On Friday, August 2, 1968, Pink Floyd opened a three-night weekend at the Avalon Ballroom. It is a sentence worth sitting with, because it belongs to a very short window. This was Pink Floyd's first American visit, and the band that walked onto the Avalon stage was no longer quite the band that had made "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn": Syd Barrett, the group's singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter, had left that spring, and David Gilmour had come in beside Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason. So the Avalon got a Pink Floyd in transition — post-Barrett, pre-fame, a British psychedelic band feeling out the room that had arguably invented the light-show idiom they were built to fill. Below them on the bill were the Holy Modal Rounders, the ecstatic and unclassifiable New York folk act, and Chrome Syrcus (Crome Cyrcus on some listings), a Seattle group — a bill documented on chickenonaunicycle's Family Dog list and corroborated on Wolfgang's, which files it under FD-131 and credits the poster to Bob Schnepf, with Jerry Wainwright named alongside him on some catalog listings.

The Avalon by August 1968 was in its last full year. Chet Helms and the Family Dog were feeling the pressure that would close the room within months, and there is something fitting about Pink Floyd headlining there near the end — the English inheritors of the psychedelic ballroom playing one of the halls that had defined it, just as that hall was running out of time. FD-131 is a strong, clean artifact: catalog number, designers, and headliner all confirmed on reachable sources, no honest gap to flag, which is not something every night this week can say.

The same Friday, two other rooms were running, and both belong in the day's record even if neither owns it. At the Fillmore West, the Conklin BG-131 booking had rotated to its second bill: Iron Butterfly headlining, Canned Heat second, Initial Shock opening, August 2 through 4 (chickenonaunicycle; Wolfgang's for the poster). This is the far side of the split-poster the earlier part of the week already unpacked — the same single Conklin sheet, now advertising the acts that had not yet reached the stage on opening night. Iron Butterfly were riding "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," released that summer; the pairing of that band with the boogie of Canned Heat made for a heavy Friday at the Fillmore West while Pink Floyd played the Avalon a couple of miles north. And out at the Great Highway, the Grateful Dead played the first of the two nights they salvaged after the light-show strike had shut their Friday the day before — August 2, with Albert Collins and Ballet Afro-Haiti, the FD 69-0801 weekend finally underway. That Saturday show is a strong night in its own right, but the Dead's Great Highway weekend has its center on the following day, where the surviving tape and the run's stranger details sit, so August 2 logs it as the opening rather than the headline.

The earlier years give August 2 nothing at the ballrooms, and the pattern is by now familiar. In 1965 the scene had not begun. In 1966 and 1967, August 2 was a mid-week dark night — a Tuesday and a Wednesday respectively — falling in the gaps the weekend booking rhythm left open; the Fillmore's next 1966 bill was still three days off, and the Avalon's Charles Lloyd weekend in 1967 did not open until August 3. No invented Tuesday shows fill those blanks.

So August 2 is 1968's, and specifically the Avalon's: a freshly reconstituted Pink Floyd, Gilmour just weeks into the job, headlining the room that had helped make the whole light-and-sound idea in the first place, on a Schnepf poster with nothing left to hedge.