Thursday, July 25, 1968 continued the Moby Grape, Jeff Beck Group and Mint Tattoo bill at the Fillmore West, under Lee Conklin's BG-130.

The middle of this card is where the future was. The Jeff Beck Group were on their first American tour — Beck on guitar, Rod Stewart singing, Ronnie Wood on bass — and *Truth* had been released that month. Stewart was twenty-three and had been fired from or quit most of the bands he had joined; the American tour is where he found out he could hold a large room. Within two years he and Wood were in the Faces.

Moby Grape above them were going the other way. Their 1967 debut is among the best records the San Francisco scene produced — five songwriters, three guitars, no weak track — and Columbia had wrecked its launch by releasing five singles from it simultaneously, a stunt that made a serious band look like a marketing exercise. By this booking Skip Spence had left after the breakdown that produced *Oar*, and the group at the Fillmore West was a diminished version of the one on the sleeve.

Beck had left the Yardbirds two years earlier — the same Yardbirds who had played the Fillmore Auditorium under BG-75 almost exactly twelve months before this night.