On the evening of Tuesday, July 16, 1968, the marquee at 10 South Van Ness Avenue read Fillmore West, though the hall was still learning its own name. Bill Graham had only weeks earlier moved his operation from the aging Fillmore Auditorium on Geary into the former Carousel Ballroom, and the room's inaugural weeks were still shaking out. This night opened a three-evening run — July 16 through 18 — sharing a single poster with the harder-charging bill that would close the week. The card was Big Brother and the Holding Company, fronted by Janis Joplin, with folksinger Richie Havens and the little-remembered Illinois Speed Press below them. It was one of those ordinary Tuesday listings that only in retrospect reveals itself as a hinge.

Because in July 1968, Big Brother was a band living in the last weeks of its brief, incandescent prime. Their second album, Cheap Thrills, had been recorded and mixed but not yet released — it would reach stores on August 12, nearly a month after this show. So the audience filing into the Fillmore West had not yet heard the studio "Piece of My Heart" or "Summertime"; they came for the live thing, the raw and ragged instrument that had made Joplin a sensation at Monterey a year before. The tension that would soon fracture the group was already gathering in the wings — the industry's growing conviction that Joplin was the star and the band merely her backing musicians — but that reckoning was still months off. She had not left, had not announced leaving. That would come in September, with a final December bow. On this July night she was still, complicatedly, one of them.

Sharing the stage was Richie Havens, the Brooklyn-born folk guitarist with his open-tuned, percussive strum and a voice like weathered oak — a full year before Woodstock would make him famous as its opening performer. Illinois Speed Press, a Chicago transplant featuring future Poco guitarist Kal David, filled out the undercard.

The poster tying the run together was BG-129, the work of Lee Conklin, whose intricate black-and-white draftsmanship had earned him a place among Graham's stable of artists after he walked into the Fillmore offices and was hired on the spot. Conklin's design rewards patience: what first reads as abstract line work resolves, after a minute, into faces and bodies hidden inside the letters — the images-within-images that were his signature. An earlier attribution of this poster to David Byrd has been corrected; the hand here is unmistakably Conklin's. A small, dense masterpiece for a Tuesday that turned out to matter.