David Singer's poster for the last week of August 1969 puts Michelangelo's David on the surface of the moon. The statue stands in the foreground in its familiar contrapposto, and behind it, small and receding across the grey regolith, a second figure walks away under a black sky. Six weeks earlier Apollo 11 had landed. Singer, who by 1969 had become Bill Graham's most-used designer and who worked in photomontage rather than the hand-lettered style of the 1966 sheets, simply put the two things in one frame and let them argue.

The bill is printed in an art-deco face across the bottom, and like several Fillmore West posters that year it carries two bills on one sheet. On the left: TEN YEARS AFTER, with Terry Reid and the Bar-Kays, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, August 26, 27 and 28. On the right: SPIRIT, with Savoy Brown and Womb, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, August 29, 30 and 31. Little Princess 109 and the Brotherhood of Light took the two halves' light shows respectively.

Sunday, August 31, 1969 was the closing night of the Spirit half.

Spirit were a Los Angeles band, which at the Fillmore West still counted as coming from somewhere else. They had released *Clear* that year and were about a year from *Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus*; their drummer, Ed Cassidy, was a shaven-headed former jazz player two decades older than his bandmates and the stepfather of the guitarist, Randy California — who had, as a teenager in New York, played in a band with Jimi Hendrix. Savoy Brown, second-billed, were one of the British blues bands then working the American ballroom circuit steadily enough to be regulars rather than novelties. Womb opened.

Singer is worth a word here, because he is the designer who bridges the two eras of this poster series. He came to Graham late — his first Fillmore poster was in 1969, three years after Wes Wilson had invented the house style and largely exhausted it — and he worked almost entirely in collage and photomontage, cutting images out of books and magazines and assembling them, where Wilson and Mouse and Kelley had drawn and hand-lettered. By the time the Fillmore West closed in 1971 Singer had produced more posters in the series than anyone. The hand-drawn psychedelic sheet, the thing the 1966 Avalon and Fillmore posters had made famous, was effectively over; what replaced it was this cooler, stranger, more literary kind of image, and BG-189 is a clean example of it. Nothing on this poster is drawn. Everything on it is found and rearranged.

August 1969 is a month that gets remembered almost entirely for one weekend in upstate New York, a little over two weeks before this show. What the Fillmore West listings record for the end of that same month is the ordinary machinery still running: two three-band bills in six nights, a Los Angeles group closing out a Sunday, and a poster that quietly juxtaposes the Renaissance and the Sea of Tranquility because in 1969 you could do that and nobody would think it strange.

Two nights later, on Tuesday September 2, the hall would host what the listings call simply a "Tuesday Night Jam/Audition" — no poster, no bill, no catalog number. That is the other half of the picture. For every David-on-the-moon there were open nights nobody printed anything for.