A year on, on Wednesday, August 20, 1969, Fillmore West was three nights into David Singer's BG-188 week: John Mayall - the British bluesman whose Bluesbreakers had been a finishing school for Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor - over Mother Earth and the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, with the Brotherhood of Light show (catalog, artist, bill, and the Aug 19-24 run all per the David Singer collection on gdao and wolfgangs' BG-188 handbill; Singer credited on both).

Mayall had just remade himself. The Turning Point band was drummerless and acoustic-leaning, a deliberate turn away from the volume the Fillmore had been built on - and a strange thing to bring to Bill Graham's room at the exact moment the era was getting louder. The players he had trained were by then famous elsewhere; he arrived without them, and quieter.

The week had another story folded into it. Graham was promoting the ill-fated "Wild West" free festival for Golden Gate Park, and the handbill carried that news alongside the bill - a reminder that the posters did double duty as the scene's noticeboard. The run continues on the August 21 page.

The Turning Point is the record to have in mind here, because it explains what an audience at Fillmore West in August 1969 actually encountered.

Mayall had spent the 1960s running what amounted to a conservatory. The Bluesbreakers had passed Eric Clapton through in 1965–66 — the *Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton* album, the "Beano" record, is the one that got "Clapton is God" written on London walls — then Peter Green, who left to form Fleetwood Mac, then Mick Taylor, who in July 1969, weeks before this show, had joined the Rolling Stones. Mayall's gift was for finding guitarists and letting them go.

And then in 1969 he did something nobody expected: he dropped the drummer. *The Turning Point*, recorded live at the Fillmore East that July and released that autumn, is an acoustic-leaning, drummerless quartet record — Mayall on harmonica and guitar, Jon Mark on acoustic guitar, Johnny Almond on saxophone and flute, Steve Thompson on bass. "Room to Move" came off it. He brought that band to San Francisco.

Consider the timing. August 1969 is Woodstock month; the Fillmore West's own bills that summer run to Santana, Ten Years After, Spirit, Led Zeppelin's first American year. Volume was the direction of travel. Mayall arrived in the loudest room on the West Coast with no drummer and played quietly, and it worked — *The Turning Point* became the best-selling record of his career.

Mother Earth, second-billed, were Tracy Nelson's band, by then based in the Bay Area after arriving from Texas and Chicago. The New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, third, were the genuinely odd booking: classically trained musicians out of Juilliard, two of them oboists, playing rock with baroque interpolations. One of them, Michael Kamen, would become one of the most successful film composers of the next thirty years.

The handbill for this week carried something besides the bill. Graham was promoting the Wild West festival, a free event planned for Golden Gate Park that summer, and the news went out on the poster — which is a reminder that these sheets were not only advertising. They were the scene's noticeboard, and the surviving ones carry announcements, benefit notices and political material alongside the music. The Wild West festival collapsed before it happened, under disputes about commercialism and community control that were themselves a sign of how much had changed since 1966.