On Thursday, August 24, 1967, the Avalon opened FD-77 - Bob Fried's "War and Peace" poster - with Big Brother & the Holding Company at the top: Janis Joplin, two months after Monterey Pop had made her a star, playing her home room. Beneath her the bill reached back through the blues that made her: Bo Diddley, the Chess-records architect of the beat that bears his name, and Bukka White, the Mississippi Delta bottleneck master (and Riley "B.B." King's cousin), with the local Salvation Army Banned filling out the card (catalog, artist Bob Fried, bill, and the Aug 24-27 run per rockposters and the classicposters catalog record). It is a quintessential Family Dog bill - the scene's own new star over two living roots of American music - and Fried's Tolstoy-derived image gave it a poster to match.

Consider what the Avalon had assembled on this one card, because bills like it are the reason the Family Dog is remembered as more than a competitor to the Fillmore.

Bukka White, third on the sheet, was born in Mississippi around 1909. He recorded for Victor in 1930 and for Vocalion; he served time at Parchman Farm and recorded there for John Lomax in 1939; his "Fixin' to Die Blues" was in Bob Dylan's first album repertoire before most of this audience had finished school. He was rediscovered in 1963 by two young enthusiasts who wrote to "Booker T. Washington White, Aberdeen, Mississippi" on the strength of a lyric, and the letter reached him. Four years later he was playing a psychedelic ballroom on a steel-bodied National.

Bo Diddley, second, had given rock and roll one of its two or three foundational rhythms — the clave-derived pattern that carries his name and that half the bands in this room had borrowed without always knowing where it came from. He had been recording for Chess since 1955.

And on top: Janis Joplin, twenty-four, two months past Monterey Pop, playing the room where Big Brother had become a band. The distance between the top of this bill and the bottom is roughly forty years of American music, arranged in reverse chronological order down a poster.

The sheet itself is Robert Fried's — catalogued in this project under the name the Family Dog listings use, though the artists table carries both "Bob Fried" and "Robert Fried" as separate rows, a duplication flagged for cleanup. Fried was a Bay Area painter and printmaker whose poster work is denser and more painterly than the hand-lettered style around it; FD-77 is often called the "War and Peace" sheet for its Tolstoy-derived imagery. He died in 1975, at thirty-eight.

There is a cataloguing trap on this date worth recording. Some Family Dog indexes file FD-73 against this late-August weekend. That is a misfile — FD-73 belongs to a run in late July 1967, and the Avalon sheet for August 24–27 is FD-77. It took three archives to settle, and it is the kind of error that propagates silently once it is in a catalog.