Thursday, August 29, 1968 opened the Youngbloods with It's a Beautiful Day and Initial Shock at the Avalon, on Roger Weil's FD-135.

The poster is the reason this otherwise ordinary weekend is worth stopping on. Weil drew a masked, feather-crowned figure riding a lizard, flanked by two branching sprays of botanical illustration, in dense white-on-black hatching that reads like a plate torn from a Victorian natural-history volume. The type at the bottom is plain, almost austere by 1968 Avalon standards: THE YOUNGBLOODS / IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY / INITIAL SHOCK, with Dr. Albright on lights.

Weil made exactly two posters for the Family Dog — this one and FD-136 the following weekend — and then vanishes from the record entirely. No birth or death dates, no training, no account of how the commissions came about. The Avalon's numbered series ran to roughly 147 sheets and is remembered through five or six names; an engraving-style sheet for a routine weekend, by a designer nobody can identify, is closer to the truth of how it was actually made.

The Youngbloods had cut "Get Together" the year before to modest sales. A public-service campaign put it back on the radio in 1969 and made it, retroactively, one of the era's defining songs.