On Thursday, July 13, 1967, the band that started it all came back to the Avalon Ballroom. The Charlatans -- top of the card, per wolfgangs and chickenonaunicycle, over the Youngbloods and the Other Half, with the North American Ibis Alchemical Co. light show and a four-night run through Sunday the 16th -- were, by the middle of the Summer of Love, something almost paradoxical: founding fathers in their twenties, two years past the revolution they had started and still without an album to their name.

The chronicle's origin story runs through this band. In the summer of 1965 the Charlatans had gone up the mountain to Virginia City, Nevada, to be the house band at the Red Dog Saloon -- Edwardian tailoring, frontier theater, and a residency that assembled, in one barroom, nearly every element the San Francisco ballrooms would industrialize: the costumed band, the light show, the poster (George Hunter and Michael Ferguson's hand-drawn card for the engagement, "the Seed," is the chronicle's founding artifact), and the audience as participants in a total environment. When the Family Dog threw its first dances that fall, the Charlatans headlined; the scene that followed was in a real sense their invention.

Two years later, the week this page documents, that scene had just been consecrated at Monterey -- where the Charlatans had not played. Big Brother had detonated there; the Airplane were national stars; the Dead and Quicksilver had record deals. The inventors, meanwhile, had cycled through record-company false starts whose sessions stayed on shelves, and kept gigging. A four-night stand at the top of a Family Dog card in the scene's biggest summer is therefore both a homecoming and an act of stubborn persistence: whatever the industry had failed to do with them, the ballroom audience still knew exactly who they were.

The middle of the bill belonged to the Youngbloods, Jesse Colin Young's band, then still based in the East and soon to be Californians -- carriers of "Get Together," the song that would become the era's benediction when its moment finally came in 1969. Their gentler, folk-rooted swing against the Charlatans' saloon Americana makes the card read, in hindsight, like a conversation about what San Francisco music would mean once the loud summer ended. Underneath, the Other Half supplied the harder argument: a garage-psych outfit whose guitarist, Randy Holden, would shortly carry his scalding tone into Blue Cheer. Chickenonaunicycle's listing adds Wildflower to the final Sunday night only -- July 16 -- so this opening-night page leaves them off the bill and notes them here.

The poster is FD-71, and it is one of the run's handsomest collaborations: Bob Fried's design built around a Herb Greene photograph, per the wolfgangs record. Greene was the scene's court portraitist -- his camera had already fixed the Airplane, the Dead and the Charlatans themselves into the images posterity uses -- and Fried, one of the Avalon series' most elegant designers, set the photograph inside his own frame. A photographic poster for the most photographed band in San Francisco: the artifact understands its subject.

The Charlatans would finally see an album released in 1969, by which time the moment had passed and the classic lineup had frayed. That is the melancholy the page holds at arm's length. In mid-July 1967, at the Avalon, none of it had happened yet: four nights, the Ibis light show, Fried and Greene's card on the poles, and the band that invented the whole apparatus standing inside it, at home.