On July 25, 1967 — a Tuesday — the marquee at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco read The Yardbirds, James Cotton Blues Band, and Richie Havens. It was opening night of a six-night stand, and the poster for it, BG-75, has outlived nearly everything else about the week. Bonnie MacLean drew it: a woman's face framed by a great fan of peacock feathers, and it remains one of the most collected images in the whole Bill Graham series (gdao.org item 393762; wolfgangs.com BG075). MacLean had been Graham's secretary and, by most accounts, married him only weeks before these shows — a detail worth keeping loose, since it circulates more as ballroom-scene lore than as anything I can pin down cleanly.

The bill split down the middle. The Yardbirds headlined the first three nights, July 25 through 27; the Doors took the back half, July 28 through 30. James Cotton and Richie Havens played all six. That structure is why the poster carries two headliners at once, and why it now reads a little strangely — two bands on one sheet of paper, each pointed at a completely different future.

Start with the Yardbirds, because the interesting fact about this night is who wasn't on stage. By this 1967 American tour, Jeff Beck was gone. He had walked away from the band mid-tour in the U.S. back in late 1966, which left Jimmy Page as the sole lead guitarist — Page, with Keith Relf singing, Jim McCarty on drums, and Chris Dreja (rockprosopography101; yardbirds.us). For a stretch in 1966 the Yardbirds had run the almost absurd luxury of Beck and Page together on twin leads, the lineup you can catch on film in Antonioni's Blow-Up. That version was already history by the time the band pulled up to the Fillmore. What San Francisco got on July 25 was the leaner, later Yardbirds — a group carrying a run of famous singles and a fraying commercial moment, with Page increasingly the center of gravity.

A setlist for this exact date survives on setlist.fm, and the run was captured on a bootleg that later circulated under the title "Live Yardbirds Featuring Jimmy Page," so we do have some sense of what the room heard — the older hits alongside the material Page was steering toward. I'd treat the fine grain of any single night's set with a little caution; bootleg provenance and setlist databases don't always agree on which song landed on which date. But the shape is clear enough, and the through-line is Page.

Here's the part that's easy to overplay, so I'll try not to. One year after this night, in 1968, Page would assemble what he first billed as the New Yardbirds and then renamed Led Zeppelin. Some of the raw material was already in his hands in 1967 — the extended showpieces, the heavier textures. But nobody standing in the Fillmore on July 25 knew that, and it's worth resisting the temptation to hear Zeppelin in a Tuesday-night blues-rock set at the Fillmore. What's true is narrower and better: this was a transitional band, post-Beck and Page-led, roughly twelve months out from the thing Page is actually remembered for.

And then, on the same poster, three nights away, the other future. The Doors would open their half of the run on July 28, and they arrived at exactly the right moment — "Light My Fire" was climbing to the top of the Billboard chart that very week (a timing the collector notes around BG-75 tend to emphasize, and it holds up). So MacLean's peacock poster ended up holding two trajectories at once: a band a year from becoming Led Zeppelin, and a band riding its first number one into the room. One sheet of paper, two different versions of where rock was about to go.

A couple of nearby-year footnotes for the same date, kept in the margins where they belong. On July 25, 1968 — a Thursday — the Fillmore West bill was Moby Grape, the Jeff Beck Group, and Mint Tattoo, poster BG-130 by Lee Conklin. That's the small irony worth a grin: Beck, a year removed from quitting the Yardbirds, headlining across town in San Francisco with the Rod Stewart / Ron Wood edition of his own group. The well-known Jeff Beck Group live recording from this stand is dated July 24, so the 25th sits right beside it rather than on it. And on July 25, 1969 — a Friday — the Fillmore West opened a run with the Steve Miller Band, Albert King, and Mountain, poster BG-183 by David Singer. For 1965 and 1966, this exact date reads quiet; I don't have anything confirmed to hang on it, so I'll leave it blank rather than manufacture a moment.

But the night that matters here is the Tuesday one — opening night of a split-headliner week, the Yardbirds without Beck and led by a guitarist a year from something much larger, sharing a poster with a band about to hit number one. The music from both halves has scattered into bootlegs and reissues. What's held together, improbably, is Bonnie MacLean's sheet of paper.