By August 4, 1967, the Avalon Ballroom had settled into a rhythm that let it program against the grain, and the weekend that opened the day before is a good example: the Charles Lloyd Quartet headlining a psychedelic dance hall. On Friday, August 4, 1967 — the second night of a run that had opened Thursday the 3rd and would close Sunday the 6th — Lloyd's group and West Coast Natural Gas Company held the Avalon stage, on the FD-74 poster designed by Robert Fried (per chickenonaunicycle's Family Dog list, which gives the August 3–6 dates, the bill, the catalog number, and Fried; corroborated on Wolfgang's). It was an inspired booking. Charles Lloyd's quartet in this era was one of the most celebrated groups in jazz — the band that had crossed over to rock audiences at Monterey and the Fillmore, its classic lineup built around the young Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette (though we don't assert which sidemen played this specific Avalon weekend, only that this was the quartet's crossover moment). Chet Helms putting a jazz quartet at the top of an Avalon bill was of a piece with the Family Dog's willingness to treat the ballroom as something wider than a rock room — the same instinct that would bring Ornette Coleman to the Fillmore West the following summer.

Robert Fried's FD-74 is worth its own note. Fried was among the Family Dog's more painterly poster artists, and his work sits a little apart from the hard-edged lettering of the Mouse-and-Kelley or Wes Wilson sheets — reason enough for the Avalon's Charles Lloyd weekend to carry August 4 on the strength of its artifact as much as its bill. (In this chronicle's index he is the same hand catalogued as Bob Fried; the two names are one artist.)

August 4 across the other years is mostly a lesson in what the poster ballrooms were not doing on a given night, and one correction worth making out loud. In 1968, August 4 was the Sunday that closed two runs at once: Pink Floyd's weekend at the Avalon (the FD-131 booking, third and final night) and the Iron Butterfly / Canned Heat / Initial Shock leg at the Fillmore West (the far side of the Conklin BG-131 sheet, also closing). Both are real, both are already anchored by their opening nights earlier in the week, and so both log here as closings rather than as August 4's headline. It is worth flagging what August 4, 1968 was not: the Creedence Clearwater Revival / Steppenwolf / It's a Beautiful Day bill sometimes attached to early August 1968 — the show billed as the "last first-period show at the Fillmore Auditorium" — actually took place July 2–4, 1968, not in August, and the "last show" note in the show-lists attaches to July 4. We keep that event where it belongs, a month earlier, and do not import it here.

The earlier and later years give August 4 little. In 1965 the scene did not exist. In 1966, August 4 was a Thursday, and the poster ballrooms were dark — the Fillmore's Love weekend and the Avalon's Big Brother weekend both opened the next night, August 5; the only thing listed on the 4th is a single-sourced, obscure Matrix club booking we decline to assert. In 1969, August 4 was a Monday dark night at the Fillmore West, sitting between the Everly Brothers weekend that closed August 3 and the Butterfield bill that opened August 5; the Grateful Dead's Great Highway weekend had ended the day before. No invented Monday show fills the gap.

So August 4 is 1967's, and the Avalon's: a jazz quartet at the top of a psychedelic bill, on a Robert Fried poster, in a room that thought a ballroom could hold more than rock and roll.