On the ninth of July 1968, the Fillmore West was four days old and Bill Graham was already teaching it what he wanted it to be. The room -- the old Carousel Ballroom at Market and Van Ness, taken over after the Fillmore Auditorium era closed -- had opened on July 5 with a housewarming week. For the second week, per chickenonaunicycle, Graham programmed six straight nights of blues billed plainly as a "Blues Bash": Tuesday through Thursday, July 9-11, the Electric Flag with Buddy Guy and Freddie King; Friday through Sunday the bill flipped to Blue Cheer and Ike & Tina Turner, with Freddie King holding his slot all six nights. The Bill Graham Foundation's show archive confirms the opening card night by night: the Electric Flag first, Buddy Guy second, Freddie King third.

The booking is Graham's pedagogy in miniature. From the Fillmore Auditorium's earliest days he had made a habit of placing the ballroom audience's own bands alongside the Black American musicians they had learned from, and the Blues Bash carried that habit into the new building intact. Buddy Guy was Chicago's live-wire guitarist, still better known to English rock stars than to American teenagers; Freddie King was the big-toned Texan whose instrumentals were a training manual for a generation of players. Neither man had anything to prove, and both were exactly the kind of act Graham liked to put in front of an audience that thought it had discovered the blues the previous summer.

Topping the opening half of the week was the Electric Flag, the horn-driven "American music band" Mike Bloomfield had founded the year before and unveiled at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. By July 1968 the Flag was a band of formidable parts -- Buddy Miles at the drums chief among them -- and famously unstable chemistry; it would not hold together in that form much longer. That instability is invisible on the card and irrelevant to the night: with Guy and King on the same stage, the Flag's Chicago-schooled soul revue made the Tuesday-through-Thursday stand a single continuous argument about where the ballroom music came from.

The poster is BG-128, and it is Lee Conklin's -- one card covering the entire six-night bash, per wolfgangs, with the whole cast named: Electric Flag, Buddy Guy, Freddie King, Blue Cheer, Ike & Tina Turner. Conklin was one of the defining pen-and-ink minds of the late Fillmore run, a maker of dense, morphing figures in which lettering, limbs and faces trade places on close inspection, and giving the blues week a single Conklin sheet rather than two separate cards makes the poster itself read the way the week was booked: as one event. The light show all week was Holy See, per chickenonaunicycle and the wolfgangs record.

There is a small period joke buried in the scheduling. Blue Cheer -- the loudest band in San Francisco, the power trio whose demolition of "Summertime Blues" had improbably carried a San Francisco band onto AM radio that spring -- inherits the stage on Friday from three of the most disciplined blues players alive. The chronicle takes no side; the booking says everything about 1968, when "blues" was elastic enough to cover Freddie King's precision and Blue Cheer's volume inside a single week under a single poster.

This page anchors on the opening night, Tuesday, July 9, with the engagement running through Thursday the 11th, when the Electric Flag / Buddy Guy / Freddie King card gave way to the weekend's. The Fillmore West was less than a week old, and the Blues Bash was its first full statement of intent: the new room would not just host the San Francisco sound, it would keep placing that sound next to its sources -- with the receipts, in Conklin's ink, numbered BG-128.