On July 26, the San Francisco ballroom scene offers two strong nights a year apart, and they sit oddly well together: a night in 1968 when Bill Graham put a jazz quartet at the top of a rock bill, and a night in 1967 when the Yardbirds — now steered by Jimmy Page — worked through the middle of a week's stand.

Start with 1968. It was a Friday, and the room was Fillmore West. The poster is BG-130, drawn by Lee Conklin, and it's one of those split six-night jobs that covers two separate stands, July 23–28 (famsf.org; wolfgangs.com). The first stand, July 23–25, ran Moby Grape / Jeff Beck Group / Mint Tattoo — and because Moby Grape is the overall headliner across the six nights, the poster leads with them, not with the bill that opened July 26. That second stand, July 26–28, is a different show entirely: the Charles Lloyd Quartet on top, with The Herd and the James Cotton Blues Band beneath (billgrahamfoundation.org, per-date July 26 1968; famsf.org).

The Charles Lloyd booking is the part worth slowing down for. Lloyd's quartet in this period included a young Keith Jarrett on piano and Jack DeJohnette on drums — two players who would become enormous figures in jazz on their own — and that lineup is generally what's meant when people talk about Lloyd's late-'60s group. (If you want the exact personnel on the exact Fillmore West nights, treat that as not fully nailed down here; the quartet's membership is well documented for the era, but I haven't seen a night-specific confirmation for July 26.) What matters is the crossover it represents. This is Bill Graham putting modal, spiritual jazz directly next to rock, on the same stage, for the same audience — and it wasn't a charity booking. Lloyd had real draw with the rock crowd. His "Forest Flower," recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966, had reached listeners well outside the jazz core and made him a name a ballroom audience would actually turn out for. Booking him over a rock undercard at the Fillmore reads, in hindsight, as one of the clearer moments when Graham's rooms treated jazz and rock as one continuous scene rather than separate worlds.

The undercard is worth a note for how transatlantic it is. James Cotton, the Chicago blues harmonica player, is the kind of act that shows up again and again on these bills — the ballroom scene's debt to the blues made concrete. The Herd were an English pop-rock group of the period (the band that gave Peter Frampton his first real visibility), which places a British teen-pop act under an American jazz headliner on a San Francisco rock poster — a genuinely strange and telling combination, and a fair snapshot of how wide Graham's booking net was by mid-1968.

Now back up a year, to 1967. Wednesday, July 26, at the Fillmore Auditorium — this is the middle night of the BG-75 run, poster by Bonnie MacLean, and the bill is the Yardbirds / James Cotton Blues Band / Richie Havens (billgrahamfoundation.org; famsf.org). The stand's opening night, July 25, is told on its own page, so I'll keep the poster itself brief here: BG-75 is the same MacLean piece across the run, and the Doors take the room over starting July 28. July 26 is simply the Yardbirds' second night in the middle of that week.

The Yardbirds at this point are the Jimmy Page-led version — post-Jeff Beck, the group narrowed to the lineup that would, within roughly a year, dissolve and reconstitute as Led Zeppelin. So this is Page on a San Francisco ballroom stage in the summer of 1967, working a run of nights rather than a single show, which is the more interesting fact than any one setlist. (I'd hedge on specifics of what they played on the 26th versus the other nights; the run is documented, but I wouldn't assert a night-by-night setlist.) And note James Cotton again — the same Cotton Blues Band that turns up on the 1968 Charles Lloyd bill is here in 1967 under the Yardbirds, one more small sign of how tight and recurring the pool of supporting acts was in these rooms.

For color, and clearly flagged as outside the poster-ballroom scene: a year earlier still, on Tuesday, July 26, 1966, the Rolling Stones played the Cow Palace in Daly City — an arena, across the bay, on a package tour, with no BG or FD poster number attached (rollingstonesdata.com; setlist.fm; concertarchives.org). The bill around them was a period grab-bag: Jefferson Airplane, the Standells, the McCoys, the Trade Winds, and Sopwith Camel. It was reportedly Mick Jagger's 23rd birthday, and the story that travels with the show is that Jefferson Airplane smuggled Jerry Garcia in as a "crew" member. That's a fun bit of local lore, and I'd hold it loosely — it's the kind of anecdote that gets repeated more confidently than it's sourced. Either way, it belongs in a different category than the two Fillmore nights above: an arena package tour, not the poster-driven ballroom scene this project tracks.

To keep the record honest about what isn't here: 1965 falls before the scene had really formed, so there's nothing to tell. And 1969 — Saturday, July 26 — is an honest gap. No San Francisco ballroom bill for that date came through as confirmable from vetted sources on this run, so rather than invent one, I'll just say it's blank for now and leave room to fill it later.