On Friday, August 26, 1966, the Family Dog hung Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley's FD-23 at the Avalon Ballroom and put Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band over the Charlatans for a two-night weekend.

It is a bill that reads, in hindsight, as the scene's past and its future sharing a stage — and neither act was what the shorthand suggests.

**The Charlatans were the origin.** In the summer of 1965 they had gone to Virginia City, Nevada, and taken a residency at the Red Dog Saloon: Victorian frock coats and string ties, guitars, a light show of sorts, and a poster — Michael Ferguson and George Hunter's "Seed" handbill, which predates BG-1 by most of a year and is routinely called the first psychedelic rock poster. The Red Dog summer is the event the whole San Francisco story is usually traced back to. By August 1966 they had been at it for over a year, were still without a released album, and were watching bands formed long after them sign national deals. The Charlatans invented a great deal of the visual grammar this chronicle catalogues and got almost none of the credit or the money.

**Beefheart was the future, but not yet.** Don Van Vliet in the summer of 1966 was a Southern California blues singer with an extraordinary voice and a fairly conventional band — *Safe as Milk*, his first album, was still a year off, and *Trout Mask Replica*, the record that made his name a synonym for difficulty, was three years away. What the Avalon crowd saw was a Magic Band playing electric blues with an unusually ferocious front man, not the avant-garde project he became. The pairing looks prophetic now. On the night it was simply a good bill.

Across town at the Fillmore the same weekend, Bill Graham's BG-25 was advertising the 13th Floor Elevators — who did not show up either night, and were replaced by Quicksilver on the Friday and Country Joe & the Fish on the Saturday. So the two halls that weekend offer a neat contrast: the Fillmore selling a band that never arrived, the Avalon quietly delivering exactly the bill it printed.

That is worth holding onto, because the Avalon's reputation is for the looser, more communal operation — Chet Helms ran it closer to a dance than a concert, and it never had Graham's business discipline. But the Family Dog printed FD-23, booked Beefheart and the Charlatans, and put them on stage on the nights the poster named. The romance of the Avalon is real; so was the competence.

Mouse and Kelley's sheet for it is one of their vellum-printed pieces from the run of 1966 posters that made their partnership famous — the same two hands that would draw the "Tree House" (FD-24) the following week for the Elevators' rescheduled Avalon appearance, when the Texas band finally did turn up.