Saturday, August 27, 1966 closed Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band with the Charlatans at the Avalon, on Mouse and Kelley's FD-23.

The weekend's real story is what was happening four blocks away, and this chronicle tells it on the same date: Bill Graham's BG-25 at the Fillmore advertised the 13th Floor Elevators, who did not appear on either night. Quicksilver stood in on the Friday, Country Joe & the Fish on the Saturday, and the Great Society — whose singer Grace Slick is the photographed face at the centre of that very poster — was bumped off the played bill entirely.

The Avalon, meanwhile, simply delivered exactly the bill it printed. Beefheart and the Charlatans, both nights, as advertised.

That contrast is worth holding because the reputations run the other way. Graham is remembered as the businessman and Helms as the idealist who could not run a room; the Avalon closed in 1968 and the Fillmore West lasted until 1971. But on this particular weekend in 1966 it was the Family Dog that did what its poster said, and Beefheart — a year from *Safe as Milk*, three from *Trout Mask Replica*, still a Southern California blues singer with an extraordinary voice — played both nights over the band that had started the whole scene at the Red Dog Saloon the summer before.