Thursday, August 17, 1967 fell inside one of the most ambitious weeks Bill Graham ever booked. Jim Blashfield's BG-78 covers seven straight nights at the Fillmore Auditorium, August 15 through 21, and the roster across those nights reads like an argument for what the room was for: Chuck Berry, Count Basie and his orchestra, the Charles Lloyd Quartet, the Young Rascals, the Steve Miller Blues Band and the cast of *Hair*.

But a poster is not a bill, and this is a week where the difference matters. The Fillmore Auditorium listings give a different headliner in three brackets across the run:

- **August 15, 16 and 17** — Chuck Berry, the Charles Lloyd Quartet, the Steve Miller Blues Band - **August 18 and 19** — the Young Rascals, the Charles Lloyd Quartet, *Hair* - **August 20** — the Count Basie Orchestra with the Charles Lloyd Quartet

So August 17 is a **Chuck Berry** night. Count Basie played the 20th and does not belong to this date, and the Young Rascals belong to the 18th and 19th. Only the Charles Lloyd Quartet plays straight through, which is its own remarkable fact — a modal jazz group holding the middle of the bill for a solid week while the headline changed three times over it.

That correction is the point of this page. The temptation with a seven-night sheet is to read the printed roster as one enormous bill, and it produces exactly the kind of plausible, tidy, wrong sentence this chronicle exists to avoid. The poster promises a week. The venue lists record the nights.

What is true, and remains extraordinary, is the shape of the week as a whole. A founding architect of rock and roll; one of the great big bands in the history of American jazz; a modal quartet whose *Forest Flower* had just made Charles Lloyd an unlikely favourite with rock audiences; a blue-eyed-soul group with number ones; a young Steve Miller; and a touring cast of a musical. In one hall, in seven days, in the middle of the Summer of Love. Graham's Fillmore was never only a rock room and this is the week that proves it hardest.

Berry himself was forty on this Thursday, twelve years past "Maybellene," playing to an audience largely composed of people whose bands had learned his songs first. He toured relentlessly through this period, usually with pickup backing, and the Fillmore booked him repeatedly — he returns to these pages at the Fillmore West in 1968 and 1969.

BG-78 is Jim Blashfield's first poster in the Graham series: four slightly out-of-round shapes carrying the lead acts' names, avian and human forms tangled around them, claws, mushrooms. He went on from posters to animation and won awards for it. He would draw BG-80 for Cream's second Fillmore run twelve days later.