By the last week of August 1968, Bill Graham's San Francisco operation was running out of the second Fillmore West, and the poster for the week was Lee Conklin's — BG-134, a dense pen-and-ink tangle of interlocking bodies that resolves, if you let your eye settle, into the head of a lion. Graham generally preferred color for his advertising; this drawing was strong enough that it went to press essentially as Conklin drew it.

The sheet announced a week that split down the middle. The Fillmore West listings are precise about the division: August 27, 28 and 29 belonged to Steppenwolf, the Staple Singers and Santana; August 30, 31 and September 1 belonged to the Grateful Dead, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Sons of Champlin. One poster, two headline bills, six nights.

Wednesday, August 28 sat squarely in the Steppenwolf half. "Born to Be Wild" had been on the radio since that summer, and Steppenwolf headlined. The Staple Singers — Roebuck "Pops" Staples and his children, carrying gospel out of the Chicago church circuit and into a psychedelic ballroom — took the middle. And at the bottom of the bill was a local band still introducing itself to audiences: Santana, listed in the venue records that night under exactly that one word.

The poster ended up better known than the show. Santana were taken enough with Conklin's lion to ask him to redraw it for the cover of their first album, the self-titled *Santana* released the following year, and the image and the band have been linked in collectors' minds ever since. The album — out in August 1969, just after the band's breakthrough at Woodstock, and carried by "Evil Ways" — spent better than two years on the Billboard chart. The cover became far more widely seen than the concert poster ever was, to the point that many people who know the lion have no idea it started as an ad for a Tuesday-through-Sunday run at the Fillmore West. That a third-billed opening act in August 1968 would commission its own version of the artwork within the year is a fair compression of how fast things were moving.

Conklin himself is one of the quieter figures in the poster series. He came to it in 1968, near the end of the hand-drawn era, and his work is denser and more figurative than the pure-lettering sheets that made the style famous — faces and bodies folded into each other until the whole surface reads as pattern first and image second. The lion is the best-known example: most people who can see the animal cannot immediately say what it is made of, which is precisely the effect. It is also, unusually for the series, a drawing that survives being reproduced small. That is likely why it worked as an album cover at all.

A note the catalogs and the venue lists agree on, and this chronicle honors: BG-134 is one poster carrying two different headline bills, and it is tempting to read the whole sheet as a single night's lineup. It was not. Steppenwolf's name belongs to the front half, the Grateful Dead's to the back, and August 28 is a Steppenwolf night — with a young Santana third on the bill, three nights before the Dead took the same stage under the same lion.