On July 3, 1965, the Beach Boys headlined a twelve-act "Summer Spectacular" at the Hollywood Bowl — the Byrds, the Kinks, Sonny & Cher, the Righteous Brothers, Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, the Sir Douglas Quintet, Dino Desi & Billy, Ian Whitcomb, Donna Loren and the Liverpool Five beneath them, some fifteen thousand in the seats of the Bolton Canyon amphitheatre. It was the band's first hometown show in nearly a year. It is remembered for two things, and they have nothing to do with each other.

**Brian Wilson's last stand.** Wilson had withdrawn from regular touring at the end of 1964, after the panic attack on a flight to Houston that ended his life as a road musician; Glen Campbell and then Bruce Johnston had taken his place on stage. He made a rare complete appearance here, and it was effectively his last full concert with the band for two years — he would not return in that capacity until August 1967. One contemporary account described him "taut as a guitar string," fingers trembling. What he went back to was the studio: *Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)* had just come out, "California Girls" was climbing, and ahead of him was *Pet Sounds*. The Hollywood Bowl on this night is the hinge between the Beach Boys as a touring act and the Beach Boys as a thing Brian Wilson made in a room.

**And the Kinks' American disaster.** The band's 1965 US tour was a catastrophe of union confrontations, unpaid fees and short tempers, and July 3 sits in the middle of it. Accounts of the night itself differ and this chronicle will not pretend otherwise: some have Ray Davies nearly refusing to go on after a pay dispute with the promoter; others have the Kinks declining to play at all, waving to the audience and walking out of the building. What is not disputed is the shape of the fortnight around it — the pay disputes, and the band's no-show at the Cow Palace the following night — which fed the American Federation of Musicians complaint that kept the Kinks out of the United States for four years. They did not tour America again until 1969, which is why one of the most influential British bands of the decade is almost absent from the San Francisco ballroom era this chronicle otherwise documents.

Two absences, then, decided on the same July evening in Los Angeles. Wilson went into the studio and made the record that changed what a pop album could be. The Kinks went home and were locked out. Neither is visible on a poster, because the Hollywood Bowl in 1965 did not advertise the way the San Francisco halls would a year later — the Bowl belonged to the Philharmonic and to a civic tradition of summer concerts, and a rock bill there came with a printed program, not a hand-lettered sheet.

That is worth noticing on its own. This is a chronicle organised around posters, and July 3, 1965 is a night that mattered enormously and left no poster at all. Ten months later Bill Graham would print BG-1 and the San Francisco scene would begin documenting itself in a way Los Angeles never quite did. The Bowl's twelve-act spectacular — bigger than anything the Fillmore would stage for years — passed into history on ticket stubs and newspaper listings.