The Who played the Malibu Shore Club at Lido Beach, on the south shore of Long Island, on July 7, 1967 — in the middle of their first substantial American tour.

The venue is the point. The Malibu is a beach club, open since 1948, whose ordinary business was swimming, cabanas and summer members; through the 1960s it also ran concerts, and the promoter Don Friedman put touring rock acts into it. So the Who — three weeks past their Monterey Pop set, with Townshend and Moon at the height of their instrument-destroying period — played a beach club between a swimming pool and the Atlantic.

That is not a curiosity, it is what the American touring circuit actually was in 1967. No national network of purpose-built rock venues existed yet. A British band on tour played ballrooms, theatres, armories, roller rinks, beach clubs and whatever else had a stage and a promoter willing to take the risk, and the San Francisco halls this chronicle mostly documents were unusual precisely because they were purpose-built for it.

Within two years the Who were playing Woodstock and the model had changed completely.