, the New Tweedy Brothers, Oxford Circle, and the Sons of Champlin. Two acts sold the show; four played it. That gap between the advertised bill and the played bill runs through this entire chronicle, and BG-12 is one of its cleanest examples.

Wilson signed it "Wes Wilson '66" in the lower left, in the molten hand-drawn lettering he was inventing in real time — here in vivid pink on green, at a moment when he was producing roughly a poster a week and had about a year left before he and Graham fell out over money.

For collectors the sheet has a tell that has nothing to do with the art. The original was printed on vellum at roughly 14 by 19⅞ inches and carries union logo #72 in the centre of the bottom margin; the second printing, on white stock, carries #183; the third, on white stock with a blue back, carries no union logo at all. An original handbill exists too, purple ink on thin white paper. Printers' union marks are how a first printing gets identified sixty years later — a detail entirely invisible to anyone reading the poster as art.

The show sits at a poignant hinge. This American run was among the last with Morrison before the band fractured — over money, by most accounts, with members' visas expiring soon after the tour — and he began the solo career that produced *Astral Weeks* and *Moondance*. During Them's concurrent Los Angeles residency the young Doors opened for them and carried "Gloria" into their own set, one of the small traceable transmissions by which the British R&B underground seeded American rock.