Saturday, August 24, 1968 was Spirit's second Avalon night under FD-134, over the Sir Douglas Quintet and Notes From the Underground.

Spirit were a Los Angeles band and an unusually strange one. Their drummer, Ed Cassidy, was a shaven-headed former jazz player two decades older than the rest of the group — he had worked with Cannonball Adderley and Roland Kirk — and he was the stepfather of the band's guitarist, Randy California. California had earned that stage name at fifteen in New York, when Randy California had played in a band with Jimi Hendrix, then calling himself Jimmy James, who gave him the name to distinguish him from another Randy in the group. Their first album had come out that January; *Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus* was two years off.

The Sir Douglas Quintet beneath them were Doug Sahm's Texans, by then relocated to California and a fixture of both ballrooms. Notes From the Underground were a Berkeley band.

A year later Spirit would headline the back half of BG-189 at the Fillmore West, on Singer's Michelangelo-on-the-moon sheet — a trajectory from the Avalon's second billing to a Graham headline in twelve months.