Thursday, August 29, 1968 closed the Steppenwolf bracket at the Fillmore West — Steppenwolf, the Staple Singers and Santana, the last of the BG-134 front half. The Grateful Dead took the same poster the following night with an entirely different bill.

Santana closing this bracket is the detail that matters in hindsight. They were third on the card, listed in the venue records under the single word, and they were taken enough with Lee Conklin's poster — the dense pen-and-ink tangle of bodies that resolves into a lion's head — to ask him to redraw it for the cover of their first album the following year. That album came out in August 1969, just after Woodstock, and the lion became one of the most reproduced images of the whole era, far better known than the concert poster that produced it.

Which means this night is the last of three on which a band still billed third under Steppenwolf was looking at the artwork that would carry their name across the world within twelve months. A year and a week later, Santana headlined this same hall on BG-190.

The Staple Singers, in the middle, brought gospel out of the Chicago church circuit into a psychedelic ballroom — Roebuck "Pops" Staples and his children, another of the roots acts Graham placed under rock headliners as a matter of course.